If we are being pragmatic, it is necessary to know the facts on which we base our strategy.<br>
<br>I will publicly admit that I do not understand the goals of "Green Open Access". <br><br> I would like to ask a set of (hopefully simple) factual questions about Green. Please humour me by only answering the questions. I may have wrong assumptions - that why I am asking.<br>
<br>1 does Green OA require the archival of complete published fulltext? <br> [My assumption is YES] <br>2 does Green OA depend on publishers agreeing to authors self-archiving their manuscripts? <br> [My assumption is YES]<br>
3 is there any "official organization" that *formally* negotiates Green OA with publishers? <br> [My assumption is NO]<br>4 what percentage of publishers currently forbid Green OA as defined in Q1? <br> [My assumption is about 40%]<br>
5 How many institutions do Green OA mandates potentially apply to? <br> [I estimate between 1000 and 10000]<br>6 Is there one or more global organization *formally* coordinating these institutions? <br> [I suspect NO]<br>
7 What proportion of publications come from "Universities" or other organizations that potentially support self-archiving infrastructure? <br> [I guess about 80%. Publications from industry, research institutions, hospitals, field stations, etc. should NOT be dismissed as irrelevant or substandard.]<br>
8. How many institutions currently offer Green OA? <br> [I think Peter Suber recently suggested about 1500 have repos].<br>9 what is the current full economic cost of a self-archived manuscript in a (a) UK University? (b) Elsewhere? <br>
[see below]<br>10. Is there any agreed mechanism for (a) humans (b) machines to tell that an object in a repo is a Green manuscript? <br> [I assume MAYBE for (a) and NO for (b)]<br>11. Is there any SIMPLE way of finding all Green manuscripts across all repos? <br>
[I assume NO.] <br>12. How is the compliance of authors in depositing Green OA measured? By whom? [I assume this has to be done by an institution and this requires them to (a) know how many publications have been published by "their staff" and (b) know how many are in the repo. I assume it is the aggregation of these figures that gives the "20%" green figure.<br>
13 How many institutions know and publish metrics of Green deposition including a percentage of the possible?.<br><br>14. The goal of Green OA is, as I understand it, for all Universities [sic] to put copies of all their peer-reviewed publications into a professionally supported Institutional repository. YES/NO<br>
15. Can Green OA deliver 100% of the scholarly literature [sic]? <br> [I assume NO]. <br> If not what is a figure that proponents would feel represented a major positive outcome ("success")?<br><br><br><br clear="all">
<br>[*] I think PeterS suggested about 1.5-5 FTEs per IR. Assume 2, and cost each at 100K USD Full economic costs. I trawled UK Universities and found that they had between 500 and 10000 items. Not all of these are final manuscripts - some are theses (although these are so heterogeneously archived it's almost impossible to know) and some are other artifacts. Assume 1000 deposits per year (and I think that is optimistic) and you get over 100USD per manuscript, not including researcher time. I don't think that this reduces dramatically by volume as many manuscripts require assistance from the repo staff.<br>
<br><br>-- <br>Peter Murray-Rust<br>Reader in Molecular Informatics<br>Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<br>University of Cambridge<br>CB2 1EW, UK<br>+44-1223-763069<br>