Open Access Archivangelism

There are two essential components to an effective “Green” OA mandate (i.e., a mandate that generates as close to 100% compliance, as soon as possible):

(1) The mandate must uncouple the date of deposit from the date the deposit is made OA, requiring immediate deposit, with no exemptions or exceptions. How long an OA embargo it allows is a separate matter, but on no account must date of deposit be allowed to be contingent on publisher OA embargoes.

This is exactly what the New HEFCE policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework has done.

(2) Eligibility for research assessment (and funding) must be made conditional on immediate-deposit (date-stamped by the journal acceptance letter). Again, this is in order to ensure that deposits are not made months or years after publication: no retrospective deposit.

The deposit requirement for eligibility for research assessment and funding is not itself an OA requirement, it is merely a procedural requirement: For eligibility, papers must be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Late deposits are not eligible for consideration.

This engages each university (always extremely anxious to comply fully with REF, HEFCE and RCUK eligibility rules) in ensuring that deposit is timely, with the help of the date-stamped acceptance letter throughout the entire 6-year REF cycle, 2014-2020.

These two conditions are what have yielded the most effective of all the Green OA mandates to date (well over 80% compliance rate and growing) at University of Liege and FRS-FNRS (the Belgian Francophone research funding council). Other mandates have since been upgrading to this mandate model: Harvard FAS has already adopted immediate-deposit as one of its conditions. So has the European Commission's Horizon2020. And now RCUK — thanks to HEFCE/REF — will reap the benefits of the immediate-deposit condition as well (see ROARMAP)

OA embargoes are another matter, and HEFCE/REF is wisely leaving that to others (RCUK, EU Horizon2020, and university mandates) to stipulate maximal allowable embargo length and any allowable exceptions. What HEFCE/REF is providing is the crucial two components for ensuring that the mandate will succeed: (1) immediate deposit as a (2) condition for REF-eligibility.

But let me add something else that will become increasingly important, once the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit requirement begins to propagate worldwide (as I am now confident it will: UK is at last back in the lead on OA again, instead of odd-man-out, as it has been since Finch):

The immediate-deposit clause and the contingency on eligibility for research assessment and funding also ensures that the primary locus of deposit will be the institutional repository rather than institution-external repositories. (Deposits can be exported automatically to external repositories, once deposited and once the embargo has elapsed; they can also be imported from extrenal repositories, in the case of the physicists and mathematicians who have already been faithfully depositing in Arxiv for two decades,)

But besides all that, many of the eprints and dspace institutional repositories already have — and, with the HEFCE mandate model propagating almost all of them will soon have the email-eprint-request Button:

This Button makes it possible for users who reach a closed access deposit to click once to request a copy for research purposes; the repository software emails an automatic eprint request to the author, who can click once to comply with the request; the repository software emails the requestor the eprint. (Researchers have been requesting and sending reprints by mail — and lately by email — for decades, but with immediate-deposit and the Button, this is greatly accelerated and facilitated. So even during any allowable embargo period, the Button will enhance access and usage dramatically. I also predict that immediate-deposit and the Button will greatly hasten the inevitable and well-deserved demise of publisher OA embargoes.)

Let me close by noting another important feature of the new HEFCE/REF policy: The allowable exceptions do not apply to the immediate-deposit requirement! They only apply to the allowable open-access embargo. To be eligible for REF2020, a paper must have been deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (with a 3-month grace period).

(No worries about HEFCE's optional 2 year start-up grace period either: Institutions will almost certainly want their REF procedures safely and systematically in place as early as possible, so everything can go simply and smoothly and there is no risk of papers being ineligible.)

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Postscript. Expect the usual complaints from the usual suspects:

(i) "This is a sell-out of OA! It's just Green Gratis OA, not Libre OA: What about the re-use rights? And if it’s embargoed, it isn’t even Green OA!"

Reply: Relax. Patience. A compromise was needed, to break the log-jam between the Finch/Wellcome Fool’s-Gold profligacy and publisher embargoes on Green OA. The HEFCE immediate-deposit compromise is what will break up that log jam, and it’s not only the fastest and surest (and cheapest) way to get to 100% Green Gratis OA, but also the fastest, surest and cheapest way to get from Green Gratis OA to Libre Fair-Gold OA.

(ii) "This is a sell-out to publishers and their embargoes."

Reply: Quite the opposite. It will immediately detoxify embargoes (thanks to the Button) and at the same time plant the seeds for their speedy extinction, by depriving publishers of the power to delay access-provision with their embargoes. It is also moots the worries of the most timorous or pedantic IP lawyer.

It thereby provides a mandate model that any funder or institution can adopt, irrespective of how it elects to deal with publisher OA embargoes.

And a mandate that can be simply and effectively implemented and monitored by institutions to ensure compliance.

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Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35

Harnad, S (2006) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model. Open Access Archivangelism 71

Rentier, B. (2009) Liege Mandate Definitely Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (or Dual Deposit/Release: IDOA/DDR) Open Access Archivangelism 502

______ (2011) Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model Open Access Archivangelism 864

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In, Open Access Week 2012

Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog. July 4 2012

______ (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cat’s grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September 3rd 2012

______ (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

______ (2012) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

______ (2012) Public Access to Federally Funded Research (Response to US OSTP RFI) Open Access Archivangelism 865/866

Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V & Harnad, S (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, A Swan & AA Baptista, Eds. Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na UMinho no Mundo.

Harnad, S (2013) Finch Group reviews progress in implementing open access transition amid ongoing criticisms. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog November 18th 2013

______ (2013) “Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog December 5th, 2013

______ (2013) Follow-Up Comments for BIS Select Committee on Open Access. UK Parliament Publications and Records, Spring Issue

______ (2013) Evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Open Access, Winter Issue, 119-123.

______ (2013) Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014

______ (2013) Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access. Written Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access, Winter Issue

______ (2013) Recommandation au ministre québécois de l'enseignement supérieur.

______ (2013) Comments on Canada’s NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. Canadian Tri-Agency Call for Comments, Autumn Issue

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

(partial list, to be updated: please provide corrections and additions):

- Start with a 2/3 supermajority, generated by a smear campaign and inciting mobs to violence

- Gerrymander the electoral districts

- Adopt laws to control the media

- Buy up the media

- Recruit and buy up corrupt oligarchs

- Re-write the constitution

- Adopt new laws and amendments whenever desired

- Retire the judiciary and appoint your own

- Take over the national bank presidency

- Take over private pensions

- Nationalise businesses and properties, then re-privatize to cronies

- Conduct press and police campaigns to smear the opposition

- Use EU subsidies to fund government electoral campaign

- Limit electoral campaigning in media

- Fund private foundations to do limitless media promotion of government

- Use taxes and subsidies to lower utility costs to disguise economic decline

- Blame all economic ills on opposition

- Oblige tenement owners to advertise utility savings

- Enfranchise non-citizens in adjoining countries to vote; facilitate their voting

- Make it as difficult as possible for citizens living abroad to vote (misinformation, red tape)

- Fund the fraudulent creation of many bogus opposition parties to create confusion in the ballot box

- Have oligarchs buy up all poster campaign space for government posters

- Adopt laws restricting campaign posting in public view

- Use media control to foster a popular climate of hatred toward the opposition and xenophobia toward the outside world

- Borrow bail-out funds at extortionate rates from Russia for nuclear plant building

- Use the loan to fund “Hungary is Performing Better” campaign

- Leak innuendos and initiate criminal proceedings against the opposition weekly, dropping them once they prove groundless and have already done their damage

[Please re-post this list amended and expanded: Maybe there's hope to get it to go viral before the elections]

All this potential research money wasted — utterly wasted — on Fools Gold. Some Reflection from Wellcome Would be Welcome.

Falk Reckling: If Green OA would really work (Fools Green?), we would not need such compromises, but some of them could work: http://ioppublishing.org/newsDetails/Austria-open-access

There's no "Fools Green" just foolish OA policy (or non-policy). Green OA works perfectly well when it is effectively mandated (as it is by FRS in Belgium, U Liège, U Minho and others; see ROARMAP).

FWF, for example, fails to (1) mandate immediate institutional deposit, irrespective of publisher embargo on OA, and fails to (2) make research evaluation and funding contingent on immediate institutional deposit, as the effective Green OA mandates do. This effectively makes compliance with the FWF "mandate" completely contingent on publisher policy. OeAW does much the same.

It may seem more sensible to pay for Fools Gold than to think, pay attention to the empirical evidence, and design an effective policy, but in fact it's a regrettable and needless waste of time and money.

See:
Optimizing the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) Open Access Mandate: I & II

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In, Open Access Week 2012

Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V & Harnad, S (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, A Swan & AA Baptista, Eds. Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na UMinho no Mundo.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Falk Reckling: Stevan, I personally appreciate your efforts very much, always inspiring, but how to install a Green OA if most of the institutions in Austria have no repository and if a lot of researchers like to prefer to deposit the version of record ? That is the reason our OA policy offers equal options, see: http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/public_relations/oai/index.html

Falk, my suggestions:

(1) Mandate (i.e., require) institutional repository deposit of the refereed final draft immediately upon acceptance as a condition for research evaluation or FWF funding. (The FWF mandate will be backed up by a very similar EU Horizon2020 mandate.)

(2) If the fundee's institution does not yet have a repository, recommend OpenDepot as the provisional locus of deposit until the institution has a repository of its own.

Researchers will deposit, and institutions will create repositories and verify compliance, just as in every other country with an effective Green OA policy.

According to OpenDoar, Austria already has 9 institutional repositories (plus two disciplinary ones).

Falk Reckling: just have a look at that these repositories

Of course those repositories are mostly empty! That's the point! They will not fill until FWF and OeAW (and then the institutions themselves) adopt effective mandates. It is circular to say that there's no point to upgrade our Green OA mandates to make them effective because the repositories are empty! The empty repositories are the reason the mandates need to be upgraded. And the upgrade to immediate institutional deposit as a condition of evaluation and funding works. (Try it and you will see.) And I did say that institutional repositories would be created in response to effective Green OA mandates...

Wouter Gerritsma, wrote in GOAL:

"For two working groups of the Dutch University libraries I was asked to make a calculation for the costs of a 100% Gold open access model. It will only costs 10.5 million euro extra was my conclusion. Blogged at http://wowter.net/2014/03/05/costs-going-gold-netherlands/"

Unless I have misunderstand, this "10.5 million euro extra” for Dutch University Libraries means 10.5 million euro extra over and above what Dutch University Libraries are paying for subscriptions (34 million euros).

In other words, for a surcharge of 10.5 million dollars, Dutch University libraries can purchase gold OA for Dutch research output (assuming that suitable gold OA journals exist for all Dutch research output, and that all Dutch researchers are willing to publish in them).

But, at the same time, Dutch University libraries also have to continue to pay to subscribe to the research input from all other universities and research institutions worldwide, as long as the latter publish in subscription-based journals rather than gold OA journals (or are unwilling or unable to pay for gold OA).

This pre-emptive double-payment for gold OA I have come to call “Fool’s Gold."

What is being left out of this calculation, of course, is that the Netherlands, like all countries, can have OA at no extra cost at all by mandating green OA self-archiving of all of its research output in Dutch universities’ institutional repositories.

In other words, Wouter's calculations sound like a response to Sander Dekker's Dutch echo of the UK Finch Committee recommendations to pay extra for gold OA instead of just mandating green OA.

Such recommendations originate, not coincidentally, from the two countries with the heaviest concentration of the journal publishing industry, and hence the journal publishing industry lobby, as repeatedly voiced in the Netherlands by Sander Dekker, Netherlands State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

All the published objections to the Finch recommendations would apply to Dekker’s Dutch recommendations if they were ever to become a policy (mandate). Fortunately they are not mandatory and can and should be ignored in favor of mandating green OA, as the European Commission has done. The UK mandate will also (it is to be hoped) shortly shored up with an immediate-deposit requirement from HEFCE.

To understand why green OA needs to be mandated first, and how it will first provide OA, and then make subscriptions unsustainable, inducing publishers to cut costs and convert to Fair Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price by offloading all archiving and access provision onto the worldwide network of mandatory green OA institutional repositories, see:

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

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Wouter Gerritsma replied:

Stevan,
 
Yes we could have green with the current subscription models and repository infrastructure. But still some important players don’t allow green (Wiley, Nature and ACS to mention a few)
 
But all I wanted to do, and was requested to do, to make a calculation to see what it would cost if our junior minister Sander Dekker would get what he wanted. Complete Gold OA for the Netherlands.
 
It would cost us 43 instead of 34 million euro.
Currently we are spending already 34 (subscriptions) plus 4 million (OA APC). So we are rapidly falling into a trap of paying twice http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/30/paying-twice-or-paying-thrice-brienza/
 
Wouter  

Wouter,

Yes, of course I knew that you were only the messenger, and doing the calculation! It is the pressure from Sander Dekker (or, rather, from those who are putting the pressure on Sander Dekker!) that is behind the foolish idea of increasing the already overstretched Dutch research publication budget by 30% from 34M euros for subscriptions to 43M by adding payment for pre-emptive, over-priced, double-paid Fool's Gold OA!

But there is a solution for green OA embargoes: In the case of Elsevier, they're no problem, because Elsevier does not have a green OA embargo -- just a lot of empty, non-binding pseudo-legalistic double-talk about authors retaining the right to self-archive unembargoed "except if they are required [mandated] to exercise that retained right." 

That is of course patent nonsense. But for those timid authors who don't realize it, they can still be mandated to deposit the final refereed draft of their articles in their IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to keep it under "Closed Access" if they wish to comply with an embargo. The author can then provide individual access on a case-by-case basis: Users click the IR's eprint-request Button to request an individual copy, and the author can then comply with the request with one click.

Needless extra clicks for the (timid) author, but extra access too, and extra usage, uptake, and impact. (And a lot better than paying a needless extra 10M!)

And of course the result after a few years of mandatory immediate deposit, providing 60% immediate OA for the unembargoed deposits and 40% Button-mediated access will be that embargoes will quietly die their inevitable, well-deserved deaths, as more and more authors provide immediate OA instead of clicks.

Green OA embargoes, in other words, are illusory impediments, bits of FUD to confound timid authors. No sensible person on the planet believes they have any chance of actually holding back the Green OA dam (something the citizens of the Netherlands should understand!).

Best wishes,

Stevan