Open Access Archivangelism

SUMMARY: Imre Simon asks:
Why are Institutional Repositories (IRs) near empty unless mandated, whereas Central Repositories (CRs) like ArXiv and  CiteSeerX appear to be full without a mandate? 
    Here is the answer:
    (1) Authors deposit papers directly in Arxiv, whereas CiteseerX (like Google Scholar) is harvested from authors' websites.
    (2) The crucial factor is central vs. institutional locus-of-deposit. Search is always at the CR level.
    (3) These CRs (Arxiv for physics, Citeseerx for computer science) are fuller than IRs because: (3a) An entire discipline is bigger than an institution. (3b) The global unmandated deposit rate is about 15% of OA's total target: all annual journal articles, across all disciplines and institutions. (3c) But deposit rate is the ratio of deposits to total output, which is much bigger for an entire discipline than a single institution. Physics and Computer Science have been depositing, one centrally, one institutionally, unmandated, for years, but OA's problem is all the disciplines that are not.
    (4) Locus-of-deposit and mandates are closely related issues.
    (5) Deposit mandates can be either funder or institutional mandates.
    (6) Funder mandates only cover funded research, and not all research is funded. 
    (7) But all research output is institutional.
    (8) So if all institutions mandated OA, that would generate universal OA.
    (9) So what is most needed is universal institutional OA mandates.
    (10) Funder mandates would help far more if they could facilitate the deposit not only of the research they fund, but all research.
    (11) To do this, funder mandates need only change one small detail. This would lose none of their funded content, but could help gain the rest of the output of each of its fundees' institutions.
    (12) Funders need to stipulate the fundee's own IR as the preferred locus-of-deposit for complying with the funder's deposit mandate.
    (13) The fundees' deposits can be harvested to CRs from IRs.
    (14) The issue of search and functionality at the harvester level is a red herring. 
    (15) The special features of the few disciplines that began spontaneously self-archiving long ago, unmandated, have nothing to do with the IR vs CR deposit-locus issue; hence unmandated CRs do not offer a viable alternative to universal IR mandates.

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Imre Simon wrote (in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

"It is an unquestionable reality that unmandated IR's [Institutional Repositories] remain all but empty.

"[In contrast] ArXiv, CiteSeerX, Repec and SSRN are the four examples of large thematic repositories [Central Repositories, CRs] I know of which are populated without a mandate.

"One wonders why?"

The answer is highly instructive. Let me try to map it out as 15 simple points, one following from the other:

(1) There is a profound difference between (1a) Arxiv (and perhaps also SSRN), which are Central Repositories [CRs] in which authors deposit papers directly, and (1b) CiteseerX (and partly also Repec), which are harvested CRs, their papers and metadata being harvested from local repositories, usually at the author's host institution, where they have been directly deposited. Harvested CRs are like OAIster -- or, for that matter, Google Scholar!

(2) The difference is crucial, because central vs. institutional locus-of-deposit is what is really under discussion here; no one is disputing that navigation and search are done, and should be done, at the central level, irrespective of whether CR deposit is direct or CR contents are harvested.

(3) There are several reasons why these particular CRs (Arxiv, Repec, SSRN, and the biggest of all, Citeseerx) are fuller than IRs:

    (3a) An entire discipline is bigger than a single (multidisciplinary but local) institution

    (3b) These CRs contain only the deposits of those individual authors and disciplines that do deposit spontaneously, unmandated; these amount to about 15% of OA's total target output, and that is well known. The problem is the remaining 85% -- which will be pretty homogeneously represented in each individual multidisciplinary institution's IR (each one 85%-empty if unmandated).

    (3c) But there is a systematic denominator bias here, for the success of an IR in capturing its institutional research output needs to be reckoned as the ratio of its annual deposited papers to the total annual paper output for that institution, whereas for the success of a CR must be reckoned as the ratio of its annual deposited papers to the total annual output for the discipline or disciplines the CR covers (worldwide)! For certain disciplines and subdisciplines -- such as High Energy Physics, Astrophysics, Economics and Computer Science -- this ratio will be quite high. But those are not OA's problem disciplines, because they are depositing already, whether centrally or locally, unmandated, and have been doing so for years. OA's problem is all the disciplines that are not doing so, for those are the main basis of the 85% emptiness of IRs.

(4) The reason all this matters -- and the reason it is so important not to conflate direct-deposit CRs with harvested CRs, nor to conflate deposit locus with search locus -- is that the locus-of-deposit issue is very deeply interrelated with the issue of mandates.

(5) Deposit mandates can be funder mandates or institutional mandates.

(6) Funder mandates only cover funded research, and not all (perhaps not even most) research output is funded; moreover, this would be true even if all funders already mandated OA.

(7) In contrast, (virtually) all research output (and hence all of OA's target content) is institutional. Institutions are the universal research providers.

(8) So if all institutions mandated OA, that would generate universal OA.

(9) Hence if all of OA's target content is institutional output, it follows that, inasmuch as the 85% of research that is not being deposited spontaneously will be deposited once it is mandated, what is most needed is universal institutional OA mandates.

(10) Funder mandates already help, for their subset of OA's total target content, but they would help far more if they could facilitate the deposit not only of the research they fund, but all research: in other words, if funder mandates could help induce institutions, too, to mandate OA, for all of their own research output, not just the subset mandated by the funder.

(11) In order to be able to do this, funder mandates need only standardize one implementational detail, one that does not lose any of their own target content, but has the potential to extend the reach of the funder mandate to touch the rest of the research output of each one of its fundees' institutions.

(12) Funders need to stipulate the fundee's own IR as the preferred locus-of-deposit for complying with the funder's deposit mandate (with an interim backup repository like DEPOT -- which was created to host deposits until the depositor's institution sets up an IR of its own, to which the DEPOT deposits can then be automatically exported: currently, DEPOT has had only 66 deposits in its nearly 2 years of existence, and that is because most UK funders are either requiring CR deposit or leaving it open which repository their choose fundees deposit in).

(13) The contents can be harvested to CRs from IRs.

(14) The issue of search and functionality at the harvester level is a red herring. (Citeseerx is a perfect example of the functionality of a CR that harvests from distributed IRs.)

(15) Nor do the special features of the few disciplines -- such as computer science, the first, and physics and economics, which took spontaneously to self-archiving long ago, without waiting for a mandate -- have anything to do with either (a) the IR/CR issue, or (b) viable alternatives to mandates, because no one has so far demonstrated any alternatives (apart from waiting and waiting) that can generate the 85% of content missing from IRs, and from OA as a whole.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: There just might be some hope that UK's Research Funding Councils -- all seven of which now mandate Green OA self-archiving, as recommended by the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology in 2004 -- could go on and take the initiative to stipulate that each fundee's Institutional Repository (IR) is to be the default locus-of-deposit (with DEPOT as the interim back-up). If adopted by the UK Funding Councils, this small change in implementational detail has a good chance of motivating all UK universities and research institutions to adopt Green OA self-archiving mandates too, for the rest of their research output. This UK model will then undoubtedly propagate globally, to bring the planet universal OA at long last!

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Gerry Lawson [GL] (NERC Research Information Systems, RCUK Secretariat) wrote (in JISC-REPOSITORIES):

GL: Stevan, a very useful series of postings - thanks. UK Research Councils have a variety of OA mandates - including two which mandate deposition in CRs (MRC- UK PubMed and ESRC - Society Today).  WIth the exception of EPSRC (and this may well change) the others do mandate deposition, but are unspecific about where.  NERC, for example, says:

"From 1 October 2006 NERC requires that, for new funding awards, an electronic copy of any published peer-reviewed paper, supported in whole or in part by NERC-funding, is deposited at the earliest opportunity in an e-print repository.  NERC also encourages award-holders to deposit published peer-reviewed papers arising from awards made before October 2006. "

BUT its very difficult to check compliance to these mandates!  Councils have reduced their final reporting requirements on the expectation that it will be possible to collect outputs information (not just publications) electronically from grantholders.  RCUK is assessing options for doing this - either pushing/pulling from Institutional Repostories or from HEI CRIS systems, or both.  Whatever is decided its certain that that we'd be assisted by inclusion in IRs of metadata fields for a) "Funder" (perhaps using a dropdown list of funders URIs); and b) "GrantReference".  

Gerry, you are absolutely right. IRs need to have a metadata field that specifies the funder, for a variety of reasons, including verification of grant fulfillment conditions.

(As you note below, the EPrints IR software has already implemented this metadata tag.)

This is also yet another strong reason why funders should not require direct deposit in a CR, nor even simply require open-ended deposit in any repository at all (as NERC does), but should instead specify the author's own institutional IR as the designated locus of deposit (and DEPOT for those fundees whose institution has not yet set up its own IR).

Universities are already eager to do everything they can to help in ensuring compliance with funders' grant conditions. They can accordingly be invaluable aids to each funding council in verifying compliance with its deposit mandate. See: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates".

GL: The disadvantage of using IRs rather than Central Repositories is the absence of minimum standards and formats in the former.  Both the above fields exist in CRs (e.g. UK PubMed and Society Today)

But the standards and formats can all be implemented in IRs. EPrints is continuously upgrading its functionality to keep pace with the emerging needs of Open Access (including Open Access mandates by funders and institutions). 

Don't forget that two free IR softwares -- EPrints and DSpace -- are used to create the majority of IRs. IR software standards can be made widespread or even universal (as OAI-PMH, for example, was made) in the distributed worldwide IR community with a resultant power, scope and functionality that can not only match but exceed what can be done with CRs -- and without any of the disadvantages of CRs that Professor Rentier, author of the U. Liège mandate, and I have both described.

GL: So, three questions re IRs

1. Funder and GrantRef fields exist in EPrints (as free text) from version 3.0  - do they exist in DSpace and Fedora - and in what form?

I don't know. But EPrints -- which is the first of the IR softwares and invariably the leader in keeping upgrades lock-step with the emerging needs of OA -- will contact DSpace and Fedora developers, as it has in the past (most notably with the all-important  "request a copy" Button) to urge them to implement the GrantRef field too. (Meanwhile, institutions should just adopt EPrints!)

GL: 2. Can a standard be introduced where they allow multiple funders - like multiple authors? (its unlikely we'd want to be as sophisticated as adding a %DueToGrant field!)

I can't see any reason why not. I am branching this to Les Carr, who will be able to reply. (Perhaps it has been implemented already.)

GL: 3. If Councils were to add to their mandates a sentence like:  'By [date] such records should be tagged with Funder and Grant Reference information, and made available for harvesting', what would be an appropriate [date].  I guess this is depends on the harvisting tool.  I'm told that standard OAI-PMH doesnt handle these fields and that SWAP is not widely used?  What is the best approach?

For the technical answer, I defer to Les Carr and the EPrints development team.

But for timing, the question is slightly more complicated: The Councils should specify that the deposit must take place immediately upon the date of acceptance for publication. This date will vary from paper to paper, of course, so it cannot be specified in advance, but it is the most natural, reliable and universal reference point for authors and funders to use to time their deposit. See: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

With IRs (as long as we ensure that they provide the requisite functionality), harvesting need not be restricted to only metadata OAI fields. Again, I defer to Les, but the EPrints and DSpace metadata fields should surely be uniformly detectable and automatically harvestable regardless of whether they are part of the OAI protocol. (Les?)

GL: Additionally, some Councils mandate deposition only 'where a suitable repository exists'.  Should we change this to something like 'where a suitable Institutional Repository does not exist it is expected that the JISC-supported repository of last resort, 'The DEPOT' , will be used.'?

Yes, definitely! That will at last breathe some life into DEPOT so that it can at last begin to be used for its intended purpose, which was precisely that!

I am ever so grateful for your reply, Gerry, because it shows not only that the Funding Councils are listening, but it confirms how important and fruitful convergent mandates can and will be. Much gratitude also to Professor Rentier, Rector of University of Liège, whose timely and perspicacious essay on the relation between IRs, CRs, and between institutional and funder deposit mandates has triggered all this constructive discussion and coordination.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: What France -- exactly like every other country -- needs is both funder and institutional Open Access (OA) mandates, requiring the self-archiving of all refereed research output immediately upon acceptance for publication, and all converging on single-locus deposit in the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR). (It is completely irrelevant to this whether or not the IR happens to be hosted by HAL, France's national Central Repository [CR], which is designed so as to be able in principle to give every university or institution in France its own "virtual IR" if the institution so wishes.) But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, then OA's slumbering giant -- the universities and institutions that are the providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, in all fields, virtually none of which yet mandate the deposit of their institutional research output in their IRs -- will just keep hibernating: Institutional (and departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, most researchers (85%) will not self-archive anywhere (in either an IR or a CR), and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow. Apart from the funder-mandated research -- and the few fields (such as computer science, economics and physics) where researchers have already been self-archiving spontaneously for years worldwide -- the CRs will of course be in exactly the same state as the IRs.

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Thierry Chanier wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

TC: The question of tools for central repositories (CRs) is central. It is preferable to avoid opposing CRs and IRs.

They are not opposed. Both are welcome and useful. What is under discussion is locus of deposit. (The deposited document itself, once deposited, may be exported, imported, harvested to/from as many repositories as desired. The crucial question is where it is actually deposited, and especially where deposit mandates from funders stipulate that it should be deposited.)

The issues for locus-of-deposit are:

(1) Single or multiple deposit? 

I think everyone would agree that at a time when most authors (85% ) are not yet depositing at all, this is not the time to talk about depositing the same paper more than once.

(2) If single deposit: where, institution-internally or institution-externally? 

The author's institutional repository (IR) might be his university's IR, or his research institute's IR, or the IR of some subset of his institution, such as his department's IR or his laboratory's IR. The point is that the locus of production of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines and worldwide -- is the author's institution. The author's institution also has a shared stake and interest with its authors in hosting and showcasing their joint research output.

All other links to the author's research are fragmented: Some of it will be funded by some funders, some by others, and some will be unfunded. Some will be in some discipline or subdiscipline, some in another, some in several. There is much scope for collecting it together in various combinations into such institution-external collections, but it makes no sense at all to deposit directly in some or all of them: One deposit is enough, and the rest can be harvested automatically. The natural and optimal locus for that one deposit is at the universal source: the author's own institution.

(3) Import/Export/Harvest from where to where?

The natural and optimal procedure is: deposit institution-internally and then, where desired, import/export/harvest institution-externally. This one-to-many procedure makes sense from every standpoint: Single convergent deposit, convergent mandates, maximal flexibility and efficiency, minimal effort and complication (hence maximal willingness and compliance from authors). The alternative, of many-to-one importation, or many-to-many import/export means multiple, divergent deposit, divergent mandates, reduced flexibility and efficiency, increased effort and complications (and hence reduced willingness and compliance from authors).

TC: In some countries, CRs may be prominent (particularly because local institutions have a low status, so IRs may not mean much to researchers ... when they exist), because centralized procedures for evaluating research may offer opportunity to researchers to start depositing - see below about France.

Institutional status-level is irrelevant, because research is not searched at the individual IR level but at the harvester (CR) level. We are discussing here what is the optimal locus of deposit, so as to capture (and mandate the capture of) all of OA's target content, worldwide, and as quickly and efficiently as possible. What matters for this is to find a procedure for systematically capturing all research output, and the natural and exhaustive locus for that is at the source: the institution (university, research institute, department, laboratory) that hosts the researcher, pays his salary, and provides his institutional affiliation.

There is of course research evaluation at the institution-internal as well as the institution-external (funder and national) level. But even for national research assessment exercises, such as the RAE in the UK, the institution and department are the "unit of assessment"; they are local, and distributed. And the natural locus for their research output is their own IRs. And that is exactly how it is that many UK universities provided their submissions to RAE 2008. See the IRRA .

TC: Researchers should be free to choose where they deposit but with requirements to deposit. They may do it in different repositories (I mean one document is only in one place, but depending on the nature of the document/data, one may choose various repositories)

I am afraid that it is here that we reach the gist of the matter (and the height of the misunderstanding and equivocation):

First, the only kind of deposit under discussion here is OA's primary target content: refereed journal articles. That is also the only deposit requirement (mandate) under discussion here, because although there are many other things an author might choose to deposit too -- books, software, multimedia, courseware, research data -- those are optional contents insofar as OA deposit mandates are concerned. And it is specifically the locus of deposit of the required contents (refereed journal articles) that matters so much, particularly in funder mandate policies.

It might sound optimal for a funder to simply require deposit in some OA repository or other, leaving it up to the author to choose which (and such a funder mandate is certainly preferable to a mandate that specifies deposit in a CR, or to no mandate at all). But this is in fact far from being the optimal mandate, for the reasons discussed by Prof. Rentier: 

Most researchers (85%) do not deposit unless they are required to. Funders can only mandate the deposit of the research that they fund. If they require that it must be deposited in a specific CR, they are in direct competition with institutional mandates (necessitating double or divergent deposit). If funder mandates simply leave it open where authors deposit, then they are not in competition with IR mandates, but they are not helping them either. As noted, institutions are the producers of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines, worldwide. Only 30 institutions mandate deposit so far, worldwide (out of tens of thousands). If a funder mandates deposit, but is open-ended about locus of deposit, it leaves institutions in their current state of inertia. But if funders specifically stipulate IR deposit, they thereby immediately increase the probability and the motivation for creating an IR as well as adopting an institutional deposit mandate for the rest of the research output of every one of the institutions that have a researcher funded by that funder.

TC: It is a tactical decision for OA supporters, knowing the local habits, to advertise ways of deposit to colleagues

But we already know that advertisement, encouragement, exhortation, evidence of benefits, assistance -- none of these is sufficient to get most researchers to deposit. Only requirements (mandates) work (and you seem to agree).

Now institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, because they are the universal providers of all of OA's target content. So to induce the "slumbering giant" to wake up and mandate OA for all of his research output, there has to be something in it for him (or rather them, because the "slumbering giant" is in fact a global network of universities and research institutions). What is in it for each of them? A collection of its own institutional research output that it can host, manage, audit, assess and showcase. What use is it to each of them if their research output is scattered globally willy-nilly, in diverse CRs? It increases the research impact of the institution's research output, to be sure, but how to measure, credit, showcase and benefit from that, institutionally, when it is scattered willy-nilly? 

Now, as noted, importation/exportation/harvesting can in principle work both ways. But if a university that might wish to host its own research assets has to go out and find and harvest them back from all over the web, because they were deposited institution-externally, instead of being deposited institutionally in the first place, the time and effort involved is considerably greater than simply mandating direct institutional deposit would have been -- and that back-harvest does not even yield all of the university's output: only whatever institutional research output happened to be funded by funders that also mandate OA! Yet if those funders had mandated IR deposit, all that work would already be done, and the university would have a strong incentive to adopt a mandate requiring the rest of its research output to be deposited too.

Meanwhile, for a mandating funder, harvesting the distributed IR content of all of its fundees into a CR is far easier; part of the fulfillment conditions for the grant need only specify that the author should send the funder the URL for the IR deposit of all articles resulting from the grant. The rest can be done automatically by software.

TC:  We have to make sure that people in charge of funding research (EU, National) do not oblige researchers to deposit in one specific place (their CR or any other).

On the contrary, there is every reason that funders should specify the fundee's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, for the reasons just adduced. Open-ended mandates are better than competing CR mandates, but they are not nearly as good as convergent, synergistic IR mandates (to help awaken the slumbering giant).

(As I was writing this posting, two new funder mandates have been announced -- FRSQ in Canada and NRC in Norway: Both are welcome, but both are open-ended about deposit locus, and consequently both miss the opportunity to have a far greater positive effect on global OA growth, by stipulating IR deposit.)
 

TC:  But I understand funders, because when they ask researchers to provide access to their work and advertise the fact that they have been paid by them, there is currently no practical way of doing so (labels put on deposit with the name of the program which gave the money, and harvesters able to compute this information)

Yes, precisely. Funding metadata can easily be added as a field in the IR deposit software -- and institutions will be only too happy to help in monitoring grant fulfillment conditions in this way, in exchange for the jump-start it provides for the filling of their own IRs.

TC: I also understand funders because I feel that they want to add interesting tools (search, computation, meta-engine), tools which could be developed by central harvesters (CH). We are late on this issue and harvesters have not made much progress (see below).

To repeat: Locus of direct deposit has nothing whatever to do with harvester-level search. Search is not done at the IR level but at the harvester (e.g., CR)  level.

TC: 1. HAL and research evaluation: 3 years ago I tried to convince my former lab to open a sub-archive within HAL (same repository, but URL specific to the lab, with proper interface). I also tried to convince my university to have a general meeting with directors of local labs in order to invite them to do the same and, at another level, to manage the sub-archive in HAL for the university (a solution somewhere in between CR and IR). My lab colleague  agreed, started the work but gave up because of lack of time. My university never replied to my proposal.

HAL is a nationwide resource that can in principle be used (much the way the Web itself is used) to allow an institution to create and manage its own "virtual IR". As such, HAL is partly a platform for creating virtual IRs, rather than a CR.

So, essentially, what you and your colleague tried to do (and only partly succeeded) was to create and manage an IR. That's splendid, and welcome, but we already know that IRs alone are not enough. Without a mandate, they idle at the usual 15% baseline.

(Please note that a lab repository is an IR.)

TC:  Now, thanks to procedures for evaluating research in France, labs will have to choose the way they want to be evaluated (I mean the technical procedure to achieve it). Some software used by the national board will do the computation out of HAL. Consequently, my lab decided this week to urgently re-open and manage its sub-archive in HAL. Of course, the first thing they have to do is deposit metadata. The actual deposit of the corresponding full-text is not mandatory. But they will take the opportunity to suggest to researchers to deposit as well their full papers.

It won't work; it's been tried many times before. So this is a great opportunity lost. As you see, the IR clearly languishes neglected without a mandate. With a mandate -- particularly one in which evaluation is based on what is deposited, as in Prof. Rentier's mandate at Liège -- researchers perk up and deposit. But if all they have to deposit is metadata, that's all they will deposit (even though adding the full-text is just one more keystroke).

The reason is that the effect of mandates is mostly not coercive. Researchers don't jump to deposit just because they are required to deposit. They actually want to deposit, but they are held back by two main constraints, one small, the other big: 

(1) The small constraint is ergonomic. Researchers are overloaded, and they will not do something extra unless it really has a high priority. A deposit mandate, especially one tied to funding and/or evaluation, gives the few minutes-worth of keystrokes per paper (which is all that a deposit amounts to) the requisite priority that they otherwise lack.

(2) The big constraint is psychological: Researchers are (groundlessly) afraid to deposit their papers (even the 63% for which the journal already gives them its explicit blessing to do so) -- afraid until and unless their institutions and/or their funders tell them they must, because then they know it is officially okay to do so! The mandate unburdens their souls, and unlocks their fingers.

TC:  Last thing: I do not mean that in France, only HAL should be used. We should make sure we have the choice to deposit where we please.

What France needs, like every other country, is funder and institutional mandates converging on single-locus IR deposit (irrespective of whether the IR is hosted by HAL). But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, the giant will keep hibernating, institutional (departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow.

TC:  2. Harversters : advantages and current limits:  Just a personal experience. Till recently I used to advertise my list of publications by giving the URL of an open archive, Edutice (a thematic one, VERY USEFUL in our domain, a sub-part of HAL but with its local procedures, interface, etc.). Now I give colleagues the OAISTER URL (with the path to follow) to get all my publications (because some of them are in other archives). The problem is: deposits in Edutice appear twice in the OAISTER list (as deposits of Edutice and of HAL - but there is one only deposit). It is a concrete example of progress which should be made to avoid repetitions in harvesters (among many other new features).

If they had all been deposited in your own IR you would have had an automatic listing of all your works (without duplications) through a simple google IR site-search "chanier site:http-IR-etc." -- and your institutions would have it all too. And so would OAIster. And you could have exported to Edutice with SWORD if you wished.

De-duplication and version-comparator software is already being developed (though it's hardly worth it yet, when the problem is not the presence of duplicates but the absence of even a singleton for 85% global refereed research output) -- and that's what mandates in general -- and convergent IR mandates in particular, to awaken the slumbering giant -- are needed for.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: The publisher lobby is trying to undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public that funded it. Tendentiously misnamed the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" the Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" publicly funded research in exactly the same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, sold for author royalty income.
    It is time for OA advocates and the general public (US and worldwide, because US OA policy has vast global implications) to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright. Please consult the Alliance for Taxpayer Access on how you can help and also express your support for mandating more OA rather than less, to President Obama.
    This is also a good time to shore up the NIH Mandate with a small change that will not only increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide, but  strengthen it against attempts like the Conyers Bill to undermine it: Specify that the research is to be deposited in the fundee's own Institutional Repository. (From there it can be automatically harvested to central repositories like PubMed Central.) The majority of journals already formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR). Immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities in the world: This small change would also spread the adoption of institutional mandates to NIH's fundees' institutions, extending OA to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded, thus ushering in universal OA at long last.

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The publisher anti-Open-Access lobby is trying to use a time when the economy is down and the head of NIH is out to slip through a Bill that would undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public that paid for it.

The Conyers Bill is now trying to overturn the Public Access Act on the basis of copyright double-talk that would be ludicrous if it were not so ominous:

The published reports of publicly funded research findings are given away by their researcher-authors free for all in order to maximize their usage and impact. The Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" their work in exactly the same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, produced and sold by their authors to maximize their royalty income: The tendentiously misnamed "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" would rescind NIH's requirement that the results of the research it funds with taxpayer money should be deposited, free for all, on the Web.

The Conyers Bill's copyright arguments -- almost transparently contrived and arbitrary -- have been decisively refuted point for point by Law Professor Michael Carroll and other experts, just as all the other far-fetched, self-serving arguments marshalled by the publisher anti-OA lobby have (despite the hiring of "pit-bull" Eric Dezenhall as public-relations consultant) been repeatedly rebutted each time they were unleashed.

It is time not only for OA advocates, but the general public -- both US and worldwide (because US OA policy has vast global implications) -- to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright.The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is hard at work to save the NIH Mandate; please consult them on how you can help. You can also express your support for mandating more OA rather than less, to President Obama.

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This would also be an opportune time to shore up the NIH Mandate itself with a small but important change in implementational detail that will not only increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide, but it will also strengthen it against mischievous attempts like the Conyers Bill to undermine it:

(1) Open Access is Open Access regardless of where on the Web a paper is freely accessible.

(2) Currently, the NIH mandate specifically stipulates deposit in a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR), PubMed Central.

(3) The majority of journals already formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR). (This is because they fear that endorsing deposit in 3rd party CRs would open the door to free-riding on their content by rival publishers.)

(4) Apart from being immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities and research institutions in the world: That makes it a much more diffuse, hence difficult target for the publisher anti-OA publisher lobby than PubMed Central, NIH or Congress.

(5) IRs also make it possible to deposit papers as "Closed Access" rather than Open Access during any publisher embargo period. The Closed-Access paper's metadata (authors, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are freely accessible and searchable webwide, and link to an IR Button that allows individual users to email the author an automatic request for an individual copy for research use with just one click, which the author can in turn fulfill with just one click, almost instantaneously. Over 60% of journals already endorse immediate OA for IR deposits. The Button provides "Almost OA" for the rest, to tide over researcher needs during any embargo.

(6) Hence if the NIH deposit mandate specifically stipulated deposit in the author's IR, rather than deposit in PubMed Central, it could harvest the deposit's metadata to PubMed Central, harvest the full-text after the allowable embargo, and moot most of the copyright issues, while indirectly providing "Almost OA" even during the embargo (via the Request-a-Copy Buttons of the global network of IRs distributed across the planet).

(7) This small change in implementational detail in NIH's funder mandate would also motivate and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates at all NIH's fundees' institutions, which would in turn help reinforce and protect the NIH mandate (from Conyers-like attacks) as well as extending it to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded.

(8) Stipulating IR deposit rather than CR deposit will also make the NIH funder mandate a model that can be emulated worldwide, globalizing the adoption of both funder and institutional mandates and helping to usher in universal OA at long last.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum