 I didn't want to start the beginning for this crowd, so I'm not going to define open access or give you the basics. If you want to do any of that, I'd be glad to do it in the Q&A afterwards. I was told to speak for about 20 to 30 minutes, and I prepared slides that I could speak about for an hour, and I'm going to try to hold myself to 20 or 30 so that we have more time for Q&A if I succeed. But in what I will talk about, I'm going to refer to a couple terms that I want to define. These may be familiar as well, but I just want to make sure we're all on the same page. For me, green open access is open access through a repository. One of the important facts about repositories is that they can hold peer-reviewed literature even though they don't perform peer-reviewed themselves. So when I say no local peer-review, I just mean they don't perform it themselves. But they don't exclude peer-reviewed literature by any means, and a good open access policy will encourage the deposit of peer-reviewed articles. Gold open access is open access through a journal, regardless of the journal's business model. Every now and then I read a journalist or someone say that gold open access requires a payment from the author. That's not true. Some journal business models require payments from authors, but others don't. So no matter how they do it, if it's coming through a peer-reviewed journal, it's gold open access. And this distinction I'm borrowing from the world of software and applying to the world of research literature, gratis open access is simply free of charge. That's it. It's not necessarily free of any copyright or licensing restrictions. Libra open access is free of charge and free of some copyright and licensing restrictions. Because there are many different restrictions that you could lift, Libra open access isn't just one thing. It's a range of things. These two distinctions are not the same. The green gold distinction is about venues and where the open access is deposited or how it's delivered. This distinction is about user rights. Okay. What I want to talk about today are a few crossover points in the future of open access. In setting up this talk, some of my hosts wanted to title it the future of open access as if I knew what that was. And I insisted I'm making it into a question. I don't really know the future of open access. I like Alan Kay's remark that it's easier to make the future than to predict it. And I want to make the future of open access. These crossover points are mid-range goals that I'm working on. And I predict that we will reach them. But I don't predict exactly when we're going to reach them. But I want to take a stab at predicting the order in which we'll reach them and talk about the efforts in reaching them. But not try away from the fact that I am talking about the future and not just about my current projects. I'm going to talk about 12 crossover points in the future of open access. And two of them, the easiest to, have already been accomplished. And I'm only including them so you get a sense of what I mean by a crossover point. The first crossover point is when most toll access, or TA journals, allow green open access to their articles. And today about 63% of surveyed toll access journals do that. Which means they give blanket permission to their authors. If you publish in our journal, you can deposit your peer reviewed manuscript in a repository without asking us for permission. You don't have to come back and ask us for permission. A slightly larger number will permit green open access on request. They just don't give blanket permission in advance. We can talk a little bit about why this percentage is in flux. It's probably not surprising. Some new journals are deciding to add permission. There seems no doubt that some journals are rescinding previous permission. But it's also the case that the service, which is surveying journals to get their policies, is adding new journals that had never been surveyed before. And some of the new ones that hadn't been surveyed do allow it and some don't allow it. And all these together explain the fluctuation. I'm going to talk later about funder policies and institutional policies which require the deposit into open access repositories. And they are bound to increase the percentage of journals that permit this well above 63. The second crossover point, which has already occurred, is for open access books, at least for gratis open access books. And the crossover comes when there are more gratis open access books online than in the average university library. And I wish I could be more precise about when we crossed over, but I can't. And so I'm just going by some very rough estimates. I couldn't even get a good estimate of how many books there are in the average university library. Maybe someone else already knows this. But when I did some research, I came up with a dated number for England and no number at all for the United States or for the whole world. And that number was 700,000 volumes. Google now offers 1,500 gratis open access books for your mobile phone alone. So I think we crossed this one over a couple of years ago. And the next crossover is when we'll have more gratis open access books online than in the world's largest academic library, which is this one. Again, I only got a dated estimate for the size of the number of books in the Harvard Library, which is almost 16 million. It might be larger today. But that number includes bound back issues of journals, not just monographs. But the Google Library Project, even as outlined in 2004, ended 15 million volumes. So it may not be long before we cross that point as well. And then the next crossover after that will be when we have more Libra open access books online than in the average or largest academic library, that's many years ahead. One thing that took some of us by surprise, and this means me, was how quickly we would get to this crossover point. Most open access advocates, including me, focus on journal literature, because journal article authors are not paid for their articles. And because it's royalty free literature for them, they can consent to open access without giving up revenue. That looked like the low hanging fruit. Well, public domain books are even lower. The only problem is that public domain books have to be digitized. It turns out, because public domain books have reached this important crossover point before the journal literature has, it is easier to digitize public domain books and put them online than it is to get permission from authors who are not being paid to get their works online. We have a hard cultural problem between us and open access to literature. And we only have a technical problem between us and open access to public domain books. Okay, here we're starting the crossover points that have not yet come, that are still over the horizon. This next one will come when most publicly funded research is subject to open access mandates. And I'm thinking of something like the open access mandate now enforced at the National Institutes of Health. That was a voluntary policy since 2005. It was a mandatory policy since last year. And if you'd liken that question period, we can talk about the bill in Congress which would repeal it. But right now the policy is still enforced. There are about 30 plus public funding agencies around the world that have similar policies and a few private funders that have done likewise. This seems to be spreading. There's a very strong argument for open access to publicly funded research. When it's not classified military research. And funding agencies, especially public funding agencies, understand that logic. They tend to be staffed by people who are public spirited. They know they're serving the public and they welcome it. In some countries the step cannot be taken without the legislature. That happened in the United States. In some countries it's taken by the agencies on their own authority. By the way, if the NIH policy is repealed by this bill in Congress, we'll have to face the question whether the NIH could continue with the policy on its own. In some form that's compatible with the statute. But the next crossover point after this will be when most privately funded research is subject to a similar open access mandate. There's some interesting history here. The very first funding agency to adopt an open access mandate was the Wellcome Trust in England, which is private. It's the largest private funder of medical research in England. It's, you might say, the Gates Foundation of England. But ever since the Wellcome Trust took this step and then was followed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, not many private funders have followed suit. On the one hand, it's easier for them because they're not subject to lobbying the way public funding agencies are. But for some reason, after this fast early start, they've been growing more slowly. There'll be an important crossover when most peer-reviewed manuscripts are silk archived right away or deposited in a green open access repository right after they're accepted for publication. Here we have to take the complexity of the disciplines into account. In some fields we've probably already crossed over. In particle physics, it appears that 100% of new literature is deposited in some form, not necessarily the peer-reviewed manuscript, but at least a preprint by the authors. And many peer-reviewed manuscripts are also deposited right away. And other disciplines are very far from the crossover point. If it turns out that 20% of the researchers publish 80% of the articles or anything like that, which I do think is true, and if we can appeal to the most productive of those researchers first, then we can reach this crossover long before we appeal or change the habits of most researchers. And that's my hope. If you have to set priorities for your activism, aim for the most productive researchers first. One thing we can talk about in the Q&A period are the barriers to this. Why aren't faculty depositing an open access repository? There are a lot of answers, there's a lot of studies on author attitudes, and they all tend to show that authors are still not very familiar with this option. And when they are familiar with it, they have gross misunderstandings about what's involved. They think it must violate copyright, it doesn't. Or they think it must bypass peer review, which it doesn't. There's a lot of educating to do to get colleagues to come on board. But because it's a long story, I'd rather save that for the Q&A. The next crossover that I predict will be when most authors understand the issues accurately. We can have the previous crossover before this one because authors can deposit in accordance with the funder policy without actually understanding the issues. All they know is that their funder expects them to do it. And the NEH understands this. And the NEH is often trying to get its principal investigators to deposit when they don't really know what this means, or why they should do it, or what the rationale is, or what the benefits are. Doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as they deposit. But when will authors really understand? It's important to get to that point because then we'll have high levels of spontaneous self-archiving and not just high levels of mandated self-archiving. There are a lot of barriers here, too. And you're probably aware of some of the myths and misunderstandings circulated by publishers. But every now and then, I just get frustrated by the misunderstandings promulgated by new, excited converts. Open Access has a lot of new, excited converts. Because it's a growing movement, lots of people come to it highly persuaded, highly energized, and excited, but not quite understanding all the issues and say to their friends, you want to do this at bypass's peer review. Or you ought to do this at violates copyright in the way that is sticking it to the publishers. That doesn't help, but it's a fairly common phenomenon. Or, well, never mind. Next crossover is when most universities will do what Harvard is doing now, launching their own repository. Some universities are doing it consortially, that counts. But why will we get to this point after some of the earlier crossovers? One reason is that universities don't need their own repositories to comply with the NIH policy. The NIH policy has its own local repository called PubMed Central. And NIH funded researchers are required to deposit there, not in their local university. When all universities, or most universities, have their own repositories, NIH might well change its policy. Or it's already said that it's willing to cooperate with institutional repositories, and steer deposits there in the first place, and then maybe harvest them back to PubMed Central. Most funding agencies can't do that now because most universities don't have their own local repository. We could make this up if we had a universal repository to take deposits from people who don't have one locally. There are a couple universal repositories. The latest one, maybe the best one, is the depot in England whose funding runs out this year. And now we have to think about in what form that might survive. But in the absence of universal repositories, in the absence of a separate repository at every funding agency, every university ought to have one. They ought to have it for their own reasons, but also to soak up, and host, and disseminate the literature funded by funding agencies. One thing I want to return to in a different slide, but also maybe in the Q&A, is that universities will get to this crossover point later than funders because they simply move more slowly. And we should ask, why are they moving more slowly? Aren't their interests in open access the same, and equally strong as the interest of funding agencies? The next crossover will be when most open access journals are Libra open access. Here, I wish we had good data. We don't. My seat of the pants judgment is that most open access journals are not yet Libra. They're all gratis. And many open access journals think that the whole point of open access is simply to take the price off and make it free as in beer. And they forget the free as in speech part. Some have thought about the issues, and they realize that if they made it free as in speech, they would make it free to copy and redistribute through other channels, which by the way is one of the purposes. But if they did that, they would lose traffic, and if they lost traffic, they would lose advertising revenue. So some of them deliberately curb copying in order to steer traffic through their own site and keep their ad revenue up. But I'd say that most of them just haven't thought about it, and think open access is synonymous with gratis open access. This is one of these crossover points that could happen tomorrow if open access journals understood the issues. They lose almost nothing except some traffic if they move from gratis to Libra. And they're in a good position to do it, because they don't have to compete with publishers. They don't have to negotiate with resisting publishers. They are the publishers. And they've already decided to go open access. All they have to do is lift some permission barriers. There are some grounds for optimism here. I've been job owning, but I don't have as much influence as these two organizations should. The Open Access Scarlet Publishers Association launched last year. It's an organization of open access journal publishers. It consists of some of the biggest ones, some of the smallest ones, some for-profit ones, some non-profit ones. It's very representative. And it requires Libra open access, and it recommends a Creative Commons attribution license, which is the same one I recommend. It's the most open of all the Creative Commons licenses. The Spark Europe Seal of Approval Program is very similar, but it's not a membership organization. Spark Europe is just a very knowing organization affiliated with Spark, with which I'm affiliated, which decided to set standards for what is a good open access journal, or how an open access journal can meet the relevant standards, and then recognize those who live up to the standard and help those who need help in living up to that standard. It recommends Creative Commons attributions licenses. So to get this recommendation from two directions, I think it's very helpful. A little piece of background here. There's nothing in the open access movement to correspond to the Free Software Foundation. There's no top-down organization, which could, if it wanted, dictate what counts as open access. So we depend on bottom-up organizations, and these two are both bottom-up. They don't represent everybody. The OSPA might eventually represent all publishers, but it's right now represents those who have chosen to join. I like that about it. It means it's bottom-up. It's not dictating to anybody. It's just saying that if you join us, this is what we expect you to do. And Spark Europe is saying, if you want our Seal of Approval, this is what we hope you will do. This crossover point will come when most toll access or non-open access journals have open access backfiles. And for this purpose, I don't really care if the moving wall is six months, one year, three years. As long as they've digitized their background and made it openly available, I'll be happy. And I'll count that as a crossover. An important default will have changed. There are two problems. It's hard to digitize the backfiles, especially for an old journal that has a lot of back issues. And then the journal has to decide to make them open access. Google will pay to digitize the back issues of a journal. But the terms of the deal are not very good for some journals. Some journals are choosing to take it, but I think the uptake is slow because Google doesn't give the journal a copy of the digital file. When a library lets Google digitize its books, the library does tend to get a copy of the file, even though there's some limits on what it can do with that digital copy. But the journals who participate in this program don't even get a copy. That's slowing down uptake there. And some of the other large digitization projects focus on public domain literature, and most journal backfiles are still under copyright. So it's hard to arrange the money to digitize the back issues of a journal. But assuming they could be digitized, the second hurdle might be cleared if you let Google do it. One condition of Google's participation is open access. In this case, gratis open access, not Libra. But even if a journal digitized it, hoping to sell access, I think it would discover before long that the benefits of open access exceed the trickle of revenue that it would really get. Journal revenue really comes from new issues. And it could get some revenue if it wanted to from quite old issues. But if it gave up that trickle of revenue in favor of open access, it would have much wider visibility and impact even citations, which would boost its impact factor. One issue here that would take a long time to talk about, I'll just allude to, and maybe we could do that in the Q&A. Many people believe, publishers argue, that as the volume of green open access rises, the pressure on subscription journals to convert to tall access will increase, and we'll see more conversions. They regard that as unfair pressure. But whether you regard it as unfair pressure or a very good strategy, it's still not clear that it's really going to happen that way. The causation, at least, is complicated. In physics, as I say, we have close to 100% green open access to new literature. And yet, the physics publishers themselves have said they cannot see any cancellations attributable to the rise of green open access. On the contrary, they host their own mirrors of the Cornell Archive, which hosts all these open access articles. So the coexistence of high levels of green open access with the persistence of tall access journals is documented in the only field where we have a natural experiment. So we don't really know whether raising the level of green open access, which we hope to do through these funder policies and university policies, will force journal conversions. It may or it may not. Having mentioned the physics example, let me also say the other disciplines may not behave like physics. And that's why we might see pressure to convert in other fields. But so far, we haven't seen it in physics. And so far, physics is the only field with high enough levels of green open access to do the test. An author addendum is in addition to the publisher's copyright transfer agreement. It basically says, notwithstanding anything the publisher wants, I want this. And if you publish my article, then you're consenting to this. And they're usually written by lawyers so that scholars who don't know copyright law can ask for the right thing. And they ask for the rights to authorize open access to the article. Harvard basically is using an author addendum to get permission to host the articles that it wants to host. The NIH uses an author addendum. Many universities that don't yet require open access through their repository nevertheless recommend author addendum. They know that some of their faculty want to retain more rights than they would get from the standard copyright contract, but they don't know what to ask for. And they don't want to put them to the trouble of negotiating when they don't know what they're asking for, and when they don't really have any bargaining power. If it's one faculty member against a publisher, usually the faculty member loses. So author addendum to solve the problem, at least in part, by standardizing the request and putting the institution's weight behind the request. And they'll be a cross-server when most new literature is covered by author addendum. And it could be author addendum recommended or required by a university or recommended or required by a funding agency. When these were new, about 2004, when they had just been conceived, it was very unlikely that any university would actually require the use of one. Because if one university did and only one university did, any publisher could refuse to publish work by that university, or at least refuse to accept the addendum with impunity. There could be no pressure on it to accept. So the real crossover may come not when 51% of new research is covered by addendum. But when we've reached some critical mass, such that the publisher's own calculation is, we would have more to lose than to gain by rejecting this. Right now, author addendum are spreading, which means that critical mass is growing, which means that it's harder and harder for publishers to say simply without examining it or without further reflection, we refuse to accept that. Because it is a proposed contract addendum, the publisher is free to take it or leave it. And most publishers are not taking it. But some are, and I think that percentage will keep growing. It's possible that author addendum may never reach the crossover point because they become unnecessary. The main purpose of an author addendum is to get permission to deposit a peer-reviewed manuscript in an open access repository, maybe to get a few other rights. But that's the most important right. But if most journals adopt that policy on their own, then we don't have to ask them to do it through an addendum. And as I said, 63% of subscription journals already grant blanket permission for that. And as universities and funding agencies require authors to retain certain rights and use those rights to authorize open access, journals essentially accommodate it because they have no choice. And so that makes an addendum unnecessary as well. I want to mention what Ohio Link has been doing since 2006. When it negotiates the site licenses for universities within Ohio, and it represents all universities in Ohio, it asks for permission for Ohio authors to deposit in the repository without further permission or payment. And insofar as they succeed, they make author addendum unnecessary. It's a great strategy, I wish more universities would adopt it. As you negotiate site licenses, you're really bargaining on behalf of your readers. But take a moment to bargain on behalf of your authors at the same time and say, if we pay you all this money for the site license, we want the right without further permission to deposit in the local repository. And finally, addendum might become unnecessary as more journals convert to open access. And I am predicting that. But it's crossover point number 11. It's the furthest or one of the furthest in the future. OK, if you remember, one of the earliest crossover points was when the majority of new research would be covered by a funder or funding agencies open access policy. This is the analogous crossover point for university policies. And I think it's much later in the game. We're not going to see this for a longer time. And I'm not sure why. I wish I had better numbers on it. There are roughly 30 university policies and roughly 30 funder policies. I've been looking for good estimates on how many universities there are in the world and how many funding agencies there are in the world. And you'd be surprised how difficult it is to get a good number. You can't even get a good number of how many countries are in the world. The UN disagrees with the CIA about that. What counts as the university? It's very hard to say. I've seen estimates from 4,000 to 30,000. It's a huge range. But if you say that there are, let's say, 15,000 universities in the world and roughly 10,000 funding agencies, which is the best estimate I've been able to find, then we have 30 out of 15,000 university policies and 30 out of 10,000 funder policies. So the rate of progress is faster for funding agencies than universities. And that's my experience, too, just watching the announcements come out. Funding agencies are announcing them more often than universities. I think there's some other variables here that we might want to talk about. Again, we're facing the phenomenon that universities act more slowly than funding agencies. Why is that? One reason might be universities are both producers and consumers of research. If there's a conflict of interest in the larger landscape, which creates the debates about open access, universities tend to internalize some of that conflict. And there may be branches of the university, let's say those that represent research faculty, that want open access, and other branches like the university press, which don't. I reminded of what happened at Penguin Books during the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Penguin publishes brand new books under copyright and it reprints public domain books. And the public domain sector thought the Copyright Term Extension Act was terrible because it would shrink the number of books they could reprint for profit. And the other branch of Penguin said, no, this is great for us because it means more and more books are under copyright for us. I forget how they finally decided. This crossover comes when most peer review journals convert to open access. I don't expect it for a long time. I'd be happy if they convert it to Gratis or Libra. If they convert to Gratis first, I think Libra might come later. As I said earlier, about 15% of journals are already in this category. Or maybe I said that at a morning meeting, not here. This, we take steps toward this crossover point every time a new open access journal launches and every time a tall access journal converts to open access. But the other two steps backward that correspond to those two steps forward are also taking place. New tall access journals are being launched all the time. And every now and then, an open access journal converts back to tall access. Of these four, the fourth takes place the least often. It's fairly rare for an open access journal to convert back. In the past six months, I can only think of two examples, but in the past six months, there have been at least 30 conversions the other way from tall access to open access. My take, which is not based on a survey, is that the net movement of these forward and backward steps is forward, but it's slow. The number of open access journals is certainly growing, but the number of open access journals relative to tall access journals is growing fairly slowly. So I don't expect this crossover to come soon. One reason, another reason why it may not come soon is that some tall access journals can coexist with open access journals. And it's worth thinking about which ones can coexist and how they coexist. I think very high-precision journals might continue to charge subscriptions forever. Why? Because of their high prestige, they will be must-have journals just about everywhere. Every library that can afford, let's say nature, will do what it can to continue to pay for nature, even if nature never converts. If there's a general trend for journals to convert, the high-precision journals could be the last holdouts. They don't have to. Some very high-precision journals have already converted, but if they want to hold out, they could. Many second-rate journals can be protected from this pressure to convert by virtue of bundling. And most of the librarians, you all understand that, I probably don't have to elaborate. But I think one of the purposes of bundling is to protect second-rate journals from cancellation. And so they can coexist with open access journals, regardless of the rising pressure on them to convert. By non-fungibility, I just mean that journals don't publish the same articles as one another. So if you've got a tall access journal and an open access journal in the same field, even the same microfield, they publish different articles. And if your school needs access to the ones in the expensive journal, you have a reason to continue to subscribe and get those. The holdout effect is just my term for something that would have taken too long to put on the slide. If we really have a trend toward conversions to open access, then every time formerly subscription journals convert to open access, we save money in the library. And that money can be spent on open access alternatives, but it could also be spent on the holdouts who still charge subscriptions. So the last ones to convert will be the ones who find it easier to find subscribers. And every subscription journal that understands that logic may want to be the last one to convert, unless they see other reasons to convert. In other words, unless they have actually seen the benefits of open access. And the last of these 12 crossover points is when most literature on deposit in repositories is Libra rather than just Gratis. Most open access repositories are limited to Gratis open access. When will they ever have Libra open access? There's a subset of PubMed Central, which is Libra open access. Most of the Harvard repository is Libra open access. By the way, that's one of the reasons it's an exemplary policy in my mind. But very few have Libra open access content. And the main reason is that most repositories depend for permission on publishers. I told you 63% of publishers give blanket permission for open access, but that means for Gratis open access, not for Libra open access. When you deposit an article in a repository using their permission to avoid infringement, it has to be just Gratis. You can't put it under a Creative Commons license, for example. But that doesn't have to remain the case. We are slowly shifting to a system in which most permission for open access in repositories will come from authors rather than publishers. For example, the Harvard policy is a good example. Harvard asks authors to retain a right, a key right, the right to authorize open access. When that happens, open access at Harvard is authorized by the authors, not by the publisher. In most other places, the author transfers rights to the publisher, and then we try to get permission back from the publisher. And that's a hard job, because most publishers either withholding it or they're withholding it for Libra open access, even if they grant it for Gratis. But the more university and funding agency policies we see, the more we will see open access authorized by authors rather than by publishers. And the author permission is more likely to grant Libra open access. A group of funding agencies, the United Kingdom PubMed Central Funders Group, consists of eight funders, including the Welcome Trust, sometimes pay the cost of publication in a traditional subscription journal. And when they do, they not only demand that the article be open access, but that it be Libra open access. And that's very progressive. I wish more funding agencies would do that. But note that that's gold Libra, not green Libra. But I think the logic of that and the logic that Harvard uses to get Libra open access can spread, which is why I'm hopeful that one day we'll actually reach this crossover point. For example, today funder and university policies tend to tell their grantees or faculty, you must retain a right to authorize open access. And when you read the fine print, that means authorize gratis rather than Libra open access. But those policies could be tweaked to say you must retain the right to authorize Libra open access. And when the article goes in our repository, it has to have a Creative Commons license. And this is a business proposition to publishers, that is the grantees or faculty are not taking the publishers property. They're simply approaching the publisher in the beginning saying, not only will you publish my article, but will you publish it under these terms so that a copy will become Libra open access either right away or within a few months. And publishers can take that or leave it. At the right moment, publishers will take it. They wouldn't take it today very often. One way Harvard copes with that is by having a waiver possibility. So if you're a Harvard faculty member and you want to publish it a journal that doesn't accept Harvard's terms, it can ask you to request a waiver and you can ask for a waiver and Harvard will grant it. When will this policy spread? When will we actually reach this crossover point? When it's safe, when Harvard is taking the lead on this, if another university takes the lead and then another and then another, and we start to get a critical mass of institutions that require Libra open access and not just Gratis, then publishers will be under increasing pressure to accommodate them the way they have been under pressure to accommodate Gratis open access requests. There's been a Gratis open access condition on publishing certain authors. There could well be a Libra open access condition. What we are running up against is what you could call the publishers inalienable right to refuse to publish any work for any reason. No, we're not talking about copyright. We're talking about their right to refuse to publish something. If you ask for too much, you'll get a refusal. The publisher will just say we won't cooperate with you. But the publishers will not refuse to publish the work of Harvard University plus a dozen other major research universities. So the more universities that adopt this policy, the more they create the conditions of their own success. It will become self-fulfilling leadership if they do it at the right moment. This morning we talked about this in one of the meetings that most of you weren't attending, but there are two things, two points I wanna make about it that will just repeat what I said there. On the one hand, I want universities to watch for those conditions. Right now, if you're only requesting Gratis open access, fine, that's progress, it's important progress, and maybe you can't request Libra open access today without triggering too many refusals to publish. On the other hand, that will change as more institutions adopt policies, and here's the second point, your university could be one of those whose adoption could trigger the difference. You have to take your own action into account when you're predicting the future and not just wait for an opportunity created by other institutions. That's it, I'd be glad to take your questions. We're gonna try this again. Oh, that sounds good. Yes. I think we're stuck with that. Maybe repeat the question. Yeah, are we stuck with the Sonny Bono Act, which is the Copyright Term Extension Act? And the reason I think we're stuck with it is that first of all, all copyright reforms in the past few decades have been in the wrong direction rather than the right direction, and there are reasons for that that I haven't gone away. And second, it'll be very hard to roll back copyright terms, even if we can agree to freeze copyright terms. There's a possible taking argument in a bill that would earn an amendment that would roll back copyright terms. I don't know whether the taking argument is strong or weak, but it's strong enough to elicit that legal objection and certainly to elicit the squawking that comes from people who think their property is being taken from them. I don't like retroactive legislation that moves things from the public domain back under copyright. Publishers will certainly not like legislation which retroactively takes things from copyright and puts them in the public domain. We may just have to give up on retroactive changes and go forward with this very long term of copyright. And the only silver line here is that when we have a consenting partner, we can bypass it with contract. I mean, Creative Commons licenses are contracts that bypass the defects of public copyright law. And the disadvantage of those is that they're not the default and we have to go out of our way to use them. The advantage is that when we go out of our way to use them, we are seizing control. We are acting and making work free that we want to be free. Yes. Under Libra Open Access, how are scholarly attributions protected? Good question. Libra Open Access, remember, is a range of things. At the upper end of the range would be the public domain. And only under public domain would there be no more right of attribution. But the freest of all the Creative Commons licenses short of assignment to the public domain is the Creative Commons attribution license which waives all rights except the right of attribution. So it preserves that. And all the other Creative Commons licenses also preserve attribution. They also had a few other restrictions. But my view is that scholars don't need the public domain. They may not even want the public domain for their own new work. Public domain might be the best legal basis for open access to old work, sufficiently old work that's actually in the public domain. But for your own work, you want the right of attribution. You're not writing for money. You're not writing to sell your work. You are writing for credit. You're writing to advance your career. You're writing for impact. And you don't want to give up the right of attribution. There's no reason why you should have to. And from the other side, users want to read your work without charge. They want maybe to copy locally or send a copy to a colleague or maybe print copies for their class. These require freedom to copy. But nobody needs freedom to take credit for your work. So to me, a Creative Commons attribution license permits everything that legitimate scholarship requires. And we never have to give up the right of attribution to somehow get better open access. It wouldn't be better. Yes. Okay, let me explain what the Conyers bill is first. It's a bill that would prohibit or overturn the NIH policy and prohibit similar policies at every federal funding agency. The way the NIH policy works is to ask NIH grantees to retain a certain right when they go to publish and to use that right to authorize open access through NIH. It's the same method that Harvard uses here. And the Conyers bill would simply say, no federal agency can ask its grantees to retain a right and then use it to permit the agency to distribute the work, at least when the work we're talking about has been enhanced by a third party, in this case, been peer reviewed by a journal, a private sector journal. And that applies to all the work funded by the NIH because the NIH policy applies to those peer reviewed manuscripts. And so it looks like it's focused dead on at the NIH. It turns out that it's sloppily written and it's not surgically focused on the NIH. It would turn over procurement practices at federal agencies across the government. When any federal agency, whether it's interest in research or just a consultant's report, commissions and work under copyright, it wants to retain rights to use that in the way that it has in mind. Otherwise it wouldn't have bothered to commission the piece in the first place. The Conyers bill would prohibit that. And it would mean that even if you commission a report from a consultant, you may not be free to use it because you didn't retain the right and you couldn't enforce that through your funding contract. So far, the open access advocates whose goal would be undermined by this are awake and fighting it. But as far as I can tell, the other agencies whose procurement policies are in jeopardy have not woken to it and are not opposing it yet. The Conyers bill was first proposed in the previous Congress at the very end of the session so it never came up for a vote. It was reintroduced early in this session. I think Conyers is serious about it. He's gonna push. There are a couple of things to be said about it though. I think he introduced it early because Tom Daschle dies, done his taxes, so we don't have a secretary of Health and Human Services. Health and Human Services is the department that houses the NIH. We don't have an NIH director either. The NIH director retired in October. Elias Serhouni, he was a very good man. He supported the open access policy. And we have these key power vacancies at key agencies who would be leading the fight to keep the NIH policy alive. Without them, we still have a serious fight. 33 Nobel laureates wrote a letter to Congress last year when the policy was introduced, arguing that it would be a huge mistake and the NIH policy is a huge boon. Important library organizations, in fact every important library organization in the United States has backed the NIH policy and opposed the Conyers bill. 46 law professors specializing in copyright have written a letter to Congress saying that the Conyers bill is not only unnecessary and harmful, but it misunderstands copyright law. And the publisher rhetoric on its behalf contains significant misstatements about copyright law. People who are paying attention to the issues, I think, support the NIH policy and not the Conyers bill. But John Conyers is an experienced tactician and he's gonna try to get this through. There's one other relevant piece of evidence. Last year when this was introduced, he spent most of his own time when defending it in public, talking about the jurisdiction of his committee. He's the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which vets all new bills with a stake in copyright law. It's not a committee that does science funding or science policy, it does copyright. And the NIH policy was requested or demanded by the House Appropriations Committee by an appropriations bill. And Conyers is angry that it was not vetted by his committee. He thinks his committee is being bypassed. He's being neglected, his power is being ignored. Now, this is a turf battle that we have to take into account. It's part of political reality. And if you want to win, you still have to work with the players and their interests as they really are. On the other hand, when his committee asked for jurisdiction over the NIH policy by going to the rules committee, the rules committee said no, there's no copyright issue here. I can explain why if you'd like, but it goes back to the method that the NIH is using to authorize open access. It's not taking the publisher's property and violating their copyrights, which by the way is how the publishers are framing it. It is asking grantees to retain rights when they publish. Grantees are allowed to retain those rights. Copyright law protects the right of copyright holders to divide the bundle and save some and transfer others. That's all the NIH policy does. There's no violation whatsoever. It doesn't amend copyright law. And if it did, it might trigger some tension with our international obligations. It only changes the contract between the funding agency and the grantee. So the rules committee said there is no copyright issue here. It doesn't have to be vetted by your committee. That should have been enough for him to say, I guess there's no legitimate turf question here, but he's still insisting there is a legitimate turf question here. So on the one hand we've got this bill, which is ominous. I think it's harmful. It's backed by somebody who knows the ins and outs of Congress who will do what he can to get it adopted. On the other hand, he's not apparently motivated to undo open access at the NIH or any wells. He's motivated primarily to protect the jurisdiction of his committee. But I predict it will not pass. On the other hand, because it's introduced and because the language could be slipped into any bill at any time, it's ominous. We have to watch for it. We have to be vigilant. We have to fight a battle. We wish we didn't have to fight. There are other things we'd like to be doing. One thing we'd like to be doing is spreading the NIH policy across the federal government. And we're gonna keep working on that, but we have to bear in mind that if the NIH policy is repealed, the chance of spreading it to other agencies is almost nil. So we have to keep the NIH policy alive while we work on spreading the policy elsewhere. Yeah, the question is whether the economic downturn is accelerating the movement toward open access. The NIH just got 10 billion extra dollars from the stimulus package. And if all that goes into research, then all of that will turn into open access articles. Without that budget increase, the NIH was already producing 80,000 peer reviewed papers per year, which have to become open access under the policy. That's gigantic. Just for a little perspective, the NIH budget is larger than the GDP of 125 countries. And it just became $10 billion wealthier than that. So on the one hand, downturn is helping open access by enlarging the volume of open access, at least through NIH. It'll enlarge the volume through NSF a little bit. NSF does not provide open access to peer reviewed manuscripts the way NIH does. It provides open access to the reports written by grantees at the end of the grant period. That's not nearly the same thing. But if I could just broaden the question a little bit. In my view, the economic downturn strengthens the case for open access. And we haven't yet seen it turn into new policies at new agencies and new institutions. But I think it will. The economic downturn has meant that most universities or the average university in the United States has lost 30% of its endowment. This is trickling into budgets. It's already having its effect, but I'm sure your operating budget has not yet been cut by 30% because your university has a spending rule so that a deep loss in one year doesn't have an immediate deep impact. But that impact might deepen over the next couple of years and you're already seeing some cuts. The more cuts we have, the more the case for open access will strengthen. Libraries, I think, will be canceling more subscriptions than they've ever had to cancel in decades. That means that access to literature will be less than it has been for decades, at least if you don't count the growth in the volume of literature itself. That strengthens the case for open access. And in November, I argued that open access to literature would be an economic stimulus all by itself. John Houghton and others have done studies showing that open access literature has an economic amplifier. And it not only increases economic activity by researchers, not just creating jobs for people who work in labs, but it creates economic activity in manufacturing, which depends on research. The drug industry depends on research. The tire industry depends on research. Mining companies depend on research. All kinds of economic actors depend on research, which, if free, would stimulate even more of their economic activity. And relieve their budgets to do something else. Since then, others have argued that we ought to expand open access if for no other reason than for economic stimulus. And what I would like to see is the NIH policy preserved. The NIH policy then copied across the federal government. And if we have to set priorities, I'd like to see it done first in the agencies that are funding green research and creating green jobs. We've already decided climate change is a crisis on a par with the economic crisis. And we've already decided that these problems are synergistic, that is, the solution to the energy problem will be part of the solution to the economic problem. If we can create green energy, we'll be creating green jobs and green exports. That will stimulate the economy. So if we stimulate the economy by solving our energy problem, we will be solving two problems at once. But that very elegant solution depends on increasing research in green energy, in green technology. If that research is open access, it will amplify the beneficial effect on both fronts that is for solving the economic problem and for solving the energy problem. I wrote that in an open letter to Barack Obama and John McCain before the election. Of course, I didn't hear back, but I think the logic is still sitting there. And the worst things get, we will want to make cuts everywhere, but there will always be a voice saying, don't cut the things that will help us get out of this problem. Don't cut the things that will help us gain access to research, which will solve our other problems as well as stimulate the economy. I hope that voice isn't lost in the rush of short-term thinking. You can see the rush of short-term thinking now in Congress. We had a very serious recovery bill to pass, and instead of passing the very best bill, we passed the bill that could be passed by the majority we could scrape together in one week. If that's the way we're gonna do politics, then I think this elegant logic might be lost. But if we remember what solutions would work better for our serious problems, the ones that really address our national priorities, then I think we'll recognize open access is part of the solution. Research in green energy is part of the solution. Open access to that research will amplify its usefulness for us. So Peter, as you noted, you're addressing a group largely of librarians. As a wannabe librarian, this is thrilling to me. You should also know that some people have come across the river, not just from Harvard Libraries, Felipe and her team from BC and so forth. So you've attracted a real group here. You noted that there's no free software foundation equivalent in the open access, which I think a very provocative point. It's a very bottom up effort with lots of different people doing it, almost no institution. But I would argue in a way that people gathered in this room are your free software foundation. You've got institutional power in librarians here, and you noted that all the librarians signed on against the conure bill and so forth. And I presume that the call to action for librarians is not just keep canceling serials. That's not the advice at all. Okay, so that's not the advice. So I would be curious, what would you say to this assembled group and librarians who may be listening to this on webcast in terms of our role in advancing what we see to be common cause here? Good question. Librarians are among the best allies of the open access movement. But all of our institution allies put together don't make the free software foundation. They still don't make a top-down organization. They make a bottom-up possibility. And we're reaping some of those possibilities, but it's still not the same thing. There are a lot of things librarians can do. One thing they have done is to have their important organizations send a letter to the Judiciary Committee opposing the conure's bill, and they've done that. What I would like to see, and I mentioned what earlier in the talk, which is when you negotiate site licenses more or less on behalf of readers, don't forget the authors at your institution. And try to negotiate the right for authors within your institution once you've paid your subscription money to deposit their articles in the institutional repository. This percentage, which is now 63%, can slowly climb to 100% if librarians do that. And this gets to the last point I want to make. Librarians are essentially the only buyers of peer-reviewed journals. There is some fraction that are bought by industry, but it's a fairly small one. I think librarians have to wake up to their power here. When you're the only buyers of something, you can dictate terms. You have to be careful not to do that in a way that raises anti-trust problems. But again, I compare this to the economic crisis. Barack Obama once called the economic crisis an opportunity, and what he meant was, we have a chance to demand transformation from the banks we are saving. We don't just have the problem of pouring money into the banks that we're saving and mortgaging our future. While we do that, we can demand transformations that change their behavior and solve long-term problems. I think librarians can do that. Librarians can say there are a lot of long-term problems with the scholarly communication system. We are in a position basically to bail out the journals. Not that we're gonna spend more than we're spending now, but we spend basically all you get, you publishers of academic journals. And we want to demand transformations. You're not serving all of our interests. As a matter of fact, you're serving fairly few and you're actually harming some of our others. Librarians have to act that way and they have to use the power of the purse and say if we're gonna buy your journals and give you money this way, we want certain things back. That is, this is a negotiation. You know it's a negotiation, but are you using your bargaining power as much as you could be to get a package that helps the university? One way is to get the right of self-archiving. And then when the moment is right, the right of Libra self-archiving and not just greatest self-archiving. And then if your institution doesn't yet have a repository, that's another thing you can do. Launch one and then work with other institutions that have some experience to adopt a policy which is effective in filling it. You probably know, launching a repository is the easiest thing. It's free and open to our software. It doesn't cost anything to launch in that sense. But it can be expensive in maintaining if you are going to reach out to faculty to make the deposits they have to make. And we academics worldwide are slowly learning what works and what doesn't work in filling a repository. So network with each other. As you launch repositories, learn from each other what works and what doesn't work. Share that knowledge. And if all the research produced by all the universities with enlightened librarians were open access, the problem would be solved. And by the way, every school I know with a good open access policy had enlightened librarians as part of the team of entrepreneurs who pushed it. In this case, Stuart Sheber is the chief entrepreneur who's not a librarian. He deserves a lot of credit, but there were librarians helping out and their role is indispensable. And librarians have given presentations at faculty senate meetings which have enlightened faculty who just were clueless about the pricing crisis. You probably have a lot of experience with clueless faculty, but what you may not realize is that they can be educated. And there are a lot of examples in which librarians have gone to faculty senates given a presentation and within a meeting or two get a resolution which might be toothless, but then that starts the wheels turning on a serious policy. If you mean spontaneously filled as opposed to being filled by virtue of some mandate. Then the best example. Okay, well there are two approaches. One is with a mandate or with, let's just call it a mandate for now, and the other is without one. When I say mandate, I don't want to make it sound as though simply adopting mandatory language solves the problem because it doesn't. Every university with a mandatory policy has mandatory language on the books but they don't depend on the mandatory language to solve the problem and to get all the articles deposited. They are all, every single one, supplemented with education of faculty, assistance for faculty in making the deposits and incentives for them to make their deposits. And at the universities that have adopted mandates, there's never 100% compliance the next day, the next month or the next year, but it starts to grow from 15% which is the approximate average for spontaneous self-archiving toward 100%. Arthur Sayle has done about six studies on Australian universities who went from no mandates to mandates and his data show a study rise of each one from 15 toward 100. In my view 100 is asymptotic. We'll never really reach 100. There'll always be a little noise there, some exceptions, somebody that you couldn't reach. But with a combination of mandatory language, firm expectations laid down by people who matter, education, assistance and incentives, you can bring it about. Now, for universities that don't have even mandatory language, the best strategy is apparently the one at work in Dutch universities. The Dutch have a system that they call the cream of science. It's a dairy metaphor. And the best work rises to the top and so they wanna get all their work into repositories but they also wanna recognize the best work and so they call that the cream. And I don't know how they decide what the cream is but every week they feature some items on deposit in their repository in public either on the front page of the repository or on the periodicals put out by the university. And it's a way of reaching the profile of some of the people who have made deposits. And you know faculty publish in part to advance knowledge in their fields but also in part to advance their careers. So when they see somebody getting kudos for having deposited in their repository, getting glory and visibility above and beyond what they got from publishing in the journal, that's something that they want for themselves. And it's an incentive. It's not a mandate and it tends to work pretty well. I haven't seen data on how the Dutch cream of science repositories are approaching 100% but I do know that they're well above 50% and as far as I know they're the only mandates that have achieved above 50% compliance without a mandate. I'm not convinced that publishers are anti open access. They're anti declining profits. So would you recommend that institutions, libraries and so on actually take a slightly different approach which is be more collaborative and actually work with publishers to come up with new business solutions such as in the social media world which is rapidly expanding and actually take that more collaborative approach to new business generation. They won't care publishers I would suspect. You know what happens to the content in journals provided they can see that bottom line increase. Yes. First of all, I hope I didn't say that all publishers are anti open access. I don't believe that they are. They're not monolithic. They're very different from one another. Some publishers already provide open access themselves. Libra open access. Some are experimenting with gratis for Libra open access in good faith and watching the results. Some I do believe are experimenting in bad faith and we could talk about that. Some are watching the experiments of others to see what comes out. So there's a huge variety of publisher attitudes and then some publishers who actually provide open access on their own are lobbying hard against the NIH policy and in favor of the Congress Bill. So it's a very mixed bag of attitudes. I do think there's a lot of room for helping publishers find better business models but if the business models we help them find are not open access then I'm not really that interested. But I think librarians might understand the scholarly landscape at least as well as publishers. Obviously publishers are in the biz and they should understand it to some extent but many publishers talk as if they never hear what librarians have to say. Which means there's a whole perspective there that publishers are lacking and librarians can help educate publishers by showing them that side of things. For example, publishers like to say there's no problem here. Everybody who needs access already has access and I think librarians can be the ones to tell them I'm sorry that's wrong. The people at our institution have access to the things that we buy but we're very conscious of all that we don't buy and all that we can't afford and there's a serious problem here. I think society publishers could be reminded by libraries that they're not part of the big deal and that your budgets tend to be absorbed by the big deal and that society generals are threatened by the big deal much more than they are threatened by open access. And society publishers seem to have bought the line that open access is the biggest threat to their existence but I think the big deal is a bigger threat to their existence. And I think librarians who know that best who know the pressure to buy the big deal which leaves almost no money left over for other generals is a signal that society generals should get. And I think if society generals knew that if they really appreciated that because they heard it from librarians then they would understand that open access might be a survival strategy for them. Instead of competing with the big deal which I think is a losing proposition they could just bypass it altogether by becoming open access. Yeah I think it's very good. First of all I have no fear that Springer will turn Biomed Central into a non-open access publisher. Just before the purchase Biomed Central had become profitable. I don't know if you realize Biomed Central was a for-profit publisher all along but it was in the red and it was climbing toward the black and it achieved the black before the purchase. And one reason Springer was interested was that it saw the trajectory it wanted to buy a profitable open access publisher. Biomed Central was and is the world's largest open access publisher. Now Springer is the world's largest open access publisher. I think it cherishes that role. He doesn't want to undermine it. What we don't know is whether BMC will influence Springer more than Springer influences BMC. Right now it's a separate subsidiary. It's doing its own thing. The rest of Springer is doing its own thing. They seem to be independent but that independence may not last much longer. One of the stated rationales for the purchase was that BMC which already enjoyed some economies of scale would enjoy even more with Springer and that's a real possibility. That could allow them to reduce their expenses and thereby reduce their publication fees which would be interesting rather than raise them to match the ones already charged by Springer. The other benefit of the purchase is that the CEO of Springer, Derkhanck, said in public open access is a sustainable part of STM publishing. It's not an audiological crusade. And nobody can accuse Derkhanck of being an open access activist. He's a businessman and he said as a business matter this is a sustainable part of publishing. We want to be part of it. My reading is Springer is preparing for an open access future. And he just took the gem. He took the world's largest open access publisher. And if Elsevier or Wiley or Thompson wants to do the same thing, what are they gonna do? BMC is already gone. The second largest open access publisher is Hindawi which publishes about 80 plus open access journals. It might already be getting feelers from some publishers. But I think publishers who are really reading the landscape properly are preparing for an open access future. And I think that's what the BMC acquisition really means. Thank you very much. We need to wrap up. But I wanna thank Peter Suber for coming and talking to us about the future of open access. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for coming.