Self-Archiving Mandates

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Leslie Chan wrote:

"I see the Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI-Elsevier deal [in which HHMI pays for for "gold" OA publishing of its funded research] as a major set back for institutional self-archiving as it muddies the green landscape, which I am sure is one of the underlying intents of Elsevier and other publishers in the STM group. I suspect more publishers may follow suit and reverse their stand on green if they think there is money to be made. Something needs to happen quickly. The Trojan Horse has proved to work, unfortunately. What should we do?"

I know exactly what needs to be done, and it has been obvious all along: The mandates have to be taken completely out of the hands of publishers and out of the reach of embargoes, and there is a sure-fire way to do it:

The mandates must be Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandates.

Let the access to the deposit be provisionally set as Closed Access wherever there is the slightest doubt. That way publishers have no say whatsoever in whether or when the deposit itself is done. Then let the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button -- and human nature, and the optimality of OA -- take care of the rest of its own accord, as it will. If only we have the sense to rally behind ID/OA.

Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)

It is as simple as that. But we have to unite behind ID/OA, and give a clear consistent message (and for that we have to first clearly understand ID/OA!)

If we keep flirting with embargoes and Gold and publishing reform and funding instead of univocally rallying behind the ID/OA mandate that will immunise us from publisher policies and further embargoes, we will get nowhere, and indeed we will lose ground.

It is as simple as that.

(P.S. HHMI got into this because of another legacy of folly, not originating with HHMI: The irrational insistence on central deposit in PubMed Central instead of local deposit in each researcher's own Institutional Repository. A Central Repository can -- on a far-fetched construal -- be argued to be a rival 3rd party re-publisher. Not so the author's own institution, archiving its own research.)

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum