Open Access Archivangelism

        See update 8/2/08/ Open Access: "Gratis" and "Libre"

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Re-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News. (This is to register 100% agreement on this definition of "Strong" and "Weak" OA):

Strong and Weak OA

The term "open access" is now widely used in at least two senses. For some, "OA" literature is digital, online, and free of charge. It removes price barriers but not permission barriers. For others, "OA" literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. It removes both price barriers and permission barriers. It allows reuse rights which exceed fair use.

There are two good reasons why our central term became ambiguous. Most of our success stories deliver OA in the first sense, while the major public statements from Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin (together, the BBB definition of OA) describe OA in the second sense.

As you know, Stevan Harnad and I have differed about which sense of the term to prefer --he favoring the first and I the second. What you may not know is that he and I agree on nearly all questions of substance and strategy, and that these differences were mostly about the label. While it may seem that we were at an impasse about the label, we have in fact agreed on a solution which may please everyone. At least it pleases us.

We have agreed to use the term "weak OA" for the removal of price barriers alone and "strong OA" for the removal of both price and permission barriers. To me, the new terms are a distinct improvement upon the previous state of ambiguity because they label one of those species weak and the other strong. To Stevan, the new terms are an improvement because they make clear that weak OA is still a kind of OA.

On this new terminology, the BBB definition describes one kind of strong OA. A typical funder or university mandate provides weak OA. Many OA journals provide strong OA, but many others provide weak OA.

Stevan and I agree that weak OA is a necessary but not sufficient condition of strong OA. We agree that weak OA is often attainable in circumstances when strong OA is not attainable. We agree that weak OA should not be delayed until we can achieve strong OA. We agree that strong OA is a desirable goal above and beyond weak OA. We agree that the desirability of strong OA is a reason to keep working after attaining weak OA, but not a reason to disparage the difficulties or the significance of weak OA. We agree that the BBB definition of OA does not need to be revised.

We agree that there is more than one kind of permission barrier to remove, and therefore that there is more than one kind or degree of strong OA.

We agree that the green/gold distinction refers to venues (repositories and journals), not rights. Green OA can be strong or weak, but is usually weak. Gold OA can be strong or weak, but is also usually weak.

I've often wanted short, clear terms for what I'm now going to call weak and strong OA. But I also wanted a third term. In my blog and newsletter I often need a term which means "weak or strong OA, we don't know which yet". For example, a press release may announce a new journal, digital library, or database, without making clear what kind of reuse rights it allows. Or a new journal will launch which makes its articles are freely available but says nothing at all about its access policy. I will simply call them "OA". I'll specify that they are strong or weak OA only after I learn enough to do so.

Stevan and I agree in regretting the current, confusing ambiguity of the term, and we agree that the weak/strong terminology turns this ambiguity to advantage by attaching labels to the two most common uses in circulation. I find the new terms an especially promising solution because they dispel confusion without requiring us to buck the tide of usage, which would be futile, or revise the BBB definition, which would be undesirable.

Postscript. Stevan and I were going to write up separate accounts of this agreement and blog them simultaneously. But when he saw my draft, he decided to blog it without writing his own. That's agreement!

Posted in Open Access News by Peter Suber at 4/29/2008 03:01:00 PM.

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SUMMARY: The SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER on "what faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution" proposes the key modification that will upgrade the Harvard self-archiving mandate to the optimal alternative -- a universal, no-opt-out, Deposit Mandate, plus a licensing clause with an opt-out option -- making the mandate suitable for adoption by all universities and funders worldwide. The crucial difference is that the deposit clause must be no-opt-out -- a true mandate. (I hope Harvard too will consider making the tiny change that would upgrade its mandate to this optimal alternative.) This upgraded mandate, more powerful even than what the White Paper notes, should now also make it more evident why it is so important to integrate university and funder mandates, both converging deposit on (and then harvesting from) the repositories of the institutions that are the providers of all the research (attention NIH!).

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OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS:
What faculty authors can do to ensure
open access to their work through their institution
A SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER

Bravo to the drafters of this SPARC/SCIENCE-COMMONS White Paper!

It is such a pleasure (and relief!) to be able to endorse this paper unreservedly.

There are distinct signs in the text that the drafters have been attentive, and paying close heed to what has proved empirically to work and not work elsewhere, and why.

Here are the three crucial paragraphs: The first two, I and II (numbering and emphasis added), give the basic context for the landmark Harvard Mandate. But the third (III) gives the key modification that upgrades the Harvard model to the optimal alternative -- a universal no-opt-out Deposit Mandate, plus a licensing clause with an opt-out option -- now suitable for adoption by all universities and funders worldwide:

[I] Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy under which (1) faculty are required to deposit a copy of their scholarly journal articles in an institutional repository and (2) automatically to grant to the University a University License... to make those articles openly accessible on the Internet.
Each of these two components is independently important.

[II] The deposit requirement by itself is valuable because it ensures that the University's collection of Harvard-authored scholarship will grow significantly. Institutions (primarily in Europe) that have adopted similar deposit requirements have experienced high rates of deposit, while those with voluntary policies have had low participation. The deposit requirement is also effective even in the absence of a University License, since a large percentage of journal publishers' copyright agreements already permit authors to post their final manuscript in online institutional archives...

**[III] The Harvard policy allows faculty to waive both the deposit requirement and the University License for a given article upon request.
An alternative approach is to allow faculty to waive the University License only, but not the deposit requirement.
Such a policy would ensure that all faculty articles are digitally archived, but those that are deposited by faculty who waive the University License would not be made openly accessible, unless the faculty member allowed it at a later date. Such a policy maximizes archiving while also maintaining faculty flexibility in negotiating with publishers who do not accept open archiving or accept it only after a lengthy embargo period.

The difference between the above alternative (III) and the current Harvard policy, though a tiny one, is the difference between night and day for the success and power of the mandate, and hence its suitability to serve as a model for other universities (and research funders) worldwide: The difference is that the deposit clause must be no-opt-out -- a true mandate. (It is no-opt-out deposit mandates that have generated the high levels of deposit elsewhere; it is hence crucial to restrict the opt-out option only to the license clause.)

"Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate:
Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Mandate"

I (and many others) will now strongly support and promote this alternative mandate model, for universal adoption. (I hope Harvard too will consider the tiny change that would be required in order to upgrade its mandate to this optimal alternative.)

The strength and scope of this alternative mandate is, if anything, understated by the White Paper. The no-opt-out Deposit Mandate plus the License Clause is far more powerful even than what the White Paper states, but never mind! What the White Paper states (and its excellent practical suggestions) should be more than enough to encourage the universities of the world to adopt this model mandate.

(One ever so tiny quibble that I feel churlish even to mention, concerns the timing of the deposit, and which draft to deposit: The optimal timing for deposit is immediately upon acceptance of the refereed draft for publication. (There is no earthly reason for science and scholarship to wait till the time of publication.) And the draft to deposit is the author's final, refereed, accepted draft ["postprint"]. Of course that draft is citable [as author/title/journal -- in press]; and the citation can be updated as soon as the full year/volume/issue/page-span information is available. And of course quoted passages can be specified by section-heading plus paragraph number: no overwhelming need for the pagination of the publisher's final PDF.)

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

I hope that this optimal university mandate will now also make it more evident why it is so important to integrate university and funder mandates (attention NIH!), so that the university IR is the convergent locus of direct deposit for both:

"How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

"One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The European Commission (EC) Grant Agreement mandates that "an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission" but does not specify how to provide it.
   This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR).
   That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR.
   The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requests direct central deposit, should adopt exactly the same implementational detail. Institutional IR deposit and central harvesting would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates.

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N. Miradon wrote on the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

NM: Professor Harnad advises that "...It should be a part of the fulfillment condition on the recipients of all EC research funding -- both the funded researchers and their institutions -- that all refereed research publications resulting from the funding must be self-archived in the fundee's institutional repository. They (or their metadata) can then be harvested/collected/ imported/exported to the EC from the IRs..."[1]
      Diffidently, I would suggest that the advised "self-archiving in the fundees' institutional repositories" should be implemented in the Commission's next Framework Programme of Research and Development (FP8).
      This, because in the current Framework Programme (FP7) there is a general requirement that "...an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission..." (para II.30.4 of Annex II - General Conditions, FP7 Grant Agreement)[2].
      So the Commission already has its own institutional repository, containing every single publication produced under FP7.
      Tweaking that repository to make it harvestable is likely to be easier than making even a minor rewrite of the Grant Agreement.

Not even a minor rewrite of the Grant Agreement is needed (and a great deal is at stake):

The EC Grant Agreement does not specify how "...an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission..."

This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify (in form-letters or instructions to the FP7 grant recipients) that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR).

That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR.

It is infinitely more useful, sensible, and conducive to the growth of OA IRs, OA self-archiving mandates and OA itself for the Commission's collection to harvest from the recipients' IRs -- rather than just for EC-funded research to be back-harvestable by authors and institutions from the EC's central collection:

Authors and their institutions already have copies of their own research output. The objective is to get all that research output deposited, whether EC-funded or not. The power of the EC mandate can easily be extended far beyond merely the research that the EC funds, by simply specifying the recipient's own IR as the preferred locus of the direct deposit, with the EC simply harvesting the deposits for its central collection therefrom.

Exactly the same recommendation -- on how this minor detail in the implementation of its OA mandate would make a vast difference for the growth to OA -- has been made to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requested direct central deposit instead of the institutional IR deposit and central harvesting that would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates.

The OA mandates of:

European Research Council,
Australian Research Council
Austria's Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Belgium's Research Foundation Flanders
India's National Knowledge Commission
Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology,
Russian Academy of Science's Central Economics and Mathematics Institute
Swiss National Science Foundation
most of the Research Councils UK

have already specified institutional deposit either as the sole mode of direct deposit, or as one of the options.

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

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

NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy

NM: The proposal that the European Commission should "set up a web-based repository for published project results" was suggested by EURAB and subsequently supported by the Cour des Comptes [footnote 1 of page 17 of [0]).
      But Professor Harnad rejects this idea. He says that instead of running its own repository, the European Commission should harvest from the recipients' Institutional Repositories [1].

I did not say the EC should not run its own repository. I said they should not mandate direct deposit therein. They should mandate direct deposit in the author's IR and then harvest to the EC repository from there.

And EURAB did not insist on direct central deposit: "The repository may be a local institutional and/or a subject repository".

NM: This would be fine, if all 100% of those institutional repositories were up and running. But are they?

Each of the universities and research institutions of Europe is only a free piece of software and a couple of days of sysad time away from having its own IR. If the Commission specified the recipient's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, most of the institutions that don't yet have an IR would set one up.

(And for those institutions that don't yet have an IR, there are always interim IRs like DEPOT (and, I hope, soon, through Prof. Bernard Rentier's EurOpenScholar and U. Southampton, "EurOpenDepot") as well as consortial IRs, to tide them over.)

The problem is not and never has been getting an IR, but getting the IR filled with its intended OA content. That's why funder mandates need to complement institutional mandates, with both systematically converging on the IR as the locus of deposit.

NM: I just looked for ["Seventh Framework Programme" projects] in Google. The first hit was the "WELTEMP" project (Water Electrolysis at Elevated Temperatures) [2].
      I could not find any of the WELTEMP partners [3] listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories [4].
      The coordinator's university (DTU) is listed on Den Danske Forskningsdatabase // Danish Research Database [5]; but today (2008-04-28) this says "NB! The Danish Research Database is currently not being updated, we are working on a new solution planned to release in the 1st quarter of 2008". As regards Technical University of Denmark (DTU), it says "literature and projects available for 1996 - 1999 (2000 onwards will follow)".

The reason IRs are running fallow today is because neither their institutions nor their funders are mandating deposit in them. That is my point!

All research originates from institutions. If the Commission mandates deposit of its EC-funded research institution-externally, it is needlessly doing far less than it easily can, in order to generate 100% OA for all European research, from all disciplines and all institutions, whether EC-funded or not.

NM: I have nothing against WELTREMP or any of its partners. On the contrary, I suspect that they are representative of quite a lot of grant recipients, i.e. that somewhat less than 100% of Framework Programme 7 grantees have got a fully functional Institutional Repository. This may have changed by the time we get to the next Framework Programme - lets hope that it has. But for the moment, since the Commission already has a repository with 100% coverage, I cannot think that EURAB and the Cour des Comptes are wrong to suggest that this repository simply be put on the web.

The objective is not to get EC-funded research into a central EC repository (though that is welcome too). The objective is to get all EC-funded research OA (along with all EC-unfunded research). An extremely minor detail in the implementation of the EC's deposit mandate -- namely, depositing institutionally and then harvesting centrally -- would make a very major difference for OA growth in Europe.

The concern about institutions that do not yet have IRs can be accommodated by stipulating that direct deposit in the grant recipient's own IR (and sending the URL to the EC) is the EC's preferred means of submission, but direct submission is permissible too.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Below is Peter Suber's excellent summary table (excerpted from his original article in Open Medicine), listing (and correcting) the most common misconceptions about the NIH Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate.

Note especially the update addendum at the end: NIH's is indeed an Immediate Deposit (IDOA) Mandate (what Peter calls a Dual Deposit-Release Mandate). (I.e., it is not a delayed-deposit mandate.)

Peter also corrects the common error about locus of deposit: the NIH deposit needs to be made in PubMed Central, not in PubMed.

[I would add, however, that it would be infinitely better for worldwide OA if NIH's stipulated locus for the direct deposit were the fundee's own Institutional Repository (from which it could simply be harvested/imported/exported to PubMed Central). That would help enormously to integrate and universalize all Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates, from universities as well as funders, systematically scaling them up to all universities and research institutions worldwide, covering all research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, in a convergent, mutually reinforcing synergy.]

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More on the OA mandate at the NIH

Peter Suber, An open access mandate for the National Institutes of Health, Open Medicine, April 16, 2008.  Also PDF. 

Table 1: Common misconceptions about the new NIH open access policy
Fiction	Fact
The mandate is to publish in open access journals.	The mandate is to deposit in an open access repository (PubMed Central).
The mandate is to bypass journals and peer review.	The mandate is to provide open access to articles already published in peer-reviewed journals.
The mandate applies to the published version of articles.	The mandate applies to the final versions of the authors’ peer-reviewed manuscripts.
The mandate directs deposits to PubMed.	The mandate directs deposits to PubMed Central.
The mandate requires a 12-month embargo on the copy in PubMed Central.	The mandate permits an embargo of up to 12 months on the copy in PubMed Central.
The new NIH budget is US$29 million.	The new NIH budget is US$29 billion.
The new mandate will last for only 1 year.	The new mandate will last indefinitely.
The mandate requires violation of copyright law.	The mandate requires compliance with copyright law.

Peter Suber:  This table is based on the most common misconceptions I'd heard in the first month after the policy's adoption.  Now I'd add at least one more. 

Fiction:  The policy requires deposit at the end of the embargo period. 

Fact:  The policy requires deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication.

[re-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News]

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ECS developers win $5000 repository challenge, a press release from the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), April 15, 2008. 

Excerpt:

Developers from ECS, Southampton, and Oxford University won a $5000 challenge competition which took place at the OR08 Open Repositories international conference.

Dave Tarrant, Tim Brody (Southampton) and Ben O'Steen (Oxford), beat a large field of contenders, including finalists from the USA and Australia, by demonstrating that digital data can be moved easily between storage sites running different software while remaining accessible to users (watch video). This approach has important implications for data management and preservation on the Web....

[W]ith the growth of institutional repositories alongside subject-based repositories, and in cases where multiple-authors of a paper belong to different institutions, it is important to be able to share and copy content between repositories.

Meanwhile the repository space has become characterised by many types of repository software - DSpace, EPrints and Fedora are the most widely used open source repository software - containing many different types of content, including texts, multimedia and interactive teaching materials. So although sharing content and making it widely available (interoperability) has always been a driver for repository development, actually moving content on a large scale between repositories and providing access from all sources is not easy.

The OR08 challenge, set by the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG), had just one rule for the competition: the prototype created had to utilise two different 'repository' platforms....

This data transfer was achieved using an emerging framework known as Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a topic that attracted one of the highest attendances at OR08....

Comment [from Peter Suber].  Congratulations to Tarrant, Brody, and O'Steen.  I look forward to the day when institutional repositories can harvest full-texts and metadata from disciplinary repositories and vice versa.  That will greatly reduce the temperature on the question where researchers initially deposit their work (and where universities and funders require them to deposit their work), and greatly increase the security of deposits (on the LOCKSS principle).  Thanks to ORE and the tools developed by the Southampton-Oxford team, this day is not far off. 

Comment from Stevan Harnad: The demonstration of the bulk transferability of the contents of one OAI-compliant repository to another is indeed welcome. It shows that it does not really matter from the point of view of either accessibility or harvestability where a research output is deposited (as long as it's in an OAI-compliant repository). But where it is deposited still matters a great deal for the probability of research output being deposited at all, and especially for the probability of deposit mandates being adopted at all -- particularly deposit mandates on the part of institutions, who are the providers of all the research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines.

The importance of the new OR08 demonstration of the transferability of Institutional Repository (IR) contents is hence greatest for confirming that both institutional and funder mandates can and should require deposit in the author's institutional IR, from which central harvesters, indexers and search engines, as well as Central Repositories (CRs) like PubMed Central, can then harvest/import them. This convergent synergy would be best for the progress of OA.

(The fact that external deposits can also be back-harvested to the depositor's own institutional IR is also welcome and useful, but it certainly does not imply that depositing willy-nilly anywhere is as likely to scale up to systematic OA policies, generating universal OA, as depositing, systematically and convergently at the universal source: the researcher's own IR -- and then, where desired, harvesting/exporting externally therefrom.)

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R. and Rowland, F. (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Technical report.

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

First, let me heartily congratulate University College of Boras (UCB) on having adopted an Open Access policy, and for registering it in ROARMAP! This is Sweden's fourth open access policy. (The other three are Lund's, Stockholm's and KB's).

But UCB's policy is so excruciatingly close to being a picture-perfect Green OA mandate -- and could so easily be transformed into one (which would make it the planet's 42nd OA mandate, and Sweden's 1st) -- that I can't resist again playing the preacher. All the essential elements are in place. It's just that the current wording needlessly loses the opportunity to make full use of the components of the policy, and of what is legally open to UCB.

The pertinent current passages are these:

3. All employees at the University College of Boras must register their publications in BADA.

5. Scientific journals often have a policy stating that manuscripts of articles (with certain restrictions) also can be published in an open digital archive. All employees at the University College of Boras are recommended to deposit manuscripts to BADA according to the rules and regulations of the journal, and if such rules and regulations are lacking the author should request permission to publish the article in BADA.

The all-important distinction UCB has failed to make is the one between (a) depositing a document and (b) making it Open Access.

The full text of a document can always be deposited in an Institutional Repository and made Closed Access, which means that no one can access it except the author and the webmaster. No legal restrictions can be placed on such internal institutional record-keeping for an institution's own research output. The metadata are accessible and visible webwide, but the full text is not.

Then there is the option to make the deposit Open Access. This can be done in accordance with the journal's copyright policy. 62% of journals already endorse immediately making the deposit Open Access. (See Romeo [n.b, it is momentarily malfunctioning!])

For the remaining 38%, I strongly recommend that UCB implement the "email eprint request" Button, which makes it possible for authors of Closed Access Deposits to provide, semi-automatically, individual copies to individual eprint requesters, for research purposes, during any embargo period.

All that needs to be done is to change the word "register" in clause 3 above to "deposit", and in clause 5, in the first sentence, the phase should not be "published in an open digital archive" but "made Open Access"; and then replace "deposit manuscripts to BADA" with: "make the deposited manuscript Open Access" according to... etc., as follows:

3. All employees at the University College of Boras must deposit their publications in BADA -- [the final refereed draft ("postprint") immediately upon acceptance for publication].

5. Scientific journals often have a policy stating that manuscripts of articles (with certain restrictions) also can be made Open Access. All employees at the University College of Boras are recommended to make the deposited manuscript Open Access according to the rules and regulations of the journal, and if such rules and regulations are lacking the author should request permission to publish the article in BADA.

With the above changes the UCB policy not only becomes a mandate (which has been demonstrated by Professor Arthur Sale in Australia to work successfully to generate 100% OA within about 2 years) rather than just a request or invitation, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to fail. But such a policy would be in conformity with the unanimous recommendation of the Council of the European University Association, representing 791 universities in 46 countries. It would also be in line with the policy of the European Research Council and the flagship of the European universities' Open Access mandate: University of Liege, of which the Rector, Professor Bernard Rentier, is also founder and director of EurOpenScholar, which is dedicated to promoting OA mandates all over Europe.

I urge UCB to make the few small changes required to make UCB's current policy into the model Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access ((DOA) mandate, the optimal OA policy for UCB, a model for the rest of Scandinavia, and the 42nd Green OA mandate worldwide.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

From: European University Association (EUA) News:

Universities need to do more to develop institutional policies and strategies that increase access to their peer-reviewed research results to the widest range of users, to maximise the impact and visibility of university research.

This is one of the key recommendations published by EUA’s Working Group on Open Access, which aim to raise awareness of the importance of the open access issue within the university community, both in terms of its impact upon the research process but also its financial implications for university libraries.

EUA is recommending that universities across Europe set up an ‘institutional repository’ (or take part in a shared repository) as a key first step to achieving this goal. These repositories should be established and managed according to current best practices and policies developed by universities should ensure that researchers deposit their publications in the repository on acceptance of publication. Embargoes should only apply to the date of open access provision and not the date of deposit.

University policies should also take better account of copyright and the institutional intellectual property rights (IPR) management.

The recommendations were published following a meeting of the EUA Council, which took place before the opening of the EUA Spring Conference at the University of Barcelona. The working group’s recommendations are based on the core premises: the university’s role and responsibility as guardian of research knowledge as a “public good” and that the results of publicly funded research should be publicly available as soon as possible; and that quality assurance peer review processes are pre-conditions for scholarly publishing.

Please click here to read the full recommendations.

Robert Kiley [Wellcome Trust] wrote:

"Conscious that this licence only extends to "gold" OA articles, the Trust is continuing to work with publishers to explore the possibility of developing a similar licence for author manuscripts."

It's important that everyone understand clearly what is at issue here:

(1) The Wellcome Trust, the world's first research funder to mandate OA, has not only mandated Green OA self-archiving, but has also made funds available to authors to pay their publishers to make their articles Gold OA, in order to make them not just price-barrier-free (Green OA) but also permissions-barrier-free.

(2) This means that non-OA publishers, while continuing to receive full subscription revenue, are paid extra fees by Wellcome in exchange for the extra usage rights.

(3) There is no question that these extra usage rights are welcome and useful.

(4) The question is whether they are worth the extra money at this time.

(5) The problem is not only that the extra money is being diverted from research funds (at a time when research funds are getting ever scarcer and harder to come by).

(6) The problem is also that paying the publishers extra money is not a solution that scales: Wellcome may be able to afford it, but what about all the rest of the world's research output, unfunded by Wellcome?

(7) Can all funders afford (and do they wish) to divert scarce research funds to pay for extra publisher costs?

(8) And what about unfunded research?

(9) Can universities afford (and do they wish) to adopt OA mandates that also entail paying publishers extra fees? Should they want to?

(10) Perhaps most important: Are these extra (welcome, useful) usage rights worth making a fuss about just now, when we do not yet even have universal Green OA, or universal Green OA mandates?

(11) Will fussing about "fair use is not enough" at this time increase or decrease the probability that the world's research institutions and funders converge on a scaleable strategy that will at least deliver universal Green OA (at long last)?

(12) To repeat: It is not that the extra usage rights are not useful, desirable and welcome, nor that a large private research funder like Wellcome is not to be commended for being willing to put both their efforts and their money behind securing them.

(13) It is that this is not the time to focus on what universal Green OA mandates will not deliver.

(14) It is the time to put our full collective weight behind the solution that will scale up to deliver universal Green OA.

(15) (It is virtually certain that universal Green OA itself will then go on to usher in the extra usage rights -- at no extra charge.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

SUMMARY: (a) On the current BBB definitions, Green OA ("price-freedom") is not OA, hence Green OA mandates are not OA mandates. This is self-contradictory, and the definition needs to be updated.
      (b) I am of course in no way opposed to getting more than OA ("price&permission-freedom") ("p&p"): I am opposed to getting less than OA because of (prematurely) insisting on more than OA: to delaying or diminishing the good for the better.
      (c) I believe that consensus on adopting and applying Green OA self-archiving mandates (true and effective mandates, with no opt-out option) is within immediate reach globally and has already demonstrated (locally) that it will generate full Green OA.
      (d) I also believe that universal Green OA will in turn generate p&p OA as a natural matter of course.
      (e) I also believe that reaching consensus on adopting and complying with p&p OA mandates from the outset is highly unlikely, and that holding out for that, instead of immediately agreeing on mandating Green OA, will only delay reaching universal OA. This would amount to getting less than OA because of (prematurely) insisting on more than OA.
      (f) The same is true about (incoherently) arguing (on the basis of BBB) that Green OA is not really OA, hence Green OA mandates are not really OA mandates.
      (g) Peter Suber has understood, fully, that our tactical differences are only about priorities: about means, not ends. (Not everyone else has understood this.)
      (i) There is an interim pragmatic trade-off among embargoes, opt-out options and the payment of extra publisher fees that is adequately resolved for the immediate primary needs of research and researchers by the immediate deposit mandate plus the "email eprint request" Button, which provide interim "almost-OA" during any embargo. Universal ID/OA mandates will hasten the inevitable natural death of access embargoes and usage restrictions.

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Klaus Graf wrote:

"How many people must die because an OA guru says 'There is a need to update BBB' and denies the need of re-use?"

Umm, a bit shrill! But here's my (6-step) answer:

(1) We have neither price-freedom nor permission-freedom today. (So if people are dying because of that, they're dying.)

(2) I am as sure as I am of anything (short of Cartesian certainty) that universal price-freedom (Green OA) not only fulfills most of the immediate needs of researchers, but that it is also the fastest and surest way of eventually achieving permission-freedom too (let's call that "Gold OA," for simplicity -- it's not, but it'll do).

(3) Now price-freedom can be achieved by self-archiving, and self-archiving can be (and is being) mandated.

(4) Insisting now on wrapping permission-freedom (copyright-retention) into the mandate makes it much more difficult and less likely that consensus will be reached on adopting a mandate at all -- and if adopted, this stronger p&p mandate seems to require an opt-out option as a compromise (as in Harvard's p&p mandate), which means it is no longer a mandate at all, hence compliance is no longer assured. (This can be fixed by restricting the opt-out option to the permission clause, and adding an immediate deposit clause with no opt-out.)

(5) But (as Peter Suber has very fully understood) I have no reservations at all about stronger mandates (Green price-freedom plus Gold permission-freedom mandates) if they can be successfully agreed upon, adopted, implemented and fulfilled. More is always better than less if it can indeed be had; more is only an obstacle if it stands in the way of the less that is already within reach.

(6) Harvard's p&p copyright-retention mandate, with an opt-out, is not a mandate. If it nevertheless proves, in 3 years, to deliver nearly 100% p&p OA, then it will be a success (and I will have been proved wrong). If not, then yet another 3 years will have been lost by needlessly over-reaching -- because we already have evidence that weaker Green deposit (price-freedom) mandates, without opt-out, deliver nearly 100% (Green) OA within 3 years. (And if Harvard's p&p mandate with opt-out is widely imitated in the meanwhile, instead of just a price-freedom mandate without opt-out, without even knowing whether p&p with opt-out is destined to succeed or fail, then a lot more years of OA will be needlessly lost.)

So "How many people must die"? Klaus thinks it will be fewer if we reach further, trying for both price-freedom and permission-freedom in the same swoop (at the risk of getting neither). I think it will be fewer if we first grasp what is already within our reach, because that is not only sure to give us most of what we want and need immediately (price-freedom), but it is also the most likely way to get us the rest (permission-freedom) thereafter too.

(By the way, if we don't update BBB, then Green OA is not OA, and Green OA mandates are not providing what they say and think they are providing, but something else. Nor have I been talking about OA for a decade and a half now, but about something else. "If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever wooed...")

"Kripke (1980) gives a good example of how "gold" might be baptized on the shiny yellow metal in question, used for trade, decoration and discourse, and then we might discover "fool's gold," which would make all the sensory features we had used until then inadequate, forcing us to find new ones. [Kripke] points out that it is even possible in principle for "gold" to have been inadvertently baptized on "fool's gold"! Of interest here are not the ontological aspects of this possibility, but the epistemic ones: We could bootstrap successfully to real gold even if every prior case had been fool's gold. "Gold" would still be the right word for what we had been trying to pick out all along, and its original provisional features would still have provided a close enough approximation to ground it, even if later information were to pull the ground out from under it, so to speak." [Harnad 1990]

Amen.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Scotland's first University-Wide Green OA self-archiving mandate has been adopted by University of Stirling:

      [A]ll journal articles, published from January 2007, are to be self-archived in the University’s Digital Research Repository, Stirling Online Research Repository (STORRE).
     Articles are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.
     The author's final accepted draft should be submitted.

This is actually Scotland's second Green OA self-archiving mandate: The first was a funder mandate: Scottish Executive Health Department.

This is also the 17th UK Green OA mandate (13 funder mandates, 2 institutional mandates, 2 departmental mandates: Southampton ECS (2 Jan 2003), Brunel ICSM (6 Dec 2006), U Southampton (squeeking in 4 Apr 2008), and now U Stirling) (9 April 2008).

There are now 41 mandates in all, worldwide.

(The UK continues to lead the world in both funder and institutional mandates, but watch out for the waking giant! The 791 universities in 46 countries in the European University Association (EUA), whose Council has unanimously recommended that its individual universities mandate Green OA self-archiving.)