Open Access Archivangelism

If (with Peter Suber, in today's Open Access News), we count October's full mandates adopted (BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, PPARC), expanded (Wellcome Trust), and proposed (Canada's CIHR, US's HHMI) -- plus Austria's FWF's and UK's CCLRC's "semi-mandates" -- that would make ten in one month (even more than Peter's eight, which missed PPARC and CCLRC!). (There might even be an 11th expanded October mandate from Australia's University of Tasmania, just registered by Arthur Sale in ROARMAP.)

The adoption of two big proposed mandates is still being breathlessly awaited: FRPAA in the US and the European Commission's Recommendation (A1), but there's no need for other institutions, funders or nations to wait to adopt, register and announce their own!

U. Southampton ranks 3rd in the UK and 25th in the world in the G-factor International University Ranking, a measure of "the importance or relevance of the university from the combined perspectives of all of the leading universities in the world... as a function of the number of links to their websites from the websites of other leading international universities" compiled by University Metrics.
      Why is U. Southampton's rank so remarkably high (second only to Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, and out-ranking the likes of Yale, Columbia and Brown in the US)?
      Long practising what it has been preaching -- about maximising research impact through Open Access Self-Archiving -- is a likely factor. (This is largely a competitive advantage: Southampton invites other universities to come and level the playing field -- by likewise self-archiving their own research output!)

OA, OS, FS & CC share commonalities but also have some differences: there are genuine convergences and genuine divergences. Forcing them all into a single procrustean mold does them all a disservice. I agree that they should not do one another harm, and they do not and will not. But it would also do a kind of harm to conflate things that are logically and practically distinct. And it doesn't work, in concrete terms, no matter how much abstract discourse it may generate:

Here is the heart of the matter. Let me try to convey it purely by analogy first: I am personally in favour of open-code pharmacology ("OP"): The formula for potential cures should not be kept secret, or prevented from being used to sell or even give away the medicine.

It does not follow from this, however, that if a commercial pharmaceutical company develops a non-OP cure for AIDS today that I will refuse to use it or promote it! Nor will I try to suppress or refuse to cooperate with non-OP research or non-OP researchers, while there are still diseases and patients, needing to be cured now.

To take this allegory further: OA is like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): All those doctors have already dedicated themselves to providing their services for free, but it does not follow from that that they should only use, or only collaborate with OP drugs and OP suppliers. They should use whatever they can get, and favor OP whenever they can do so, but not at the expense of the immediate needs of their patients.

That's how it is with OA and OS/FS/CC: I am personally 100% in favour of OA, FS, and CC for my own output (though I think I shall write little software in this lifetime!) and for the output of others of a like mind on OA/FS/CC. But I would be against imposing OS/FS/CC (or OP) by fiat, for fear of losing potential creativity and productivity. (This is a point on which otherwise like-minded people can and do disagree.)

And the immediate situation for OA is this: 100% OA is within reach now. It needs OAI-compliant OA Institutional Repository (IR) software. I would personally prefer if all OA IR software (indeed all software) were GPL, but I would not mandate it, nor would I refuse the immediate help of non-GPL software in reaching 100% OA, any more than an MSF doctor would refuse the immediate help of a non-OP drug for treating AIDS, now.

(Maximizing research impact is not as pressing a problem as saving people from AIDS; so this analogy, like all analogies, has its limitations. But it's not a bad idea to ask ourselves quite explicitly whether we take research so lightly that we agree with the above reasoning for AIDS, but not for research.)