Forging An OA Alliance With R&D Industries and Mobilizing University Mandates

---

Napoleon Miradon has written a very insightful and informative commentary on Richard Poynder's powerful and timely article about the Brussels EU Conference and Petition: "Open Access: The War in Europe". Poynder analyzed the dynamics of the interaction between the Open Access (OA) movement, the European Commission, and the publishing industry lobby. Miradon suggested ways in which the OA movement could lobby legislators more successfully. Here, I suggest how (1) a strategic alliance with the R&D Industry (on behalf of maximising research uptake, usage and applications) as well as (2) direct action by universities (by adopting local Green OA mandates for their own research output) will help further accelerate global OA progress.

---

Many thanks for M. Miradon's remarkable analysis and valuable advice in his commentary on Richard Poynder's rousing article about the struggle for Open Access to European Research.

(M. Miradon, I do not know who you are, but I infer you are a present or formal EC official with a great deal of experience with EU politics and a certain sympathy for OA. The OA movement is indeed indebted to you for your insights and insider information.)

The "OA movement" is really just a loose federation of mostly academics. It is not skilled or experienced in the area of political lobbying, alas. Some sectors (SPARC US and Europe, perhaps) might be in a position to become more sophisticated in lobbying, but the individual OA activists, being employed academics -- researchers first and activists only second -- are not.

The lobbying wings of industries are paid professionals. We have none of those. There is a hope, though, namely, a strategic alliance (perhaps mediated by EURAB) between the academic-researcher OA activists and the vast R&D industry that applies the fruits of research. The R&D industries are far bigger than the publishing industry. They need to be explicitly mobilized to our side (because they too have a strong interest in open access to research, not for themselves directly [which they can easily afford to pay] but for all researchers worldwide [who cannot]: It is researcher-to-researcher access and collaborative/cumulative research progress that supplies R&D industries with the research findings for their R&D applications.

But let me make a parallel point: OA is (fortunately) not doomed to wait for legislation, and for lobbying and convincing legislators, in order to prevail. Let us not forget for a minute that if researchers themselves had any sense, we would already have 100% OA, for we would simply self-archive spontaneously. We are too sluggish, busy and confused. Fine, so we need mandates from our research funders and institutions (who are merely busy and confused). Part of their confusion is that they cannot mandate (Green) OA because of something or other having to do with the publishing industry. (It is as vague as that!)

So the problem falls into the laps of legislators, who must mandate the researchers' funders and institutions to mandate the researchers to move their fingers. But legislators have not only laps, but bottoms, which they must protect -- from the many lobbying interests to which they are vulnerable.

So lobbying becomes the name of the game, for the legislative route.

But there is a parallel route, and it has already been engaged in the UK (first) and to an extent also in Europe and Australia: This is the research funding councils (RCUK, ERC, ARC), who can take a cue from the inclinations and interests of the research community, and proceed with a Green OA mandate even if the legislators are deadlocked. And they have begun. And so have individual universities and research institutions. See ROARMAP. And in that sector OA activists can be effective (and have been) without having to learn to navigate the corridors of legislative power.

So, in my view, the Brussels meeting was a way to display the will of the research community: the EC petition did that, and now it has given birth to a US petition too. Petitions, of course, will not generate mandates either. But they will help the OA movement "lobby" funders and universities directly, to mandate. Indeed, funders, universities, research institutions, academies and societies, and R&D industries are signing the petitions, officially, as organisations. There remains but a small step to point out that these organisations need not petition the legislators to mandate them to mandate: They can mandate directly themselves!

That is the next step: There was already a logical gap in 2002, between researchers (34,000) signing the PLoS petition to publishers, demanding OA, yet not moving their fingers to deposit their own papers. There is now a second logical gap in research funders and institutions signing the EU and US petitions to legislators to mandate Green OA globally, while they do not go ahead individually and mandate OA locally, for their own funding body or their own university!

The gap between fingers signing petitions, fingers adopting mandates and fingers depositing papers will be bridged now. It has become too glaringly obvious to be ignored, with all these somber OA declarations, initiatives and manifestos, signed, but no practical action taken!

We will keep pursuing the indirect legislative route for global mandates, yes, but we will also publicise and accelerate the direct research-community route of divide and conquer: Local mandates are fully within our own hands, especially at the university level.

See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) (also known as the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

PS The request to present the petition to the commissioner in public at the Brussels meeting was denied, but it was nevertheless presented (in private), the presentation was photographed (by Leslie Chan) and the photos were presented at the last session of the meeting, publicly, in Alma Swan's stirring Powerpoint series.