Self-Archiving Mandates

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SUMMARY: Adopted in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of such mandates worldwide. (As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed.) In 2004-5, two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys by Alma Swan had predicted that the willing compliance rate for such self-archiving mandates would be over 80%. In 2005-6, Arthur Sale estimated from data on actual depositing behaviour in Australian repositories that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate in about two years.
    Now Southampton's Les Carr has confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations: the ECS Departmental Repository's deposit rate in 2006 is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample. This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates and help persuade US legislators to upgrade the failed NIH "public access" policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

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Set in motion by Prof. Tony Hey in 1999, drafted in 2001, and officially adopted by Prof. Wendy Hall in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of Green OA mandates worldwide. As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed, for a total of 40 to date.

In 2004-5, Dr. Alma Swan, of Key Perspectives Associates, on the basis of two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys, had predicted (in the face of widespread scepticism about the likely success of self-archiving mandates) that the willing compliance rate for self-archiving mandates would be over 80% (with total compliance over 90%).



In 2005-6, Prof. Arthur Sale, in a study comparing data on actual deposit rates for three Australian universities (two unmandated and one, Queensland University of Technology, mandated since 2004), found that yearly deposit rates for the repositories without mandates remained low (c. 15%), even with incentives and library assistance (c. 30%), whereas the mandated deposits grew much faster. Extrapolating these growth rates, he estimated that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate (80-90%) in about two years.

Dr. Les Carr, co-drafter of the ECS mandate and now also the administrator of Southampton's ECS Departmental Repository, has now confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations. ECS's deposit rate in 2006 (the fourth full year of the ECS mandate) is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample.



This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates. (Sale especially recommends starting at the departmental level rather than waiting for university-wide consensus, if consensus is not reached quickly: a "patchwork" mandate.)

The demonstrated success of institutional self-archiving mandates also has implications for research-funder and national-level policy: In the US, the proposed NIH self-archiving "public access" policy was downgraded from a mandate to a mere request; adopted in 2004, it has failed, miserably (deposit rate <5%). Let us hope that the evidence of the success rates for Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates will help open the eyes of US legislators to the need to upgrade the NIH policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Suber in the SPARC OA Forum: "Forwarding from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), with its permission. This is an excerpt from the minutes of its June 2007 meeting, which were sent to all Hong Kong university vice-chancellors and presidents on August 6, 2007. The "UGC institutions" are the eight universities supported with public funds by the University Grants Committee." -- Peter Suber

Open-access Repositories for Research Results from UGC Institutions

15. Some countries have already adopted policies that require results of publicly funded research be made publicly accessible via open-access repositories, and a suggestion has been made to the RGC that we shall adopt similar practice in Hong Kong. After deliberation, the RGC decided not to make it compulsory for the Principal Investigators (PIs) to allow open access of their research outputs. However, the RGC strongly encourages your institution and researchers to make available the research output via open-access repositories on a voluntary basis, and/or other publication venues such as journals and books.

Hong Kong's RGC is alas out of step, and -- perhaps unaware of the history of requesting vs. requiring OA -- is fated to repeat that history. Adopting a request rather than a requirement is an already tried and true recipe for failure in providing open access to research (cf. the failed NIH "strong encouragement" policy (compliance rate: <4%) that is now under strong momentum toward upgrading to a mandate).

[It may just be a coincidence, but possibly it is pertinent that China was the odd man out in Swan & Brown's 2005 international/interdisciplinary surveyof researchers worldwide: Most respondents said they would not self-archive unless their institutions and/or funders required it. When asked whether they would comply with an institutional or funder requirement to self-archive, the international average was about 95% compliance: over 80% willing compliance and less than 15% reluctant compliance. (This has since bben confirmed by Arthur Sale's comparative statistics on actual compliance). But for some reason, China was the most reluctant of all, with only 58% willing compliance, and 31% reluctant (Figure 3). (Perhaps in China OA mandates are being mistakenly equated with totalitarianism -- whereas they should rather be seen as an extension of the benign, ubiquitous, even if unstated, publish-or-perish mandate that ensures that research findings are published at all; and closer to the spirit of paying taxes in order to support and reap the benefits of public services.) ]

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Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report, Key Perspectives Inc.

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Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).

Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.
Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February

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 (April 2003).

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 Publishing (Oxford) Limited. .

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

This is to commend and strongly endorse the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology's (IRCSET's) proposed Green Open Access self-Archiving Mandate. Other supporters are encourage to write to IRCSET before 28 September to provide their endorsement too.

[Thanks once again to the Peter Suber for alerting us all to this one too!]

IRCSET's proposed mandate is not only timely and welcome, but it is the optimal funder mandate, being based on the EURAB's proposed mandate, likewise the optimal one.

IRCSET proposes mandating immediate deposit, without exception, in an OA Repository (Institutional or Central) and it puts a maximum cap of 6 months on the length of the allowable access embargo, after which access to the deposit must be made Open Access rather than Closed Access.

Most other funder mandates to date are not quite as good as this IRCSET's. Most (1) peg the date of deposit to the end of the embargo, which is a huge mistake. And many (2) do not put any cap on on the permissible length of embargo, which, together with (1) essentially moots the mandate completely, making it the publisher who determines whether and when an article is deposited at all. Third, (3) many insist on central self-archiving, rather than institutional self-archiving.

So, bravo to IRCSET for requiring immediate deposit, for capping the permissible mandate at 6 months, and for specifying only that the repository must be an OAI-compliant OA repository, rather than insisting on or favouring central deposit.

(If there is one thing that could be brought out more explicitly, it is that institutional deposit is preferable to central: central repositories can always harvest from institutional ones. But it is institutional self-archiving that has all the local institutional incentives, that covers all research output, and that scales to cover all of research, whether funded or unfunded.)

But even exactly as it stands, IRCSET's is the best of the existing funder mandates (there are now 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-Archiving mandates adopted, and 8 more [including Ireland's] proposed, for a total of 40, worldwide). If the Irish mandate is adopted in its present form, it will immediately become the best of the adopted funder and national mandates, and the one for all subsequent funder and national mandates to model themselves upon. (Some of the already adopted institutional/departmental mandates, such as Southampton's, Minho's, QUT's and CERN's are already optimal, requiring immediate deposit, and of course institutional deposit.)

Comhghairdeas, Eire!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Thomas, Chuck & McDonald, Robert H. (2007) Measuring and Comparing Participation Patterns in Digital Repositories: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 1. D-lib Magazine 13 (9/10) doi:10.1045/september2007-mcdonald

Excerpt: "As for mandatory-deposit repositories, the limited available data indicate authors represented in such repositories tend to contribute more of their intellectual output. Sale (2006) predicted institutions establishing deposit mandates were likely to see such results within three years of implementing these policies. Harnad (2006) cited surveys showing 95% of scholars [would] comply if their university mandates depositing in an institutional repository. This study's findings only reinforce such predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior."

In the online era, the days of reprint requests ought to be over, with Open Access taking their place. But some research funders and universities are still hesitating about mandating Open Access Self-Archiving, because they are concerned about publishers' embargoes. Here is the solution:

Even where a publisher embargoes or does not endorse OA self-archiving, universities and research funders can and should still go ahead and mandate immediate deposit anyway, with no exceptions or delays, but allowing the deposit to be made Closed Access instead of Open Access during any publisher-imposed embargo period.

The Institutional Repository's semi-automatized Email Eprint Request Button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to tide over all researcher usage needs webwide till the end of the embargo (or till embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths, under the growing pressure and increasingly apparent benefits of OA).

See how the paper reprint request era, and its prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, already anticipated most of this:

Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations? Scientometrics 56: 283-286.

Abstract: Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range 1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent correlation between the number of requests and citations to article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55; 95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that received most reprint requests are cited more often.

Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93–101.

Abstract: This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed each year, most being triggered by Current Contents...

Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the World Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic Archive. The Scientist 13(4):14.

Excerpt: It is the utopian expectation of those who live in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has major consequences for the future.

Garfield, E. (1965) Is the 'free reprint system' free and/or obsolete? Essays of an Information Scientist 1:10-11.

Garfield, E. (1972) Reprint Exchange. 1. The multimillion dollar problem ordinaire, Essays of an Information Scientist 1:359-60.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Here is an important message from the American Alliance for Taxpayer Access, posted in Peter Suber's Open Access News, about the need for US citizens to contact their senators in order to support the NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate against the anti-OA publishing lobby:

Added: Charles Bailey has just provided a generic text that you need merely cut/paste as your letter.

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   Time to contact the Senate

An alert from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:

As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access to publicly funded research and ­ specifically ­ ensuring the success of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy by making deposit mandatory for researchers.

Earlier this summer, the House of Representatives passed legislation with language that directs the NIH to make this change.  The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a similar measure.  Now, as the Appropriations process moves forward, it is critically important that our Senators are reminded of the breadth and depth of support for enhanced public access to the results of NIH-funded research. Please take a moment to weigh in with your Senator now.

Contact information for your Senator is here. Please fax a letter with your support no later than Friday, September 28, 2007.

Feel free to draw upon the following talking points:

• American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by the U.S. government. Widespread access to the information contained in these articles is an essential, inseparable component of our nation's investment in science.
• The Fiscal Year 2008 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill reported out of committee contains language directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to change its Public Access Policy so that it requires NIH-funded researchers to deposit copies of agency-funded research articles into the National Library of Medicine's online archive.
• Over the more than two years since its implementation, the NIH's current voluntary policy has failed to achieve any of the agency's stated goals, attaining a deposit rate of less than 5% by individual researchers. A mandate is required to ensure deposit in NIH's online archive of articles describing findings of all research funded by the agency.
• We urge the Senate to support the inclusion of language put forth in the Labor/HHS Appropriations bill directing the NIH to implement a mandatory policy and ensuring free, timely access to all research articles stemming from NIH-funded research ­ without change ­ in any appropriate vehicle.

(We'll be making additional resources for patient advocates ­ including the recording of our August 30 Web cast and specific talking points ­ available shortly as well. Watch the ATA Web site or email me directly for updates.)

Again, please take a moment to express your support for public access to research to your Senator as soon as possible and no later than September 28. As always, we'd appreciate it if you'd let us know of what action you're able to take, or send a copy your letter to the ATA through (202) 872-0884 (fax). Thank you!

Comments by Peter Suber:

Publisher associations are lobbying hard against this bill.  For example, the AAP/PSP launched PRISM, the behemoth Copyright Alliance weighed in, and Elsevier hired another lobbying firm.  It's critical that we show the Senate our support for a stronger OA policy at the NIH.  If you're a US citizen, please contact your Senators and spread the word to others who could do so.

I've omitted the list of Senators with their fax numbers, but it's in the ATA message if you need it.  For other kinds of contact info for your Senators (DC office, DC phone, local offices, local phones, email), use CongressMerge.  Remember to act before September 28!

Peter Suber

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The UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is now the 6th of the 7 UK Research Councils to adopt a Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

That makes AHRC's the 18th funder OA mandate worldwide, in addition to 14 university and departmental mandates, 2 proposed multi-university mandates, and 4 proposed funder mandates, for a total of 38 Green OA mandates adopted or proposed so far.

Like most of the mandates adopted so far, the AHRC has some needless, easily-corrected flaws, but first, let us (with Dr. Johnson) applaud the fact that it has been adopted at all: Bravo AHRC!

Now the mandate's altogether unnecessary and ever-so-easily-corrected flaw:

In their anxiety to ensure that their policy is both legal and not needlessly worrisome for publishers, AHRC (and many of the other funder mandates, including yesterday's CIHR mandate from Canada) have allowed an embargo period before the article is made OA, if the publisher wishes.

That is fine. But it is a huge mistake to allow the time at which the article must be deposited to be dictated by the publisher's embargo.

The deposit should be required immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exception. If there is no publisher embargo, that deposit is also immediately made Open Access at that same time. Otherwise it is made Closed Access for the duration of the embargo period. (Only the bibliographic metadata are visible and accessible via the web, not the article itself.)

It may seem pointless to require an article to be deposited immediately if it cannot be made OA immediately. But the point of requiring immediate deposit either way is to close a profound loophole that could otherwise delay both deposit and OA indefinitely, turning the mandate into a mockery from which any researcher can opt out at the behest of his publisher.

The early mandators have been very progressive and helpful in having adopted OA mandates at all, but now that mandates are spreading, it is important to optimize them, and plug the needless loopholes. Otherwise the mandates will suffer the same fate as the ill-fated NIH Public Access Policy, which failed so badly that its self-archiving rate was even lower than the spontaenous baseline for random self-archiving, in the absence of any policy at all. (The proposed NIH policy upgrade to a mandate is now one of the 4 pending funder mandate proposals).

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

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

OA mandators (and those proposing or contemplating OA mandates): Please consult the above links, as well as Peter Suber's critique below, and then do the minor tweaks that are the only thing needed to transform your policies into reliable, effective mandates, setting an example worthy of emulation by others.

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Peter Suber in Open Access News wrote:

The UK Arts & Humanities Research Council announced its long-awaited OA policy today. You can find it on the AHRC access policy page and in Appendix 9 of its lengthy (111 pp.) Research Funding Guide for 2007/08:

It is the AHRC’s position that authors choose where to place their research for publication. It is for authors’ institutions to decide whether they are prepared to use funds for any page charges or other publishing fees. Such funds could be part of an institution’s indirect costs under the full economic costing regime....

The AHRC requires that funded researchers:

   -- ensure deposit of a copy of any resultant articles published in journals or conference proceedings in appropriate repository

   -- wherever possible, ensure deposit of the bibliographical metadata relating to such articles, including a link to the publisher’s website, at or around the time of publication

Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example, embargo periods and provisions limiting the use of deposited content to noncommercial purposes, are respected by authors.

The final paragraph is emphasized (in bold type) in the Funding Guide but not emphasized on the access policy page.

Comments.

-- I applaud the mandatory language. But the policy is sketchy on most other important details. It doesn’t indicate which version should be deposited or what counts as an appropriate repository. It urges immediate deposit for metadata but doesn’t do so for the text itself. It gives no timetable for depositing the text and no maximum length for the delay or embargo.

-- It gives nearly as much space to the exception as it does to the policy, and creates the same gigantic loophole as the new CIHR policy and the older ESRC policy. If publishers don’t want their authors to make any version of their articles OA, they only have to adopt a house rule to that effect and suddenly the AHRC policy does not apply to AHRC grantees who submit work to that publisher.

--The AHRC is the sixth of the seven Research Councils UK to announce its OA policy. If this kind of mandatory language qualified by a vitiating exception can be called a mandate, then it’s also the sixth to adopt a mandate. The other five are at the BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and STFC. The EPSRC is still deliberating. Of the six RCUK OA policies, three allow authors to use grant funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (MRC, NERC, STFC) and three do not (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC).

Peter Suber, Open Access News

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Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California

The UC Faculty Survey results are summarized in a somewhat misleading way:

"There is limited but significant use of alternative forms of scholarship, with 21% of faculty having published in open-access journals, and 14% having posted peer-reviewed articles in institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories."

(1) The practise in question is making published articles open access (not "alternative forms of scholarship").

(2) 21% of UC Faculty published articles in OA journals and 14% posted their published postprints in repositories.

(3) But 31% posted their published postprints on personal or departmental websites (and 29% posted their preprints).

So the comparison between the proportion of OA publishing (Gold OA) and OA self-archiving (Green OA) is not 21% vs. 14%. It's 21% vs. either 31% or anything up to 74% (if the 3 forms of self-archiving were additive).

UC should correct these summary figures. Otherwise it is giving a very misleading picture of the actual proportions at UC between the two ways of providing OA. This is important, because it is OA self-archiving that has the greatest scope for growth and acceleration, as Gold OA cannot be mandated, but Green OA can (and should be).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has just announced the official adoption of the Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate it had proposed last year.

This is the 31st Green OA Mandate adopted worldwide, but the 1st in North America. (Indeed, only one North American University -- l'Universite du Québec à Montréal -- has signed the Berlin Declaration.)

In all, 14 departmental and university self-archiving mandates plus 17 funder mandates have so far been adopted worldwide. In addition, 2 large multi-university mandates (Brazil and Europe) are in the proposal stage, as are 4 proposed funder mandates (two of them in the US and very big).

The UK is still substantially in the lead for OA mandates adopted, but if the pending US and European mandate proposals are adopted, OA will have prevailed unstoppably worldwide.

The next big growth area will be the sleeping giant of university Green OA mandates, fueled by both the OA movement and the Institutional Repository movement. The UK universities and the European ones are moving in concerted directions here. Time for US university provosts (who signed in support of the FRPAA Green OA mandate proposal) to go into action too!

Stay tuned...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum