Open Access Archivangelism

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

SUMMARY: In “Authors: I don’t care where you deposit, just do it”, Gavin Baker suggests that it does not matter where authors deposit their papers to make them Open Access (OA): in an Institutional Repository (IR) or a Central Repository (CR). Nor, more importantly, does it matter where authors' funders mandate that they should deposit them, because IR deposits can be harvested to CRs and vice versa. I point out that this apparent symmetry between IRs and CRs with respect to the harvestability from one to the other (in either direction) is irrelevant today because most of the target content for OA is not yet even being deposited at all, anywhere: In other words, authors are decidedly not "just doing it." Nor are institutions -- the universal providers of OA's target output, both funded and unfunded, across all fields -- "just mandating that authors do it." Apart from the tiny number (about 30) that have already mandated deposit, institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, until they wake up and mandate the deposit of their own research output in their own IRs. Not all research output is funded, but all research output is institutional: Hence institutions are the universal providers of all OA's target content. Although not many funders mandate deposit either, the few that already do (about 30) can help wake the slumbering giant, because one funder mandate impinges on the research output of fundees at many different institutions. But there is a fundamental underlying asymmetry governing where funders should mandate deposit: As Prof. Bernard Rentier (founder of EuropenScholar and Rector of U. Liège, one of the first universities to adopt an institutional deposit mandate) has recently stressed, convergent funder mandates that require deposit in the fundee's own IR will facilitate the adoption of deposit mandates by institutions (the slumbering giant), whereas divergent funder mandates that require CR deposit (or are indifferent between CR and IR deposit) will only capture the research they fund, while needlessly handicapping (or missing the opportunity to facilitate) efforts to get institutional deposit mandates adopted and complied with too. The optimal solution for both institutions and funders is therefore: "Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally".

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The well-meaning recommendations of Gavin Baker (GB) in “Authors: I don’t care where you deposit, just do it” are based on some implicit misunderstandings and unrealistic assumptions about the status quo today (OA < 15%) and what is practically required to get us from that status quo to 100% OA, at long last.

Locus-of-Deposit Matters for OA Mandates. Getting us to 100% OA at long last is precisely what OA deposit mandates are all about. And that in turn is what makes locus-of-deposit the crucial matter that Prof. Rentier has fully recognized it to be: The lesson for GB is that if you care about getting authors to deposit, you need to care about where you mandate deposit!

Symmetry of IR/CR InterHarvestability Is Irrelevant Without Deposits, and Deposit Mandates. GB makes the simple, indeed simplistic assumption of symmetry, insofar as harvestability is concerned: There are Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Central Repositories (CRs) and they are all interoperable, hence inter-harvestable: “What difference does it make where the OA content is deposited? It can be harvested in either direction!” The difference is very simple: Most of it is not deposited anywhere, and what we are talking about is choosing the fastest and surest policy to get it all deposited (and hence OA).

Next to No Deposits Without Deposit Mandates. Everyone (including GB) is at last coming to realize that the way to get OA's target content to be deposited and thereby made OA is by adopting deposit mandates, because most researchers (85%) are simply not depositing, whereas most researchers say they will deposit, willingly, if mandated; and it turns out that when it is indeed mandated, most researchers actually do deposit.

Who Should Mandate Deposit, Where? The apparent symmetry of cross-harvestability to/from IRs and CRs (once everything is indeed deposited) certainly does not answer these two questions. A closer examination of the question of who is to mandate deposit, and where discloses profound and interrelated asymmetries. The two candidates for mandating deposit are authors' employers (i.e., their institutions) and authors' funders. And the two candidate loci for deposit are the authors' own institutions (IRs) or various thematic or geographic collections (CRs).

Not All Research Is Funded, But All Research Is Institutional. There are tens of thousands of research-active universities, research institutions, and major R&D organizations worldwide. These are the "institutions" and they generate virtually all of OA's primary target content: refereed journal articles. There are also a few thousand major research funders, public and private, that fund some (but by no means all) research output.

Asymmetry I: Funder Mandates Only Cover Part of OA’s Target Content. And here we have the first profound asymmetry that GB overlooks: All of OA's target output is produced by institutions (unaffiliated researchers represent such a minute fraction of the total that it would be absurd to base overall OA policy on this tiny special case). But not all -- in fact perhaps not even most -- of OA's target output is funded. So if CRs are to be filled by funder mandates, they will not be filled with all and perhaps not even most of OA's target content even if all funders were to mandate it -- and, crucially, most funders still don't mandate deposit at all.

The “slumbering Giant”: Most Institutions Do Not Yet Mandate Deposit. The fact that most institutions don’t mandate is the practical gist of the entire locus-of-deposit issue: How does locus-of-deposit affect probability-of-mandate adoption (and compliance)? Without the mandates (and mandate compliance), we do not have the OA.

Funder Mandates Can Wake the slumbering Giant – If They Stipulate Institutional IRs As Locus-of-Deposit. Now the coverage-asymmetry we have already pointed out -- that all research originates from institutions but not all research is funded -- already suggests that there may not be parity between IRs and CRs: If funders were the only ones to mandate deposit, and they either stipulated that papers had to be deposited in a CR, or they left it open-ended whether they were deposited in a CR or an IR, then that would leave all unfunded (institutional!) content undeposited, and no form of CR-to-IR harvesting could fill the IRs with their missing content. This would remain true even if (mirabile dictu) all funders were to mandate deposit. It is the institution/funder, IR/CR coverage asymmetry, which is irremediable by harvesting.

Institutions Are the Universal OA Providers. Now note that the reverse is not true, and this is another aspect of the coverage-asymmetry: If (mirabile dictu) all institutions were to mandate deposit, then that would indeed generate 100% OA, and funders and CRs would indeed be able to harvest all their target content from the CRs. The trouble is, and remains, that all institutions do not yet mandate deposit; only a tiny number of them (about 30) do today.

Funder Mandates Reach and Bind Multiple Distributed Institutions. It is likewise true that only a tiny number of funders (also about 30) as yet mandate deposit. (Perfect symmetry so far.) But because the number of funders is far smaller than the number of institutions, and because some of the mandating funders are rather big ones, the actual proportion of mandating funders (as well as the amount and proportion of OA content that they cover) is substantially higher than the current proportion of mandating institutions (and the amount and proportion of OA content that they cover).

Asymmetry II: Funder Mandates Can Jump-Start Institutional Mandates – If Locus-of-Deposit Is Convergent Rather than Divergent. This is the second IR/CR asymmetry, and the most important one, for with a simple change in the stipulated locus-of-deposit of these few funder mandates (and future ones) -- from CR or IR/CR deposit to IR deposit -- funder mandates can, at no loss to themselves, help to jump-start a burst of IRs and IR mandates from the “slumbering giant,” the distributed worldwide set of institutions: the universal providers of all OA content. Every single funder mandate in fact touches on many institutions: the institutions of each one of its fundees. If funders mandate CR deposit only, or even if they leave it open whether deposit is in a CR or an IR, they miss the opportunity to systematically motivate and facilitate IR-creation and mandate-adoption by institutions. Suppose funders instead stipulate the fundee's own IR as the designated locus of deposit (allowing, where needed, the option of depositing in interim back-up repositories like DEPOT, [currently languishing with only 66 deposits!], explicitly designed to host deposits temporarily for institutions that have not yet set up IRs of their own, ready to be exported to the depositor's institution automatically as soon as they have set up their own IR):

Funders Motivate Institutions to Mandate and Authors to Comply. The result of funder mandates designation the fundee's IR as locus of deposit is that funders greatly increase the potential scope and power of their deposit mandates, far beyond only their own funded output: With institutional authors depositing funder-mandated papers in their own IRs, not only are authors thereby motivated to deposit the rest of their output in their IRs too, but their institution is motivated to capture the rest of its institutional output by mandating deposit too. (The slumbering giant awakes!)

Collaboration and Convergence Versus Competition and Divergence Between Institutional and Funder Mandates. If funder mandates thus collaborate and converge on locus-of-deposit with institutional mandates, by stipulating IR deposit (at the unitary local source: the universal provider), instead of competing and diverging needlessly on locus of deposit, nothing whatsoever is lost and everything is gained. Automatic harvesting is indeed there, ready to collect funder-mandated IR deposits into the funder's preferred CRs where desired, because the deposits themselves have been done: Institutions are well placed and only too willing to cooperate in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the grant fulfillment conditions of the funders of their researchers. And the more that institutions are involved in seeing to it that their researchers do their depositing in compliance with funder requirements, the sooner the token will fall for them, so they realize that the very same solution can and should be applied to all their institutional research output, funded and unfunded, in all areas, by adopting an institutional mandate too.

Institution/Funder Complementarity and Synergy in Reaching Universal OA. It is from the fundamental asymmetry underlying the question of locus-of-deposit and direction of harvesting that the institution/funder complementarity and synergy emerges: It has next to nothing to do with the symmetry of harvestability, given the deposits, and everything to do with ensuring that the deposits actually get done! (And this is without even mentioning the third asymmetry underlying the absurdity of institutions having to back-harvest their own institutional output because it has been deposited willy-nilly institution-externally instead of being deposited institutionally in the first place, and then automatically exported wherever else desired.)

I will reply to the rest of GB's posting via quote/commentary:

If requiring deposit is left to universities, their repositories will only contain publications by their researchers.

(1) But the total of all institutional research output is the total of all research output, hence 100% of OA’s target content. (“Institutions” includes all universities, research institutes, and major R&D organizations.)

(2) Not so for the total of all funded output.

(3) And the fundamental problem for OA today is that the institutions – the slumbering giant, the universal providers – do not yet require deposit. Only a tiny number of them do.

(4) If (as is simply assumed here) all institutions did mandate deposit for all of their research article output, we would have 100% OA.

(5) The issue, therefore, is: How can locus-of-deposit be used to help induce all institutions to mandate deposit?

Since some researchers have multiple institutional affiliations, and since any given publication may be authored by researchers across multiple institutions, it is easy to see that researchers will ultimately have to deposit their publications in as many repositories as there are institutions involved in their research.

We are talking about one, single locus of direct deposit, particularly for funder-mandated deposits, and whether that one deposit should be in the author’s own IR or a non-institutional CR, if the purpose is not just to deposit that one paper to make it OA, but to wake the slumbering giant to mandate depositing all institutional output to make it OA.

For an author affiliated with multiple institutions, that still only means a one-time IR deposit, in the IR of one of his institutions, followed by export to the IRs of the rest of his institutions. That has nothing to do with the question of symmetry for the locus of deposit of funder mandates that cover multiple institutions.

This trend seems to rest on the naive notion that, in the Internet era, it is somehow still necessary for researchers to conduct their work solely through the channels of a university.

It is not clear what futuristic scenario GB may have in mind, but the reality today is that researchers are employed and paid by their institutions to conduct and report their (funded and unfunded) research.

It is understandable that universities may wish to host a complete collection of the research published by their faculty, but nowadays that can easily be accomplished by importing it automatically from the more complete collections of the distributed Web.

Yes, just as manna from heaven could be harvested to feed the hungry! The trouble is, most research (85%) is not yet deposited anywhere on the distributed Web today, hence nowhere to be harvested to or from, because deposit has not yet been mandated. We are talking here about how locus-of-deposit, particularly for funder mandates, can increase the probability of waking the slumbering giant (institutions) to mandate deposit of all of their output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, institutions, languages and nations. That way we might one day indeed have a “complete collection” of OA research output globally.

Recall also that universities are not the universal providers of all research output. There will always be independent scholars, as well as publications by authors in government, non-profits and think tanks, and corporations.

Government, non-profits, think-tanks and corporations are all “institutions,” can all create their own (individual or consortial) IRs, and can mandate deposit in them. And funders can mandate deposit in those IRs by those of their fundees working at those institutions.

The OA philosophy is global. It cannot be reduced to a single university.

No one is reducing OA to a single university. OA content is distributed across a global network of institutions, the universal providers. And the idea is not reduction but expansion – of the practice and policy of depositing the research output of all those institutions in their own IRs, through collaborative, convergent rather than competing and divergent deposit mandates from both institutions and funders.

Institutions: Require that researchers ensure their publication ends up in your IR, wherever they initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to depositing in a funder or thematic repository, they’re responsible for working with the IR manager to ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the IR allows users to set up automatic harvesting themselves, either for a single publication or for all the author’s future publications, if they don’t want to talk to the IR manager.

All splendid alternatives for institutions that already mandate deposit! But the trouble is that the giant is still slumbering, and we are talking about how to wake him. If he were already awake -- i.e., if all or most or even many institutions were already mandating deposit for all of their research output -- then locus-of-deposit would be far less crucial, and GB’s symmetry assumptions and alternatives would be perfectly fine.

The trouble is that that is not at all where we are today. The giant is fast asleep; indeed he has grotesquely overslept! And this panorama of alternative ways to do what he is not doing, nor thinking of doing, is not going to wake him up and induce him to do it.

Whereas convergent IR mandates from funders have a good chance of serving as the wake-up call...

Funders: Require that grantees ensure their publication ends up in your repository, wherever they initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to depositing in an institutional repository, they’re responsible for working with your repository manager to ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the repository allows users to set up automatic harvesting themselves, either for a single publication or for all the author’s future publications, if they don’t want to talk to the repository manager.

In the current status quo, when only a tiny proportion of funders is mandating deposit at all, and an even tinier proportion of institutions is doing so, this advice is perhaps a tad premature... for existing IR content.

But it would certainly be a good idea to couple IR deposit mandates from funders with clear instructions on how the deposits may be automatically exported to the funder’s preferred CR (if any), as well as how compliance with the deposit mandate is to be verified as a fulfillment condition of the grant, with the collaboration of the fundee’s institution, IR software (for a funder-name metadata tag) and IR management.

This seems more flexible and accommodating to all preferences. In particular, it’s superior to the suggestion that funders should require authors to deposit in their institution’s repository, because [1] not every institution has an IR. Indeed, [2] not every funded researcher may even have an institution. The ultimate goal is opening all research, regardless of where the authors work or who funded the research.

[1] Every institution is just (a) a piece of free software, (b) a $1000 linux server plus (c) a few days of sysad set-up time from having its own IR. In the meanwhile, there are interim alternatives like the DEPOT or multi-institution consortial IR solutions like the Whiterose Consortium.

[2] Unaffiliated researchers are a red herring, when we are talking about a collaborative policy that will greatly enhance the probability of mandating deposit for the overwhelming majority of OA’s target output that is produced by researchers affiliated with an institution. Moreover, universities have a long and admirable tradition of hosting the work of unaffiliated scholars (and some IRs already do).

In summary: The symmetry between Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Central Repositories (CRs) with respect to harvestability the harvestability from one to the other (in either direction) is irrelevant today because most of the target content for Open Access (OA) is not yet being deposited at all. Convergent funder mandates that require IR deposit will facilitate the adoption of deposit mandates by institutions (the universal research providers), whereas divergent funder mandates that require CR deposit (or are indifferent between CR and IR deposit) will needlessly handicap (or fail to facilitate) efforts to get institutional deposit mandates adopted and complied with. The universal, synergistic solution for both institutions and funders is: Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally.

Gavin Baker comments:

"Every research funder should mandate OA to the research it funds.
Every institution that produces research (college, universities, research institutions) should mandate OA to the research it produces.
Every researcher should ensure her research is OA."

Noble wishes. But alas not being fulfilled -- and it's been a long wait. That's why specifying institutional locus-of-deposit for existing funder-mandates matters: to help make these wishes come true instead of just continuing to hope they will come true of their own accord.

"[P]ractice has shown that policy is significantly more effective than unenforceable exhortations to authors in general. So our question is not whether to mandate OA, but how"

Indeed. But exhortations to mandate are not effective either! So this is an exhortation to make a specific modification in existing (funder) mandates to make them more effective in generating further (institutional) mandates.

"Where he’s wrong: Dr. Harnad repeats...“Not All Research Is Funded, But All Research Is Institutional”... he weakens this statement to 'virtually all'..."

Not all researchers have fingers -- only "virtually all" do: That does not mean it cannot be mandated that the deposit keystrokes need to be done.

"[N]ot all academic journal literature is written by authors at colleges, universities, or research institutions"

Fine. This changes nothing regarding the potential benefits of funder mandates stipulating IRs as the default locus of deposit. As noted, where the fundee has no IR, they can and should deposit in a back-up CR such as DEPOT.

"Institutional mandates won’t touch these [unaffiliated] authors (by definition). Funder mandates may touch some, though I’d suspect that most such research is unfunded"

That makes this case even more irrelevant. This is about funder-mandates inducing fundees' institutions to adopt institution-mandates. No IR? Or no Instiutution? Deposit in the DEPOT -- and let's not let this minuscule number of exceptions obscure the potential benefits of funder mandates stipulating institutional deposit as a rule!

"(Harnad notes that some funders do offer “back-up” repositories for grantees without IRs, but without endorsing this flexibility.)"

I did indeed endorse it, many, many times: And, in case of doubt, I endorse it here too.

"Harnad also deftly re-defines the traditional meaning of “institution” in “IR”, to mean “any organization whose employees might ever produce research”... As a result, he reduces further the number of “unaffiliated” researchers"

Yes. And your point is...?

("Every institution is just (a) a piece of free software, (b) a $1000 linux server plus (c) a few days of sysad set-up time away from having its own IR. In the meanwhile, there are interim alternatives like the DEPOT...")

"Doesn’t it make more sense to tell your employees to deposit in a higher-visibility thematic repository?"

Most definitely not. It makes immeasurably more sense to mandate that both fundees and institutional employees deposit in their own IR (or DEPOT) and let high-visibility CRs harvest the deposits thereafter, because that will generate more institutional mandates. That is in fact the very essence of the point I am making.

"My point about authors with multiple institutional affiliations also goes unheeded. Harnad suggests that this situation “only” requires one deposit, “followed by export to the IRs of the rest of his institutions”. Well, now we’re talking about export, which is exactly what I call for between IRs, thematic, and funder repositories. There’s no difference between exporting from one IR to another and between exporting from a thematic repository to an IR."

That's the symmetry-fallacy again, which is exactly what I was refuting: There's no point "calling for" ("exhorting") the export of nonexistent (because undeposited) content. The point here is about funder-mandates designating institutional deposit in order to generate institutional-mandates (waking the "slumbering giant", "more bang for the research buck," or whatever you want to call it) so as to generate all that missing content!.

"Harnad also understates the resource requirements for adequately maintaining an IR. I’ll let Dorothea Salo answer this point."

Umm -- I'd rather this point was answered by the managers of the few successful, well-stocked IRs that are actually doing what OA IRs are for -- rather than doing anything but (and at high cost)...

"Where I was wrong: Since more research comes out of institutions (as a whole) than is funded (as a whole), institutional mandates offer broader coverage."

No, institutional mandates would offer broader coverage (indeed, universal coverage, if universally adopted). But only 30 have been adopted so far; and so what we are talking about here is how funder-mandates stipulating institutional deposit could induce more institutions to mandate deposit for the rest of their total output, funded and unfunded.

"(But a given funder may sponsor significantly more research than a given institution produces, and there are fewer funders than institutions, so they give more “bang for the buck” as initial targets.)"

Again, the point is not that a funder generates more research than a single institution (though most do), but that a funder generates research at many institutions. That's what will give them "more bang for the buck" if they mandate IR rather than CR deposit. (And we are talking about making this small but important change in existing funder-mandates, not about just wishing for more funder-mandates.)

"[D]o funders have any leverage to encourage institutions to deploy IRs and mandate deposit? I am less sanguine about this than Harnad, but flooding IRs with deposits certainly could have the effect of building institutional constituencies for IRs and thus for institutional mandates."

Sounds like you are and are not sanguine, Gavin!

And funders do have enormous "leverage" with their fundee institutions. But we are not talking about direct leverage to require fundee institututions to create IRs or adopt deposit mandates -- just the indirect leverage that would result from specifying IRs instead of CRs as the funder-mandate's default locus of deposit.

"Therefore: Is there some promise in using funder mandates to prod universities toward institutional mandates? Yes, there’s some. Is it a sure thing? No. Do funders still need to provide a “repository of last resort” to deal with exceptions? Yes."

Agreed! So what are we arguing about?

(Yes, "repositories of last resort" do need to provided -- though it's not clear why they have to be provided by the funder; nor how many of them are really needed. There's plenty of room, for example, in DEPOT, which currently has only 66 deposits after almost two years of existence, simply because funders are mandating direct deposit in their own CRs instead of the fundee's IR -- for which DEPOT was specifically created to serve as the back-up.)

"Is it still easier for funders to monitor compliance and ensure adequate levels of service (including preservation) by requiring grantees to get their work into the funder’s repository, one way or another? Yes."

Here's the way: import/export/harvest them from the IRs (and DEPOTs). And the fundee institutions will be more than happy to collaborate in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the funder's grant fulfillment conditions.

"Require grantees to deposit in their IR, if they have one. Require also that grantees ensure their publication ends up in your repository, wherever they initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to depositing in an institutional repository, they’re responsible for working with your repository manager to ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the repository allows users to set up automatic harvesting themselves, either for a single publication or for all the author’s future publications, if they don’t want to talk to the repository manager."

Yup, that's it! So what are we arguing about, Gavin?

"[Or] Encourage grantees to deposit in their IR, if they have one."

Now that, in contrast, would be useless, just as encouraging ("exhorting," "calling for," "wishing") authors to deposit -- or funders or institutions to mandate -- is useless. What we are talking about is a tiny but concrete and specific change in the implementational details of actual, adopted funder mandates, so as to require institutional (or, as last resort, DEPOT) deposit, in order to generate more institutional mandates. Merely "encouraging" it will generate nothing.

"[T]he risk of backlash if IRs are poorly managed, a factor over which the funder can have little control..."

Why are we speculating about the possibility of full, ill-managed IRs when what we are actually faced with is virtually all IRs (whether well-managed or ill) empty! Necessity is the mother of invention: Fill those IRs with their valuable intended content, and institutions will nurture them as the invaluable assets they will prove to be. Keep fussing instead about the current or future management of idle or nonexistent IRs and you will have years more of idle or nonexistent IRs.

"Funder repositories come with their own cost: the increased potential for government interference in science that comes with greater centralization"

Let's not get carried away! We're talking about published journal articles, made openly accessible, free for all. If they are deposited in each researcher's distributed IRs, they can thence be harvested into multiple CRs. If there is government "interference" (whatever that means) in governmental CRs, there will be plenty of other harvested CRs (e.g. google scholar!) where those came from.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Andrew Brown, wrote in the Guardian (5 Feb):

“[O]pen access is unsatisfactory [because] open-access journals [are] not yet widespread enough... The only answer I can think of is to bring electronic subscriptions into the library system.”

There is another answer: Open Access (OA) does not mean only, or mainly, open-access journals ("Gold OA"). The other, more widespread way to provide OA is for the authors of articles published in non-OA journals to make them OA by depositing an electronic version in an OA Repository ("Green OA"), thereby making them free for all (including those whose libraries cannot afford a subscription) -- as 34 research funding councils worldwide (including all the UK Research Councils, the European Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health) as well as 31 Universities and Faculties (including Southampton, Glasgow and Stirling in the UK, and Harvard and Stanford in the US) have already adopted mandates requiring the authors they fund and employ to do.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

      

Funder mandates from Canada (FRSQ), Norway (NRC) and Spain (Asturias) now bring the planetary total of Green OA Mandates to 65! (Three new ones in one day; thanks to Peter Suber for news of two of them.)

This is the timely and incisive analysis of what is at stake in the question of locus of deposit (institutional vs. central) for open access self-archiving mandates. It was written (in French, and then translated into English) by Prof. Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège and founder of EurOpenScholar. It is re-posted here from Prof. Rentier's blog.

For more background on the important current issues underlying the question of institutional vs. central deposit mandates by universities and research funders, click here.

Liège is one of the c. 30 institutions (plus 30 funders) worldwide that have already adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate .

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Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?

Posted by Bernard Rentier in Open Access

[Also recommended: a remarkable and very complete review of OA by Peter Suber.]

The “Green Open Access (OA)” solution, providing free access to research publications in Institutional Repositories (IRs) via the Web, is certainly the best one, but sooner or later it will face a new wave of centralised thematic or funder repositories (CRs).

The latest initiative comes from the very active EUROHORCs (European Association of Heads of Research Funding Organisations and Research Performing Organisations), well known for its EURYI prizes and its prominent influence on European thinking in the research area. EUROHORCs is working to convince the European Science Foundation (ESF) to set up, through a large subsidy from the EC, a centralised repository (CR) which would be both thematic (Biomedical) and geographic (European). The concept is inspired by PubMed Central, among others.

The EUROHORCs initiative is very well-intentioned. It is based on an awareness that many of us share: It is of the utmost importance that science funded by public money should be made freely and easily accessible to the public (OA). But the initiative also reveals a profound misunderstanding about what OA and researchers’ real needs are all about.

The vision underlying the EUROHORCs initiative is that research results should be deposited directly in a CR. However, if research results are not OA today, this is not because of the lack of a CR to deposit them in, but rather because most authors are simply not yet depositing their articles at all, not even in an IR.

Creating a new repository is hence not the solution for making research OA. The solution lies in universal deposit mandates, from both institutions and funding agencies. If this task is left to large funders such as the European Community, their central repositories will only contain publications of the research they have funded. From this it is easy to see that researchers will ultimately have to deposit their publications in as many repositories as there are funders supporting their research. Not only is this not practical, it is needlessly cumbersome.

The obvious solution is that both research institutions and funding agencies should jointly require IR deposit. Once that systematic coordination has been successfully implemented, if CRs are desired, they can easily be created and filled using compatible software for exporting or harvesting automatically from IRs to CRs.

What is worrisome is the needless double investment in creating two distinct kinds of repositories for direct deposit. This trend seems to rest on the naive notion that, in the Internet era, it is somehow still necessary to deposit things centrally. But in reality, the centralising tool is the harvester, and its search engine. Google Scholar, for example, is quite efficient in finding articles in any repository, institutional or central, yet no one deposits articles directly in Google Scholar. The perceived need for direct-deposit CRs is groundless, technically speaking. Such CRs even run the risk of serving as hosts for only the publications funded by a single funder. IRs guarantee OA webwide for all research output, in all disciplines, from all institutions, regardless of where (or whether) it has been funded.

It is understandable that funders may wish to host a complete collection of the research they have funded, but nowadays that can easily be accomplished by importing it automatically from the more complete collections of the distributed IRs -- since institutions are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded -- as long as funders collaborate with institutions in first ensuring that all the IRs are filled with their own institutional research output.

Besides, the OA philosophy is global. It cannot be reduced to a single continent. Science is universal.

Giving priority to creating more CRs for direct deposit today is not only a waste of time: it is also counterproductive for the growth of convergent funder and institutional mandates. It would generate multiple competing loci of primary deposit for authors -- most of whom, we must not forget, are still not depositing at all.

In conclusion, it seems far more efficient to focus first on filling IRs at this time; once that is accomplished, if it is judged useful, CRs can be configured to collect their data from IRs rather than being used as divergent points of direct deposit themselves.

The potential success of OA, without conflicting head-on with publishers, rests on the deposit of authors' own final drafts of their published articles, through a one-time, simple action on the part of the author. All research is generated from research institutions: IRs are hence the natural locus for author deposit, providing optimal proximity, convenience and congruence with the mission of the author's own institution. The rest is merely technical: a matter of automated data transfer to external CRs.

The EUROHORCs proposal is only worthwhile if it contributes to the secondary harvesting of data from primary IRs. Otherwise, it is missing the point of OA.

ORBi wins its challenge

U. Liège's IR "ORBi" (Open Repository and Bibliography) is fulfilling its promise: over 4,000 references have already been filed since November 26th and, in a happy surprise, 79% of these articles turn out to be full text. This is thus ahead of schedule for our institutional Green OA Mandate (announced in March 2007 to take effect in October 2009): "Whenever the university reviews faculty publications for promotion, tenure, funding, or any other internal purpose, the review will be based exclusively on full texts deposited in the IR."

The graph below shows clearly how the IR contents are growing. And yet a quick calculation also reminds us that we are still far from capturing the actual number of papers published yearly by our university authors.

[Funder mandates can help accelerate and motivate both the adoption of institutional mandates like ours, and author compliance with them -- provided the funder mandates stipulate the author's IR as the single convergent locus for direct deposit (followed by automatized harvest to CRs). If funders instead insist upon direct central deposit in their external CRs, they simply create a needless retardant and disincentive for author compliance, and hence for universal OA, rather than reinforcing and facilitating them.]

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Dépôts institutionnels, thématiques ou centralisés ?

Posté par Bernard Rentier dans Open Access

A lire: une remarquable revue très complète de l’OA par Peter Suber.

La formule des dépôts institutionnels permettant la libre consultation de publications de recherche par l’Internet est certes la meilleure, mais elle est, tôt ou tard, menacée par une nouvelle tendance visant à créer des dépôts thématiques ou des dépôts gérés par des organismes finançant la recherche.

La dernière initiative provient de la très active association EUROHORCs (European association of the heads of research funding organisations and research performing organisations), bien connue pour ses prix EURYI et dont l’influence sur la réflexion européenne en matière de recherche est considérable. Elle tente de convaincre l’European Science Foundation (ESF) de mettre sur pied, grâce à une subvention considérable des Communautés européennes, un dépôt centralisé qui serait à la fois thématique (sciences biomédicales) et localisé (Europe) sur base du principe qui a conduit à la création de PubMed Central, par exemple.

L’idée part d’un bon sentiment. Elle est née d’une prise de conscience que nous partageons tous: il est impératif que la science financée par les deniers publics soit rendue publique gratuitement et commodément. Mais en même temps, elle est fondée sur une profonde méconnaissance de l’Open Access, de l’Open Access Initiative et des besoins réels des chercheurs et des pouvoirs subsidiants.

La notion qui sous-tend cette initiative est que les résultats de la recherche doivent être déposés directement dans un dépôt centralisé. Mais si les résultats de la recherche ne sont pas aujourd’hui en accès libre et ouvert, ce n’est pas parce qu’il manque des dépôts centralisés, c’est tout simplement parce que la plupart des auteurs ne déposent pas leurs articles du tout, même pas dans un dépôt institutionnel.

La solution n’est donc pas de créer un nouveau dépôt. Elle est dans l’obligation pour les chercheurs de déposer leur travail dans un dépôt électronique, cette obligation devant être exigée par les universités et institutions de recherche ainsi que par les organismes finançant la recherche. Si l’on se contente de laisser faire les grands pourvoyeurs de fonds tels que l’Union européenne, on ne disposera dans le dépôt central que des publications de la recherche qu’ils ont financée. On comprend donc qu’àterme, le chercheur sera amené à encoder ses publications dans autant de dépôts différents qu’il bénéficiera de fonds d’origine différente. Ce n’est pas pratique, c’est même inutilement lourd.

Comme les institutions de recherche la produisent (avec ou sans financement public, dans toutes les disciplines, dans tous les pays, dans toutes les langues), la solution qui saute aux yeux est qu’ensemble, les institutions de recherche et les organismes finançants doivent encourager la mise en place de dépôts institutionnels. Ensuite, si l’on tient à réaliser des dépôts centralisés, on pourra toujours le faire, en redondance, et ce sera facile si les logiciels sont compatibles.

Ce qui est inquiétant, c’est l’investissement, redondant à ce stade, qu’implique la création de dépôts centralisés. En fait, ceci correspond à une vision naïve qui laisse penser qu’à l’heure de l’Internet, il faille encore centraliser quoi que ce soit. L’élément centralisateur, c’est le moteur de recherche. Prenons Google Scholar: il est parfaitement efficace pour retrouver les articles dans l’ensemble des dépôts institutionnels, aussi bien que dans un dépôt central. L’utilité des dépôts centralisés n’est donc pas justifiable sur le plan technique. Le risque est même qu’ils ne solidifient uniquement que le dépôt des travaux faits avec les fonds d’un seul bailleur de fonds. Les dépôts institutionnels assurent la présence sur le web de tous les travaux scientifiques quels qu’ils soient, peu importe comment ils sont financés.

On peut comprendre que les bailleurs de fonds et organismes finançants aient envie de disposer d’un répertoire complet des travaux qu’ils subsidient, mais il est logique alors qu’ils collectent les données — c’est maintenant très aisé techniquement et cela nécessite juste un peu d’organisation pour être systématique — à partir des dépôts institutionnels plus complets ou que ces derniers leur communiquent automatiquement l’information.

Par ailleurs, la philosophie qui sous-tend l’Open Access est planétaire. Elle ne peut se confiner à une dimension européenne. La science est plus universelle que cela.

La création de dépôts centralisés n’est pas seulement une perte de temps, elle est aussi contre-productive pour la généralisation du dépôt obligatoire car elle multiplie, pour des chercheurs qui résistent déjà à déposer ne fût-ce qu’une fois leurs travaux, elle multiplie les endroits où ils doivent les déposer !

Nous sommes donc en présence d’une initiative de très bonne volonté, qui a du sens pour l’ESF, mais qui est un peu maladroite. Il eût été préférable de développer le principe que les dépôts centralisés soient des récoltants d’informations à partir des dépôts institutionnels et non des endroits de dépôt direct. Le principe même des dépôts thématiques (par sujet, par domaine de la science, par nationalité, par continent, par source de financement, etc.) ne peut qu’ajouter à la confusion dans un domaine qui n’est déjà pas facile à mettre en place et où le succès le plus complet est lié à la proximité du niveau de pouvoir et d’exigence. Les dépôts thématiques (ici, il serait doublement sectoriel: Europe & Biomédecine) ont beaucoup de sens, mais doivent rester secondaires par rapport à l’exigence fondamentale du “tout accessible”.

En d’autres termes, le succès de l’Open Access, sans se heurter de front aux éditeurs, repose sur les dépôts d’articles publiés par ailleurs et sur l’exigence d’un travail unique pour l’auteur. Le plus simple et le plus efficace pour cela est le dépôt institutionnel. Toute recherche provient d’institutions: le dépôt idéal le plus efficace et le plus complet ne peut donc être qu’institutionnel. Le reste est technique: ce n’est plus qu’une affaire de récolte d’informations.

La proposition de l’ESF n’est donc intéressante que si elle se situe au niveau de la récolte secondaire des données à partir des dépôts institutionnels primaires. Dans sa présentation actuelle, elle manque son but.

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