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Open and Impactful Academic Publishing

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06 December 2024

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Abstract
We posed selected questions on open access (OA) to Stevan Harnad thirty years after his “subversive proposal” to maximize research impact by self-archiving scholarly articles in university-hosted or disciplinary online repositories to make published articles openly available. Self-archiving, however, was adopted by a small minority of active scholars. In 2022, for example, the most comprehensive research database indexed ~800,000 “green” OA articles and ~2,000,000 “gold” OA articles. Following conversation with Professor Harnad, this work answers three research questions: is self-archiving of scholarly work still a valid alternative to maximize research impact? Besides OA, what is required for publishing impactful research articles? How can a personal academic website benefit open access? The answers to these questions may further inform educational work on open and impactful academic publishing in the digital era.
Keywords: 
Subject: Social Sciences  -   Other

Introduction

In mid 1994 Harnad, a psychology scholar specializing in cognitive science at that time based at Princeton and Southampton universities, published on the VPIEJ-L Internet discussion list based at Virginia Polytechnic Institute a proposal for a conference presentation. Entitled “Publicly retrievable FTP archives for esoteric science and scholarship: a subversive proposal” [1], the text called on all authors of research papers to self-archive their articles (the authors’ refereed final drafts) for free in online archives accessible via file transfer protocol (FTP, a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network). Its incipit swiftly renders the practical approach praised by Harnad:
“We have heard many predictions about the demise of paper publishing, but life is short and the inevitable day still seems a long way off. This is a subversive proposal that could radically hasten that day [1]”.
The post will originate the so-called open access (OA) movement in scholarly publishing [2]. Research articles indeed were made available by publishers to readers via subscription or by paying an access fee. “The authors of refereed journal articles write them only to reach researchers and to have an effect on their research”, Harnad subsequently wrote in 2001, “the idea that access to them should be toll-gated in any way makes as much sense as tollgated access to commercial advertisements” [3]. In the same year, the scholar was invited to participate in a two-day meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (today Open Society Foundations) with the purpose “to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet” [4].
The meeting ended with the 16 participants signing a declaration (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, BOAI) soliciting researchers to make their research papers OA and free to reuse provided that authors retained “control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited” [5].
In the subsequent years, self-archiving research articles on a personal academic website, in a disciplinary repository like arXiv or on the website of the institutions employing the authors of research papers will be called by Harnad “green” OA [6]. The cognitive scientist will instead term “gold” OA, the other main form of open access in which authors pay an article processing charge (APC) to the publisher in exchange for managing the peer review and eventually openly publish online the refereed study [7].
In 2023, nearly three decades after Harnad’s proposal, the percentage of journal articles reviews and conference papers available to read via subscription-only amounted to 52%, further increasing with respect to 49% in 2019 and 51% in 2021 [8]. Furthermore, gold OA was by far the dominant type of open access, comprising 38% of all scholarly articles, reviews and conference papers published globally, and green OA declining to 5% from 9% in 2020 [8].
Besides damaging society (which directly supports academic research work through taxpayer money) in terms of delayed innovation [9], paywalled access to scholarly articles damages the career of researchers too. Indeed, regardless of pleas [10,11] and organized efforts [12] to enhance scholarship evaluation by expanding the evaluation criteria, citation-based metrics remains the key criterion for hiring, retention and promotion in academia [13]. The open access citation advantage (OACA) measured comparing the citation counts of OA versus non-OA articles for articles in the same journal and year that were and were not made OA by author self-archiving (on a sample of 14 million articles indexed between 1992 and 2003) varies between ~40% increase in citations with OA in biology and nearly 250% for articles in physics [14].
Following conversation with Professor Harnad thirty years after the “subversive proposal” [1], this work answers three research questions:
RQ1: Is self-archiving of scholarly work still a valid alternative to maximize research impact?
RQ2: Besides OA, what is required for writing and publishing impactful research articles?
RQ3: How can a personal academic website benefit open access?
The answers to these questions may further inform educational work on open and impactful academic publishing in the digital era [15].

Results and Discussion

A conversation with Stevan Harnad
First question is personal. You were amid the attendants of a meeting in Budapest in 2001 that is considered the debut of the open access/open science movement. What brought you there?
I had already been advocating “OA” (before the name) for well over a decade, including my 1994 “Subversive Proposal” that all researchers should self-archive their refereed research online, free for all, and the American Scientist Open Access Forum (as of 1998). (This eventually was eventually dubbed “Green OA”.)
I had also founded and edited one of the first “Gold” OA journals in 1989, Psycoloquy, sponsored by the American Psychological Association, and free for all. (“Gold OA” – which means the publisher makes the article OA, but it does not necessarily mean author-pays fees). And I had already been editor of an Open Peer Commentary journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press, since I founded it in 1978. (Open Peer Commentary was my real motivation for OA). I was invited to BOAI by Peter Suber, who had also been advocating OA (before the name) for some time. The name “OA” first appeared in Peter Suber’s BOAI Declaration.
What drove your attention to open access?
Open Peer Commentary.
Was it a personal dissatisfaction as a psychology scholar with the fact that most research articles were published and thus available only behind a paywall? Or was it a feeling of lack of social justice in light of the huge profits of scholarly publishers who had conquered who actually took for nothing new knowledge from unaware scholars seeking publication, and thus impact for their science?
Scholars and scientists publish their peer-reviewed research articles to make them accessible to all potential users, to be read, used, applied, cited and built-upon. Their careers (“publish or perish”) also depend on this. It was hence obvious then, and still is now, that these give-away researchers, who seek and receive no revenue from their published journal articles, should make them accessible to all would-be users for free online.
In 1994 you authored and published online the “Subversive Proposal” calling on scholars to archive their articles for free for everyone online? More than thirty years later, most scholars continue not to self-archive online their articles regardless of publishers granting permission to self-archive?
I don’t know about “most” anymore, in the online era, but I would say “not nearly enough.” (Publisher “permission” was never needed; belief in that was superstition, timidity, and rationalization all along.)
Why, in your opinion, has this happened?
You mean why has it not happened nearly enough, nor fast enough…
Is the delay due to lack of attention and digital skills of scholars being unable to open a personal academic website and post online their own articles?
Initially, perhaps, though we at Southampton had already created EPrints (soon emulated by DSpace) free software so universities could create their own Green OA repositories. But today just about everyone has the digital skills and resources.
Or has it been due to universities and other research institutions who were lazy and slow in making their websites also repositories of the articles published by their affiliates?
Yes, that too. And most important, too lazy, slow, pedantic and timid to mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication of the peer-reviewed final version of all research publications.
The aim of making a scientific study open access, you wrote, is to maximise impact and uptake. Linacre has just published data showing that after “Green and Gold running neck-and-neck until they diverged over the last decade or so” showing that Green OA would have “failed in comparison to Gold Open Access” [16]. Yet, a recent analysis of Maddi and Sapinho comparing the citation impact of 2,458,378 publications in fully OA journals to that of a control group of non-OA publications over the period 2010-2020 [17], found that there is no open access citation advantage for publications in fully OA journals and that there is rather a disadvantage. Hence, you were right: green self-archiving provides more benefits and increases impact, whereas “gold” OA does not. How do you explain similar findings?
This is all nonsense. If an article is good, and useful, and researchers want it, they will access it any way they can (subscription, green or gold), read it, use it, apply it, and cite it. Open Access (whether Green or Gold) can only add to Toll Access usage, not reduce it. Access is access. The rest is about whether the research is worth reading, using, applying, and citing.
A wise and purposeful use of “social media” by scholars seems to greatly benefit the societal impact of a scholar's research. How should a scholar practising open science approach social media in your regarded opinion?
Do good research, make sure to have it peer-reviewed and published, make it Green OA, and, if relevant, cite and discuss it in online peer discussion groups. But serious scholars and scientists are dedicated to the usage and uptake of their findings, not to their promotion on blogs, twitter, Reddit, or Ted Talks. We do not seek “Likes” but peer uptake, applying. And building upon it, to contribute to scholarly and scientific knowledge and learning (some of which stands among the few things the human species need not be ashamed of).
One important journal in the life sciences, eLife, no longer accepts or rejects papers after peer review: all submissions that are peer reviewed are published as Reviewed Preprints after the peer-review process has been completed [18]. Do you still ascribe value to peer-review (and editing) as quality control means, as stated in the “Subversive Proposal”?
This is just labelling and marketing. A paper that has been peer-reviewed to meet the standards of a reputable journal is published and can be cited as published in that journal. If it is not peer-reviewed, but “appears in” that journal, it is not a published (refereed-) journal article. It is merely an unrefereed journal, hosted by the journal’s website.
Why create confusion in users by making it harder to know what is and is not a peer-reviewed journal article?
Yes, I still think it is important for researchers to know whether a paper is likely to be reliable and worth their time to try to use, apply and build upon. (Copy-editing has become much less reliable these days and maybe it’s not worth the effort or cost.)
“Peer review” can of course vary in quality and reliability from journal to journal. That’s why the journal’s name and track-record is still an important marker. Many journals have standards so low that their articles amount to unrefereed preprints. (This is true of subscription journals as well as pay-to-publish Gold OA journals, but the latter contain many more predatory junk journals.)
I do also wonder what percentage of published research is important enough to warrant the time and effort of peers to referee it. The reserve of available, qualified peer expertise is greatly overstretched today, and referees are selected by secretaries (“editorial assistants”) through literature searches and software that are making a farce of the refereeing process.
Only time (not I) can tell what effect this is having on research quality, and whether it is worthwhile anymore. Can the default be “unrefereed,” with the hope that the important and reliable subset will be signaled by open peer feedback and usage (as the open “postpublication” “peer” review advocates propose)?
Along with Green OA came the preprint, explicitly mentioned in your “Subversive Proposal”. When research is complete and written, it is made freely available to the scholarly community and to the public via self-publication on the internet (today on a preprint platform, on an academic social network, yesterday - as you did with the Subversive Proposal - via “anonymous ftp”). Even in this case, some research communities have been highly receptive, with massive uptake of preprint publishing. Others, very reluctant, even in the very same "basic" sciences (i.e., compare Physics with Chemistry) though its benefits are today well-documented even for the academic career of scholars preprinting their research. Why, in your opinion, such strong differences?
It’s partly discipline or speciality differences in habits and needs, but partly also differences in content and substance. I, for example, had been worried about the potential danger of blurring the boundary between refereed and unrefereed reporting of findings in medicine, but I do not know the public health data on that.
Peer-review is a form of “regulation” of quality and reliability, as in the domain of food and medicine. It varies greatly in quality in any case, and is easily thrown to the four winds. But I don’t want to be the one to suggest throwing regulation to the winds. Let others bear the historical responsibility for that. (Unchecked climate change has already shown what we reap from sowing a free-for-all of profit-driven “libertarianism”.)
Along with research outcomes indirectly measured by the number of research papers and their citations, proponents of open science wisely suggest to include in the evaluation of scholarship teaching and societal service. Do you agree with this broader scope approach to the evaluation of scholars in academic promotion and tenure processes? Do you have practices of such an approach in evaluating colleagues in Canada, Great Britain or in other countries?
To my knowledge, the evaluation of scholarly and scientific “output” is pretty mechanical and superficial in all these countries: not maximizing quality but regressing on the mean. I suppose that is part of the inevitable wages of scale. But I think we could do better with the many actual and potential online metrics available – as a supplement to, but not a substitute for - qualified human evaluation, taking into account publications, usage, scholarship, teaching, applications, and even activism.
Is self-archiving of scholarly work still a valid alternative to maximize research impact?
Exploring the case for self-archiving in 2024 from a historic perspective, the answers of Harnad are revealing. The slow uptake of research paper self-archiving was due both to: i) the researcher’s belief (“superstition”) in a publisher permission to self-archive “that was never needed”, and ii) to universities and research institutes being “too lazy, slow, pedantic and timid to mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication of the peer-reviewed final version of all research publications”. The psychologist also adds “rationalization” and “ timidity” to the author behavioral traits that contributed to the aforementioned belief.
Scepticism about the benefits of OA for research impact and limited availability of university-hosted repositories, we further argue, are two other main drivers that may explain such counterintuitive author and university behavior. “Universities and their researchers” indeed in principle “share in the benefits of maximizing research impact and share in the costs of lost impact” [6].
Ever since the “subversive proposal” Harnad insisted that the main objective of OA was to maximize research impact [19], with the latter translating into further research funding, research progress and joint advances to the researcher’s career and to financial support of the researcher’s institution.
Put simply, scepticism was due to the fact that most researchers were (and still are) not familiar with the open access citation advantage data published by Harnad and co-workers in 2008 using a 12-year sample of 14 million articles indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information database between 1992 and 2003 for the fields of physics, sociology, psychology, law, management, education, business, health sciences, political sciences, economics and biology [14]. The team identified an OACA varying between 40% in biology and nearly 250% for articles in physics.
Linacre and co-workers recently reported that until 2013 the number of green and gold OA articles indexed by the most comprehensive research database (Dimensions) [20] was about 400,000 for both categories, but in the subsequent decade numbers diverged with about 800,000 green OA and 2,000,000 gold OA articles indexed in 2022 [16]. The researchers concluded that green OA “has failed” [16]. The share of green OA articles amid those published between 2009 and 2015 (indexed by the Web of Science) amounted to 11.5% [21]; with green OA being particularly used in physics and mathematics, thanks to the widespread use of the arXiv online repository.
In the last three months of 2004, Swan and Brown carried out an international, cross-disciplinary study on green open access surveying 1296 researchers (74% of whom were academics, 3% in research institutions, 5% in the public sector and 5% in industry or business) on self-archiving article preprints and post-prints using personal web pages, institutional repositories and disciplinary repositories [22]. More than half (51%) had never self-archived at least one article during the previous three years. Out of the 49% of the respondents who had self-archived articles and conference presentations, most researchers (27%) had opted for posting a copy of the refereed, published research article on a personal web page rather than on institutional (20%) or subject-based (12%) repositories. The share of researchers using their personal website had even increased (27%) when compared the 20% found in the previous survey (January 2004).
In 2008, the launch of academic social network of ResearchGate (RG) gave place to the first substantial change. A significant number of scholars opted to use academic social networks such as RG (or Academia.edu) to self-archive their articles, without paying attention to copyright issues. “ResearchGate was able to garner early adoption” commented an entrepreneur and data scientist in 2023, “by providing a venue for authors to post their articles despite having relinquished the copyright to do so” [23].
For example, in early 2015 RG already had 7 million members and 19 million full-text publications [24]. The analysis of 500 papers written in English randomly selected from a one million list of papers available as full-text on RG found that only 108 out of 500 were OA articles whereas 201 (51.3%) out of 392 non-OA articles uploaded infringed the publishers’ copyright [24]. Publishers predictably reacted, and in 2017 two large publishers sued RG for providing unrestricted public access to copyrighted articles. Today, after having settled litigation with the publishers in late 2023 [23], RG generally does not include non-OA articles uploaded by authors.
As expected, in order to prevent legal issues due to copyright infringement, universities and research institutes owning “institutional repositories” (usually the website of the university) opted to check permissions for any published faculty research paper prior to make it OA [25]. As a result, “from the perspective of faculty members the time and effort involved in determining or securing copyright often outweighed the benefits of institutional repositories” [24].
Things further accelerated since 2011, when the Sci-Hub online database was launched. In a few years, the database made de facto openly accessible nearly the whole scholarship output. As of March 2017, about 69% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and slightly more than 85% of articles published in paywalled journals were freely available on Sci-Hub [26]. This simple fact, wrote and Maddi and Sapinho in 2023, “instantly cancels the positive effect of OA publication insofar as question of access to scientific content no longer arises” [17].
Indeed, following comparison in the citation impact of 1,024,430 publications in “hybrid” journals (subscription journals in which author can make their articles OA following payment of an article processing charge) to that of a control group of non-OA publications over the period 2010-2020, the two scholars found that the high (60%) OACA in 2010 reached its maximum 70% in 2016. Since then it steadily declined to about 20% by 2020 [17]. Furthermore, following comparison in the citation impact of 2,458,378 publications in fully OA journals, the team identified an open access citation disadvantage for publications in fully OA journals amounting to about -20 to -15%, when compared to the uncontrolled group comprised of all non-OA publications indexed by the research database Web of Science in the same time framework [17].
A recent investigation of 19 million research outputs (and 420 million citation links) published from 2010 to 2019, found that green OA has a stronger effect on increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research than gold OA via publisher platforms [27]. Plots of the mean Shannon scores compared across closed, open, gold OA and green OA categories between 2000 and 2019 showed that green OA benefits researchers because it allows to reach wider audiences as shown by the higher diversity of citing outputs (the geographic locations of author affiliations and the fields of research of citing outputs) used as a proxy for wider dissemination of research.
These outcomes reinforce the opportunity to self-archive research papers on the personal academic website [28]. As suggested by the editor of a medical journal “this is a free option that allows authors to aggregate their works in their own web space”, that will not “come at a cost to manuscript discoverability” [29] provided that the website is properly developed according to the principles and guidelines of search engine optimization [28].
Besides OA, what is required for writing and publishing impactful research articles?
In general, most scholarly journals no longer print journals but only publish online the digital version of research papers in PDF format (to maintain the reader-friendly format developed for scholars who will print and read physical copies of research articles) and also in (“digital-first”) computer readable interactive markup languages such as HTML and full-text XML. This makes self-archiving on a personal academic website even more desirable.
Generally available as PDF files, most self-archived refereed research articles are available as single-column pages using double spacing, often with tables and figures placed at the end of the manuscript. This format, however, was the old manuscript format required by journals when peer review was carried out by reviewers by handwriting through the paper on manuscripts exchanged through postal service.
Article templates allow authors to place images, graphs and tables close to the point where they are discussed within the text, can be easily accessed online and used to produce research papers directly in typeset format. This enhances readability (both on paper after printing the article and on screen), and increases the chances of engaging and retaining an audience amid peers. In 2012, for example, just over half (51.1%) of articles were found to be read on the screen of a computer or of a mobile digital device [30].
Format affects understanding at all levels.
Even the in-text citation format affects reading comprehension, with undergraduate students (enrolled in science courses) reading comprehension being 34% higher when reading articles with numeric in-text citations compared to articles with parenthetical, Author-Year, in-text citations [31]. Research papers, furthermore, are read by peers by first reading the abstract and the conclusions [32]. Hence, authors of impactful papers will both use a template to format their paper and learn how to write succinct abstracts clearly stating the scope of the investigation and the main conclusions after summarizing the main results. Empirical evidence studying the understanding of third-year undergraduate students clearly shows that this results in substantially higher readability, understanding, and confidence [33].
On the other hand, using the intrinsic multimedia communication capability of the world wide web, today several journals use visual abstracts, consisting of an infographic style format coupled with a short word summary of the research detailing the research questions, findings and take home message of the research study [34].
Academic publishing is a market where information is exchanged for attention [35]. In this market information is plentiful and growing at fast pace whereas attention is the scarce resource. Since 1952, indeed, the number of research papers published annually grows exponentially with an annual growth rate of 5.08% and a doubling time of 14 years [36].
Hence, any effective means to enhance scholarly attention, such as using visual abstracts to disseminate research using social media [37], will enhance the chances of having the research being read, used and cited.
When research papers were printed, every printed work had a substantial economic cost. For example, in the early 1980s, it cost about 12 USD cents a word to publish a scientific paper and another 12 cents every time that word was reprinted in an abstracting publication [38]. Today, replaced by online research databases, abstracting publications in print have ceased to exist. For example, in the field of chemistry Wiley ceased publication of Cheminform at the end of 2016, while the American Chemical Society ceased print publication of Chemical Abstracts at the end of 2009. On the other hand, publishing articles online has an exceedingly low cost when compared to printing on paper and distributing the printed journals.
How can the personal academic website benefit open access?
Two major reasons support the opportunity to use a personal academic website [39] to self-archive scholarly work.
First, self-archiving a research paper on a personal academic website saves time and eliminates bureaucracy making self-archiving quick and effective. For example, in France in 2020, even though self-archiving in the HAL repository was mandated for evaluation of CNRS researchers, archiving by nonfaculty still accounted for 52% of all deposits [40]. Researchers in most world’s countries continue to not self-archive even in scientifically leading countries such as the United States of America (USA). For instance, University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s institutional repository at the end of 2021 hosted 126 works, despite the 3,000 faculty during that period had published 4,817 works [41]. In the subsequent academic year, the librarians thus created a mediated workflow in which they would identify and deposit scholarly papers for the repository on behalf of the researcher. In academic year 2022-2023 out of a campus with 3,000 faculty, 14 faculty members used the workflow to add 158 works to the repository. Combined with independent self-archiving, the overall number of works self-archived at UNC Charlotte reached 276 in 2022-2023, from 123 in the previous academic year. In brief, faculty and researchers remain nonresponsive. “This lack of response could be for a variety of reasons, including people feeling burdened by too many emails” [41].
Another reason for which a scholar should use her personal academic website is that for over two decades since the Web introduction, until collaboration between publishers and search engine companies was established, academic articles stored in publishers’ databases were actually part of the “academic invisible web” [42].
Remarkably indeed, research on self-archiving assistant, associate, and full professors (a 1,500-member survey sample group of 17 leading universities in the USA (doctorate-granting universities offering at least 20 doctoral degrees per year) conducted in 2006 found that amid the scholars who self-archived work, self-archiving on “personal Web pages” was adopted for self-archiving by 67% of the faculty who self-archived works, with most surveyed faculty responding that “self-archiving required minimal time and effort” [43].
Nearly two decades later, self-archiving on a personal academic website remains the quickest and most effective way to self-archive scholarly work, whereas numerous platforms offer free or premium personal academic website professional hosting and editing services [39].

Conclusions

In summary, following Harnad’s 1994 “subversive proposal” to self-archive published articles on the Internet [1], the cognitive scientist and his co-workers demonstrated a large and significant open access citation advantage for all disciplines ranging from ~40% in biology to nearly 250% for articles in physics [14]. Addressing a letter to Nature in 2001, Lawrence did the same for papers in computer science: analysis of articles published in the same journal gave an increase of 286% in the citation rate for online articles [44]. One would therefore expect that scholars worldwide would have embraced self-archiving en masse. This, however, did not happen, and in 2022 the ~800,000 green OA articles indexed by the most comprehensive research database (Dimensions) were less than half of the ~2,000,000 gold OA articles [16]. To understand why we posed selected questions to Stevan Harnad thirty years after his 1994 “subversive proposal” [1].
The main drivers of this outcome were a combination of factors including unfounded scepticism concerning OA, and bureaucratic access to the few institutional repositories available. In brief, concomitant with the global trend that made citations of scholarly papers and other citation-based metrics the dominant evaluation criteria to evaluate researchers for hiring, tenure and promotion [45], most scholars and universities across the world opted to deal with self-archiving as something chiefly concerning the advocates of “open science”. Similar scepticism was accompanied by unjustified prejudice towards the first fully OA journals [46].
As time passed, scholars became aware of the OA citation advantage. Yet, rather than making their articles freely accessible on institutional repositories or on personal websites, since 2009 they started to publicly upload their journal articles on academic social networks such as ResearchGate [24]. This lasted till late 2017 when, following legal action from publishers for copyright infringement, most articles posted on academic social websites were eventually removed [23].
In the meanwhile, the scholarly community based in economically developed countries started to uptake gold OA [16], namely publication of articles in OA after payment to the publisher of a fee (“article processing charge”). Paradoxically, however, the success of the Sci-Hub platform illegally providing access to nearly the whole scientific literature has cancelled the positive effect of OA publishing, creating the conditions for a OA citation disadvantage for publications in fully OA journals [17].
In this complex context, this study aimed at fostering further progress towards open and impactful academic publishing answers three relevant questions on self-archiving thirty years Harnad’s “subversive proposal” [1].
The first answer is that, far from having “failed” [16], self-archiving is even more needed today than it was when Harnad called for self-archiving when the world wide web then in its infancy [1]. Self-archiving indeed shows a stronger effect on increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research than gold OA, as shown by recent investigation of 19 million research outputs and 420 million citations published from 2010 to 2019 [27].
The second answer is that OA academic publishing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for impactful research. Self-archived research papers need to be written in a clear and concise style, and directly in reader-friendly format, because this substantially enhances readability and thus the chances of having the research being read, used and cited. This in its turn requires that most universities provide undergraduate and graduate students with formal education on scientific writing [47], and on the principles and tools of open science [15]. Concluding the second edition of his influential book on scientific writing published in 1983, Day wrote that “universities that do not provide courses in scientific writing should be ashamed of themselves” [48].
The third answer is that self-archiving on a personal academic website is even more desirable today than it was (and is) self-archiving in institutional repositories because it saves time and efforts eliminating bureaucratic burdens often associated with “posting” works on online repositories.
The findings of this study on research article self-archiving, one decade after those identified a decade ago by Björk and co-workers [49], may inform the aforementioned (and highly needed) educational programs of Universities on open and impactful academic publishing in the digital era [50,15].

Author Contributions

Conceptualization: Mario Pagliaro, Rosaria Ciriminna, Rafael Luque. Funding acquisition: Mario Pagliaro, Rosaria Ciriminna. Formal analysis: Rosaria Ciriminna, Rafael Luque, Giovanna Li Petri, Giuseppe Angellotti. Investigation: Rosaria Ciriminna, Rafael Luque, Giovanna Li Petri, Giuseppe Angellotti. Writing – original draft: Mario Pagliaro. Writing – review & editing: Rosaria Ciriminna, Rafael Luque, Giovanna Li Petri, Giuseppe Angellotti.

Acknowledgments

M.P. and R.C. thank Ministero delle Imprese e del Made in Italy for funding the article processing charge of this study under the Piano Operativo della Ricerca “Ricerca e sviluppo sull'idrogeno” financed by the EU NextGenerationEU - M2C2 Investment 3.5, in the framework of the project PNRR Ricerca e Sviluppo sull’Idrogeno 2022–2025 - Accordo di Programma “Idrogeno” (PRR.AP015.017.002), “Obiettivo 1 - Produzione di idrogeno verde e pulito”, “LA 1.1.6 - Sviluppo di materiali e componenti non contenenti materiali critici per elettrolizzatori anionici (AEM) operanti anche ad elevata pressione differenziale”.
Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interests.

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