Self-Archiving Mandates

On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, James J. O'Donnell [JJO'D] wrote (on liblicense):

JJO'D: "...Whether to include [books] in OA "mandates" is Stevan Harnad's question, and since I regard such mandates with skepticism, that question doesn't concern me."

But the question of mandates does concern a bigger and bigger constituency, now that the Australian Research Council, 6 of 7 UK Research Councils, the European Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the US National Institutes of Health, and a growing number of universities have already mandated OA self-archiving -- and the vast sleeping giant of universities worldwide is just about to awaken and follow suit:

22 funder mandates,
12 institutional mandates,
3 departmental mandates,

plus

5 proposed funder mandates,
3 proposed multi-institutional mandates,
1 proposed institutional mandate

That's a total of

37 mandates already adopted and
9 more proposed so far
= 46

So this might be an opportune time to re-examine the basis of one's skepticism about OA mandates...

JJO'D: "I am struck by the assertion that "all authors would want OA for their articles" if certain conditions are met. That's an interesting hypothesis, but I would simply underscore that the number of authors who currently do want OA for their articles is low enough that Harnad and others recommend they be coerced to achieve the goal. That fundamental disjuncture is important to understand and is advanced by empirical work, not by thought experiments."

(1) "Coerced" is a rather shrill term! (Is every rule that is in the public interest -- smoking bans? seatbelt laws? breathalyzer tests? taxes? -- coercion? Is academia's "publish or perish" mandate "coercion"?)

(2) It is empirically incorrect to assume that the number of authors that do want OA for their articles is the same as the number who spontaneously self-archive or publish in an OA journal today:

(3) Considerable empirical work has been done on these questions: The surveys by Alma Swan and others have repeatedly shown that (a) many authors still don't know about OA, and (b) many of those who know about it agree that they would want it for their articles, but they fear (wrongly) that it might be illegal, prejudicial to their publishing in their journal of choice, or just plain (c) too complicated and time-consuming to do it.

(4) As a matter of empirical fact, (a) - (c) are all wrong.

(5) More important, the surveys have found that although most authors still do not self-archive, 95% report that they would self-archive if their institutions and/or funders mandated it -- and 81% of them report they would do so willingly.

(6) In other words, most authors regard Green OA self-archiving mandates not as coercion, but as facilitation, for doing what they would want to do, but otherwise daren't (or otherwise could not assign it the proper priority in their academic publish-or-perish obligations).

(7) By way of still further empirical confirmation, Arthur Sale's many studies have shown that institutional self-archiving policies are successful -- and institutional OA repositories successfully approach capture of 100% of institutional research output -- if and only if they are mandates.

(8) All of that is empirical; there is one thought-experiment, however, and that is the various speculations and counter-speculations about whether or not Green OA self-archiving mandates will "destroy peer-reviewed journal publication" (see APPENDIX below).

(9) I fully agree that the only way to settle that question too, is empirically -- and the mandates will do just that.

(10) All indications are that if and when mandated Green OA should ever make the journal subscription model unsustainable, the only thing that will happen is a natural transition to Gold OA publishing, with (a portion of) the institutional subscription savings simply redirected to paying the (reduced but nonzero) costs of Gold OA: implementing peer review.

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APPENDIX:

Would all peer-reviewed journal article authors indeed want OA for their published articles if they knew copyright was no obstacle and knew that self-archiving time/effort was trivial?

As noted above, I think we already know the answer to that question, indirectly, from the multidisciplinary surveys that have already been conducted and published. But suppose we wanted a still more direct answer:

Suppose we were to ask authors -- only about peer-reviewed journal articles (not books, irrespective of whether books are peer-reviewed) -- the following question (which needs to be as detailed as it is, in order to short-circuit irrelevancies, enthymemes, and incorrect assumptions):

"IF there existed no legal or practical copyright obstacles to doing it, and IF doing it involved negligibly little time and effort on your part (< 5 minutes of keystrokes per paper over and above all the time it took to write it), THEN would you be FOR or AGAINST making your own published journal articles Open Access so that all their potential users could access them, rather than just those whose institutions could afford paid access to the journal in which your article happened to be published?"

I am willing to wager that the vast majority of authors in all disciplines would reply FOR (and that if we added a box "if AGAINST, please state WHY," the reasons given by the minority who were AGAINST would all, without exception, be either factually incorrect, logically incoherent, or simply irrelevant).

That, I think, is the only real issue (especially given that a huge wave of institutional and funder self-archiving mandates is now growing worldwide: See Peter Suber's forthcoming SPARC Open Access Newsletter on February 2, 2008).

Some critics of OA mandates still seem to be seeing the self-archiving and the self-archiving mandate question as somehow imperiling the publication of articles in the author's peer-reviewed journal of choice: But articles published in the author's chosen peer-reviewed journal were part of the conditional (IF/THEN) in the above conditional question.

Hence any remaining reluctance about self-archiving can only be based on speculations ("thought experiments") about the future of journal publishing; those speculations would go into the "WHY" box, and then each one (they are all well-known by now!) could easily be shown to be groundless, empirically and logically:

(a) Self-archiving would bypass peer review. (Incorrect: The premise of the question had been that you deposit your published, peer-reviewed journal articles.)

(b) Self-archiving would jeopardize my chances of publishing in some journals, because they don't allow it. (Incorrect: (i) The premise of the question had been that there were no copyright obstacles. (ii) 91% of journals already endorse immediate self-archiving (for either unrefereed preprint, refereed postprint [62%], or both); for the 38% of postprints, the access can be embargoed and the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button will provide almost-immediate OA to all eprint requesters during the embargo.)

(c) Self-archiving would jeopardize the survival of peer-reviewed journal publishing. (Un-empirical speculation: (i) There is no evidence to date that self-archiving reduces journal revenue, even in the fields where it has reached 100% years ago. (ii) Counterspeculation: If/when self-archiving made the subscription-based cost-recovery model unsustainable, peer-reviewed journal publishing would simply switch to the Gold OA journal publishing model, with institutions paying for their authors' publication costs out of (part of) exactly the same money they are currently using to pay journal subscription costs.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

These recommendations by the EUA Working Group on Open Access were adopted unanimously on January 25 2008 by the Council of the European University Association, representing 791 universities in 46 countries throughout Europe.

Many thanks to Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege and founder of EurOpenScholar, who forwarded the report to the American Scientist Open Access Forum for posting, with permission. This clearly represents a new era for Green OA self-archiving mandates, moving now from funder mandates to university mandates, thereby covering all research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, worldwide, at its source.

Below are the highlights of the recommendations, followed by the recommendations in full. In essence, the recommendation is that

all European Universities should create institutional repositories and should mandate that all research publications must be deposited in them immediately upon publication (and made Open Access as soon as possible thereafter)

as already mandated by RCUK, ERC, and NIH, and as recommended by EURAB. In addition, the EUA recommends that

these (funder) self-archiving mandates should also be extended to all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding.

HIGHLIGHTS:

A. Recommendations for University Leadership

The basic approach... should be the creation of an institutional repository. These repositories should be established and managed according to current best practices (following recommendations and guidelines from DRIVER and similar projects) complying with the OAI-PMH protocol and allowing inter-operability and future networking for wider usage....

University institutional policies should require that their researchers deposit (self-archive) their scientific publications in their institutional repository upon acceptance for publication. Permissible embargoes should apply only to the date of open access provision and not the date of deposit. Such policies would be in compliance with evolving policies of research funding agencies at the national and European level such as the ERC.

B. Recommendations for National Rectors' Conferences

All National Rectors' Conferences should work with national research funding agencies and governments in their countries to implement the requirement for self-archiving of research publications in institutional repositories and other appropriate open access repositories according to best practice models of the ERC and existing national research funding agencies operating open access mandates...

C. Recommendations for the European University Association

EUA should continue to contribute actively to the policy dialogue on Open Access at the European level with a view to a self-archiving mandate for all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding, hence in support of and building upon the ERC position and other international initiatives such as that of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Recommendations from the European University Association Working Group on Open Access

I. WG: Aims and Scope

In January 2007 EUA established a 'Working Group on Open Access' for a one year period as a platform of expert opinion to provide both a voice for, and visibility to European universities as stakeholders in the policy debate. Its mission was dual-fold: to raise awareness of the importance of 'open access' issues to the wider university community, both in terms of its impact upon the research process and its financial implications for university libraries, and to develop recommendations for a common strategy for the university sector as key stakeholders in policy development in the field. The decision to set up the Working Group had reflected the general view that the interests of universities were not being heard in the growing policy debate on the issue of the wide implications of rapid development of digital ICT for publishing which tended to be dominated by the commercial interests of the major scientific publishing companies.

The Working Group membership drew upon the range of different university perspectives on the concept of 'Open Access' from those of academic researchers, librarians and university management. In the course of its three meetings in 2007 the Working Group gathered expert opinion on open access publishing business models, legal and copyright issues, technical development of national digital repositories and their European networking, and the policies being developed towards open access publishing by funding agencies at the national level and the European Commission.

Professor Sijbolt Noorda (Chair of the WG) and members contributed also to several European Conferences held in 2007 including the major conference on 'Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age' held jointly by the European Commission DG Research and DG Information and Media in Brussels in February 2007 in which the university sector were recognised formally as a major 'stakeholder' in the open access policy debate.

In reaching its recommendations that are addressed to three audiences - university leaders at the institutional level, National Rectors Conferences and the EUA - the Working Group has borne in mind the full spectrum of issues involved; these range from the clear opportunity offered to widen access to the results of research, to the implications of open access publishing for peer eview and quality assurance in academic research and the rapidly rising costs of scientific publications for university libraries (through high subscription prices for both electronic and printed journals, including 'bundling' marketing strategies by publishers).

II. European and Global Context of the Recommendations

The WG recommendations seek to build upon the findings of the 'Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of Scientific Publications Markets in Europe' (European Commission, DG Research, project report, January 2006), and public statements issued by the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) on Open Access as well as the current practices of some funding agencies such as UK Research Councils and the newly adopted policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States concerning open access mandates for peer-reviewed publications arising from grants.

In the European context the most recent significant development has been the ERC announcement on 17th December 2007 of its position on open access, as follows:

"The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMedCentral, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication."

WG recommendations seek also to provide support to European level initiatives promoting institutional repositories, their networking and wider accessibility through the future Confederation of European Repositories being developed by the DRIVER project consortium (funded under the European Commission 7th Research Framework Programme) and other university-led initiatives such as EurOpenScholar and the UNICA network.

III. Recommendations

The WG recommendations (below) are based upon the following core premises: the university's role and responsibility as guardian of research knowledge as a 'public good'; the results of publicly-funded research should be publicly-available as soon as possible; and quality assurance peer review processes are pre-conditions for scholarly publishing and therefore are essential to be maintained in the digital publishing mode.

It is important to emphasise that the scope of the WG recommendations cover as a priority the need for the enhancement of open access to peer-reviewed published research literature only, and not scientific research data, teaching materials etc. Issues of access to research data, its archiving and preservation need further attention from universities, funding agencies and scientific professional bodies, and are subject to several initiatives at the national and European level which are not addressed here (e.g. the Alliance for Permanent Access and European Digital Information Infrastructure).

A. Recommendations for University Leadership

   1.   Universities should develop institutional policies and strategies that foster the availability of their quality controlled research results for the broadest possible range of users, maximising their visibility, accessibility and scientific impact.

   2.   The basic approach for achieving this should be the creation of an institutional repository. These repositories should be established and managed according to current best practices (following recommendations and guidelines from DRIVER and similar projects) complying with the OAI-PMH protocol and allowing inter-operability and future networking for wider usage.

   3.   University institutional policies should require that their researchers deposit (self-archive) their scientific publications in their institutional repository upon acceptance for publication. Permissible embargoes should apply only to the date of open access provision and not the date of deposit. Such policies would be in compliance with evolving policies of research funding agencies at the national and European level such as the ERC.

   4.   University policies should include copyright in the institutional intellectual property rights (IPR) management. It should be the responsibility of the university to inform their faculty researchers about IPR and copyright management in order to ensure the wider sharing and re-use of the digital research content they have produced. This should include a clear policy on ownership and management of copyright covering scholarly publications and define procedures for ensuring that the institution has the right to use the material produced by its staff for further research, educational and instructional purposes.

   5.   University institutional policies should explore also how own resources could be found for author fees if 'author pays model' of open access publishing prevails in the future in some scientific fields/domains.

B. Recommendations for National Rectors' Conferences

   1.   All National Rectors' Conferences should work with national research funding agencies and governments in their countries to implement the requirement for self-archiving of research publications in institutional repositories and other appropriate open access repositories according to best practice models of the ERC and existing national research funding agencies operating open access mandates. National Rectors' Conferences should encourage government to work within the framework of the Council of the European Union Conclusions on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation" adopted at the EU Competitiveness Council meeting on 22nd-23rd November 2007.

   2.   National Rectors' Conferences should attach high priority to raising the awareness of university leadership to the importance of open access policies in terms of enhanced visibility, access and impact of their research results.

C. Recommendations for the European University Association

   1.   EUA should continue to contribute actively to the policy dialogue on Open Access at the European level with a view to a self-archiving mandate for all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding, hence in support of and building upon the ERC position and other international initiatives such as that of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

   2.   EUA should continue to be visible and to rally expertise from Europe's universities on Open Access issues to provide input to European and International events advancing open access to scientific publications, research data and their preservation.

One more Australian university Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (CSU, Australia's 6th mandate: thanks to Arthur Sale for the news) and one Italian funder mandate (ISS, Italy's first: thanks to Valentina Comba via Peter Suber) have been announced. (Also a "strong encouragement" policy from Hokkaido University brings us closer to a first Japanese mandate.)

Worldwide, that now makes:

   22 funder mandates,
   12 institutional mandates,
   3 departmental mandates,

plus

   5 proposed funder mandates,
   1 proposed institutional mandate,
   2 proposed multi-institutional mandates

That's a total of

   37 mandates already adopted and
   8 more proposed so far
   = 45

(plus at least 31 registered self-archiving institutional and funder "OA policies" and probably many more unregistered policies -- all of them still shy of a mandate, encouraging/inviting/rquesting instead of requiring/mandating, but within easy reach of upgrading to a mandate, exactly as NIH did recently).

   = at least 76 known to be adopted, proposed, or poised

See ROARMAP.

(Arthur Sale whispers that we should expect more announcements soon, from Australia.)

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If your institution or funder has adopted an OA mandate, please register it in ROARMAP.

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The Self-Archiving Sweepstakes are on -- and let us hope for a planetary sweep in 2008, particularly from the sleeping giant: the university sector. (The world deserves at least a bit of good news for a change!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]

The arch-analyst of apertivity, Richard Poynder, has published yet another excellent interview, this time time with Peter Murray-Rust, a dedicated advocate of Open Data (OD).

Here are a few comments on some important differences between Open Access (OA) and Open Data (OD).

The explicit, primary target content of OA is the full-texts of all the articles published in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. This is a special case, among all texts, partly because (i) research depends critically on access to those journal articles, because (ii) journals are expensive, because (iii) authors don't seek or get revenue from the sale of their articles, and hence have always given them away to any would-be user, and because (iv) lost access means lost research impact.

Research data are also critical to research progress, of course, but the universal practice of publishing research findings in refereed journal articles has not extended to the publication of the raw data on which the articles are based. There have been two main reasons for this. One was the capacity of the paper medium: There was no affordable way that data could be published alongside articles in paper journals. The other was that not all authors wanted to publish their data, or at least not right away: They wanted the chance to fully data-mine the data they had themselves gathered, before making it available for data-mining by other researchers.

The online era has now made it possible to publish all data affordably online. That removed the first barrier (although there are still technical problems, which Peter Murray-Rust and others discuss and are working to overcome). But the question of whether and when an author makes his data open is still a matter for the author to decide. Perhaps it ought not to be the author's choice -- but that is a much bigger and more complicated question than OA (for in OA all authors already want to make their published articles freely accessible online).

That difference in scope and universality is one of the reasons the OA and OD movements are distinct ones: OD has both technical and political problems that OA does not have, and it is important that OA should not be slowed down by inheriting these extraneous problems -- just as it is important that OD should not be weighed down by the publisher copyright problems of OA (which do not apply to OD for the simple reason that the authors do not publish their data, hence do not transfer copyright to a publisher).

So far, this is all simple and transparent: OA and OD have different target contents, with different problems to contend with. OA's solution has been for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the self-archiving of all of OA's target content, making it free for all online. But an interesting overlap region is thereby created between OA and OD: for article texts are themselves data! And one of the most important purposes for which the OD movement has sought to make data freely available online -- apart from the purpose of making it available for collaboration and use by all researchers -- is data-mining, by individuals as well as by software, and for re-publication in further 3rd-party online databases. Data-mining can be done not only on raw research data, but on article texts too, treating them as data: text-mining.

Here too, the interests of OA and OD are perfectly compatible and complementary -- except for one thing: If text-minability and 3rd-party re-publication were indeed to be made part of the definition of OA (i.e., not just removing price barriers to access by making research free for all online, but also "removing permissions barriers" by renegotiating copyright) then this would at the same time radically raise the barriers to achieving OA itself (just as insisting on making the paper edition free would), making it contingent on authors' willingness and success in renegotiating copyright with their publishers.

The online medium itself had been the critical new factor that had made it possible to remove price barriers to access, by making research articles toll-free online. But the price for going on to insist on the removal of both price barriers and "permissions barriers" jointly, as part of the very definition of OA, would have been to raise the problem of overcoming permissions barriers as a barrier to overcoming price barriers! For the new online medium that made toll-free online access possible, did not, in and of itself, redefine copyright, any more than it redefined ownership of the paper edition.

Toll-free online access (OA) will lead to copyright reform (and publishing reform, and perhaps eventually also to the demise of the paper edition). But the online medium alone, in and of itself, simply made toll-free online access possible -- and that is hence the proper definition of OA. (After all, copyright retention by authors was perfectly possible in the paper era. In and of itself, it is not an online matter at all -- although the online medium, and OA itself, will eventually lead to it.)

Peter Murray-Rust is right that there was some naivete about some of this at the time of the drafting of the BOAI definition of OA (which I signed, even though I later opted for an updated definition of OA, one that resolved this ambiguity in favor of immediate OA and its capacity to grow). More than naivete, there was ignorance and lack of foresight, both about the technical possibilities and about the practical obstacles. It was the online medium that had made OA possible: Toll-free access for all users had not been possible or even thinkable in the paper era, either to articles or to data, for both economic and practical reasons. But with the advent of the online era, toll-free access online became thinkable, and possible. Indeed it was already within reach: The only thing authors had to do was to make their articles and data accessible free for all, online.

But most article authors did not make their articles freely accessible online -- even though they all, without exception, sought no income from them their sale, wanting them only to be used, applied, cited and built upon. Most authors remained paralyzed because (1) they were worried about copyright and because (2) they didn't know how to provide OA, imagining that it might require a lot of time and effort.

The solution was Green OA self-archiving mandates on the part of their universities and funders, as an extension of their already existing publish-or-perish mandate. In particular, the IDOA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) Mandate requires researchers to deposit their articles in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) immediately upon publication (with access temporarily set to Closed Access for those journals that impose an access embargo period).

The IDOA solution works for OA -- it provides immediate OA for all the articles that are published in the 62% of journals that already endorse immediate OA. And for the 38% that do not, the articles are deposited as Closed Access; the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button then provides users with almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period.

But this solution does not work for OD, because (a) depositing data cannot be mandated, it can only be encouraged and because (b) making article-texts re-usable by 3rd-party text-miners and re-publishers as data requires permission from the copyright holder. That is not part of IDOA, and the "email eprint request" button does not cover it either.

So the strategic issue is whether to insist on something stronger than IDOA -- at the risk of not reaching consensus on any mandate at all -- or waiting patiently a little while longer, to allow IDOA mandates to become universal, generating toll-free online access (OA), with its immediate resultant benefits to research and researchers -- and to trust that the pressure exerted by those very benefits will lead to the demise of embargoes as well as to OD (for both data and texts) in due course.

I would accordingly urge patience on the part of the OD community, as well as to the Gold OA (publishing) and copyright-reform communities (even though I am by no means patient by nature myself!). Their day will come soon too!

But first, please allow Green OA to take the natural course that is now wide open for it, paving the way with universal IDOA mandates generating toll-free online access to research, and all its immediate benefits. The strategic course to take now is to allow those mandates to propagate globally. This is not the time for over-reaching, raising the ante for OA higher than what the mandates can provide, and thereby only jeopardizing their chances of being adopted in the first place.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

As a historic matter: The European Research Council has finalised its Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (and it did so 19 days before the NIH mandate!):

"The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication[emphasis added]."

Like the NIH mandate, the ERC mandate is also an immediate-deposit mandate, with the allowable embargo applying only to the date that the deposit is made OA, not to the date it is deposited (which must be immediately upon publication). The ERC embargo is also shorter (6 months, whereas NIH is 12 months). Better still, the deposit may be either institutional or central.

The only way to improve on this nigh-optimal mandate is to require that the deposit itself be institutional -- "Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally" -- except if the grant recipient's institution does not yet have an institutional repository (in which case deposit should be in an interim generic repository such as the UK's DEPOT or Europe's EurOpenScholar).

That is the way to ensure that research-funder and institutional self-archiving mandates systematically complement one another so as to scale up, as quickly and reliably as possible, to cover all of research output (virtually all of it institutional), from all disciplines and all institutions, worldwide.

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

Bravo to both the US and Europe. Now it is time for the other US and EC funding agencies -- and, even more importantly, all the US and European universities -- to follow suit with Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates of their own.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In the wake of the historic NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate in the US, here are two well-informed current articles on university repository policy (the next phase in the planet-wide propagation of Green OA). Highly recommended:

Swan, Alma & Carr, Les (2008) Institutions, their repositories and the Web. Serials Review (in press).
ABSTRACT: It will soon be rare for research-based institutions not to have a digital repository. The main reason for a repository is to maximise the visibility of the institution's research outputs (provide Open Access), yet few contain a representative proportion of the research produced by their institutions. Repositories form one part of the institution's web platform. An explicit, mandatory policy on the use of the repository for collecting outputs is needed in every institution so that the full research record is collected. Once full, a repository is a tool that enables senior management in research institutions to collate and assess research, to market their institution, to facilitate new forms of scholarship and to enable the tools that will produce new knowledge.

Bailey, Charles (2008) Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
SUMMARY: A very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories. Fosters further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites.

The January issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter is superb, and I recommend it highly as a historical record of the milestone reached by the OA movement at this pivotal moment. There is no question but that the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is the biggest OA development to date, and heralds much more.

There remains, however, an important point that does need to be brought out, because it's not over till we reach 100% OA, because mistakes have been made before, because those mistakes took longer than necessary to correct, and because a big mistake (concerning the locus of the deposit) still continues to be made.

First, a slight correction on the chronometric facts:

Peter Suber wrote:"If NIH had adopted an OA mandate in 2004 when Congress originally asked it to do so, it would have been the first anywhere. Now it will be the 21st."

Actually, if the NIH OA mandate had been adopted when the House Appropriations Committee originally recommended it in September 2004, it would have been the world's third Green OA self-archiving mandate, not the first. And Congress's recommendation in September 2004 was the second governmental recommendation to mandate Green OA self-archiving: The first had been the UK Parliamentary Select Committee's recommendation in July 2004.

(1) The Southampton ECS departmental mandate was (as far as I know) the very first Green OA self-archiving mandate of all; it was announced in January 2003 (but actually adopted even earlier). QUT's was the second OA mandate, but the first university-wide one, and was announced in February 2004. (See ROARMAP.)

(2) The UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee Recommendation to mandate Green OA self-archiving was made in session 2003-04 and published in July 2004 (i.e., before September 2004, when the US House Appropriations Committee made its recommendation).

Moreover, the recommendation to mandate self-archiving had not only been part of the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ from its inception in 2002, but the FAQ's contents had actually preceded the existence of the BOAI by several years, with the recommendation itself -- that departments, universities and funders should mandate self-archiving -- already in circulation since about 1999. (The FAQ was also already quite specific at that time about mandating the self-archiving of the author's final accepted draft, rather than the publisher's PDF. Its one glaring error was to advocate central self-archiving -- but that was corrected as soon as the OAI protocol was formulated, making it possible to create the first OAI-compliant Institutional Repository software in 2000, thereby returning to the original distributed, institutional model of self-archiving of 1994.)

In contrast, to see where the precursor to the NIH mandate stood in 1999, one must re-read the original e-biomed proposal of May 1999. There was still a bumpy and meandering road ahead (via the PLoS petition in 2001 and the Bethesda Statement in 2003), with several false starts and dead ends (among them the first NIH non-mandate itself!), before the realization that what had been needed all along was self-archiving and a Green OA self-archiving mandate.

"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)

Now NIH's has indeed instantly become by far the most important of the Green OA self-archiving mandates to date in virtue of its size and scope alone, but it still hasn't got it right!

The upgrade from a mere request to an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate was indeed an enormous improvement, but there still remains the extremely counterproductive and unnecessary insistence on direct deposit in PubMed Central. This is still a big defect in the NIH mandate, effectively preventing it from strengthening, building upon and complementing direct deposit in Institutional Repositories, and thereby losing the golden (or rather green!) opportunity to scale up to cover all of research output, in all fields, from all institutions, worldwide, rather than just NIH-funded biomedical research in PubMed Central: an altogether unnecessary, dysfunctional, self-imposed constraint (in much the same spirit as having requested self-archiving instead of mandating it for the past three lost years).

Even the benefits of Congress's wise decision to mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication -- thereby transferring the allowable 12-month embargo to the date at which access to that deposit is set to Open Access, rather than allowing any delay in the date on which the deposit itself is done -- are lost if that deposit is required to be made directly in PubMed Central, rather than in each author's own Institutional Repository (and thence harvested to PubMed Central): With direct IR deposit, authors can use their own IR's "email eprint request" button to fulfill would-be users' access needs during any embargo. And, most important of all, with direct IR deposit mandated by NIH, each of the world's universities and research institutions can go on to complement the NIH self-archiving mandate for the NIH-funded fraction of its research output with an institutional mandate to deposit the rest of its research output, likewise to be deposited in its own IR. This will systematically scale up to 100% OA.

The hope is that -- recognizing that similar mistakes have been made in the past, and that that has cost dearly in years of lost OA, and recognizing that the remedy is ever so simple, with no loss, only gain ("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally") -- the NIH will still have the sound sense, in the euphoria over the successful passage of the mandate itself, to optimize its mandate now, so it can do the maximal good in the minimal time, across all fields and institutions, worldwide.

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum