JS: “I do agree with Charles Baily that ‘green’ doesn’t automaticallymean ‘go’. Being a repository manager myslef, I never just ‘go’ when I encounter ‘green’ on the (invaluable) SHERPA Romeo list.”

But it is authors who must go or not go, with their own articles, not repository managers. That is why it is called *self*-archiving. Someone else may do the keystrokes, but the one to decide on going or not going is the author.

JS: “First, I need to check whether the publisher archiving into an institutional repository, rather than just on a personal or departmental website.”

Why? The distinction is completely empty! We are talking about how
institutions label disk sectors! “Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived onyour personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, theEPrint Archive is a part of the Department’s infrastructure for your personal homepage.”

JS: “Secondly, I need to check the permitted format: some publisher object to using the publisher PDF, other publishers require the use of the publisher PDF.”

Why? The default option is to self-archive the author’s refered,
accepted, final draft (the postprint). The PDF is unnecessary. Better
just to link to the publisher’s version.

JS: “Thirdly, I need to check on publisher policies every time I deposit, since publishers may change their policy from day to day.”

Why? Why not let the publisher notify if there has been a change?

So, could the light get greener than it is now’ I believe, it should.”

What research needs today is more author self-archiving, not more needless fussing.

Stevan Harnad

— CB: “Here’s what I found [for a "green" publisher]. My “preprint distribution rights” allow “posting as electronic files on the contributor’s own Web site for personal or professional use, or on the contributor’s internal university/corporate intranet or network, or other external Web site at the contributor’s university or institution, but not for either commercial (for-profit) orsystematic third party sales or dissemination, by which is meant any interlibrary loan or document delivery systems. The contributor may update the preprint with the final version of the article after review and revision by the journal’s editor(s) and/or editorial/peer-review board.”

That is exactly right for a green publisher: The final, accepted draft may be self-archived in the author’s own institutional archive.

That’s what only 15% of authors are doing today.
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm

That’s what 100% of authors ought to be doing, to maximize research usage and impact (and ought to have been doing yesterday!).

— CB: “what if I want to deposit the e-print in a disciplinary archive like E-LIS or I want to put it in the Internet Archive’s upcoming “OAI-compliant ‘universal repository‘”?… No way to immediately deposit the paper in an OAI-PMH compliant archive that will have a longer life than my Website and that can be harvested by OAI-PMH search services, such as OAIster.”

The restrictions on 3rd-party archives are perfectly reasonable and no problem whatsoever at this time. The problem today (just so we keep our eyes on the ball!) is the non-archiving of 85% of articles, hence their inaccessibility to all those would-be users whose universities cannot afford access to the journal’s official version! It is cheap and easy for any university to create an OAI-compliant institutional archive, and OAIster can happily harvest the metadata. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse

(And worrying about the preservation of non-existent contents is rather putting the cart before the horse. The self-archived OA versions of a goodly portion of the 15% of the articles that have been self-archived in the past 15 years are still online and OA to tell the tale to this day. All their publishers’ official versions are too. So fussing about the permanence of the non-contents of cupboards that are in any case meant to be access-supplements, not the official version of record, is rather misplaced, when what is immediately missing and urgently needed is their presence, not their permanance.)

— CB: “The agreement also states that the e-print must contain a fair amount of information about the publisher and the paper: the published article’s citation and copyright date, the publisher’s address, information about the publisher’s document delivery service, and a link to the publisher’s home page.”

That’s just fine too. It is only good scholarly practice to provide the full reference information and to link to the official version of record for the sake of all those potential users who can afford it. What is wrong with that, and why would any author not want to do that?

– CB: “First … “Green” may not always mean “go.”"

Not a single one of the points raised by CB in any way implies that “green” means anything other than “go.”

— CB: “Second, it would be helpful if [OA Archive] directories could identify whether articles can be deposited in key types of archives.”

They already do. The main distinction is the author’s own institutional archive versus central (3rd-party) archives. It is the former that are the critical ones. The rest can be done by metadata harvesting.

— CB: “Third, if claims are going to made about the number of “green” journals, maybe more consideration about what “green” means is in order, and perhaps OA advocates should agree on their color schemes. Is “can archive pre-print and post-print” enough for “green,” or should it be “can archive pre-print and post-print on the author’s Website or in any noncommercial archive or repository”? If the latter, the heat should be turned up on publishers that don’t permit it by authors and OA advocates.”

The answer is that the former is abundantly enough, and the ones the heat should be turned up on are the authors, to go ahead on green, not the publishers, who have already done as much as it is reasonable or necessary to ask them to do, to allow authors to provide the OA that they purport to need and want so much. (Enough, for example, for 34,000 authors to do the keystrokes to sign a petition threatening to boycott publishers that don’t make their journal contents OA, but not enough, apparently, to do the keystrokes to make their own articles OA. That, by the way, is the real koan:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3061.html )

— CB: “Fourth… maybe it’s time to tilt at a new windmill: a set of standardized copyright transfer agreements.”

No, it’s not more windmills or red herrings that researchers, their institutions, their funders, and research itself need: What they need is to go ahead and self-archive.

Stevan Harnad
Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html