Self-Archiving Mandates

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SUMMARY: The Australian Research Council (ARC) has proposed to mandate OA self-archiving by its fundees. SPARC has advised ARC (1) to require retaining non-exclusive rights as well, (2) to require OA self-archiving within 6 months of publication, and (3) to earmark ARC funds for OA journal publication costs, so OA can be immediate. I suggest instead (1) that to mandate self-archiving it is neither necessary nor desirable to mandate retaining non-exclusive rights at this time, (2) that deposit should be mandated immediately upon publication, with any allowable 6-month delay applying not to the timing of the deposit itself but only to the timing of the setting of access to the deposit (as Open Access rather than Closed Access), and (3) that it is neither desirable nor necessary at this time to earmark ARC funds to pay to publish in OA journals for immediate OA: Institutional Repositories' EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button will be sufficient to tide over user needs during any 6-month embargo interval between deposit and OA. (Australia's OA specialist Arthur Sale concurs.)

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Across the years, SPARC has often been a great help to the Open Access movement. But SPARC could help so much more if it could take advice, in addition to giving it (sometimes with insufficient information and reflection):

- A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature (Jun 2000)
- SPARC reply
- Comments on the SPARC Position Paper on Institutional Repositories (Aug 2002)
- New SPARC/ARL/ACRL Brochure on Open Access (Jun 2004)
- Eprints, Dspace, or Espace? (Oct 2004)
- "Life After NIH" (Apr 2005)
- A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times (May 2005)
- "Disaggregated Journals" (Jul 2005)

SPARC has given the Australian Research Council the following advice:

(SPARC's advice in boldface, followed in each case by my comment, indented, followed by Australian OA specialist Arthur Sale [AS] commenting on my comment, in italics, double-indented)

SPARC: "Research funders should include in all grants and contracts a provision reserving for the government relevant non-exclusive rights (as described below) to research papers and data."

Fine, but this is not a prerequisite for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archiving. It is enough if ARC clearly mandates deposit; the rest will take care of itself.

AS: "A sensible fundee will take this action; how sensible they are will remain to be seen. The unsensible ones will have some explaining to do. ARC could have given advice like this, but didn't."

SPARC: "All peer-reviewed research papers and associated data stemming from public funding should be required to be maintained in stable digital repositories that permit free, timely public access, interoperability with other resources on the Internet, and long-term preservation. Exemptions should be strictly limited and justified."

That, presumably, is what the ARC self-archiving mandate amounts to.

AS: "Exactly. And every university in Australia will have access to such a repository by end 2007. 50% already do."

SPARC: "Users should be permitted to read, print, search, link to, or crawl these research outputs. In addition, policies that make possible the download and manipulation of text and data by software tools should be considered."

All unnecessary; all comes with the territory, if self-archiving is mandated. (The policy does not need extra complications: a clear self-archiving mandate simply needs adoption and implementation.)

AS: "Totally agree..."

SPARC: "Deposit of their works in qualified digital archives should be required of all funded investigators, extramural and intramural alike."

Yes, the self-archiving mandate should apply to all funded research.

AS: "It does."

SPARC: "While this responsibility might be delegated to a journal or other agent, to assure accountability the responsibility should ultimately be that of the funds recipient."

Not clear what this refers to, but, yes, it is the fundee who should be mandated to self-archive.

AS: "Yes the onus is on the fundee(s), and especially the principal investigator who has to submit the Final Report."

SPARC: "Public access to research outputs should be provided as early as possible after peer review and acceptance for publication. For research papers, this should be not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This embargo period represents a reasonable, adequate, and fair compromise between the public interest and the needs of journals."

The self-archiving mandate that ARC should adopt is the ID/OA mandate whereby deposit is mandatory immediately upon acceptance for publication, and the embargo (if any, 6 months max.) is applicable only to the date at which access to the deposit is set as Open Access (rather than Closed Access), not to the date of deposit itself. During any Closed Access embargo interval, each repository's semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button will cover all research usage needs.

AS: "ARC is silent on timing, but I expect a quick transition to the ID/OA policy by fundees. Anything else is a pain - it is easier to do this than run around like a headless chook later. The Research Quality Framework (RQF) will encourage instant mandate because of its citation metrics. NOTE ESPECIALLY THAT THE ARC GUIDELINES DO NOT SIT IN A VACUUM BY THEMSELVES. The National Health and Medical Research Council and the RQF are equally important. "

SPARC: "We also recommend that, as a means of further accelerating innovation, a portion of each grant be earmarked to cover the cost of publishing papers in peer-reviewed open-access journals, if authors so choose. This would provide potential readers with immediate access to results, rather than after an embargo period."

The ID/OA mandate -- together with the EMAIL EPRINT button -- already cover all immediate-access needs without needlessly diverting any research money at this time. The time to pay for publication will be if and when self-archiving causes subscriptions to collapse, and if that time ever comes, it will be the saved institutional subscription funds themselves that will pay for the publication costs, with no need to divert already-scarce funds from research. Instead to divert money from research now would be needlessly to double-pay for OA; OA can already be provided by author self-archiving without any further cost.

AS: "This recommendation will certainly be disregarded, correctly in my opinion. ARC has never funded publication costs and does not intend to start now. Australian universities are already funded for publication and subscription costs through the normal block grants and research infrastructure funding. All they have to do is redirect some of their funding as they see fit. The recommendation might accelerate innovation, but it is not the ARC's job to fund innovation in the publishing industry."

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Many thanks to Dr. Helio Kuramoto for his excellent, accurate summary of the recent Open Access (OA) workshop at U. Minho, Portugal. I just wanted to add that I (and other OA activists worldwide, notably Eloy Rodriques of U. Minho, organizer of the workshop) admire and applaud the efforts of Dr. Kuramoto and IBICT. Brazil is already a leader on the "golden" road to Open Access (OA) in the Developing World, namely, OA publishing, with its admirable Scielo journals initiative; but this is definitely not enough. What is urgently needed at this time is a strong Brazilian initiative along the faster, surer "green" road to OA: OA self-archiving, and especially OA self-archiving mandates from Brazil's research institutions and funders, exactly as summarized by Dr. Kuramoto:

"O estabelecimento dessa política e desse mandato só pode ser conseguido por meio do convencimento dos dirigentes das agências de fomento, das instituições governamentais, em espeical as universidades e os institutos de pesquisas, além, obviamente, dos pesquisadores."

This was also the verdict of the recent OA congress in Bangalore, likewise attended by representatives from Brazil; its outcome, the "National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries" was precisely the one summarized above by Dr. Kuramoto.

(I regret that I could not write this comment in Portuguese, but, with the help of Ana Alice Baptista, I have tried to make up for that here.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In Open Access News, Peter Suber excerpted the following from the AIP Position On Open Access & Public Access:

"AIP is fearful of and against government mandates that provide rules in favor of one business model over another.
AIP is against funding agencies mandating free access to articles after they have undergone costly peer review or editing by publishers."

It is important not to confuse AIP (American Institute of Physics) with APS (American Physical Society). AIP is merely the publisher of the journals of APS, which is a Learned Society (and one of the most progressive on OA).

Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society) (began Dec 1999)
APS copyright policy (Mar 2002)

Don't take the grumbling of AIP too seriously. The APS/AIP division-of-labor is optimal, because it allows us to separate the scientific/scholarly interests from the publishing interests (which are so thoroughly conflated in most other Learned Societies, notably the American Chemical Society!).

ACS meeting comments on e-prints
Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

The AIP is basically saying that the interests of generating and protecting AIP's current revenue streams and cost-recovery model trump the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the interests of the tax-paying public that funds their funders.

In contrast, the international Open Access movement, five out of eight UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust, a growing number of Australian and Canadian Research Councils, CERN, the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), the provosts of most of the top US universities, the European Commission, the Developing World, and a growing number of individual universities and research institutions think otherwise.

(By the way, self-archiving mandates do not "favor of one business model over another": They are not about business models at all. They are about maximizing the access, usage and impact of publicly funded research.).

AIP is the publishing tail, yet again trying to wag the research dog. Soon we will see an end of this sort of nonsense.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. Technical Report, Department of Electronics and computer Science, University of Southampton.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On the good authority of Arthur Sale (and Peter Suber), the classification of the Australian Research Council (ARC) self-archiving policy in ROARMAP has been upgraded to a mandate.

There are now 17 self-archiving mandates worldwide, 5 of them in Australia: A departmental and university-wide one at U. Tasmania, a university-wide one at QUT, and a funder mandate at ARC, joined soon after by another funder mandate (NHMRC) and reinforced by the Research Quality Framework (RQF) (the Australian counterpart of the UK Research Assessment Exercise, RAE).

Congratulations to Australia, and especially to Tom Cochrane, Paul Callan, Colin Steele, Malcolm Gillies, and to the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale.

Brunel University's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics has just adopted the 9th departmental/institutional self-archiving mandate. (Together with the 6 research funder mandates, that now makes 15 mandates worldwide, and the 8th for the UK.)

Brunel University School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics (UNITED KINGDOM mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy:

BURA will make journal articles conference papers, doctoral theses, recordings and images freely available via the internet, allowing users to read, download and copy material for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Brunel's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics is supporting the initiative to make it compulsory for researchers to deposit their journal articles and theses in BURA. "[F]or academics it will make readily available their research to the world. If it is successful, it could also lead onto the whole university adopting mandatory self-archiving."

This is an instance of Prof. Artur Sale's recommended "Patchwork Mandate" -- departments first, then the university as a whole. Other examples are Prof. Sale's own University of Tasmania's departmental and university-wide mandates and University of Southampton's ECS departmental mandate (soon to become a university-wide mandate).

If your own university or research institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum