Librarians Applauding Embargoes on Open Access to Research Findings?

---

SUMMARY: Some librarians still applaud access embargoes, for reasons of which they will not be proud, in due course. Other librarians are doing magnificent, front-line work in the Open Access Movement. But the ones who will really have reason to be ashamed (once we reach the optimal, inevitable, and long overdue outcome at long last) are not librarians but researchers themselves: They are the only ones who can provide OA and they are also OA's primary beneficiaries. That it proved to require Green OA mandates from their employers and funders in order to induce researchers to act in their own interests -- by doing the few keystrokes that were the only thing that ever stood between them and 100% OA -- is a puzzle that historians will have to work out after it's all over. For now, however, the latest Green OA self-archiving mandates from Russia and Turkey are yet another step in the right direction.

---

On Thu, 3 May 2007, Rick Anderson (RA), Director of Resource Acquisition,
University of Nevada-Reno Libraries, wrote in liblicense, regarding the newly announced Russian and Turkish Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates:

RA: "Bravo in particular to the Russian institution, whose policy allows for a reasonable embargo period."

(1) It is odd (and rather sad) to see a librarian applauding an embargo on researchers' access to research findings.

(2) The Russian ROARMAP entry says this:

All researchers of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences are mandated by a director's decree to immediately deposit their papers/articles in the institutional Open Archive.

The accompanying link adds: "...mandate researchers of CEMI RAS to deposit all their completed research (in a working paper form), including the full text, in institutional OA (repository) not later than 6 months after their completion."

There is some linguistic ambiguity there, which I wrote to ask Professor Parinov to clarify (see his replies below). My guess was that CEMI is anxious to have the pre-refereeing preprints deposited too, and so what the director meant here was that if an economist writes a paper, it needs to be deposited within 6 months of its completion.

Reply from Prof. Parinov: "The CEMI OA self-archiving mandate policy means exactly this. Any completed research has to be deposited for public access within 6 months of completion, even if it still has the status of a pre-refereeng preprint at that time."

Hence this is not a reference to embargoing access to the final, refereed draft (the postprint).

I also asked Prof. Parinov to clarify:

(a) whether the statement meant that the clock starts at the moment of the completion of the preprint [Prof. Parinov's reply: "Exactly"],

(b) whether the postprint must be deposited immediately on acceptance [Prof. Parinov: "Yes]", and

(c) whether, if access to the postprint is not immediately set to "Open Access," then the "Fair Use Button" (allowing for semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUESTS) will be implemented to cover any research usage needs during any Closed Access embargo period. [Prof. Parinov: "Yes. We have in our "to-do" plan an implementation of such an "eprint request" button]."

(Economics has an established preprint self-archiving practice analogous to that in physics. In no field is it possible, or advisable, to force authors to make their unrefereed drafts public if they do not wish to. Hence my guess is that the 6-month window is intended more to ensure that completed papers are submitted for publication, rather than sat upon. In other words, it is just a manifestation of "publish or perish.")

RA: "The policy of the Turkish institution is presented much more sketchily in ROARMAP":

Require... researchers to deposit a copy of all their Masters and Ph.D. theses, published and refereed articles in the Institutional Repository of Middle East Technical University, if there are no legal objections...

"So there may be also be sufficient flexibility in the Turkish model to allow for commercial publishing prior to the OA deposit, but it's not at all clear."

Again, the Turkish statement could be made clearer, specifying that the deposit should be immediately upon acceptance of the refereed final draft (postprint) and that "legal objections", if any, pertain only to the date of access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access), not to the date of the deposit itself, which should be done immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Again, the Fair Use Button can tide over research usage needs during any embargo period.)

"Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?"

Let me close with a personal observation: I have criticised (some) librarians for being part of the problem rather than the solution insofar as OA is concerned. I think that is still very true, but perhaps misleading, because it is equally true that some librarians are not only part of the solution, but leaders of the worldwide OA movement toward the optimal and inevitable solution. (Prominent examples are Hélène Bosc of Euroscience, Eloy Rodriques of Minho, Derek Law of Glasgow; there are many, many others too.)

And history will make it clear that the real problem that delayed OA for well over a decade beyond the time when it was already fully within reach was not those in the library community who favored embargoing OA (or ignoring OA altogether); nor was it "legal objections." The historic cause of the unnecessary and conterproductive delay was the vast majority (85%) of the research community itself -- the very one ones who are both the providers and the beneficiaries of OA. Their causal role can best be described as inertial inaction. That is why mandates by their institutions and their funders became necessary at all.

Applauding access embargoes strikes me as a paradigmatic example of the regressive role of some parts of the library community. But researchers sitting on their hands until the keystrokes were mandated trumps that several times over:

"...why did the Give-Away authors not flock to the new medium, and the free, open, global access to their work that it would provide? This is what next year's millennium is poised to chide us for. There are some excuses, but at bottom it will be seen to be the sluggishness of human nature and its superstitious cleavage to old habits." (D-lib Magazine 1999)

(I shall abstain from the inevitable ensuing round of speculation and counterspeculation about the destruction of journal publishing if immediate OA self-archiving is mandated: It is in order to moot and thereby bypass all of that idle conjecturing -- and equally idle "legal objections" -- that the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access compromise mandate plus the Fair Use Button were designed.)

"The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model"

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum