Self-Archiving Mandates

Why was the WHO IGWG OA recommendation downgraded from "requiring" OA to just "strongly encouraging" it? As Manon Ress and Peter Suber point out, this is simply a replay of the failed NIH policy, likewise downgraded from a requirement, tried for 2 years, resoundingly unsuccessful, and now being upgraded again to a requirement by the US Congress (only to be vetoed by George Bush). As repeatedly shown by Alma Swan's surveys of what authors say they will do and Arthur Sale's studies of what authors actually do, only a requirement (mandate) works.

The following prior wording:

(b) promote public access to the results of government funded research, through requirements that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts.

has for some reason been changed in the November Geneva version to:

(b) promote public access to the results of government funded research, by strongly encouraging that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts.

George Santayana (on being condemned to repeat history) comes to mind.

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Candour prompts the following shame-faced disclosure: In the very first mandate recommendation of them all, this feckless archivangelist also cravenly allowed himself to be persuaded once -- but only once! -- to equivocate on mandating vs. "strongly encouraging," despite having insisted on the need to mandate self-archiving from the outset. To mortify me, compare the original wording of the 2003 recommendation first submitted to the UK Parliamentary Select Committee with the subsequent (downgraded) version. Fortunately, only one mention of "mandate" was diluted to "strong encouragement." The rest of the mentions are all the m-word, and it was that, fortunately, that the wise members of the Select Committee hewed to in their actual recommendation...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Michael Smith [MS] (Anthropology, ASU, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

MS: "The practice of author payment for open access journals may work for the hard sciences, but it presents major difficulties for various categories of scholars..."

Paying to publish journal articles presents difficulties for any author who does not have the money to pay, regardless of field. But it is not an obstacle to providing Open Access (OA) itself:

Although only about 10% of journals are OA journals ("Gold OA Publishing"), over 62% of journals are "Green," meaning that they have already given their green light to all their authors to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts ("postprints") OA by depositing them in their own Institutional (or Central) Repositories (IRs) upon acceptance for publication -- and immediately making them OA ("Green OA Self-Archiving"). Another 29% of journals endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint, with embargoes of various lengths on making the postprint OA.

(The IR software also makes it possible for all users to request and for all authors to provide almost-instant almost-OA even for Closed or Embargoed Access postprints on an individual Fair-Use basis by means of a semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" button. That means 62% instant OA plus 38% almost-instant almost-OA.)

OA self-archiving (Green OA) costs nothing. But it should also be pointed out that the majority of Gold OA journals today do not charge for publication -- and those that do, waive the fee if the author cannot afford to pay. (The much larger number of hybrid-Gold publishers -- offering the author the option to pay for Gold OA -- do not waive the Gold OA fee, but most of them are also Green.)

MS: "(1) social sciences and humanities, where grants are smaller and fewer than in the natural and physical sciences."

All authors in the social sciences and humanities should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(2) graduate students and younger scholars."

All graduate students and younger scholars should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(3) scholars in the third world."

Scholars in the third world should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "The author-pay model puts people in the above categories (and others) at a serious disadvantage. It would effectively leave out an entire sector of scholarship in the third world. Panglossian arguments about convincing funding agencies to pay for author charges, or transferring university library budgets from subscriptions to author charges, ignore the current financial plight of research in most of the world today."

No need of Pangloss for OA: All authors can provide Green OA to articles (62% immediate full OA, 38% almost-immediate almost-OA) by self-archiving their postprints in their IRs, today.

Green OA self-archiving mandates from researchers' own institutions and funders are now on the way worldwide. (The US congress has recently approved a particular big NIH Green OA Mandate, in a Health Bill which has just been vetoed by President Bush, but it may still be adopted if the veto is over-ridden, and could be implemented by NIH and US universities in light of congressional adoption in either case. Six of seven UK research funding councils have already mandated Green OA after it was recommended but not adopted by Parliament. There are already a total of 32 funder and university mandates adopted worldwide, and at least nine more proposed or pending.)

Once adopted globally, these Green OA mandates will immediately provide 62% OA and 38% almost-OA, and the Closed Access embargoes will soon recede under the growing pressure from the powerful and obvious benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the tax-paying public that funds them, and the vast R&D industry.

(Eventually, 100% Green OA may even lead to the cancellation of non-OA journals, thereby releasing those institutional subscription funds to pay the much lower costs of Gold OA publishing for an institution's researchers -- costs which reduce to just those of peer-review alone, with all access-provision and archiving now offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA IRs.)

But there is no need to keep waiting for Gold OA: Green OA can be provided right now.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Since almost the beginning, the inadvertent and intentional conflation of Green OA (Self-Archiving) with Gold OA (publishing) has been a great obstacle to OA itself. I used to call it "Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul" and Peter Suber has since 2006 been calling it "JAM" (Journal/Archive Mix-Up).

Please do whatever you can to dispel this error as it is really holding up progress. In most cases, it is merely the result of ignorance or misunderstanding. But in the case of those who are lobbying against the NIH Bill, it is deliberately being used as a way to impugn Green OA Self-Archiving mandates by pretending they are Gold-OA publishing mandates.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In "OA, OK?" Richard Gallagher (2007) is quite right to say "we're still waiting" for the "optimal and inevitable" [Open Access]. I was already in full agreement in the previous millennium (Harnad 1999):

"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us. It is not the pace of our scholarly and scientific research that will look risible, nor the tempo of technological change. On the contrary, the astonishing speed and scale of both will make the real anomaly look all the more striking.

"For staring us in the face in this last decade has been an obvious new way to augment that already impressive speed and scale by perhaps an order of magnitude, yet we simply haven't twigged on it...

"I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library... and its [peer-review] expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the [subscription cancellation] savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!" -- (Harnad 1999)

But Gallagher is not quite right that "most scientists became indifferent about Open Access." The syndrome is not quite indifference but a combination of ignorance and indolence (Swan 2005) concerning what is already demonstrably in their own best interests and fully within their reach. I have dubbed the syndrome "Zeno's Paralysis" (Harnad 2006); the affliction is, fortunately, curable. The medicine is OA self-archiving mandates (Harnad 2001, Harnad et al. 2003; Harnad 2007) by researchers' institutions and funders.

And those mandates are on the way. The inertia is and always was merely a matter of keystrokes: getting those digits to deposit those digits. "Publish or perish" mandates managed to induce otherwise busy, curiosity-driven researchers to find the time to set their (peer-reviewed) findings to paper, and self-archiving mandates will now ensure the few additional minutes it takes to make all published papers immediately and permanently accessible free for all their potential users online, rather than just for those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published (Carr & Harnad 2005).

To close, a few loose ends:

(1) OA is not about journal affordability but about research accessibility.

(2) Harnad (1998) is available not because of "an online forum" but because it was self-archived in my institutional repository (without waiting for a mandate).

(3) The optimal/inevitable is not just overdue since 1998, but at least since 1994 (Harnad 1995, 2004; Poynder 2004), and actually at least a decade longer.

(4) OA self-archiving mandates have been mooted since at least 2001 (Harnad 2001, Harnad et al 2003).

(5) A more optimistic version of Esposito's (2007) "nautilus" was already mooted seventeen years ago, as "scholarly skywriting" (Harnad 1990).

References

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Esposito, J. (2007) Open Access 2.0. The Scientist 21(11) 52

Gallagher, R. (2007) OA: OK? The Scientist 21(11) 13

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature 395 (6698): 127-128

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12).

Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French versions: Harnad, S. (2003) Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: Pp. 77-103. ]

Harnad, S. (2004) June 27 2004: The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" at 10.
American Scientist Open Access Forum. June 27 2004.

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

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Poynder, R. (2004) Ten Years After. Information Today. October 2004

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

This is a response to a query from a Southampton colleague who received an unsolicited invitation from an unknown individual to contribute a chapter to an "Open Access" book (author pays) on the basis of a paper he had deposited in the ECS Southampton Institutional Repository (IR) -- and possibly on the basis of its download statistics:

The colleague asked:

(1) Is the book chapter that [identity deleted] is soliciting an example of Open Access?

(2) Are download counts legitimate metrics for (2a) CVs, (2b) website statistics, (2c) departmental/institutional repository (IR) statistics?

(3) Can download statistics be abused?

(4) Should institutional authors be able to "opt out" of (4a) depositing their paper in their IR and/or (4b) having their download statistics displayed?

(1) Yes, Open Access (OA) books are instances of OA just as OA articles are. The big difference is that all peer-reviewed journal/conference articles, without exception, are written exclusively for research usage and impact, not for royalty income, whereas this is not true of all or even most books. Articles are all author give-aways, but most books are not. So articles are OA's primary target; books are optional and many will no doubt follow suit after systematic OA-provision for research articles has taken firm root globally. (Also important: article deposit in the IR can be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as Southampton ECS and RCUK have done, but book deposit certainly cannot -- and should not -- be mandated.)

(2) Yes, download metrics, alongside citation metrics and other new metric performance indicators can and should be listed in CVs, website stats and IR stats. In and of themselves they do not mean much, as absolute numbers, but in an increasingly OA world, where they can be ranked and compared in a global context, they are potentially useful aids to navigation, evaluation, prediction and other forms of assesment and analysis. (We have published a study that shows there is a good-sized positive correlation between earlier download counts and later citation counts: Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2006) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8) pp. 1060-1072.)

(3) Yes, download statistics can be -- and will be -- abused, as many other online innovations (like email, discussion lists, blogs, search engines, etc.) can be abused by spammers and other motivated mischief-makers or self-promoters. But it is also true that those abuses can and will breed counter-abuse mechanisms. And in the case of academic download metrics inflation, there will be obvious, powerful ways to counteract and deter it if/when it begins to emerge: Anomalous download patterns (e.g., self-hits, co-author IP hits, robotic hits, lack of correlation with citations, etc.) can be detected, named and shamed. (It is easier for a commercial spammer to abuse metrics and get away with it than for an academic with a career that stands at risk once discovered!)

(4) No, researchers should definitely not be able to "opt out" of a deposit mandate: That would go against both the letter and spirit of a growing worldwide movement among researchers, their institutions and their funders to mandate OA self-archiving for the sake of its substantial benefits to research usage and impact. There is always the option of depositing a paper as Closed Access rather than Open Access, but I think a researcher would be shooting himself in the foot if he chose to do that on account of worries about the abuse of download statistics: It would indeed reduce the download counts, usage and citations of that researcher's work, but it would not accomplish much else. (On the question of opting out of the display of download (and other) metrics, I have nothing objective to add: It is technically possible to opt out of displaying metrics, and if there is enough of a demand for it, it should be made a feature of IRs; but it seems to me that it will only bring disadvantages and handicaps to those who choose to opt out of displaying their metrics, not only depriving them of data to guide potential users and evaluators of their work, but giving the impression that they have something to hide.)

I would also add that the invitation to contribute a book chapter by [identity deleted] might possibly be a scam along the lines of the bogus conference scams we have heard much about. The public availability of metadata, papers and metrics will of course breed such "invitations" too, but one must use one's judgment about which of them are eminently worth ignoring.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Max Planck Society would do incomparably more for Open Access (and its own research impact) if it mandated deposit in its own Institutional Repository (IR), Edoc, rather than just canceling journal subscriptions.

For some time now, the reply from the MP Institutes and German universities has been: "We cannot mandate!"

But of course they can! The policy need not be coercive; it need not have sanctions for noncompliance. It need merely be officially adopted. And there are obvious and simple administrative ways to make it worth researchers' while to comply (if the enhanced research impact that OA vouchsafes is not enough): Simply declare the IR as the official institutional submission format for all performance review for its employees!

So there are no administrative barriers. Nor are there any legal barriers: For performance review, it is sufficient to deposit the final, revised, refereed, accepted draft -- the postprint -- immediately upon acceptance for publication, and set access the postprint full-text as Closed Access (administrative access -- with only the bibliographic metadata, not the postprint, visible webwide) rather than immediate Open Access (if the journal in which the article is published is non-Green and demands an embargo).

(Since the only thing that has been standing between us and 100% OA for years now is keystrokes, an administrative keystroke mandate is all that is needed. The increasingly palpable benefits of OA itself will take care of the rest, as carrots, rather than sticks.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum