Self-Archiving Mandates

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SUMMARY: Eight supplemental points based on Peter Suber's excellent talk (and the audience discussion) on "What Can Universities Do To Promote Open Access?" at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
(1) Journals vs. books: OA is only about author give-away work. Peer-reviewed journal articles are all, without exception, author give-aways, but most scholarly books are not. OA can only be mandated for give-away work. (Once OA for journal articles prevails, more authors will undoubtedly want the same for their monographs too.)
(2) Versions and Citability: The canonical version of a journal article is the final, peer-reviewed, accepted version (the "postprint"). That is what researchers need, though not necessarily in the form of the publisher's PDF. What is cited is always the published work. Researchers are infinitely better off if those who cannot afford the publisher's official PDF can always access the author's self-archived postprint.
(3) First OA Self-Archiving Mandate: Queensland University of Technology's was the world's first university-wide OA self-archiving mandate, as Peter notes, but the very first OA self-archiving mandate of all was that of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University.
(4) Prior Evidence of Probability of Compliance With OA Self-Archiving Mandates: Swan & Brown's author surveys found that 95% of authors would comply with an OA self-archiving mandate (over 80% willingly) but authors were not asked whether they would comply with a copyright-retention mandate. The same is true of Arthur Sale's data on actual mandate compliance rates.
(5) Deposit Mandates vs. Copyright-Retention Mandates: NIH's is not a copyright-retention mandate. It is a no-opt-out deposit mandate plus a no-opt-out requirement to negotiate with the 38% of journals who don't endorse immediate OA, so as to be able to make the deposit OA within a year. Harvard's is a copyright-retention mandate, with opt-out.
(6) Mandate Implementation Mechanisms: There are no sanctions on deposit mandates, as Peter notes; there are administrative incentives and contingencies: The IR is made the official locus for submitting publications to be assessed for performance review.
(7) Peer Review, Journals and Repositories: Journals provide peer review; IRs provide access to peer-reviewed postprints. The issue of IRs providing peer review is a red herring (raised by others, not Peter).
(8) Journal Weighting in Researcher Performance Evaluation: [added 5 April] The credit and weight accorded for publishing in a given journal in a researcher's performance evaluation should depend only on the journal's track-record for quality, not on its OA policy or status.

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Peter Suber gave an excellent talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society entitled: "What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?" and the discussion was very interesting too. The video and powerpoints are here.

I append eight comments stimulated by the talk and accompanying discussion; many are just elaborations on points Peter made:

(1) Journals vs. books: For the OA movement it is ever so important to clearly separate the case of journal articles from the case of books. The reason is simple: OA is and has to be only about author give-away work. Peer-reviewed journal articles are all, without exception, author give-aways, written only for uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty revenues.

Now although this may also be true of some scholarly books, it definitely is not true of all or most of them now. Hence not only can OA not be mandated for non-give-away books, but, at a time when OA itself is still so widely misunderstood, it is important to treat the clearcut, exception-free give-away case of peer-reviewed journal articles first, and separately, rather than to conflate it with the complicated hybrid case where the majority of the content is not author give-away at this time.

Once OA for journal articles prevails, more authors will undoubtedly want the same for their monographs too.

(2) Versions and Citability: The problems raised during the question period concerning the versions and citability problem are mostly a matter of misunderstanding:

First, we are talking about journal articles only.

The canonical version of a journal article is the final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft (the "postprint"). That is what researchers need, not necessarily the publisher's PDF.

What is cited is always the published work (unless one is explicitly and deliberately referring to unrefereed, unpublished prior drafts [preprints] or corrected, revised postpublication updates [which we could call "post-postprints"]). The version and citation issue pertains only to the specific case where one deliberately wishes to cite either an unpublished draft or an unpublished revision.

Otherwise, all citations of the peer-reviewed article itself -- whether based on reading the author's self-archived postprint of it, or the publisher's PDF of it -- are citations to the canonical published work itself (and point to the bibliographic data for the published work).

In other words: there is no special version or citation problem for postprints.

Now, as to the separate scholarly question of whether an author can be trusted if he says that "this draft of my published article is indeed the refereed final draft" -- that is a matter for scholarly practice and integrity. It is not an OA issue. It is not even a technical issue (although there are technical ways of computationally comparing versions to check whether and how a given draft diverges from the published PDF or XML text).

The only relevant point is that the scholarly and scientific research world is infinitely better off if all those scholars and scientists who cannot access the publisher's official PDF of any given article can always access the author's self-archived postprint of it. The possibility that some authors may sometimes be either untruthful or sloppy can be handled on a case by case basis if/when it ever comes up. But that possibility is definitely no reason to call into question the basic principle that what researchers need today is access to the postprint. And that it is in the authors' and their institutions' and their funders' best interests that authors should provide access to their postprints, by self-archiving them in their IRs. Inasmuch as self-archiving the publisher's PDF creates obstacles to self-archiving (because the publisher does not allow it, or because access to it is embargoed), that should definitely not be grounds for delaying the immediate provision of the author's postprint -- or for delaying the adoption of mandates to deposit it.

(3) First OA Self-Archiving Mandate: For the record: Queensland University of Technology's was indeed the world's first university-wide OA self-archiving mandate, as Peter noted, but not the world's first OA self-archiving mandate.

The very first OA self-archiving mandate was that of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in 2003: That was also the model for the first formal description of an OA self-archiving mandate in the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ and the OSI EPrints Handbook.

(4) Prior Evidence of Probability of Compliance With OA Self-Archiving Mandates: It is not correct to say that the Swan & Brown author surveys found that authors would comply, and comply willingly, with any OA mandate at all. Authors were asked specifically about a mandate to deposit, and 95% said they would comply, with 81% complying willingly. They were not asked, however, about how they would feel about a mandate to retain copyright (let alone a mandate with an opt-out). Harvard's is the first copyright-retention mandate, and there is no evidence at all on how many faculty would comply, or comply willingly.

Arthur Sale's data on actual compliance rates likewise apply only to deposit mandates, not to copyright-retention mandates.

(5) Deposit Mandates vs. Copyright-Retention Mandates: NIH's is not a copyright-retention mandate. It is a deposit mandate. It can be fulfilled by simply depositing the postprint of an article that was published in any of the 62% Green journals that have endorsed immediate OA self-archiving, or any of the remaining journals that have endorsed embargoed access within NIH's time limit. That is a deposit mandate -- plus a requirement (with no opt-out option) to negotiate deposit within the embargo period for any remaining articles, published in journals that don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving. (Harvard's in contrast, is, in its present form, purely a copyright-retention mandate, with an opt-out.)

(6) Mandate Implementation Mechanisms: There are no sanctions on deposit mandates, but there are administrative incentives and contingencies, as Peter noted. Basically, if you wish to have your publications considered for institutional performance review, the official mechanism for doing so is to deposit them in your IR. (There is a similar rationale for fulfilling the Harvard copyright-retention mandate (for the non-opt-outs): one way to meet the condition of transmitting the postprint to the Provost is to deposit it directly in Harvard's IR.)

(7) Peer Review, Journals and Repositories: Very minor point: OA is about providing OA to peer-reviewed journal articles. OA journals can provide OA to their articles, or authors can provide OA to their articles (by depositing them in their IR). Singling out the fact that an IR does not provide peer review is a bit of a red herring. It risks encouraging people to speculate about alternatives to journals, instead of just focussing on providing OA to peer-reviewed journal articles. (Peter himself is of course very clear on this.)

(8) Journal Weighting in Researcher Performance Evaluation: In evaluating research performance, there need be no extra credit or weight accorded for publishing in a journal based on its OA policy or status. The weight should depend only, as always, on the journal's track-record for quality. OA can be provided by self-archiving articles published in any journal; there is no need for a researcher to select journals for any other reason than research quality.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Suber wrote in Open Access News:

PS: "It's one thing to argue that the NIH policy should mandate deposit in the author's institutional repository (when they have one)..."

Most universities have an Institutional Repository (IR).

Even more would, if NIH mandated IR deposit as the preferred default option.

And those universities who don't yet have an IR are only a piece of free software and a few days' sysad start-up time from having one -- and not just for their NIH output, but for all their research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines.

The goal of the OA movement is to make all research output OA. But it is not just the OA content itself that needs to be "interoperable": OA mandates from funders need to be interoperable with OA mandates from institutions.

Institutions are -- without exception -- the source, the providers, of all research output, worldwide.

Hence funder OA mandates should not be competing with institutional OA mandates, needlessly and counterproductively, but adapting to, facilitating and reinforcing them.

It is not at all too late to correct this small -- but crucial and easily-fixed -- bug in the recent, welcome, timely flowering of funder OA mandates, to create a synergy with the potentially far bigger blooming of institutional OA mandates that is also on the horizon (as heralded by Harvard's recent OA mandate).

NIH need merely specify that the preferred means of fulfilling the NIH OA mandate is for NIH fundees to deposit their articles in their own institution's IR, and just send NIH each deposit's URL, so that PubMed Central can harvest it therefrom.

One small step for NIH, one giant leap for mankind.

PS: "But as long as the NIH is mandating deposit in PMC, and as long as a journal meets the NIH's criteria for depositing articles on behalf of authors, then I don't see any reason why authors shouldn't take advantage of the option."

The reason is simple:

The NIH mandate, as it stands, does not scale up to providing a systematic means of covering all of institutional research output, NIH and non-NIH, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines worldwide.

NIH research output is just a small -- but extremely important -- subset of US and worldwide research output:

NIH, the world's biggest (nonmilitary) research funder, is providing a model for research funder mandates worldwide, a model that will be influential, closely watched, and widely emulated.

It is all the more critical, therefore, that the NIH mandate should be systematically scalable -- that it should interoperate coherently (rather than compete or conflict) with OA mandates from the research providers themselves -- the universities and research institutions worldwide -- as well as with other funder mandates, in other fields and other countries worldwide.

If, instead, authors and their institutions were now to begin ceding responsibility for compliance with the NIH OA mandate to their publishers as their proxies, relying on them to deposit their work in PubMed Central in their place, this would deprive the NIH mandate of any possibility of growing to cover all of research output, in all fields, worldwide. (It would also add to the compliance-monitoring and fulfillment problem that the Wellcome Trust, which has a similar funder mandate, is just now discovering -- and NIH will soon discover it too.)

Publisher proxy deposit would at the same time tighten the control of publishers over a process that should be entirely in the hands of authors themselves: the provision of supplementary free access to their give-away work for those who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version. (Proxy deposit would also encourage publishers to charge for compliance with the NIH mandate.)

Publisher proxy deposit would also lose the three special, scalable strengths of the NIH mandate, which are (1) that the NIH mandate applies specifically to the researcher's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint, on which restrictions are the fewest), not necessarily to the publisher's proprietary PDF; (2) that the NIH mandate is a researcher self-archiving mandate, binding on researchers (not their publishers), and based on each researcher's right (and responsibility) to maximize access to his own give-away findings; and (3) that the NIH mandate is a coherent component of a universal mandate to provide OA to all research output, not just to NIH-funded research output, in PubMed Central.

It is crucially important to remind ourselves very explicitly that what we are talking about here is just keystrokes -- i.e., about who should do the few keystrokes that make a piece of peer-reviewed research OA. We are talking, very specifically, about a few minutes' worth of keystrokes per paper (over and above the many keystrokes that already went into writing it in the first place). The natural ones to do those keystrokes are the authors themselves (or their assistants, students or assigns); and the natural place for them to do it is in their own IRs. It makes as little sense to consider offloading the task of performing those few keystrokes onto publishers (or even onto institutional librarians) as it would be to offload onto any other party the task of keying in the paper itself, in these days of personal word-processing.

So although most authors today are still not doing those few extra keystrokes of their own accord (and that is precisely the problem that the OA mandates are meant to remedy) it would be exceedingly short-sighted to propose that the remedy is to invite authors' publishers to do those keystrokes for them (possibly even at additional cost). That dysfunctional remedy is remarkably reminiscent of the grotesque degree of control over the dissemination of our own giveaway research findings we have unwittingly been ceding to our publishers throughout the paper era (the "Faustian Bargain"): the very disease that OA is meant to cure, in the online era, at long last.

And needlessly insisting on direct deposit in PubMed Central is the very heart of the problem. Yet the cure is ever so simple: NIH need merely stipulate that the preferred means of fulfilling the NIH OA mandate is for each researcher to deposit the postprint in his own university's IR and send NIH the URL.

PS: "I did object to journal deposit under the older, voluntary policy, because it gave publishers the decision on the length of the embargo. Under the new policy, however, the length of the embargo is already set by the time the author signs the copyright transfer agreement. Hence, journal deposit cannot change the terms of the deal."

That leaves only the six other serious reasons militating against publisher deposit: (1) Publisher proxy deposit in an external repository needlessly competes with institutional IR self-archiving mandates instead of facilitating them; (2) it defeats the benefits of an immediate-deposit mandate, where the IR's "email eprint request" button could have tided over worldwide research usage needs during any publisher embargo by providing almost-immediate, almost-OA; (3) it loses the benefits of having specified that the OA deposit target is the author's postprint, not necessarily the publisher's PDF; (4) it leaves publishers in control of providing OA (and even facilitates their charging for it); (5) it leaves IRs empty, and non-NIH content non-OA; (6) it leaves researchers' fingers paralyzed.

PS: [update] "My response above was limited to publishers who do not charge fees, and I share Stevan's objections to those who would charge fees."

My objections are not just limited to publishers who charge fees: They concern any publisher proxy deposit, and indeed any funder mandate that does not stipulate that the author's own institutional IR is the preferred default locus for deposit wherever possible.

PS: "Or if there's some subtle way in which it can, then I'll join Stevan's call on authors to make the deposits themselves. I already agree with him that, if the policy were to mandate deposit in the author's IR, then author deposits would make much more sense than journal deposits."

Peter, the ways in which both publisher proxy deposit and direct institution-external deposit are counterproductive for the growth of OA and OA mandates are far from subtle. I fervently hope that you will support my call on authors (or their collaborators) to make the deposits themselves, preferably in their own IRs, providing NIH with the URL. And of course also the call on NIH to allow -- indeed welcome -- IR deposit and PubMed Central harvesting rather than just direct PubMed Central deposit. (And, while we're at it, the call on universities, like Harvard, to mandate deposit, without opt-out, rather than just mandating copyright-retention, with opt-out!)

This slight change in the implementational details of the NIH policy would be a small step for NIH, but a huge step for the growth of OA worldwide.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Paul Gherman: "At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant work contacting publishers to find out what their policy and procedures are. One discovery is that some of them intend to charge authors between $900 and $3,000 to submit articles to NIH. Some will allow for early posting, if the fee is paid."

Such are the wages of whim.

But they are easily fixed, free of charge:

(1) NIH specifies the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR) as the locus for the mandated direct deposit. (PubMed Central can then harvest the metadata or full-text.)

(2) Universities mandate deposit in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication (for all their research output, not just NIH).

(3) The deposit must be immediate; the access too should be set as OA immediately, but it may optionally be set as Closed Access during a limited embargo period (during which all research user needs can be fulfilled with the help of the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button).

(4) Along with encouraging (but not mandating) setting access to the (mandated) immediate deposit as Open Access rather than Closed Access wherever possible, universities can also encourage (but not mandate -- because a mandate with an opt-out option is not a mandate anyway) Harvard-style copyright retention wherever possible.

The (outrageous) notion of being charged $900 - $3000 per paper for complying with the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is something the NIH has invited upon itself by not thinking through the details of the mandate sufficiently, and mandating direct 3rd-party repository deposit instead of integrating the NIH mandate with Harvard-style university mandates, requiring immediate deposit in the university employee's own IR, without exceptions or opt-outs, and with embargoed OA access-setting the only (temporary) compromise.

I am confident that this will be the ultimate outcome in any case. The only question is: How long will it take all the wise and well-intentioned parties involved to take a deep breath, think it through, and do it, instead of hurtling ahead with alternatives they have already committed themselves to, without thinking them through sufficiently rigorously...?

See: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Ann Okerson [AO] wrote in liblicense:

AO: "Right now we have a kind of mess that needs time to sort out: trying to achieve compliance for literally thousands of authors and articles in a couple of months (since the mandate was announced in January) is a herculean task, when the institutional underpinnings (the list of these is substantial) are mostly not yet present. We have a situation in which articles can be submitted by (1) authors, many of whom would rather just have someone else do it, like the publishers -- btw, the NIH instructions for authors are not as helpful as they could be; (2) the research institutions, i.e., the ones that already have everything in place to do so; or (3) the publishers. The potential for redundancy is huge and it is wasteful. The publishers, most of whom are willing to help if given half a chance, are the ones with the redacted articles... seem like the most logical funnel to the NIH, if this can be worked out.

"Wouldn't it be good if the NIH, the publishers, and the research institutions would get into a room together and thrash this all out in an sensible way?"

The institutions who "already have everything in place to do so" can sort this out in one simple, sensible swoop:

Institutions mandate deposit in their own Institutional Repositories and invite NIH to harvest from there (or hack up an export of NIH content to PubMed Central).

The institutions whose "institutional underpinnings [they are not substantial] are... not yet present" are only a piece of free software plus a few days of sysad time away from having the requisite institutional underpinnings present.

A hasty stopgap strategy of relying on proxy deposit by publishers would be the very worst possible solution. It not only doesn't scale, but it positively obstructs the goal of systematically making all institutional research output OA (playing into the hands of those like-minded publishers who have that very goal).

We must think beyond just the NIH OA mandate to mandating OA for all all university research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andy Powell [AP] wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

AP: You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true.
   Despite who-knows-how-much-funding being pumped into IRs globally (can anyone begin to put a figure on this, even in the UK?)...

Plenty of figures have been posted on how much money institutions have wasted on their (empty) IRs in the eight years since IRs began. People needlessly waste a lot of money on lots of needless things. The amount wasted is of no intrinsic interest in and of itself.

The relevant figure is this:

How much does it actually cost just to set up an OA IR and to implement a self-archiving mandate to fill it?

For the answer, you do not have to go far: Just ask the dozen universities that have so far done both: The very first IR-plus-mandate was a departmental one (at Southampton ECS); but the most relevant figures will come from university-wide mandated IRs, and for those figures you should ask Tom Cochrane at QUT and Eloy Rodrigues at Minho (distinguishing the one-time start-up cost from the annual maintenance cost).

And then compare the cost of that (relative to each university's annual research output) with what it would have cost (someone: whom?) to set up subject-based CRs (which? where? how many?) for all of that same university annual research output, in every subject, willy-nilly worldwide, and to ensure (how?) that it was all deposited in its respective CR.

(Please do not reply with social-theoretic mantras but with precisely what data you propose to base your comparative estimate upon!)

AP: most [IRs] remain largely unfilled and our only response is to say that funding bodies and institutions need to force researchers to deposit when they clearly don't want to of their own free will. We haven't (yet) succeeded in building services that researchers find compelling to use.

We haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish of their own free will: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to publish of their own free will, we audit and reward their research performance according to whether and what they publish ("publish or perish").

We also haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish research that is important and useful to research progress: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to maximise their research impact, we review and reward research performance on the basis not just of how much research they publish, but also its research impact metrics.

Mandating that researchers maximise the potential usage and impact of their research by self-archiving it in their own IR, and auditing and rewarding that they do so, seems a quite natural (though long overdue) extension of what universities are all doing already.

AP: If we want to build compelling scholarly social networks (which is essentially what any 'repository' system should be) then we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community - social networks that are largely independent of the institution.

Some of us have been thinking about building on these "social networks" since the early 1990's and we have noted that -- apart from the very few communities where these self-archiver networks formed spontaneously early on -- most disciplines have not followed the examples of those few communities in the ensuing decade and a half, even after repeatedly hearing the mantra (Mantra 1) urging them to do so, along with the growing empirical evidence of self-archiving's beneficial effects on research usage and impact (Mantra 2).
Then the evidence from the homologous precedent and example of (a) the institutional incentive system underlying publish-or-perish as well as (b) research metric assessment was reinforced by Alma Swan's JISC surveys: These found that (c) the vast majority of researchers report that they would not self-archive spontaneously of their own accord if their institutions and/or funders did not require it (mainly because they were busy with their institutions' and funders' other priorities), but 95% of them would self-archive their research if their institutions and/or funders were to require it -- and over 80% of them would do so willingly (Mantra 3).



And then Arthur Sale's empirical comparisons of what researchers actually do when such requirements are and are not implemented fully confirmed what the surveys said that the researchers (across all disciplines and "social networks" worldwide) had said they would and would not do, and under what conditions (Mantra 4).



So I'd say we should not waste another decade and a half waiting for those fabled "social networks" to form spontaneously so the research community can at last have the OA that has not only already been demonstrated to be feasible and beneficial to them, but that they themselves have signed countless petitions to demand.

Indeed it is more a koan than a mantra that the only thing the researchers are not doing for the OA they overwhelmingly purport to desire is the few keystrokes per paper that it would it take to do a deposit rather than just sign a petition! (And it is in order to generate those keystrokes that the mandates are needed.)

AP: Oddly, to do that we might do well to change our thinking about how best to surface scholarly content on the Web to be both 1) user-centric (acknowledging that individual researchers want to take responsibility for how they surface their content, as happens, say, in the blogsphere) and 2) globally-centric (acknowledging that the infrastructure is now available that allows us to realise the efficiency savings and social network effects of large-scale globally concentrated services, as happens in, say, Slideshare, Flickr and so on).

It is odd indeed that all these wonders of technology, so readily taken up spontaneously when people are playing computer games or blabbing in the blogosphere have not yet been systematically applied to their ergonomic practices, but the fact is that (aside from a few longstanding social networks) they have not been, and we have waited more than long enough. That systematic application is precisely what the now-growing wave of OA self-archiving mandates by funders (such as RCUK and NIH) and universities (such as Southampton ECS and Harvard) is meant to accelerate and ensure.

AP: Such a change in thinking does not rule the institution out of the picture, since the institution remains a significant stakeholder with significant interests... but it certainly does change the emphasis and direction and it hopefully stops us putting institutional needs higher up the agenda than the needs of the individual researcher.

Individual researchers do not work in a vacuum. That is why we have institutions and funders. Those "research networks" already exist. As much as we may all admire the spontaneous, anonymous way in which (for example) Wikipedia is growing, we also have to note the repeatedly voiced laments of those academics who devote large portions of their time to such web-based activities without being rewarded for it by their institutions and funders (Mantra 5).

OA self-archiving mandates are precisely the bridge between (i) the existing canonical "social networks" and reward systems of the scholarly and scientific community -- their universities and research funders -- and (ii) the new world that is open before them.

It is time we crossed that bridge, at long last (Mantra 6).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Surf Foundation has released a survey on "Acceptance of the JISC/SURF Licence to Publish & accompanying Principles by traditional publishers of journals."

The gist of the survey result is that more and more publishers are moving toward explicitly endorsing author open-access self-archiving, and that the majority already endorse it.

This is good to know, but it was already evident from the EPrint Romeo statistics (derived by clarifying the SHERPA-Romeo data, and presenting it at the individual journal level). These statistics have been available and regularly updated for several years now.

Two comments:

(1) The Surf Foundation survey obscures the results somewhat, because it uses the needlessly profligate, irrelevant and confusing colour codes of SHERPA-Romeo ("green", "blue", "yellow", "white") when all we need to know is:

GREEN (62%) (journals that endorse immediate open-access self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint)

PALE-GREEN (29%) (journals that endorse only unrefereed preprint self-archiving)

OTHER (9%) (journals that do not endorse self-archiving of either preprint or postprint, that embargo self-archiving, or that charge authors money to self-archive)

(2) There is some confusion about what is meant by "open access" in the Surf report (whether (i) Gold Open Access journal publishing, (ii) Green Open Access author self-archiving, or (iii) the adoption of the JISC/SURF licensing recommendations).

For articles in the GREEN journals (62%) that endorse immediate author self-archiving of the postprint there is no need for the JISC/SURF license. It is always welcome, but not necessary in order to provide Open Access. (And even for articles the 38% non-GREEN journals, repositories can implement the "email eprint request" button to facilitate users requesting and authors providing almost-immediate, almost-OA while trying to renegotiate copyright, waiting for the embargo to elapse, or waiting for the journal to go GREEN.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's and RCUK's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's and U. Liege's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate funder mandates and university mandates to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
      Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
      Universities (and research institutions) also have a direct interest in ensuring that their researchers fulfill their funders' conditions for awarding grants.
      Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for both institutional and funder monitoring and record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

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There is a simple, natural, universal way to integrate (a) funder open-access mandates and (b) university open-access mandates, reconciling the NIH and Harvard OA mandates, as well as making the two kinds of mandate synergistic and mutually reinforcing:

(i) Separate the deposit requirement from the open access requirement.

(ii) Separate the issue of the locus and timing of the deposit from the issue of the locus and timing and copyright conditions for providing open access to the deposit.

Both universities and funders should mandate immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed final draft (postprint), in the author's own university's Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exceptions or opt-outs, for institutional record-keeping purposes.

Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions permit it. Otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes (with only the metadata visible and accessible webwide, not the postprint full-texts).

All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to (ii) the timing and copyright conditions for providing open access to the deposit, not to (i) the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.

That way:

(1) there will be a systematic (and natural) common locus of direct deposit for all research output worldwide;
(2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates;
(3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates;
(4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes can be applied independently of the deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of the mandate (instead of needlessly making (1)-(3) contingent on each case);
(5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and
(6) central OA repositories (like PubMed Central) can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

Right now, the NIH mandate requires that the postprint must be "submitted" immediately upon acceptance for publication (which is excellent!), but it does not specify how or where to submit it!

The obvious solution is that the postprint should be directly deposited, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into the researcher's own university's (or institution's) IR -- possibly as Closed Access rather than Open Access, depending on copyright and embargo conditions and negotiations. (NIH can then be sent the URL, and given access privileges.)

The recommendations of the SPARC/Science Commons/ARL joint white paper "Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright Considerations and Options" by Michael Carroll are all excellent: Their only flaw is in not separating those valid and helpful considerations and options from the question of the locus and timing of the deposit itself. That locus should always be the author's IR, and the timing should always be immediately upon acceptance for publication. None of the copyright considerations are pertinent to the deposit itself: They apply only to the provision of open access to the deposits.

In exactly the same way, the Harvard mandate is excellent in every respect except that it too conflates the deposit itself with the copyright and embargo considerations and options: Those considerations and options should only apply to whether and when open access to the deposit is provided, not whether and when the deposit itself is done. The Harvard mandate offers the option of opting out of the requirement to negotiate copyright retention. That makes the Harvard mandate into a non-mandate unless the copyright requirement, with opt-out, is separated from a deposit requirement, without opt-out.

The solution proposed here is simple, natural, solves both the NIH and Harvard problems at once, makes the funder and university mandates complementary and convergent, and provides an integrated, synergistic OA mandate model for both funders and universities that will systematically scale to all worldwide research input.

I hope that funders and universities will give this integrative proposal serious thought, rather than just pressing ahead with the current NIH and Harvard models, both of them welcome and timely, but both in need of this small yet crucial revision to ensure their coherence and success.

It is noteworthy that three recommendations were made to NIH three years ago: (1) mandate immediate deposit, with no opt-out, (2) specify direct deposit in the fundee's university IR, and (3) harvest into PubMed Central.

Those recommendations were not followed, and after three years the NIH policy was acknowledged to have failed. Because of that failure, the policy has very recently been upgraded to an immediate-deposit mandate (1). But there are already signs (from the very similar Wellcome Trust mandate) that systematic monitoring mechanisms are needed to ensure compliance with funder mandates.

University mandates are the obvious means of reinforcing and monitoring compliance with funder mandates (as part of the fulfillment conditions for receiving the grant overheads and indirect costs allotments). Moreover, university IRs are also the natural, convergent locus for direct deposit of all research output: The universities are the providers of the research, both funded and unfunded, and they have a direct institutional interest in archiving, recording, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research output as well as in maximizing its uptake, usage and impact.

Funder mandates like NIH's will naturally reinforce university mandates, like Harvard's. The two mandating parties simply have to agree on separating the universal issue of deposit itself (and the locus and timing of that direct deposit) from the independent, item-specific issue of the timing of the provision of Open Access to that deposit, its copyright conditions, embargo duration, and whatever central repositories may wish to harvest that OA deposit or its metadata, where and when.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Suber [PS] wrote in the March 2008 OA Newsletter:

PS: "My argument in a nutshell is that the [Harvard] policy won't need revision if the rate of opt-outs is low and the speed of deposits is high."

My question to my closest OA ally, Peter Suber, is this:

In what respect could that precise same argument, in precisely the same words, not have been made about the first NIH OA policy of three years ago (which went on to fail, dramatically, achieving only a 4% "opt-in" rate after 3 years)?

Does it not make more sense to immunize the Harvard policy against a similar failure in advance, instead of waiting to perhaps have to remedy the Harvard policy, too, three years hence, just as the failed NIH policy had to be remedied?

This seems particularly straightforward now that the simple remedy, which has since been tried, tested, and demonstrated to be successful (a deposit mandate without opt-out) needs merely to be added to Harvard's current permission mandate with opt-out to immunize it against uncertainty or failure. Hence none of the untested new permission mandate's potential benefits would be lost: The deposit mandate's compliance rate would simply be added to the permission mandate's compliance rate.

Is there any independent rationale for embarking on yet another 3-year experiment, this time with an untested permission mandate alone, with opt-out, rather than shoring it up pre-emptively with an already tried, tested and successful deposit mandate, without opt-out?

I just don't see how more is learned, or gained, by voluntarily renouncing a cost-free insurance policy (and possibly three years of maximized research impact), to instead wait and see whether an untested permission mandate with opt-out might be able to manage to go it alone. (Haven't we already been waiting for OA more than long enough?)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum