All
bold italic quotes are from:
Social Science and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) (Canada) Consultation on Open Access
Should SSHRC adopt [a] regulation requiring that one copy of all research results be deposited in an institutional repository?
Yes, but SSHRC should make sure that what they require to be deposited is the author's final draft,
not necessarily the publisher's official version (PDF). That's all the
RCUK is requiring; that's all the
NIH and
Wellcome require; and that's all that's needed for 100% OA.
The publisher's PDF can be deposited too, optionally, if the publisher agrees; but it is important to make sure SSHRC doesn't get bogged down by that irrelevancy, by needlessly insisting on the publisher's version instead of just the author's final draft.
Should such a regulation apply to all forms of research outputs (i.e. peer-reviewed journal articles, non-peer reviewed research reports, monographs, data sets, theses, conference proceedings, etc.)?
It should be mandatory for authors' final drafts of journal and refereed-conference articles for sure.
It's up to SSHRC whether to make it mandatory for data too.
It is tricky to force authors to make unrefereed reports public if they don't wish to, so that should be optional: merely recommended, not required.
Monographs are even trickier, as there is no need to jeopardise securing OA's main target -- research articles -- by needlessly threatening authors' potential revenues from books: Of course SSHRC authors make next to no money that way; and of course many SSHRC authors will be happy to self-archive their monographs anyway; but SSHRC should on no account put the real OA target at risk by needlessly over-reaching: Require self-archiving for articles, but only recommend it (strongly, if SSHRC wishes) for books.
Theses too are tricky, because some are destined to become books, and SSHRC is not really subsidising the thesis itself, just the supervisor's research. So it might inspire less needless author opposition if thesis self-archiving too were strongly recommended, rather than required, as with articles.
Should there be exceptions for research outputs where there is an expectation of financial return to the author (i.e., monographs where royalties are accrued)?
Yes, definitely exempt them: OA is intended for give-away texts, written for the sake of research impact; it is not intended for trade texts, written for the sake of sales-revenue.
In general, there are two accepted routes to open access: Self-archiving - depositing research results and materials in institutional repositories that can be searched by anyone with Internet access;
OA self-archiving is exactly what can and should be mandated.
Open access electronic journals - peer-reviewed journals that provide Internet-based access for readers without subscription charges.
OA journal-publishing cannot and hence should not be mandated, because:
(1) there aren't anywhere near enough suitable OA journals in most fields yet;
(2) dictating authors' choice of journals would only elicit needless opposition from authors;
(3) authors can be mandated, but publishers cannot;
(4) hence mixing OA archiving and OA publishing into the same mandate will just elicit publisher opposition to both (needlessly);
(5) OA self-archiving will already take care of providing 100% OA for all SSHRC research output
Let journal reform take care of itself: SSHRC's concern should only be with research access (and impact). Mixing that up with forced journal-reform will again just elicit needless opposition and delay for the primary target: 100% OA for SSHRC-funded research article output (authors' final drafts) so that all users worldwide can access, use, apply and build upon it, and not just those users who (or whose institutions) happen to be able to afford to access the journal in which the publisher's official version happens to be published. Publishing in OA journals should be encouraged where possible, but not mandated. If SSHRC wishes, it can offer to help support authors' OA journal publishing costs.
In sum: Mandating OA self-archiving and encouraging (and supporting) OA publishing is all that's needed from SSHRC. The rest will come with the territory. But if SSHRC instead needlessly over-reaches, needlessly trying to strong-arm publishing reform directly, the whole thing will just get needlessly bogged down for years more.
Both routes present SSHRC and the research community with operational challenges:
1. Institutional repositories: Building a management and service platform
Institutional repositories present no "operational challenges," either for SSHRC or for institutions. Institutional Repositories (IRs) can and will take care of themselves. SSHRC should just mandate self-archiving, and the IRs will be created and filled.
SSHRC needs no central SSHRC or Canadian archive. Distributed institutional self-archiving is the most natural and efficient route to 100% OA: the IRs are all interoperable because they are OAI-compliant. If SSHRC wishes, it can harvest from them the articles it has funded. See the Swan/Brown JISC study on central vs. distributed institutional self-archiving and central harvesting:
Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1):pp. 25-40.
Currently, not all Canadian universities provide an institutional repository service. Some 26 repositories are now in place, or are in development, but this does not yet provide the necessary services for all SSHRC-funded researchers.
Every Canadian university that does not have an IR already is
less than $10,000 away from having an IR. Hence this is a red herring.
If required by SSHRC, would you be willing to send all outputs from SSHRC-funded research to an institutional repository?
Of course. (
I already do.) Another JISC Swan & Brown international survey has already reported that 90% of Canadian researchers worldwide would comply (80% willingly, 10% reluctantly). This is almost identical to the international average of
95% compliance (81% willingly, 14% reluctantly).
Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.
What range of electronic publications and institutional repository services are needed to fully meet the needs of the scholarly community? See, for example erudit.org (www.erudit.org), a Quebec-based electronic service provider. Should this model be extended across Canada?
Erudit is not an institutional repository, it is a journal archive, though it does also offer space to authors for
central archiving. See the the
Institutional Archive Registry.
Don't mix up journal repositories with institutional repositories. It is the latter that are needed, and all that's missing is the SSHRC mandate. Mandate institutional self-archiving and the archives will be created, and the archives will be filled, with the primary target content (author final drafts of refereed journal articles).
If SSHRC wants to emulate a Quebec self-archiving model, have a look at the institutional self-archiving policy shortly to be announced by l'
Université du Québec à Montréal.
Or see the
mandates of CERN, University of Minho, University of Zurich, Queensland University of Technology, or University of Southampton.
Open access journals: Revising the SSHRC Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program. Although SSHRC financially supports the majority of social science and humanities journals produced in Canada , the Aid to Research and Transfer Journals Program does not provide support for non-subscription based journals. Scholarly peer-reviewed journals play a crucial role in the certification of research knowledge. In the context of open access, institutional repositories must be able to distinguish between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed research outputs. Therefore, the continued existence, and financial viability, of journals is clearly a critical issue.
The continued existence of peer-reviewed journals is not at issue, as long as SSHRC resists mixing up publishing reform (gold) with OA self-archiving (green).
Harnad, S. (2005) Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold. Ariadne 43.
It is the authors' final drafts of journal articles that need to be self-archived, and they will be tagged as "peer-reviewed final drafts" (plus journal name).
Journals' financial viability is not at issue; nor is there any objective evidence to date that it is at risk.
The only thing at issue is research access; and the only thing at risk (indeed
50%-250% of it is being outright lost today) is research usage and impact.
Harnad, Stevan (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19(16).
Please comment on each of the three following possible ways to tackle this challenge, taking into consideration the fact that there are limited resources for the support of research:
A "moving wall" system where journal articles are available only by subscription for the first six months, and then made available free of charge.
As a basis for an SSHRC OA policy? Very bad. Why are journal funding issues being mixed up with funded research access issues?
Self-archiving should be immediate, upon acceptance of the final refereed draft for publication by the journal.
No "moving walls" (unless the journal wishes to make its own contents OA after a period of its choosing, which is fine, but completely independent from the issue of immediate self-archiving by the author, and an SSHRC requirement to do it).
"Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" (Jan 2005)
A publication fee, charged by journals to authors, to be considered an eligible expense within a SSHRC research grant. This would require researchers to have access to SSHRC or other grant funds.
Good idea, if the journal is an OA journal; absurd and irrelevant if it is not.
A modification to the SSHRC support program for journals -- which currently covers 40 to 50 per cent of journal expenditures -- to allow grants to cover all peer review, administration = and manuscript preparation costs, but not costs associated with distribution.
Only if the journals become OA. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the SSHRC self-archiving requirement and should not be mixed up with it in any way.
As journal editors, do you allow your contributing authors to place their accepted articles in an institutional repository or on a Web site not connected with the journal? Why, or why not?
Who is being asked? The Romeo registry lists the 8620 journals indexed so far for their self-archiving policy, and
93% of them endorse self-archiving, 7% do not. Journal editors should register their policies if they are not already registered:
As researchers/authors, would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that requires peer-reviewed articles to be published in an open access journal and/or placed in a publicly-accessible institutional repository?
Why is this question being asked in this illogical and arbitrary composite/interwoven form (worthy of a gerry-rigged referendum query, contingent on all sorts of unfulfilled and unfulfillable premises) instead of being asked in a straight-forward way?
The two (separate!) straight-forward questions should have been:
(1) Would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that requires peer-reviewed articles to be placed in a publicly-accessible institutional repository?
The replies would then very likely have been the same as those we already know from the two
JISC international surveys: >80% willing compliance.)
(2) Would you be willing to comply with a SSHRC regulation that recommends peer-reviewed articles to be published in an open access journal when possible?
(As this is a recommendation and not a mandate, and only pertains to cases when the author judges that a suitable journal exists, the outcome will not be terribly informative; in any case, the
2 JISC surveys have already polled authors worldwide on this score, and they are indeed favorably inclined toward
suitable OA journals, if/when they exist. Now back to the real problem, with is the non-existence of OA for the
85% of worldwide research article output that is not yet being self-archived:
That is what the SSHRC self-archiving mandate -- (1), above -- is for. The rest will take care of itself.)
Stevan Harnad
