Digital Formality & Digital Reality

Comment on:
Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles
Open and Shut Feb 4 2014]

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1. Sixty percent of journals (including Elsevier) state formally in their copyright agreements that their authors retain the right to make their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version (Green) Open Access (OA) immediately, without embargo, by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories.

2. The Elsevier take-down notices did not pertain to the author’s final version but to the publisher’s version of record (and in the case of 3rd party sites like academia.edu they concerned not only the version but the location).

3. The IDOA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate is formally immune to take-down notices, because it separates deposit from OA:

4. For articles published in the 60% of journals in which authors formally retain their right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA, they can be self-archived immediately in the institutional repository and also made OA immediately.

5. For articles published in the 40% of journals that formally embargo OA, if authors wish to comply with the publisher’s embargo, the final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version can still be deposited immediately in the institutional repository, with access set as Closed Access (CA) during any embargo: only the title and abstract are accessible to all users; the full text is accessible only to the author.

6. For CA deposits, institutional repositories have an email-eprint-request Button with which individual users can launch an automated email request to the author for an individual copy for research purposes, with one click; the author can then decide, on an individual case by case basis, with one click, whether or not the repository software should email a copy to that requestor.

7. It is the IDOA + Button Strategy that is the update of the “Harnad-Oppenheim Prepint + Corrigenda” Strategy.

8. But of course even the IDOA + Button Strategy is unnecessary, as is definitively demonstrated by what I would like to dub the “Computer Science + Physics Strategy”:

9. Computer scientists since the 1980’s and Physicists since the 1990’s have been making both their preprints and their final drafts freely accessibly online immediately, without embargo (the former in institutional FTP archives and then institutional websites, and the latter in Arxiv, a 3rd-party website) without any take-down notices (and, after over a quarter century, even the mention of the prospect of author take-down notices for these papers is rightly considered ludicrous).

10. I accordingly recommend the following: Let realistic authors practice the Computer Science + Physics Strategy and let formalistic authors practice the IDOA + Button Strategy — but let them all deposit their their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted versions immediately.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)