Open Access Archivangelism

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 Charles Oppenheim (CO) wrote in AmSci:

CO: : "I regret to say that Stevan is incorrect in some of his comments. For previous RAEs, there WERE licensing arrangements put in place to permit p/copies of articles to be passed to RAE panels. he is probably unaware of this because no great publicity was associated with the arrangements that were set up."

There is no end to what people will do, if left to their own devices, safely out of reach of critical reflection. The only substantive question, though, is: What actually makes sense?

(If more publicity had attended the low-profile RAE licensing arrangements last time, perhaps some voices of reason would have been raised earlier. As it stands, it seems to me that people in the self-regulating interstices of IP-never-neverland are making ad hoc decisions about what does and does not need permission without any particular answerability to fact or reason, one way or the other!)

Unless I am mistaken, the RAE consists of the following: Researchers all over the UK submit N (4? 8? 12?) copies of their four most important articles, to be counted (and sometimes confirmed, and sometimes even read and pondered) by a panel of RAE assessors.

I (and many others the world over) receive, every year, several times, copies of the articles of candidates at other institutions who are being evaluated for employment, promotion, tenure, chairs, prizes, or funding. Does anyone imagine that a license has been or needs to be sought in order to send someone's own work out to be evaluated?

Reductio ad absurdum: Suppose the photocopies, which the author makes for his own private use, are temporarily lent to another individual, with the request that they then be returned to their owner: Does that too call for "licensing arrangements"?

Well then let the evaluation copies be considered a loan, and let that be the end of it! (If still in doubt, run the same thought experiment through with a lent book, instead of an article, or one's own photocopy of one's own book, lent.)

Still not absurd enough? Well then return to what would have been the most sensible thing to do in the first place: Not to use originals or photocopies of the publisher's version at all, but simply the author's own peer-reviewed final draft ("postprint"). Still think I need a license to send my own work to someone to assess it for a salary rise?

CO: "Licences are likewise needed this time around because the Universities do not (in general) own the copyright in these items, so they are "dealing" with someone else's (usually a publisher's) copyright material. Such copying by Universities cannot be considered "fair dealing" as it is not for one of the permitted purposes, and indeed is not permitted under any other exception to copyright. So I am glad that PLS is arranging a licence so that institutions can pass copies of items to RAE panels without risk of copyright infringement."

The solution to this rather absurd pseudo-problem -- "How can I provide a copy of my very own writing to be evaluated by someone who I would very much prefer not to oblige to go out and buy a copy for himself in exchange for the privilege of deciding whether or not to pay me more salary or research funding?" -- is super-simple: Let it not be (nominally) the "universities" that do the submitting to the RAE; let it instead be (nominally) the authors themselves. "Here is my work: Please assess me!" Let the authors either "lend" their own photocopies of their own published articles to the RAE assessors (with a postage stamp and a cheery request to return it to its rightful owner once assessed), or, better still, let them submit only their own final, corrected drafts, straight out of their own word-processors. (I had already pointed out that the fatal foolishness -- probably out of pointless pedantry if not paranoia -- was in RAE's insisting on the publisher's offprint rather than the author's postprint in the first place.)

I am, of course, not proposing that these idiotic prophylactic measures actually be taken; I am just trying to use them as an intuition pump, to wash off the nonsensical notion that "institutions" (whether the author's university or HEFCE) are here making "unfair use" of the publisher's property: It is the authors who are doing the fair-using, of their own work, in their own interests. Anyone who insists on construing it in another way is simply giving HEFCE and the universities bad advice. (But, without publicity, bad advice risks being followed.)

CO: "In summary, I'm afraid the law does require licensing this time around, as it did for the previous RAEs."

The Law requires licensing if we put the question to the Law in the following form:

"May institutions make multiple photocopies of a published work to submit them to the RAE?"

The Law comes up with an altogether different answer if we instead ask:

"May individuals lend/send personal copies of their own work to be evaluated?"

QED (or so it ought to be, but I expect there are more hermeneutic epicycles to be spun on this yet...)

CO: "My understanding is that the RAE panels want pdfs rather than author postprints because they need the reassurance that the thing they are reading is identical to that which was published. Since the RAE is an auditing exercise in which the onus is on the integrity of what is being submitted, HEFCE no doubt feel that the pdf offers the necessary security."

That is indeed the heart of the matter, and just a little common sense and reflection will reveal -- as I have pointed out many times before -- that the onus is not on HEFCE but on the institutions, to make sure that what they are submitting is kosher. If it is discovered that someone has submitted a plagiarised or unpublished or altered work -- something that the electronic medium makes even easier to detect and expose than was possible in the paper medium (though even in the paper medium, the risk and consequences of exposure had been mighty) -- then the ones that are named, shamed, blamed and punished are of course the institutions, and ultimately the researchers, not HEFCE!

To show that this is all pure pedantry and nothing more (except possibly paranoia), ask yourself whether it is really "safe" to trust even the journal offprint? After all, peer review being the frail human exercise it is, the only ones who may (or may not) have ensured that the paper met all dietetic laws were the referees: Is the onus of the integrity of the RAE exercise to be entrusted to one or two unidentified, fallible, corruptible referees? Surely RAE should re-do the peer review, and with more robust numbers, on whatever document the author submits!

If this last compunction seems to call into question the value of having the RAE assessors re-do in any measure the assessment that has already been done by the peer reviewers, then I have succeeded in making myself understood! There is no need for most of the baroque trappings of this auditing exercise: Insofar as published journal articles are concerned, it is just an auditing exercise. The RAE should not be asking for copies of the papers to read at all -- god knows how many of them actually get read anyway -- it should simply be counting: journal articles, citations, downloads, and other objective indicators. (Charles himself has published a good deal of evidence that a goodly proportion of the variance in the RAE rankings is already predictable from that scientometric audit trail.)

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35.

Instead, we find ourselves in the absurd position of twisting ourselves into knots in order to have the "legal right" to submit for re-assessment (inexpert re-assessment, and only on a spot-check basis), by an RAE panel, the publisher's proprietary page-images of a peer-reviewed article that has already been assessed (by purpose-picked, qualified peer experts -- within the vagaries of each journal's quality standards, competence, and conscientiousness, such as they are), when the resulting RAE outcome is already highly correlated with an objective audit we could have done without even needing to have the full-texts in hand! And, inasmuch as we may have felt impelled to give the full-texts a peek, we might just as well have had the author's peer-reviewed, corrected final draft (postprint), without the further pomp and circumstance, just duly certified by the already frantic and compulsive RAE preparation committee in each department of each university, eager to maximise their ranks, minimise their risks, and be compliant in every conceivable and inconceivable way.

As I said, this will all be seen to be hilarious in hindsight: Once we are all making our postprints routinely accessible online free for all in our institutional repositories, the thought that we were agitating ourselves over "licensing arrangements" for RAE assessment way back in 2006 will be seen to have just been one of those quaint paleolithic quirks, like the erstwhile conviction that everyone needed a walking stick or a top hat in order to stay upright and avoid their death of a cold or sunstroke...

CO: "Having said all that, things would have been so much simpler if, as Stevan has argued, mandated self-archived articles with copyright owned by the academic/HEI had been around years ago!"

I hate to be so contrary again but, no, it is not copyright-retention that has been and is the problem. It is finger-retention: If/when researchers make (or get made to make) their fingers do the walking, to do at last those few keystrokes required to deposit their refereed postprints (and optionally also their pre-refereeing preprints) in their own IRs -- a practice to which 93% of journals have already given their blessing, though it was not really needed, yet only about 15% of authors are actually doing it unmandated (whereas 95% would do it if mandated) -- then all of this substance- and sense-free shadow-boxing will be at an end and... (After 12 long years I no longer say "the optimal and inevitable" will be upon us: I don't doubt that we will simply graduate to some new, higher level of tom-foolery.)

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, CO replied:

CO:"With respect, Stevan has got the legal situation wrong. It is not the academics who are asked to provide copies of their articles to the RAE panels - it is their employing Universities."

But that is the point! The absurd case for licensing RAE submissions is based on simply asking in the wrong way (whereas asking in the right way would yield the identical benefits, but without the spurious licensing requirement):

(1) The objective is to have 4 articles from every participating researcher sent to RAE quadrennially for auditing and assessment.

(2) If we (arbitrarily) say it is the university that is sending 4N (arbitrary) articles to RAE, then it sounds like the university is making unfair use of 3rd-party content.

(3) If we instead (sensibly) say it is each author, sending his own 4 articles, for auditing and assessment, then it is crystal clear that it is fair (authorial) use.

Hence (3) is not only the way the whole question should be put, but it is also the most accurate and transparent description of what is actually going on, and what the RAE is actually about: Researchers are sending their articles to RAE to be assessed so that they can get more money!

I can only repeat, if RAE persists in putting it instead in an obtuse way, the results will be equally obtuse.

CO:"So, saying it is just like being asked by a colleague for a copy of one of your articles is incorrect. It is the employer making multiple copies of multiple articles."

Would it settle minds if a directive were circulated at all the UK universities stating that: "On no account must it be the Centre or its secretaries who photo-copy the articles! Each individual author must do so, personally..."?

(Charles, with all due respect, I am doing a formal and functional reductio ad absurdum here, so it won't do to just repeat the one arbitrary formal way of characterising and implementing the exercise, when another way of characterising and implementing the very same thing would have precisely the same outcome, without the absurd consequences (i.e., without the ostensible need to license 3rd-party contents!).

CO:"It's also not lending of the materials, because the RAE panels retain them, and don't return them to the HEI at the end of the RAE."

Would it settle minds if the articles were lent, with the author doing the photocopying, the department merely coordinating ("auditing"!) its own individual authors' mailings, and each author solemnly requesting, in writing, that after "assessment" his personal property itemsd should either be mailed back or destroyed?

I make no comment on the absurdity of RAE wanting to preserve the articles in their possession till kingdom come (whereas they are all already in the public record, duly published, and all that's needed for an audit is an audit-trail -- just as an accounting firm need not store the cash, just the bank-statements!). (The bright light who thought RAE needed a permanent store of the articles themselves after the assessment is no doubt the same one that insisted on the publisher's version instead of the author's final draft in the first place. I think we would all be better off if spared this illumination this time round...)

CO:"Claiming the academics are lending the stuff to RAE panels does not stand up to serious scrutiny - a check of the RAE documentation makes it clear this is not what it is occurring."

Vide supra, re. RAE storage. Arbitrary and absurd practises cannot be justified by simply saying "But look, we're doing it."

"CO: I'm sorry to be a pedantic old bore, but what the HEIs are doing for the RAE panels is copyright infringement unless a licence has been agreed."

Then let what the HEIs are doing instead be be formally "devolved" to each individual author. Then it's each individual author that's doing it. That's all that's needed (and it's merely a trivial formality; and it's been nothing but a trivial formal matter all along).

CO:"Re. the pdf versus author version, the RAE panel are auditors. Just as a financial auditor would require printed invoices, bank statements, etc., the panel has to use the legally most robust version of the documentation it is validating. HEFCE will be bending over backwards to ensure everything it does is legally watertight. I'm afraid Word documents are much less likely
to be regarded as a legal document than a pdf. The fact that HEIs would be foolish to use a doctored Word document is irrelevant to that point."

On the contrary, the fact that HEIs would be the ones taking the risk if they allowed their authors to use a doctored Word document is the point!

First, if it's going to be a financial-audit analogy, then let's keep the tertium comparationis straight:

First, auditors audit bank-statements, not cash! (They don't need to read the writing on the money, weight the pounds sterling themselves, or stash the cash for future generations.)

HEFCE itself is doling out cash on the strength of the research bank-statement audit. The bank-statements are provided by the author, via his institution. It is authors'/institutions' responsibility to ensure that their submitted bank-statement statements are valid. It is they who are liable if they are fraudulent, not HEFCE. And the sensible way for HEFCE to "validate" those bank-statements is precisely the same way any prospective lender would verify a client's bank-statements or credit rating: by consulting a central bank-asset database -- which in this case is ISI, for which the UK fortunately already has a national site-license! All that's needed for that is each article's reference metadata, not its full-text (let alone the full-text in the publisher's PDF format!).

And -- ceterum censeo -- the reference metadata are all that needs to be submitted for auditing (i.e., counting).

In contrast, "[re-]assessment" (i.e., substantive evaluation, as opposed to mere auditing) -- over and above the peer-review that these published articles have already undergone with their respective journals -- is another matter, and probably a superfluous one, but for the browsing and spot-checking that some of the re-assessors may actually wish to do, the authors' postprints are more than enough. And those postprints need sit merely in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), where the re-assessors may safely consult them at their leisure, 24/7, online...

Am I the only one who sees that this is all an imperial tempest in a virtual teapot?


Harrumph!

Your weary archivangelist, with his sparse remaining vestiges of patience alas a-frayed...
Stevan Harnad

1997 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> 2006