Open Access Archivangelism

See also:
Definitive Answer: II
and
The Definitive Answer: Deposit All Final Drafts, Immediately Upon Acceptance for Publication

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Colin Smith [CS], Repository Manager, Open University, wrote, in JISC-Repositories:

CS: "[D]espite what is written on [Wiley/Blackwell's] website, I remain concerned by some other information I received, and by the wording on their copyright form, which appears to contradict the information on their website."

Colin, please let me preface my reply with a reaffirmation of the fact that I think your efforts on behalf of OA and filling OU's IRs with OA's target content are extremely valuable, timely and welcome, both for OU and for OA. 

If I venture to offer some practical advice, it is in no way intended to imply that your work is less than precious. I am merely suggesting ways in which it can be made ever more effective. And one of those ways is to reassure authors by putting their (largely naive and groundless) worries about copyright at ease, rather than reinforcing them.

The default explanation and advice to OU's authors regarding their right to deposit their refereed, accepted final drafts in OU's repository should (in my judgment) be the following:

(1) Every final draft can and should be deposited in OU's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is absolutely no legal obstacle to doing this, without exception; publisher policy and copyright are completely irrelevant to making this deposit.

(2) Set access to the deposit immediately as Open Access if the journal (or the publisher, on behalf of all its journals) has formally stated that all of its authors may make their final drafts OA, without any access embargo (as at least 63% of journals have already done). If you have contractually agreed to an access embargo in your copyright agreement, you can instead set access to the deposit as Closed Access for the duration of the embargo. (Closed Access means only the metadata are openly accessible, not the full-text, until the embargo elapses.)

(3) If the journal or publisher has formally posted that you may make your final draft OA immediately and has elsewhere made negative statements inconsistent with that, act according to the positive statement until and unless you should ever receive a "take-down notice" from the publisher -- at which time you may simply re-set your OA deposit as Closed Access if you wish.

(4) Avoid agreeing contractually to any OA embargo wherever possible.

That, I think, is the only advice an institution and its repository should be giving its authors, to inform and reassure them about (1) their right to deposit and (2) their right to set access to their deposit as OA.

But none of this advice will have much effect one way or the other until and unless OU adopts an OA mandate:

[T]he 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.)" (Harnad 2009)

CS: "By posting on this issue, I am simply sharing information with the repository community to help us make informed decisions on behalf of our depositors. One of the biggest selling points when advocating open access self-archiving is to reassure our academics that we know what we are doing when it comes to checking publishers’ copyright and self-archiving policies. Depositors are placing their faith in our knowledge and expertise, and therefore I certainly do not think it is a mistake to be thorough."

The best institutional reassurance to its authors is an official institutional deposit mandate. The correct and complete advice (in my view) is (1) - (4) above. More (e.g., fretting about contradictory formal statements by publishers) would be just reinforcing author worries rather than reducing them.

Nor do authors need to resort to "faith." In cases where they have any "reasonable doubts" they should simply set access provisionally as "Closed Access," rather than not depositing at all -- or depositing only after any embargo has elapsed.

CS: "For green OA to be successful, it must be sustainable. For it to be sustainable, it needs to offer a good service."

For green OA to be sustainable, it has to be mandated. Otherwise there is nothing to sustain. Repository managers and library staff trying to beg, borrow or appeal deposits through reassurances about legality will never come anywhere near filling an IR with its target OA content. What is needed is an official institutional deposit mandate.

CS: "If academics think (rightly or wrongly) that we are placing them at risk by making decisions based on cherry-picked statements that suit us, I think most would not see this as providing a good service. Therefore, is it not a strategic mistake to not consider carefully any publisher mixed messages?"

I think that there might be an underlying premise here to the effect that: the way to fill an IR is to provide unmandated authors with a proxy deposit service together with reassuring legal advice. 

My own view, for what it's worth, is that this premise is profoundly erroneous: that (1) - (4) is all that repository managers and librarians need to do for authors (though if for some reason they really wish to, they can do their keystrokes for them too).

Any further effort and energy (apart from the technical maintenance of the IR, including the all-important incentive: IRstats) will be most fruitful if directed toward persuading the university (as well as its individual faculties, schools, departments and labs) of the necessity, feasibility and benefits of adopting a Green OA deposit mandate, rather than fussing about publishers' self-contradictory policy statements. We have to keep reminding ourselves that self-archiving is entirely in the hands of the research community, not the publishing community -- but those hands (or rather their fingertips) need to be mandated into movement:

It is useful for the research community to keep reminding itself that the only thing that stands between them and universal OA is keystrokes.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum