Open Access Archivangelism

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Click here for Latest Growth Graph Update

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In response to Alma Swan's graphic demonstration (posted yesterday and partly reproduced below) of the accelerating growth rate of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates (now including NIH, Harvard, Stanford and MIT), Richard Poynder has posted some very useful comments and questions. Below are some comments by way of reply:

FIGURE: Accelerating Growth Rate in Worldwide Adoptions of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates (2002-2009, in half-year increments) by Research Funders, Institutions, and Departments/Faculties/Schools (Swan 2009)

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(1) The latest and fastest-growing kinds of Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates are not only self-chosen by the researchers themselves, but they are department/faculty/school mandates, rather than full university-wide mandates. These are the "patchwork mandates" that Arthur Sale already began recommending presciently back in 2007, in preference to waiting passively for university-wide consensus to be reached.

(The option of opting out is only useful if it applies, not to the the deposit itself [of the refereed final draft, which should be deposited, without opt-out, immediately upon acceptance for publication], but to whether access to the deposit is immediately set as Open Access.)

(2) Another recent progress report for Institutional Repositories, following Stirling's, is Aberystwyth's, which reached 2000 deposits in May.

(3) Richard asks: "Will the fact that many of the new mandates include opt-outs affect compliance rates? (Will that make them appear more voluntary than mandatory?)"

According to Alma Swan's international surveys, most authors report they would comply willingly with a self-archiving mandate. The problem is less with achieving compliance on adopted mandates than with achieving consensus on the adoption of the mandate in the first place. (Hence, again, Arthur Sale's sage advice to adopt "patchwork" department/faculty/school mandates, rather than waiting passively for consensus on the adoption of full university-wide mandates, is the right advice.)

And the principal purpose of mandates themselves is to reinforce researchers' already-existing inclination to maximise access and usage for their give-away articles, not to force researchers to do something they don't already want to do.

(Researchers need to be reassured that their departments or institutions or funders are indeed fully behind self-archiving, and indeed expect it of them; otherwise researchers remain in a state of "Zeno's Paralysis" about self-archiving year upon year, because of countless groundless worries, such as copyright, journal choice, and even how much time self-archiving takes.)

(4) Richard also asks: "What is full compliance so far as a self-archiving mandate is concerned?"

Full compliance is of course 100% compliance, and the longer-standing mandates are climbing toward that, but their biggest boost will come not only from time, nor even from the increasingly palpable local benefits of OA self-archiving (in terms of enhanced research impact), but from the global growth of Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates that Alma has just graphically demonstrated.

(5) "What other questions should we be asking?"

We should be asking what university students and staff can do to accelerate and facilitate the adoption of mandates at their institution. (See "Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access.")

And the right way to judge the success of a mandate is not just by reporting the growth in an institution's yearly deposit rates, but by plotting the growth in deposit rate as a percentage of the institution's yearly output of research articles, for the articles actually published in that same year.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of a publisher's policy on author self-archiving, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

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On 22-May-09, at 5:10 AM, C.J.Smith wrote (regarding my "Definitive Answer: I"):

Stevan,

The John Wiley & Sons entry on SHERPA RoMEO describes the policy of John Wiley & Sons before they merged with Blackwell. Even so, one of the conditions of their ‘green’ status is ‘not allowed on institutional repository’. They only permit the use of the ‘post-print’ on the author’s own website.

Dear Colin, and all:

In the blogged version of the conclusions I drew from all of this, and the advice I gave on its basis, I added a fifth point that I should have added to my posting too. See (5) below:

(1) Under all circumstances,  deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft of your journal article (postprint) in your Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is no need whatsoever to make a single exception. 

(2) Unless you are certain that you have reason not to, set access to that deposited draft as Open Access (OA) immediately upon deposit. (Otherwise, you can set access as Closed Access, for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.) 

(3) The only thing even remotely at issue is whether or not, if you deposit a document in your IR and make it OA, you ever receive a take-down notice from the publisher. 

(4) If and when you ever receive a take-down notice and you wish to honor it, set access as Closed Access for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.

(5) Meanwhile, if there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive on and don't give it another thought until and unless you ever receive a take-down notice.

I also added:

And above all, reflect that if the millions of articles that have been made OA (by computer scientists, physicists, economists, and all other disciplines) since the 1980's had waited (or asked) for a clear, unambiguous green light in advance from each publisher, we would have virtually none of those millions of articles accessed, used and built-upon across those decades by the many users worldwide whose institutions could not afford access to the publisher's subscription edition. 

In other words, I think it is both unnecessary and counterproductive for individual authors (or Institutional Repository managers) to assume the pre-emptive burden of trying to sort out the double-talk that the publisher posts, or that their individual permissions grunts pronounce in response to individual permissions queries.

For the specific question of the distinction between the "institutional repository" and the "author's own website": that distinction is such utter, unmitigated nonsense that I find it difficult to believe that anyone (other than a wishful-thinking publisher's permissions grunt or permissions double-talk text-drafter) would give it a nanosecond of thought. There is no difference between an "institutional repository" and an "author's own website"! They are just names for disk sectors on the author's institutional webserver:

If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

That includes contradictory statements from the same publisher, posted at different URLs, and under slightly different names! (A number of IRs have since explicitly, and wearily, declared that their authors' sector on the IR server is now officially baptized their "website".)

Your quote from the Wiley-Blackwell Author Services page is interesting. It does indeed say the following:

“Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways, including in publications of their own work and course packs in their institution. An electronic copy of the article (with a link to the online version) can be posted on their own website, employer's website/repository and on free public servers in the subject area. For full details see authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp.”

However, when you click through to the ‘full details’ link, there is no further mention of what authors can do with their accepted manuscripts.

My advice: don't click through to the 'full details' link! This is all just double-talk and FUD. Pick the most favorable version, screen-grab it for your records, and then go ahead and post your accepted article on your employer's website/repository and forget about it.

By the way, I am fully aware of what illusion this self-serving double-talk is striving to create in this instance: to make the publisher appear to be Green on immediate OA self-archiving -- but, if you click-through, you realize that it is only at the price of paying them for hybrid Gold OA! This is shameful, misleading nonsense -- but you need not "click through": just take

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

at face value and do not give it another thought until and unless someone from "Wiley-Blackwell" ever ventures to send you a take-down notice.

And let the "you" be the author, to whom this message about how "Wiley-Blackkwell journal authors can use their accepted article" is addressed. Please don't get any 3rd-party intermediaries involved in it -- except in the form of a blanket institutional Green OA self-archiving mandate for its employees.

I asked the Wiley-Blackwell person with whom I have been in touch to update their policy on SHERPA RoMEO. Part of his response to me was as follows:“

We have no connection with the SHERPA/RoMEO site and we do not sanction the service or verify the information held there. The SHERPA/RoMEO site should therefore not be taken as an accurate reflection of our policies.”

I made no particular mention of the SHERPA/ROMEO site in my posting and advice. I simply quoted three published online excerpts of each "Wiley's" public words to their authors. Consider the Romeos to just be short-cuts to publishers' own expressed policies, and summaries of them.

(And I can only repeat, yet again, that it is an enormous strategic error to ask when there already exists a suitable public green light from the publisher -- and even worse to have a 3rd party ask: The only thing the author's institution should do is require immediate deposit, without exception, in all cases, and also to strongly recommend immediately setting access to that deposit as Open Access. But no chasing after permissions on the author's behalf, and especially not in advance, and in the absence of any take-down notice.)

I will now challenge him based on the quote you found above, but his answer to me in writing still seems very clear:

“The submission version is the only version we allow to be placed into institutional repositories. We do not allow the post-peer review article, the author’s final draft, or any other version to be deposited.”

Based on this, and on your “sensible practical advice to authors and Repository Managers alike”, I can see no other choice than to deposit Wiley-Blackwell post-prints under permanent closed access.

I see a very clear and far better choice, with publicly documented support for it from "Wiley-Blackwell":  

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

Let the author "post" his accepted draft to his IR immediately upon acceptance, set access immediately as OA, and then forget about it, as millions of authors have been doing since the 1980's, followed by virtually no take-down challenges from their publishers.

Most journals, on the contrary, have since officially given immediate OA self-archiving their green light. If and when the author ever does get a take-down notice, he can decide whether or not to honor it at that time. But pre-emptive obstacles should not be needlessly created, in advance, by having 3rd parties contact publishers' permission grunts -- even if their portfolio is "W/B Associate Permissions Manager."

(It is the author who is doing the depositing and the access-setting, not a 3rd party. Except where an exception has been negotiated by the author (as recommended, for example, by the Harvard policy), the copyright transfer agreement is between the author and the publisher, not a 3rd party.)

The Open University (OU) should adopt an ID/OA mandate. OU should not doom you, Colin, to having to contact a publisher's permissions grunt for every new OU article written, nor to have to do the hermeneutics to sort out incoherent versions of publishers' official policy. Let authors pick a grammatical English sentence, posted publicly by the publisher, to the effect that authors can post their final drafts on their websites, and take that to be a green light, regardless of whether the publisher goes on to contradict it elsewhere. It's publishers' copy-editors who are supposed to vet incoherent author prose, not authors (or Repository Managers) vetting incoherent publisher prose...

A second word to the wise,

Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum