The IDPF chartered the EPUB 3 revision with a wide-ranging mandate to expand the scope of the specification. On top of this, timely completion of the work was “critical.” To meet these demands, the EPUB 3 Working Group used two techniques to manage and limit the increasing complexity of the standard: modularization and delegation. While both of these carried downsides and risks, they became critical components in creating an effective, meaningful revision in a reasonable timeframe. Inside the EPUB 3 specifications themselves, an even more striking commitment to harmonization and delegation led the DAISY Consortium to defer completely to EPUB 3 as a distribution format, removing their DTBook format from the specification itself.

Standards are all around us but are often invisible. The keypad on your telephone is arranged the same way no matter who makes your phone, the valve stem on your car’s tires works with any air-pressure gauge or air pump, and credit cards and driver’s licenses are all the same size so they will fit into any wallet. Ironically, we tend to notice only the things that for some reason aren’t standardized: clothing sizes from different manufacturers, power adapters for electronics, and which side of the road you drive on in which country.

It has been possible to link directly to entries in RoMEO for a while, but the method was long winded.

It is now much easier!

Just go to the section Link to this Page and copy and paste the url there into your emails.

This works both for publisher and journals entries.

So now you can get back to those academics and provide them with a link to the information you wish to convey.

To direct link to the BMJ: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0959-8138/

Jane

Across the eight years since its launch in 2003, SHERPA Romeo‘s importance and value as a resource have been steadily increasing. The most recently announced upgrade covers 18,000 journals and is (1) More up to Date, with (2) More Accurate Journal Level Searching, (3) More Search Options, (4) Electronic ISSNs, and (5) Faster Performance.

In addition to congratulating SHERPA Romeo, let me use this occasion to repeat the plea I made eight years ago to adjust the colour code to provide the information that users need the most (and at the same time bring the colour coding in line with the terminology that has since gained wide currency: “Green OA”):

Although the distinction between journals that endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of both the refereed postprint and the pre-refereeing preprint (P+p) and journals that endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint but not the pre-refereeing preprint (P) is not completely empty, it is of incomparably less importance and relevance to OA than the distinction between journals that do and do not endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint (P vs. not-P).

It is OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint that the OA movement is about and for. And it is OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint that is meant by the term “Green OA.”

And yet SHERPA Romeo continues to code P+p as “green” and P as “blue”!

There is no “Blue OA.” And the over 200 funders and institutions that have already mandated Green OA have not mandated “Blue OA”: They could not care less whether the journals endorse the self-archiving of the unrefereed preprint in addition to the refereed postprint: Green OA only concerns the refereed postprint.

It is for this reason that EPrints Romeo has steadfastly generated a colour-corrected version of the SHERPA Romeo summary statistics pie-chart across these eight years — in addition to generating the statistics for journals as well as for publishers. (SHERPA Romeo originally covered only publishers, but the statistics for journals are much more informative — and positive — than the statistics for publishers, since one publisher might publish one journal and another might publish 2000!.)

To see the immediate gain in clarity and consistency from suppressing the P+p/P (“green”/”blue”) distinction in the summary statistics, compare the SHERPA Romeo and EPrints Romeo summary pies for publishers below. (Note that the EPrints Romeo data are static, because they have not been updated for several years. The eye will show that for publishers the proportions are much the same, but have gotten somewhat better in recent years.)

I beg SHERPA Romeo to add the simplified, colour-corrected pie alongside its particoloured one (with the explanation that in the OA world, “Green” means P, not just P+p.). It would make a world of difference for user understanding.

In addition, now that SHERPA is covering the data at the individual journal level, I urge providing the journal-level pie too, for it not only gives a more realistic picture, but an even more positive one.

SHERPA Romeo’s current “Green = Green” & “Blue = Green” publisher pie-chart (based on proportions of publishers):

EPrints Romeo’s colour-corrected publisher pie-chart, in which Green = Green OA (and preprints-only endorsements are coded as “pale green”) (based on proportions of publishers, but out of date by several years):

EPrints Romeo’s colour-corrected journals pie-chart, in which Green = Green OA (and preprints-only endorsements are coded as “pale green”) (based on proportions of journals). Note that the overall proportions are even better (but these data are out of date by several years, hence need updating, though they will not change much, as they already covered most of the big publishers, with the largest number of journals):

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

SHERPA Services’ is excited to announce the launch of an upgraded version of SHERPA RoMEO (www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) as part of ongoing improvements to the SHERPA RoMEO service.

The new version contains significant additions and improvements to RoMEO, and now provides:

Increased Journal Coverage:

SHERPA-RoMEO now has its own Journals database containing over 18000 journals including many titles not covered by the other lists we use – Zetoc, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and ENTREZ

More up to Date:

The new SHERPA RoMEO Journals database is faster than other lists in responding to new titles and journals that change publishers

More Accurate Journal Level Searching:

The new journals database means that RoMEO identifies rights holders more accurately, especially where a commercial publisher is publishing on behalf of a society

More Search Options:

In addition to searching for journals by title or ISSNs and publisher names, an advanced search option lets users search for publishers’ by RoMEO colour, RoMEO ID and RoMEO update date

Electronic ISSNs:

RoMEO now holds data on electronic ISSN’s in addition to print ISSN’s and users can search for both using the ISSN search field

Faster Performance:

Technical upgrades have made many features work faster than before.

About SHERPA-RoMEO

SHERPA-RoMEO uses a simple colour-code classification to simplify complex publisher and journal policy information and provides impartial, easy to follow and accurate guidance on permissions and conditions of rights given to authors by journal publishers.

SHERPA-RoMEO offers users the ability to:

• View summaries of publishers’ and journal copyright policies in relation to self-archiving
• View if publisher and journal policies comply with research funder archiving policies, mandates and guidelines
• To search journal and publisher information by Journal Title, Publisher Name, ISSN and eSSN

Additionally, SHERPA-RoMEO provides lists of

• Publishers that allow the use of their PDFs in Institutional Repositories
• Publisher with Paid Options

SHERPA-RoMEO is seen as an essential resource by many in the Open Access community.

This development work is funded by JISC. Journal information is kindly provided by the British Library’s Zetoc service hosted by MIMAS, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) hosted by Lund University Libraries, and the Entrez journal list hosted by the NCBI.

About SHERPA Services’

SHERPA Services’ are based at the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham and maintain on behalf of the open access community a portfolio of services: RoMEO, JULIET and OpenDOAR.

The Centre for Research Communications (CRC) was formed in April 2009, to help to support and inform the changes and new ideas in the way that research is communicated around the world. The CRC houses a portfolio of open access projects and initiatives currently undertaken by the University of Nottingham.

OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/

RoMEO http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo

JULIET http://www/sherpa.ac.uk/juliet

JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

For all enquiries regarding RoMEO please contact: romeo@sherpa.ac.uk

Jane, Azhar and Peter

Comments on:

Ginsparg, Paul (2011) Arxiv at 20. Nature 476: 145?147 doi:10.1038/476145a

&

Fischman, Josh (2011) Anonymous FTP Achives. The First Free Research-Sharing Site, arXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain Future. Chronicle of Higher Education August 10, 2011

Anonymous FTP archives. Arxiv (1991) was an invaluable milestone on the road to Open Access. But it was not the first free research-sharing site: That began in the 1970’s with the internet itself, with authors making their papers freely accessible to all users net-wide by self-archiving them in their own local institutional “anonymous FTP archives.”

Distributed local websites. With the creation of the world wide web in 1990, HTTP began replacing FTP sites for the self-archiving of papers on authors’ institutional websites. FTP and HTTP sites were mostly local and distributed, but accessible free for all, webwide. Arxiv was the first important central HTTP site for research self-archiving, with physicists webwide all depositing their papers in one central locus (first hosted at Los Alamos). Arxiv’s remarkable growth and success were due to both its timeliness and the fact that it had emerged from a widespread practice among high energy physicists that had already predated the web, namely, to share hard copies of their papers before publication by mailing them to central preprint distribution sites such as SLAC and CERN.

Central harvesting and search. At the same time, while physicists were taking to central self-archiving, in other disciplines (particularly computer science), distributed self-archiving continued to grow. Later web developments, notably google and webwide harvesting and search engines, continued to make distributed self-archiving more and more powerful and attractive. Meanwhile, under the stimulus of Arxiv itself, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created in 1999 — a metadata-harvesting protocol that made all distributed OAI-compliant websites interoperable, as if their distributed local contents were all in one global, searchable archive.

No need for direct central deposit in google! Together, google and OAI probably marked the end of the need for central archives. The cost and effort can instead be distributed across institutions, with all the essential search and retrieval functionality provided by automated central “overlay” services for harvesting, indexing, search and retrieval (e.g., OAIster, Scirus, Base and Google Scholar). Arxiv continues to flourish, because two decades of invaluable service to the physics community has several generations of users deeply committed to it. But no other dedicated central archive has arisen since. Like computer scientists, whose local, distributed self-archiving is harvested centrally by Citeseerx, economists, for example, self-archive institutionally, with central harvesting by RepEc.

Mandating self-archiving. In biomedicine, PubMed Central looks to be an exception, with direct central depositing rather than local. But PubMed Central was not a direct author initiative, like anonymous FTP, author websites or Arxiv. It was designed by NLM, deposit was mandated by NIH, and deposit is done not only by authors but by publishers.

Institutions are the universal research providers. Open Access is still growing far more slowly than it might, and one of the factors holding it back might be notional conflicts between institutional and central archiving. It is clear that Open Access self-archiving will have to be universally mandated, if all disciplines are to enjoy its benefits (maximized research access, uptake, usage and impact, minimized costs). The universal providers of all research paper output, funded and unfunded, are the world’s universities and research institutions, distributed globally across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, all languages, and all national boundaries.

Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally. Hence funder self-archiving mandates like NIH’s and institutional self-archiving mandates like Harvard’s need to join forces to reinforce one another rather than to complete for the same papers, and the most natural, efficient and economical way to do this is for both institutiions and funders to mandate that all self-archivingshould be done locally, in the author’s institutional OAI-compliant repository. The contents of the institutional repositories can then be harvested automatically by central OAI-compliant repositories such as PubMed Central (as well as by google and other central harvesters) for global indexing and search.

Distribute the archiving, rather than the cost. In this light, Arxiv’s self-funding pains may be a wake-up call: Why should Cornell University (or a “wealthy donor”) subsidize a cost that institutions can best “sponsor” by each doing (and mandating) their own distributed archiving locally (thereby reducing total cost, to boot)? After all, no one deposits directly in Google?

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

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“How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates“

SUMMARY: Research funder openaccess mandates (such as NIH‘s) and university openaccess mandates (such as Harvard‘s) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
      Universities’ own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets — as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
      Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author’s own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author’s university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning openaccess provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors’ IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

We will be releasing an upgrade to the RoMEO service on Monday 15th August.

Please bear with us, if there are any disruptions to the current service during this period.

Further details will be contained in a Press Release, to follow.

Jane, Azhar & Peter

Re: “Research intelligence – ‘We all aspire to universal access‘” Times Higher Education 11 August 2011

The publishing community can afford to be leisurely about how long it takes for open access (OA) to reach 100% (it’s 10% now for Gold OA publishing, plus another 20% for Green OA self-archiving). But the research community need not be so leisurely about it. Research articles no longer need to be accessible only to those researchers whose institution can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published, rather than to all researchers who want to use, apply and build upon it. Lost research access means lost research progress. Research is funded, conducted and published for the sake of research progress and its public benefits, not in order to provide revenue to the publishing industry, nor to sustain the subscription model of cost-recovery.

The publishing community is understandably “wary” about Green OA self-archiving, mindful of its subscription revenue streams. But the transition to Green OA self-archiving, unlike the transition to Gold OA publishing, is entirely in the hands of the research community, which need not wait passively for the “market” to shift to Gold OA publishing: Springer publishers’ projections suggest that at its current growth rate Gold OA will not reach 100% till the year 2029.

The research community need not wait, because it is itself the universal provider of all the published research, and its institutions and funders can mandate (i.e., require) that their authors self-archive their peer-reviewed final drafts (not the publishers’ version of record) in their institutional Green OA repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. And a growing number of funders and institutions (including all the UK funding councils, the ERC, EU and NIH in the US, as well as University College London, Harvard and MIT) are doing just that.

Green OA self-archiving mandates generate 60% OA within two years of adoption, and climb toward 100% within a few years thereafter. The earliest mandates (U. Southampton School of Electrons and Computer Science, 2003, and CERN, 2004 are already at or near 100% Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93 /
ABSTRACT: Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA.

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.
ABSTRACT: The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of “eDemocracy” one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno’s Paradox). The solution is for the world’s research institutions and funders to (1) extend their existing “publish or perish” mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) depositing their final drafts in their Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research.

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59.
ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et al?s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (?Open Access,? OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world?s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al?s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research.