Self-Archiving Mandates

Long-standing members of the American Scientist Open Access Forum will recognize some exceedingly familiar themes voiced (at long last) in the following excerpts from the very welcome and helpful 2006 Open Letter by 25 US University Provosts in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). But having now expressed their support for the federal self-archiving mandate, there is absolutely no need for the provosts to wait for the Act's adoption to act! This would be an excellent time for each to put their support into practice by adopting an institutional self-archiving mandate of their own, at their own institution (and registering it in ROARMAP for other institutions to emulate).

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An Open Letter to the Higher Education Community:

We believe that [FRPAA] represents a watershed and provides an opportunity for the entire U.S. higher education and research community to draw upon their traditional partnerships and collaboratively realize the unquestionably good intentions of the Bill's framers - broadening access to publicly funded research in order to accelerate the advancement of knowledge and maximize the related public good...

...we agree with [FRPAA's] basic premise that enabling the broadest possible access to new ideas resulting from government-funded research promotes progress, economic growth, and public welfare. Furthermore, we know that, when combined with public policy such as FRPAA proposes, the Internet and digital technology are powerful tools for removing access barriers and enabling new and creative uses of the results of research....

Collectively, our universities engage in billions of dollars of funded research. On average, approximately 50% of our research funding originates with the federal government. That public investment - estimated at over $55 billion for the research covered by FRPAA - is complemented by our own institutional investments in research units, laboratories, libraries, and the faculty and staff whose expertise permeates them. FRPAA has the potential to enable the maximum downstream use of those investments...

Each month the evidence mounts that open access to research through digital distribution increases the use of that research and the visibility of its creators. Widespread public dissemination levels the economic playing field for researchers outside of well-funded universities and research centers and creates more opportunities for innovation....

FRPAA is good for education and good for research. It is good for the American public, and it promotes broad, democratic access to knowledge...

SIGNATORIES:

Arkansas State: Susan D. Allen, Vice Chancellor for Research and Academic Affairs
California: Wyatt R Hume, Executive Vice President & Provost
Carnegie Mellon: Mark S. Kamlet, Provost & Senior Vice President
Case Western Reserve: John L. Anderson, Provost and University Vice President
Dartmouth: Barry P. Scherr, Provost
Harvard: Steven E. Hyman, Provost
Illinois/Chicago: R. Michael Tanner, Provost & Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Illinois/Urbana-Champaign: Linda Katehi, Provost & Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Indiana: Michael McRobbie, Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Iowa: Michael J. Hogan, Executive Vice President and Provost
Michigan: Teresa A. Sullivan, Provost & Executive Vice President
Michigan State: Kim Wilcox, Provost
Minnesota: E. Thomas Sullivan, Executive Vice President & Provost
Northwestern: Lawrence B. Dumas, Provost
Ohio State: Barbara R. Snyder, Executive Vice President & Provost
Pennsylvania State: Rodney A. Erickson, Executive Vice President & Provost
Purdue: Sally Mason, Provost
Rochester: Charles E. Phelps, Provost
Rutgers: Philip Furmanski, Executive VP for Academic Affairs
Syracuse: Eric F. Spina, Interim Vice Chancellor and Provost
Texas A&M University: David B. Prior, Executive Vice President and Provost
Vanderbilt: Nicholas S. Zeppos, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Virginia Polytechnic: Mark G. McNamee, University Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Washington University - St. Louis: Edward S. Macias, Executive Vice Chancellor
Wisconsin-Madison: Patrick Farrell, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

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Some Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

"Chron. High. Ed. 18 September on Cal Tech & Copyright" (Sep 1998)
"Scholars' Forum: A New Model For Scholarly Communication" (Mar 1999)
"The Need To Re-Activate the Provosts' Initiative" (Feb 2001)
"Written evidence for UK Select Committee's Inquiry into Scientific Publications" (Dec 2003)
"What Provosts Need to Mandate" (Dec 2003)
"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)
"Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" (Jan 2005)
"Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research" (Sep 2005)
"Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate" (Mar 2006)
"How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate" (Sep 2006)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Foru

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SUMMARY: CERN has been one of the scholarly/scientific world's leaders in designing and implementing one of the first, and still the biggest and most successful institutional self-archiving policies: an institutional self-archiving mandate. As a result, CERN's Institutional Repository (IR) is well on the way to housing -- and thereby providing Open Access to -- 100% of CERN's own current published research article output (and soon its past output too). CERN has also designed CDS Invenio, a software package for creating Open Access Institutional Repositories. CERN is promoting its software (for "digital library management") but not promoting its exemplary self-archiving policy: Instead of first making sure that the rest of the research world follows CERN's own sterling example by self-archiving 100% of each institution's own respective research output, so as to make 100% of research worldwide OA, CERN is busy promoting the conversion of the world to Open Access publishing! Charity may begin at home, but it does not end there! CERN should be helping to convert the world to 100% OA before trying to reform publishing. If and when CERN does put its considerable weight and energy behind propagating its self-archiving policy to the rest of the world, then CERN and its CDS invenio software too will have earned for themselves, alongside the University of Southampton and its GNU EPrints software, the status of "World's Best Practice" infsofar as OA IRs are concerned.

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On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, in response to my posting -- to the effect that "EPrints is free [and] the world's first, most widely used" [software for creating Open Access Institutional Repositories] -- Jean-Yves Le Meur commented in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

J-YLM: "This is indeed true in terms of number of installations [but] in terms of number of documents in repositories, CDS Invenio distributed by CERN [formerly CDSware] easily comes first... "

Jean-Yves is absolutely right that CERN's CDS Invenio (formerly CDSware) comes first among the top dozen digital archiving software installations in terms of average number of documents (28,327):

SOURCE: Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
Software     #Archives    Total#Items     (Average#Items)

GNU EPrints:   210     194563   (1019)
DSpace:   162     288074   (2667
Bepress   51     96246   (2048)
ETD-db:   23     301394   (15863)
OPUS    21     6300   (350)
DiVA:   14     9453   (675)
CDS:    9     169963   (28327)
ARNO:     6     157754   (26292)
HAL:   4     39259   (9815)
DoKS:   3     1970   (657)
Fedora:   3     6946   (2315)
EDOC:   2     49687   (24844)
MyCoRe:   1     1984   (1984)
Others:   212     3220717   (24216)

I would go even further, and point out that CERN's own IR, with 78,774 items, is 11th biggest among all 721 archives registered in ROAR and 3rd biggest among the c. 450 of the archives that are institutional repositories IRs (rather than central repositories, which draw from the contents of many institutions), after #1 Wageningen University (110,269) and #2 Nagoya University (82,625).

Moreover, among IRs, CERN's own IR, with its 78,774 items, mostly full-text, is indeed easily and by far the first (biggest and most successful). (Wageningen's admirable IR has 110,269 items but only about half of them are full-text documents, and the nature and percent full-text of Nagoya's imposing IR, with 82,625, still needs to be ascertained: a posting from Nagoya would be most welcome!).

I will go still further: CERN leads the world in Open Access IR "Best Practice" Policy, being the institution with the most comprehensive, systematic and successful institutional self-archiving mandate (and one of only 6 institutions worldwide that have a self-archiving mandate at all!).

The only problem is that CERN is not promoting the adoption of its superb institutional self-archiving policy along with its promotion of its CDS software!

CERN is instead too busy trying to reform publishing (so as to hasten a transition to Open Access Publishing), having already successfully reformed its own researchers' self-archiving practices.

But "Best Practice" insofar as OA (which is not the same thing as OA Publishing) is concerned may well begin at home, but it must not 'end at home!

I would be more than happy to endorse CDS Invenio as OA IR Best Practice, alongside GNU EPrints -- if and when CERN promotes the adoption of its own institutional self-archiving policy model along with its CDS software.

Otherwise CDS Invenio is, and will continue to be, just another of the softwares that (in its own words) "covers all aspects of digital library management."

For OA IR "Best Practice" is not "to cover all aspects of digital library management": it is to focus specifically on the urgent OA priority: ensuring that 100% of institutional research output is systematically and successfully self-archived in the OA IR as soon as possible, just as CERN's is. The outcome is already long overdue. CERN has already attained it. It is time for CERN to help the rest of the world to attain it too, by promoting its own institutional Best Practice along with its (excellent) software!

Meanwhile, that is precisely what GNU EPrints is doing, and has been doing all along: promoting not the practice of "digital library management" but the practice of OA self-archiving.

Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Threads:
"CERN's historic role in OA" (Aug 2005)
"Eprints, Dspace, or Espace?" (Feb 2003)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In case there is even the slightest of doubts about which software I recommend as "World's Best Practice" for creating and maintaining an Open Access Institutional Repository (OA IR), it is, of course, GNU EPrints.

EPrints is free: the world's first, most widely used, and by far the most functional of all the available OA IR softwares. It is created for and specifically focussed on OA functionality, with the most advanced features being designed and added continuously by the award-winning EPrints developmental team as it keeps up with (and indeed often leads) the accelerating development and evolving needs of the worldwide OA movement.

Enough said. See the testimonials (and add your own!), find out exactly what the focus is on and for, and then, assuming you already have an EPrints (or other) OA IR, you can go back to lobbying for OA self-archiving mandates for your institution and research funder (the current number-one priority!):

"Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate"

"A National Open Access Policy"

But don't forget to register your IR in ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) and to register your institution's OA IR policy in ROARMAP.

Your arch archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

P.S. Ceterum Censeo: All OA texts and their metadata should be directly deposited locally, in the author's own OA IR. Each researcher's own institution is the primary content-provider. If it is desired to also include them in one or more central repositories such as PubMed Central or Arxiv, eprints can and should be harvested from the local OA IR. EPrints is implementing automatizable import/export features for doing just that: Exporting to central repositories, as well as importing from them (e.g., papers already deposited centrally prior to the creation of the local IR).

There has been dramatic progress in the adoption of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates lately.

ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies) and
ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) now list:

497 institutional repositories registered to date
29 institutional or funder self-archiving policies
6 institutional self-archiving mandates
4 funder self-archiving mandates

If your university or research institutions or research funding agency has an Open Access Self-Archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP: and register your institutional repository (IR) in ROAR.

You can track the growth of the number and nature of OA policies in ROARMAP and the growth in the number and size of IRs in ROAR.

AUSTRALIA
Mandate:  Queensland U Tech  growth  Policy

EUROPE
Mandate:  CERN   growth  Policy

FRANCE
  CNRS   growth  Policy
  INRA   growth   Policy
  INRIA   growth  Policy
  Inst Jean Nicod  growth  Policy
  Inst fr rech mer   growth   Policy
  U Lumiere Lyon 2  growth   Policy

GERMANY
  Bielefeld U  growth  Policy
  Humboldt U  growth  Policy
  In Sc Net Oldenburg  growth  Policy
  Potsdam U  growth  Policy
  U Bremen  growth  Policy
  U Hamburg  growth  Policy

INDIA
Mandate:  Nat Inst Tech  growth  Policy

NORWAY
  U Oslo  growth  Policy

PORTUGAL
Mandate:  U Minho  growth  Policy

SWEDEN
  Lund U  growth  Policy

SWITZERLAND
Mandate:  U Zurich    Policy

UK
Funder Mandate:  BBSRC    Policy
Funder Mandate:  ESRC    Policy
Funder Mandate:  MRC  growth  Policy
Funder Mandate:  Wellcome Trust  growth  Policy
Mandate:  U Southampton ECS  growth  Policy
  U Southampton   growth  Policy
  CCLRC  growth   Policy

USA
  Case Western   growth   Policy
  U Kansas  growth  Policy
  NIH  growth  Policy

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SUMMARY: Lisa Dittrich, Managing Editor, Academic Medicine, seems to imagine that researchers, their institutions and their funders are being "strong-armed" into taking steps to maximize the usage and impact of their research output by OA zealots. It is more likely that for researchers, their institutions and their funders (the tax-paying public), maximizing research usage and impact is a natural end in itself, optimal and inevitable (though grotesquely slow in coming!) in the online era, that it is merely being hastened toward its natural outcome by the OA movement, and that those who imagine otherwise, perhaps because of interests vested in another outcome, are engaging in wishful thinking. Stay tuned.

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Lisa Dittrich (LD), Managing Editor, Academic Medicine, wrote:

LD: "I personally think the push to OA has come from a few zealots (Varmus and whatever Nobel Laureates he could strong arm into signing his various decrees)"

Harold Varmus strong-armed his fellow Nobel Laureates to sign his decrees? Did he also strong-arm the 34,000 signatories of the PLoS Open Letter?

LD: "and librarians upset about 'the serials crisis'"

About 'the serials crisis' or about the serials crisis? Does LD think they are just crying wolf?

LD: "Most scientists, though, with the possible exception of physicists, have been quite content with the "open access" they already have--namely, the ability to easily get content through their libraries, paid for by their library's budget."

So it is out of contentment with the "open access" they already have that those of the 34,000 researchers who were not strong-armed by Harold signed the PLoS petition?

And is it to be expected that (once the word is out) scientists, their institutions and their funders will be content to know that until they provide open access to them their articles are getting only half their potential research impact?

LD: "many of the authors I work with... don't even know what the term "open access" means!"

Keep counting, because those numbers are changing -- and not in the direction of knowing less...

LD: "And they are VERY busy people. So ask them to take one more step after publication--to deposit their research on an NIH database, or even an IR, and most will say 'I'll get to that... sometime'... "

...'unless our employer or funder mandates it, in which case 95% of us will do it, 81% willingly' (Swan & Brown 2004, 2005 research author surveys).

LD: "As with most other causes, it's those whose livelihoods --the Varmuses and Harnads of the world"

Livelihoods? We both have day jobs!

LD: "--and those whose pocketbooks--the librarians and publishers--who are most invested in this issue who get their knickers in a twist over it"

That's to be expected. But librarians and publishers can only knick and twist: it is researchers who provide the content, and they're the only ones who can provide the OA. But their employers and funders can help see to it that they do -- just as they see to it that they publish at all ("publish or perish").

LD: "intellectuals w/too much time on their hands."

Does LD mean those "opine-accessors" who just can't resist thinking out loud on OA lists? I agree they're a liability, to both sides, but I'm not sure why they're being singled out as "intellectuals": Intellectual content or rigor is certainly not what the OA movement is going to go down in history for...

LD: "The researchers are busy researching and publishing."

And counting their citations -- and getting promoted and funded for them. How long does LD think it will take the news to trickle down to the least intellectual of them that they are losing citations as long as they lose would-be users who can't afford the access-tolls?

LD: "One other thing: the assumption that all researchers want to share their data is nuts. Remember the fight over who first discovered the AIDS virus? It got pretty ugly. And we've published research in our journal about geneticists holding their findings pretty close to the vest for fear of being scooped. It's not all a love fest in science land, people."

Has LD ever wondered, then, why scientists publish it at all? or count their citations? Because, you see, OA is about what researchers publish, not what they hold "close to the vest for fear of being scooped." And have you ever asked yourself, Lisa: if your researchers didn't want to share their findings (indeed if they weren't mandated by their employers and funders to "publish or perish") what would fill the pages of Academic Medicine?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Contrary to the recent suggestion of NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, the primary and urgent purpose of open access to NIH research is definitely not so that "scientists have access to [NIH's] portfolio of research so they can see what [NIH] has funded." It is so that scientists can use and apply the research findings, immediately, for the benefit of the public that funded it for that very purpose ("CURES"). Dr. Zerhouni is right that it "is also important that at some point the public, which pays for 99.5% of this research, is not prevented from having access to it" -- but the primary purpose of open access is immediate scientific usage and applications, for the benefit of the public (which pays for 99.5% of it). NIH can have its portfolio by requiring immediate deposit without even necessarily requiring that the articles be made publicly accessible immediately. Individual scientists who need to know and use the deposited findings immediately could have immediate access through the simple expedient of the EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST button that is now being implemented in researchers' own institutional repositories -- if, that is, the immediate deposit of the full text is systematically mandated. (Otherwise email eprint requests are a hopelessly time-consuming, uncertain and low-yield strategy.) Hence the "happy medium" is to require immediate deposit in the researchers' own institutional repositories and to harvest the deposits into PubMed Central after whatever embargo period NIH judges necessary (a priori) to insure that this is not "done at the expense [of the] viability of peer-reviewed scientific publishing."

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NIH Director Elias Zerhouni was interviewed by Susan Morissey in Chemical and Engineering News: July 3, 2006 Volume 84, Number 27 pp. 12-17

Zerhouni: "What I've found with [the open access] issue is paralysis [emphasis added]. You have the zealots on one side who are hammering for open access right away. And then on the other side, you have the zealots who say that open access is absolutely not right. In the middle is the taxpayers' interest.

"I'm not driven by what the popular thing to do is; I'm driven by what's right. I believe that, number one, NIH needs a database of the research it funds so that it can have accountability and the ability to analyze its own portfolio. Our scientists must also have access to our portfolio of research so they can see what we've funded. So there's an internal need and an external need for accountability.

"It is also important that at some point the public, which pays for 99.5% of this research, is not prevented from having access to it. But this access should not be done at the expense and viability of peer-reviewed scientific publishing -- whether it be nonprofit or for profit.

"I believe very strongly that a happy medium can be found. But if the happy medium causes a loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals, it won't work."

(1) It is hard to see (1a) why it is zealotry to insist that researchers (sic) need immediate rather than delayed access to publicly funded research findings -- or (1b) how the tax-paying public's interest is in the middle!

Public research is not funded to have its uptake, usage and applications (for the benefit of the public that funds it) embargoed from all those researchers who cannot afford access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Open access has now been repeatedly demonstrated to both increase and accelerate research usage and impact. Immediate access is the growth tip for rapidly progressing fields of research. Needlessly delaying access at the growth tip produces a counterproductive and unjustifiable bottleneck in research that is in the interests of neither research progress nor the public that funded it.

Nor is there as yet any evidence whatsoever that immediate access "causes a loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals": This is being assumed, a priori, instead of being tested objectively, by requiring immediate access, monitoring the outcome annually, and making suitable adjustments only if and when there is ever any evidence that they are needed.

What induces paralysis is making these adjustments a priori, as NIH has done, requesting instead of requiring open access, and allowing it to be delayed instead of immediate. The failure of the NIH "request" policy is already apparent after the needless loss of two more years of potential research impact and progress since its first needlessly flawed NIH implementation two years ago. Those losses in research usage and impact owing to needless access embargos will themselves become directly measurable with time. In the meanwhile, the maximization of research access and progress are kept in a needless state of paralysis that is anything but a "middle ground."

(2) The primary and urgent purpose of open access is certainly not so that "scientists have access to [NIH's] portfolio of research so they can see what [NIH] has funded"! It is so scientists can use and apply the research findings, immediately, for the benefit of the public that funded it for that very purpose ("CURES").

(3) It is true that "It is also important that at some point the public, which pays for 99.5% of this research, is not prevented from having access to it" -- but that is not the primary purpose of open access! Its purpose is immediate scientific usage and applications, for the benefit of the public.

(4) Even though it is certainly not the primary reason for open access that "NIH needs a database of the research it funds so that it can have accountability and the ability to analyze its own portfolio," NIH can have that portfolio by requiring immediate deposit without even necessarily requiring that the articles be made publicly accessible immediately! Individual scientists who need to know and use the findings immediately, however, could have immediate access through the simple expedient of the EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST button that is now being implemented in researchers' own institutional repositories -- if, that is, the immediate deposit of the full text is systematically mandated. (Otherwise email eprint requests are a hopelessly time-consuming, uncertain and low-yield strategy.)

Hence the "happy medium" is to require immediate deposit in the researchers' own institutional repositories and to harvest the deposits into PubMed Central after whatever embargo period NIH judges necessary (a priori) to insure that this is not "done at the expense [of the] viability of peer-reviewed scientific publishing."

To instead allow an a-priori deposit embargo is to guarantee continued paralysis -- an outcome happy for no one (except perhaps some publishers).

Zerhouni: "I'm not driven by what the popular thing to do is; I'm driven by what's right... I believe... a happy medium can be found. But if the happy medium causes a loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals, it won't work."

Requesting delayed deposit in PubMed Central instead of requiring immediate deposit is not a happy medium, and it has already been shown to be nonviable. And the way the viability of an adaptation is determined in biological evolution is through its adaptive consequences. There is an element of "intelligent design" in this, in requiring research self-archiving at all; and we already know that self-archiving's consequences for research and researchers are positive. We don't yet know what effect mandated self-archiving will have on publishing, except that to date -- after 15 years of spontaneous self-archiving, which has in some fields reached 100% -- self-archiving itself has had no negative effect at all.

The happy medium is to require immediate deposit and allow delayed access-setting. And the way to find out whether or not it will work is to do it, and thereby test objectively whether it causes any "loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals."

That's not what's popular; it's what's right: for research and researchers -- and for the tax-paying public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is conducted. Journals need to adapt to what is best for research, researchers and the public. Otherwise it's the happy tail wagging the unhappy dog.

"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)

"How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate" (June 2006)

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum