Institutional Repositories

Most authors will not deposit until and unless their universities and/or their funders make deposit mandatory. But if and when deposit is made mandatory, over 80% will deposit, and deposit willingly. (A further 15% will deposit reluctantly, and 5% will not comply with the mandate at all.) In contrast, the spontaneous (unmandated) deposit rate is and remains at about 15%, for years now (and adding incentives and assistance but no mandate only raises this deposit rate to about 30%).

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

Swan A, Needham P, Probets P, Muir A, O 'Brien A, Oppenheim C, Hardy R and Rowland F (2004). Delivery, management and access model for E-prints and open access journals within further and higher education Report of JISC study. pp 1-121.

---

On 30-Nov-08, at 9:08 AM, Neil Jacobs (JISC) replied in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

"Thanks Stevan,

You're right, of course, the report does not cover policies. The brief for the work was to look for practical ways that subject/funder and institutional repositories can work together within the constraints of the current policies of their host organisations. There are discussions to be had at the policy level, but we felt that there were also practical things to be done now, without waiting for that."

Hi Neil,

I was referring to the JISC report's recommendations, which mention a number of things, but not how to get the repositories filled (despite noting the problem that they are empty).

It seems to me that the practical problems of what to do with -- and how to work together with -- empty repositories are trumped by the practical problem of how to get the repositories filled.

Moreover, the solution to the practical problem of how the repositories (both institutional and subject/funder) can work together is by no means independent of the practical problem of how to get them filled -- including the all-important question of the locus of direct deposit:

The crucial question (for both policy and practice) is whether direct deposit is to be divergent and competitive (as it is now, being sometimes institutional and sometimes central) or convergent and synergistic (as it can and ought to be), by systematically mandating convergent institutional deposit, mutually reinforced by both institutional and funder mandates, followed by central harvesting -- rather than divergent, competing mandates requiring deposits willy-nilly, resulting in confusion, understandable resistance to divergent or double deposit, and, most important, the failure to capitalize on funder mandates so as to reinforce institutional mandates.

Institutions, after all, are the producers of all refereed research output, in all subjects, and whether funded or unfunded. Get all those institutions to provide OA to all their own refereed research output, and you have 100% OA (and all the central harvests from it that you like).

As it stands, however, funder and institutional mandates are pulling researchers needlessly in divergent directions. And (many) funder mandates in particular, instead of adding their full weight behind the drive to get all refereed research to be made OA, are thinking, parochially, only of their own funded fiefdom, by arbitrarily insisting on direct deposit in central repositories that could easily harvest instead from the institutional repositories, if convergent institutional deposit were mandated by all -- with the bonus that all research, and all institutions, would be targeted by all mandates.

It is not too late to fix this. It is still early days. There is no need to take the status quo for granted, especially given that most repositories are still empty.

I hope the reply will not be the usual (1) "What about researchers whose institutions still don't have IRs?": Let those author's deposit provisionally in DEPOT for now, from which they can be automatically exported to their IRs as soon as they are created, using the SWORD protocol. With all mandates converging systematically on IRs, you can be sure that this will greatly facilitate and accelerate both IR creation and IR deposit mandate adoption. But with just unfocussed attempts to accommodate to the recent, random, and unreflecting status quo, all that is guaranteed is to perpetuate it.

Nor is the right reply (2) "Since all repositories, institutional and subject/funder, are OAI-interoperable, it doesn't matter where authors deposit!" Yes, they are interoperable, and yes, it would not matter where authors deposited -- if they were indeed all depositing in one or the other. But most authors are not depositing, and that is the point. Moreover, most institutions are not mandating deposit at all yet and that is the other point. Funder mandates can help induce institutions -- the universal research providers -- to create IRs and to adopt institutional deposit mandates if the funder mandates are convergent on IR deposit. But funder mandates have the opposite effect if they instead insist on central deposit. So the fact that both types of repository are interoperable is beside the point.

Une puce à l'oreille (not to be confused with a gadfly),

Stevan

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

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

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

---

IS: "Is [it] strictly true [that 'Institutions, after all, are the producers of all refereed research output, in all subjects, and whether funded or unfunded.']? My understanding was that, particularly on the social sciences arena, a number of academics continue to write & publish, even though they have retired. No? (another example of research output that requires the like of the Depot for an OA deposit service...)"

CO: "Ian is correct, especdially in the humanities. Also, there is a large amount of STM scholarly output that comes from industry, especially the pharmaceutical industry."

Yes, both "problems" are trivially easily solved, and neither is an exception to the fact that both institutional and funder deposit mandates need to be systematically convergent -- on institutional repository (IR) deposit -- rather than arbitrarily divergent (on willy-nilly institutional and funder/subject repository deposit):

(1) The drivers of universal OA are institutional and funder mandates. So, by definition, a retired author, institutionally unaffiliated and unfunded, cannot be mandated to deposit! But if they are minded to deposit (as they certainly will be, as OA becomes universal thanks to OA mandates), they can deposit in back-up repositories like the UK's DEPOT. (So, yes, DEPOT and similar back-up repositories elsewhere are an excellent resource for tiding over authors who do not have institutions, or whose institutions do not yet have IRs.)

(2) Or retired academics can deposit in the IR of their former institution: Universities not only have a long tradition of providing facilities for their retired academics, but they have a special interest, now, in showcasing their past and present research output. Whether officially "emeritus" or not, the research output of their own retired staff certainly falls within that ambit. (At UQAM, for example, retired faculty officially retain the right to deposit their publications in UQAM's IR.)

(3) Universities also have a tradition of providing facilities, where possible, for unaffiliated academics. So, given that all IRs are interoperable, and given that we are talking about published, peer-reviewed research articles, a university tradition will quite naturally evolve for IRs to host the publications of unaffiliated scholars and scientists in need of a repository to make their published work OA.

(4) The pharmaceutical industry may well be secretive about its unpublished research, but it has exactly the same interest as all other research institutions in providing access to its own published research (that's why they publish it!) -- and in gaining access to the published research of other institutions. Hence it is likely that the R&D wing of pharmaceutical companies (and other industrial research producers) will have IRs and IR mandates of their own, as the movement toward universal OA grows. (And where not, other institutional hosts or DEPOT will provide the natural solution.)

Again, I have to remind us all that the glaring and pressing immediate problem today is gapingly empty IRs where they are fully available to all their institutional authors, who are simply not depositing of their own accord ("Zeno's Paralysis"). The problem is not a press of authors desperate to deposit, but having no place to do so!

And the solution is institutional and funder deposit mandates, converging on the IRs of the universal providers of all research, in all subjects, funded and unfunded: the institutions (mostly universities, partly independent research institutions, partly the R&D of commercial institutions).

We should not now be fretting about borderline cases and putative exceptions whilst we still have not yet taken the obvious and long overdue steps needed to take care of the mainstay.

CS: "A short while ago I mentioned on this list that Elsevier are producing PDFs of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript and publishing them online as part of their 'Articles in Press' system (see attached example). The 'Accepted Manuscript' will stay online until the 'Uncorrected Proof' replaces it.

"Everyone knows that Elsevier's [author self-archiving] policy (like [that of] most other publishers) allows the use of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in repositories, but I wondered whether they would be happy about us making us of the 'Accepted Manuscript' version they are producing and publishing online.

"The answer (officially – from Daviess Menefee, Director of Library Relations at Elsevier) is 'yes'.

"This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) a window of opportunity to always get hold of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript for Elsevier items (assuming your institution subscribes to the journal in question). The 'window of
opportunity' is that time between which the 'Accepted Manuscript' appears online and is replaced by the 'Uncorrected Proof'."

KH: "As much as Elsevier appreciates praise for its policies, we also want to prevent misunderstanding.

"We are grateful that Colin Smith, Research Repository Manager of the Open University, approached us with a question on our author posting policy. Mr. Smith had noticed that for some journals an early "accepted manuscript" version of an author's paper was available on ScienceDirect and he wanted to know if authors could download it and deposit it to their institutional repositories. As our longstanding policy permits authors to voluntarily post their own author manuscripts to their personal website or institutional repository, we responded that we would not object to an author downloading this version.

"However, our broader policy prohibits systematic downloading or posting. Therefore, it is not permitted for IR managers or any other third party to download articles or any other version such as articles-in-press or accepted manuscripts from ScienceDirect and post them. To the extent that Colin Smith's message could be read as encouraging IR managers to download, it is a misinterpretation of our position."

SH: Karen Hunter's response is very fair, and Elsevier's policy on author self-archiving is both very fair and very progressive -- indeed a model for all Publishers that wish to adopt a Green OA policy.

I know there will be extremists who will jump on me for having said this, and I am sure nothing I say will be able to make them realize how unreasonable they are being -- and how their extremism works against OA.

Green OA self-archiving provides the opportunity for achieving universal OA precisely because it is author self-archiving. Thus is it is perfectly reasonable for Green publishers to endorse only self-archiving, not 3rd-party archiving; to endorse self-archiving in the author's own institutional repository, but not in a 3rd-party repository; and to endorse depositing the author's own final draft, not the publisher's draft.

The fact that we do not yet have universal Green OA is not publishers' fault, and certainly not Green publishers' fault. The only thing standing between us and universal Green OA is keystrokes -- authors' keystrokes. And the way to persuade authors to perform those keystrokes -- for their own benefit, as well as for the benefit of the institutions that pay their salaries, the agencies that fund their research, and the tax-paying public that funds their institutions and their funders -- is for their institutions and funders to mandate that those keystrokes are performed.

It would not only be unjust, but it would border on the grotesque, if the punishment for publishers who had been progressive enough to give their official green light to their authors to perform those keystrokes -- yet their authors couldn't be bothered to perform the keystrokes, and their institutions and funders could not be bothered to mandate the keystrokes -- were that their green light was construed as permission to automatically harvest from the publisher's website the drafts that their own authors could not be bothered or persuaded to deposit in their own institutional repository.

No. Open Access is a benefit that the research community needs to provide for itself. The only reasonable thing to ask of publishers is that they should not try to prevent the keystrokes from being performed. It would be both unreasonable and unfair to demand that publishers also perform the keystrokes on the authors' behalf, through automated downloads, for that would be tantamount to demanding that they become Gold OA publishers, rather than just endorsing Green OA.

What is needed is more keystroke mandates from institutions and funders, not more pressure on Green publishers who have already done for Green OA all that can be reasonable asked of them.

MBE: "...I will proudly claim the mantle of an OA extremist if it means calling [them] on Elsevier's policy. I am very happy to see Karen Hunter's message, because it confirms what I and many others have been saying for years - that Elsevier only supports Green OA publishing because they know it will be adopted by a small fraction of their authors."

SH: (1) There is no Green OA publishing, there is only Green OA self-archiving (by the author).

(2) A publisher that is Green on OA self-archiving (by the author) is removing the single biggest obstacle to Green OA (hence to OA), as well as to Green OA Mandates by authors' institutions and funders: The author's concern that to self-archive would be to violate copyright and/or to risk not being published by his journal of choice.

(3) No one is asking non-OA publishers to support OA -- just not to oppose it.

(4) What will ensure that not only a small fraction of authors but all authors provide Green OA is Green OA mandates.

(5) Green OA mandates are facilitated by publishers with Green policies on OA self-archiving.

(6) None of this requires that publishers agree to allow 3rd parties to download their proprietary files automatically.

MBE: "What more evidence do you need that Elsevier is not actually committed to OA than this explicit statement that they prohibit the clearest and easiest path towards achieving Green OA to their published articles?"

SH: The clearest and easiest path to achieving Green OA to all published articles is for their authors to deposit them in their institutional repositories and for their institutions and funders to mandate that they deposit them in their institutional repositories. It is not Elsevier that is holding up that process. It is authors, in failing to self-archive of their own accord, and their institutions and funders, in failing to mandate that they self-archive.

The only relevant evidence from Elsevier here is that Elsevier has removed the obstacles to immediate author self-archiving, as well as to institutional and funder immediate self-archiving mandates. There is nothing more that needs to be asked of Elsevier on this score, nor anything more that Elsevier need do.

(I make no mention here about something else on which Elsevier can indeed be faulted, namely, that they are an active part of the publisher lobbying against Green OA mandates! But I think that on balance their Green policy and example on immediate OA self-archiving is far more of a help to progress on Green OA and Green OA mandates than the publisher lobbying against Green OA mandates is a hindrance; indeed the lobbying is failing, globally, and especially failing against individual institutional mandates, which are far less vulnerable to industry lobbying than governmental funding agencies, although those too are successfully resisting the industry lobbying.)

MBE: "Why should Elsevier care whether authors download the articles themselves or if someone else does it for them other than the expectation that in the former case, the practical obstacles will prevent most authors from doing so."

SH: Because construing a Green Light for authors to self-archive as a Green Light for 3rd-party "self"-archiving, and 3rd-party archives would be a carte blanche to 3rd-party rival publishers to free-ride on Elsevier content.

(Again, the distinction is completely mooted, in practical terms, by the nature of the Web and of Open Access: Once content is free for all in one place, it is free for all in any place, and there is scarcely any scope for "free-riding" on free content. But these are alas still early days, and while authors and their institutions and funders are still dragging their feet on self-archiving and self-archiving mandates, there is plenty of scope for free-riders to have a little field day with an Elsevier policy that allows anyone to download and re-use their proprietary files today.)

MBE: "Unless and until Elsevier radically restructures its business model for scientific publishing, they will only permit Green OA so long as it is largely unsuccessful - the moment it becomes possible to get most Elsevier articles in IRs they will have to end this practice, as their current policy against IR downloads makes abundantly clear."

SH: On this point, Mike, I am afraid we will have to continue to disagree, profoundly. You are an advocate of a direct transition to Gold OA publishing; I am not, because I see so clearly that universal Green OA is within reach, awaiting only universal Green OA mandates by authors' institutions and funders. Those universal Green OA mandates by authors' institutions and funders (which Elsevier's Green policy greatly facilitates) -- along with time itself -- make it increasingly difficult for publishers even to contemplate back-tracking on their Green policies.

So I think you are simply wrong about this back-tracking bugaboo, which is about as valid as the publisher lobby's repeated bugaboo that OA will destroy peer review.

You continue to be impatient for Gold OA, whereas my overtaxed patience is just for OA itself -- which, unlike Gold OA, is already within sight and reach. All it takes is universal Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. Elsevier's Green policy is such a great help in that (even though even that help is not essential) that I think it far outweighs their lobbying against Green OA mandates. And it certainly outweighs their unwillingness to allow 3rd-party downloading of their proprietary files.

CS: "Karen, I very much appreciate you pointing out that my posting could have been interpreted as a rallying call to IR Managers and Administrators to systematically download Elsevier items on behalf of authors. This is not what I meant - my apologies.

"Where I originally said:

'This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) a window of opportunity to always get hold of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript for Elsevier items (assuming your institution subscribes to the journal in question).'

"I should have said:

'This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) the opportunity to inform our academics that there may well be an online version of their accepted manuscript that they can retrieve, should they have failed to retain it themselves.'

"I have to say that, while I am not averse to occasional third-party depositing, on the whole I believe Green OA can only be sustainable if the academics themselves are choosing to do it. If IR Managers and Administrators are busying around in the background, mass-uploading items without the knowledge of authors, yes your repository may grow substantially in size and it may look to the outside world that Green OA is taking off, but have you actually embedded OA into the culture of your institution? I suspect not. We have to encourage self-archiving because only by doing it themselves, engaging with their IR on a regular basis, will our academics become aware of how much there is to gain for what is actually very little pain [link added by SH].

"On that note, just to reiterate (and again I thank Karen for pulling me up on this), I am certainly not advocating that we in any way trawl Science Direct for accepted manuscripts. That would, in my opinion, be a non-sustainable approach and detrimental to the coexistence of IRs and academic publishing."

---

     -- Leslie Carr

So henceforth "I've already done the keystrokes once" is no longer an excuse for not depositing all your research article output in your Institutional Repository (nor an impediment to adopting an institutional Green OA mandate!

Try the demonstrator of Eprints (the first -- and, in my opinion, the best -- of the free IR softwares!).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Looking for Evidence of Researcher Engagement with Repositories

"a collection of success stories - anecdotes of how repositories have been able to improve the lot of researchers - for appealing to institutional repository nay-sayers and open access agnostics"

Reasons researchers really rate repositories

---

Reasons researchers really rate repositories

by Alma Swan

As the SPARC repositories conference approaches in Baltimore, repositories are the topic of conversation all over the place. Les Carr will be running an eve-of-meeting session where people can contribute and share evidence or anecdotes about how repositories are benefiting researchers. I've had a few whispers in my ear that people are still saying researchers don't rate repositories. Perhaps they don't, where they don't fully understand the picture, or where they've not (yet) personally seen the benefits of using one. But they certainly rate them when they do see those benefits. And that shows we must get the right messages to researchers - and, critically, in the right way.

One conduit is an articulate peer. John Willinsky's lovely tale of how he persuaded his fellow faculty members at Stanford to vote unanimously to mandate themselves to provide OA, greenly, through the repository is illustrative of the power of the peer. It needs a champion who has the arguments marshalled, is respected in his/her peer community, and the right moment. John used a Faculty of Education 'Retreat' at Monterey to stand up and speak to his peers. He managed to persuade them of the arguments so effectively that they had time to take a walk on the beach afterwards. That can happen elsewhere, too, though not everyone will have a beach to hand, obviously. But OA advocates who wish to rise to the 'champion' challenge can identify events or mechanisms in their own institution that can be used effectively to persuade their peers of the issues. Afterwards they can go to the park or the pub: bonding is location-independent.

The testimony of peers to the effect that using a repository to provide OA has really shown a benefit is also powerful. I've long used a quotation from a US philosopher, offered in a free-response box in one of our author surveys, to make a point to researcher audiences. It goes: "Self-archiving in the PhilSci Archive has given instant world-wide visibility to my work. As a result, I was invited to submit papers to refereed international conferences/journals and got them accepted". Not much to argue with there. One big career boost, pronto.

Let's look at another such. Last month at the Open Access & Research conference in Brisbane, Paula Callan presented some data from her own QUT repository in a workshop on 'Making OA Happen' (all the ppts are up on the conference website). The data pertain to a chemist, Ray Frost, who has personally (yes, please note, all those who say that researchers cannot be asked to deposit their own articles) deposited around 300 of his papers published over the last few years. Now, this man is prolific in his publishing activity and it is the fact that he has provided such a great baseline that means we can really trust the data here. An increase of 100% on nought is still nought, and an increase of 100% on two is only two. What we've always needed is a sizeable base to start with, so that we can legitimately say that a certain percentage increase (or whatever) has occurred.

Ray Frost has provided us with one. Look at the charts at the top of this post. What the data show is this: on the left are the papers Frost has published each year since 1992 (the data are from Web of Science). These have been downloaded 165,000 (yes) times from the QUT repository. On the right are the citations he has gathered over that time period.

From 2000 to 2003, citations were approximately flat-lining at about 300 per year, on 35-40 papers per year. When Ray started putting his articles into the QUT repository, the numbers of citations started to take off. The latest count is 1200 in one year. Even though Ray’s publication rate went up a bit over this period – to 55-60 papers per year – the increase in citations is impressive. And unless Ray’s work suddenly became super-important in 2004, the extra impact is a direct result of Open Access.

Now, there’s another little piece of information to add to this tale: the QUT library staff routinely add DOIs to each article deposited in the repository. Would-be users who can access the published version will generally do so using those. The 165,000 downloads are from users who do not have access to Ray’s articles through their own institution’s subscriptions – the whole purpose of Open Access. That’s an awful lot of EXTRA readership and a lot of new citations coming in on the back of it.

The final example of a reason for rating repositories comes from Ann Marie Clark, the Library Director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. ‘The Hutch’ has a repository built on the EPrints software and is starting to capture the output of the Center as the Library develops an advocacy programme. No doubt individual researchers at the Hutch will in future enjoy the same sort of increase in impact as Ray Frost in Brisbane. Already, though, one other reason for depositing has come to the fore in Seattle. Ann Marie reports that the National Institutes of Health, the major funder for work done by scientists at The Hutch, nowadays require that most grant applications come in electronic form only. Along with this new electronic submission system came new policies. "One in particular," Ann Marie says, "affects how our researchers think about OA and their own papers. This new rule limits them, when citing papers that support their grant proposal, from attaching more than three published PDFs. Any papers cited, beyond that limit, may only offer URLs for freely-accessible versions. As a result, convincing faculty members to work with our librarians to deposit their papers into our repository has not been difficult at all. The icing on the cake for our faculty is that our repository also offers a stable and contextual home to their, historically orphaned, supplemental data files."

So there we have it. Or them, rather. Reasons researchers really rate repositories: vast visibility, increased impact, worry-reduced workflow.

Alma Swan
Optimal Scholarship