though of course when the encroachment is zero, and gold OA mandates are harmless, then gold OA mandates would also be unnecessary.
3. Today, faculty voting for a rights-retention OA mandate want a waiver option, and when the option is available their votes tend to be overwhelming or unani-mous. But there are several circumstances that might make it attractive for faculty to abolish waiver options or make waivers harder to obtain. One is a shift in faculty per-spective that makes access to research more urgent than indulging publishers who erect access barriers. Another is a significant rise in publisher acceptance of green OA, which gives virtually all authors—rather than just most—
blanket permission for green OA. In the first case, faculty might “vote with their submissions” and steer clear of pub-lishers who don’t allow author-initiated green OA. In the second case, faculty would virtually never encounter such publishers. In the first case, they’d seldom want waivers, and the second they’d seldom need waivers.
It’s understandable that green gratis mandates are spreading faster than green libre mandates, that green mandates in general are spreading faster than gold man-dates, and that rights-retention policies with waiver op-tions are spreading faster than rights-retention policies without waivers. However, there is modest growth on one of these fronts: green libre mandates.20
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The case against these three kinds of OA policy is time-sensitive, not permanent. It’s circumstantial, and circumstances are changing. But the strategy for insti-tutions wanting to remove access barriers to research is unchanging: they should adopt the strongest policies they can today and watch for the moment when they could strengthen them.
As researchers become more familiar with OA, as more institutions adopt OA policies, as more new literature is covered by strong OA policies, as more toll-access journals convert to OA, as more toll-access journals accommodate OA mandates without converting, and even as more OA journals shift from gratis to libre, institutions will be able strengthen their OA policies without increasing publisher-controlled rejection rates or author-publisher-controlled waiver rates.
They should watch the shifting balance of power and seize opportunities to strengthen their policies.
The moments of opportunity will not be obvious. They will not be highlighted by objective evidence alone and will call for some self-fulfilling leadership. Institutional policy-makers will have to assess not only the climate created by existing policies, and existing levels of support, but also the likely effects of their own actions. Every strong, new policy increases the likelihood of publisher accommoda-tion, and when enough universities and funders have policies, all publishers will have to accommodate them. In that sense, every strong new policy creates some of the
conditions of its own success. Every institution adopting a new policy brings about OA for the research it controls and makes the way easier for other institutions behind it. Like many other policy issues, this is one on which it is easier to follow than to lead, and we already have a growing number of leaders. A critical mass is growing and every policy is an implicit invitation to other institutions to gain strength through common purpose and help accelerate publisher adaptation.
5 scOpe
As we saw in chapter 1, any kind of content can in principle be OA. Any kind of content can be digitized, and any kind of digital content can be put online without price or per-mission barriers. In that sense, the potential scope of OA is universal. Hence, instead of saying that OA applies to some categories or genres and not to others, it’s better to say that some categories are easier and some harder.
OA is not limited to the sciences, where it is known best and moving fastest, but extends to the arts and hu-manities. It’s not limited to research created in developed countries, where it is most voluminous, but includes re-search from developing countries. (Nor, conversely, is it limited to research from developing countries, where the need is most pressing.) It’s not limited to publicly funded research, where the argument is almost universally
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where most policies focus, but includes past publications.
It’s not limited to born-digital work, where the technical barriers are lowest, but includes work digitized from print, microfiche, film, and other media. It’s not limited to text, but includes data, audio, video, multimedia, and execut-able code.
There are serious, practical, successful campaigns to provide OA to the many kinds of content useful to scholars, including:
• peer-reviewed research articles
• unrefereed preprints destined to be peer-reviewed re-search articles
• theses and dissertations
• research data
• government data
• source code
• conference presentations (texts, slides, audio, video)
• scholarly monographs
• textbooks
• novels, stories, plays, and poetry
• newspapers
• archival records and manuscripts
• images (artworks, photographs, diagrams, maps)
• teaching and learning materials (“open education re-sources” and “open courseware”)
• digitized print works (some in the public domain, some still under copyright)
For some of these categories, such as data and source code, we need OA to facilitate the testing and replication of scientific experiments. For others, such as data, images, and digitized work from other media, we need OA in or-der to give reaor-ders the same chance to analyze the primary materials that the authors had. For others, such as articles, monographs, dissertations, and conference presentations, we need OA simply to share results and analysis with ev-eryone who might benefit from them.
A larger book could devote sections to each category.
Here I focus on just a few.
5.1 Preprints, Postprints, and Peer Review1
Throughout most of its history, newcomers to OA as-sumed that the whole idea was to bypass peer review. That assumption was false and harmful, and we’ve made good
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progress in correcting it. The purpose of OA is to remove access barriers, not quality filters. Today many peer-reviewed OA journals are recognized for their excellence, many excellent peer-reviewed toll-access journal publish-ers are experimenting with OA, and green OA for peer-reviewed articles is growing rapidly. Unfortunately many newcomers unaware of these developments still assume that the purpose of OA is to bypass peer review. Some of them deplore the prospect, some rejoice in it, and their passion spreads the misinformation even farther.
All the public statements in support of OA stress the importance of peer review. Most of the enthusiasm for OA is enthusiasm for OA to peer-reviewed literature. At the same time, we can acknowledge that many of the people working hard for this goal are simultaneously exploring new forms of scholarly communication that exist outside the peer-review system, such as preprint exchanges, blogs, wikis, databases, discussion forums, and social media.
In OA lingo, a “preprint” is any version of an article prior to peer review, such as a draft circulating among col-leagues or the version submitted to a journal. A “postprint”
is any version approved by peer review. The scope of green OA deliberately extends to both preprints and postprints, just as the function of gold OA deliberately includes peer review.2
We could say that OA preprint initiatives focus on by-passing peer review. But it would be more accurate to say