Model University Self-Archiving Policy

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SUMMARY: Universities are adopting Open Access Self-Archiving Policies (which is a very good thing) but the policies are often not the optimal ones, and are sometimes even inadvertently reducing instead of enhancing the access potential of university research output. In this exchange with Prof. Andrew Colman of the University Leicester, and Prof. Diane Kornbrot of University of the University of Hertfordshire, the simple parametric tweaks are pointed out that can change an ineffective OA Policy into an effective one. They are:
    (1) requiring rather than requesting deposit
    (2) requiring deposit in the university's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than in a central or discipline-based repository elsewhere
    (3) requiring deposit of the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft, rather than the publisher's PDF (unless the publisher endorses PDF deposit)
    (4) requiring deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication rather than after a publisher-imposed delay or embargo period
    (5) during any embargo, deposits can instead simply be made Closed Access rather than Open Access (and the IR's "Fair Use" Button can send and receive eprint requests and eprints semi-automatically)

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Professor Andrew Colman, University of Leicester, wrote:

I am keen to have my publications archived where they are likely to be found by interested readers. After your encouraging reply [suggesting that I deposit, by default, peer-reviewed final manuscript drafts rather than the publisher's PDF], I spent a whole day retrieving 63 manuscript drafts of articles and tidying them up for deposit in the Leicester Research Archive. Because PDFs of the published versions are already in my own web space, I inserted a hyperlink on each manuscript version, directing readers to the PDF version.

I would advise you to to forward this exchange to the IP policy-makers at U Leicester, because the logic of the current UL policy has to be more carefully thought through. I am sure UL's motivation is to help, not hinder UL's research impact while ensuring everything is in conformity with the law. A few minor but critical changes in the current policy will accomplish both goals: maximal impact, and full legality:

A month later, less than half of my manuscripts are in the Leicester Research Archive. The archive has been seeking permission from the publishers [as a precondition] for archiving each manuscript draft, and, for those for which permission has been granted, have also carefully deleted the hyperlinks that I inserted at the top of each manuscript draft.

This is the policy that urgently needs to be carefully thought through again, as it has a few major, unnecessary flaws that are easily remediable, but do need to be remedied:

(1) All manuscripts should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Deposit itself is entirely the prerogative of UL, an internal matter, not requiring permission from anyone. It is only access-setting to that deposited document -- i.e. Open Access vs. Closed Access -- that can depend in part on publisher policy.

(2) If the UL archivists wish to query the publishers about access-setting, that's fine: in the meanwhile, access to the full texts of the deposits can be set as Closed Access.

(3) If the response to the query is affirmative (or the policy indexed in Romeo endorses immediate OA self-archiving), set access as Open Access; otherwise, rely on the "Request Copy" "Fair Use" Button the Archive provides for those would-be users who need access to the Closed Access deposits during any embargo period:

See: "How the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate + the 'Fair Use' Button Work"

(Deleting hyperlinks to the PDFs on your website makes no sense at all!)

I am not convinced of the value of manuscript drafts on their own. Researchers cannot rely on them, even if they are in fact faithful versions of the published articles, which is seldom the case because of copy-editing alterations that are often not even discussed with authors.

You are judging this against the wrong baseline:

(a) If a potential user has access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, they can and will use that. Those are not the users for whom the self-archived version is being provided.

(b) If a potential user does not have access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, then their problem is not that they don't have access to a "faithful" copy-edited version, but that they have no access at all! Those are the target users for whom OA is needed, and being provided, and they are the ones who double research impact if they are at last given access.

Please do not think of OA self-archiving as a substitute subscription access (for now). The self-archived draft is a supplement to the subscription draft, provided for those who are denied subscription access. You can make your final draft as faithful as you judge necessary. But it would be a profound error in judgment and priorities to deprive would-be users of access altogether, when they can't afford subscription access at all, mistakenly thinking you are thereby protecting them from being deprived of the copy-editing!

Even if one had confidence in the accuracy of a manuscript version, it would be impossible to quote from it, because the pagination would be missing. I don't find other researchers' manuscript drafts nearly as useful as final PDFs.

Again, you are weighing this entirely from the wrong viewpoint: Those who can't access it, cannot read or use your research at all.

(And of course one can quote from a manuscript version. One quotes it, specifying the section and paragraph number instead of the page! That is in fact more accurate and scholarly than a page reference. And if the copy-editor (of the article one is writing, in which one is quoting from an article for which one only has access to the final draft, not the PDF) requests page-spans, that's the time to tell the copy-editor that one does not have subscription access, so let them look up the page numbers -- or use the even better scholarly indicator of section name and paragraph number.)

You said that "Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well". Worse than that, the person handling my submissions believes that publishers need to be contacted for each item, and that "unfortunately I do have to wait for permission to archive them, even if they are drafts. Generally publishers do not allow the 'as published versions' to be archived by anyone apart from themselves on their own sites and so for us to archive them, or provide links to sites, other than the publisher's official site, may breach copyright law... Unfortunately we are not allowed to even archive the drafts from the following publications which you have articles in [followed by a list]".

This UL provisional policy has not been thought through and needs only a few simple parametric changes to make it sensible and effective:

(i) The manuscript can and should be deposited immediately. No one's permission is needed for that, and the metadata are then immediately visible webwide, and the "Fair Use" Button can start doing its job.

(ii) The journal policy can already be looked up in Romeo for most journals, and that means 62% of the immediate deposits can definitely be set to Open Access immediately. The archivist can write to the publisher to double-check the policy if they wish, but meanwhile the deposit should be set as OA for that 62%:

(iii) For the remaining 38% of immediate-deposits, set access initially as Closed Access, and let the archivist inquire, if they wish. Meanwhile the Fair Use button will be doing its job.

See: "Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the Decision Loop"

Is this [i.e., UL's current policy] right, and if not, is there perhaps a different archive in which I and my colleagues could place our articles? I have several colleagues who are keen on this idea but are not attracted by the very partial solution available locally.

The Leicester Archive policy is very wrong on this score. I urge you to take it up with the administration, because currently they are shooting themselves in the foot, gratuitously, with this flawed policy, so easily corrected.

Yes, there are other Archives (e.g. Depot or CogPrints) you could deposit it in, but it would be a great pity if Leicester did not sort out its own deposit policy, as it is so simple to do: I. All manuscripts should be deposited immediately.

II. Not only the archivists but the authors should be able to deposit, as they can in virtually all of the other IRs worldwide. Almost no IR restricts depositing to proxy archivists (and those few that do are making a big mistake in imposing this needless and counterproductive restriction).

III. If there are worries about rights, check Romeo, and, if the archivist wishes, also write to the publisher. But meanwhile, deposit immediately and set Access as Closed Access if in doubt.

IV. Implement the "Fair Use" Button.

V. Adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) policy.

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Professor Diana Kornbrot of the University of Hertfordshire added:

I am having similar problems at University of Hertfordshire.
Is there somewhere a draft code of practice or policy (e.g. How is it done at Southampton) that we could all show to our Univ admin people?

Yes there is a draft code of practice!

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

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Universities are invited to use this document to help encourage the adoption of an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at their institution. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions; but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months).
    This IDOA policy is greatly preferable to, and far more effective than a policy that allows delayed deposit (embargo) or opt-out as determined by publisher policy or copyright restrictions. The restrictions apply only to the access-setting, not to the deposit, which must be immediate. Closed Access deposit is purely an institution-internal book-keeping matter, with the institution's own assets, and no publisher policy or copyright restriction applies to it.
    [In the meanwhile, if there needs to be an embargo period, the IR software has a semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button that allows any would-be user to request (by entering their email address and clicking) and then allows any author to provide (by simply clicking on a URL that appears in the eprint request received by email) a single copy of the deposited draft, by email, on an individual basis (a practice that falls fully under Fair Use). This provides almost-immediate, almost-Open Access to tide over research usage needs during any Closed Access period.]

2. Professor Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, which has an OA self-archiving mandate (designed by Prof. Sale) has also provided a "Generic Risk Analysis of Open Access For Your Institution".

3. Model policies for research funders have also been drafted (collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad, by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement).

4. And here is the OA Self-Archiving Policy of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (the first OA self-archiving mandate - from 2001):

1. It is our policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.
1a. It is also our policy to minimise the effort that each of us has to expend in order to provide open online access to our research output: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
1b. With all our research output accessible online we will be able to respond to the research assessment and other administrative initiatives with minimal input and effort from individual staff.
2. We have accordingly adopted the policy that all research output is to be self-archived in the departmental EPrint Archive before and after peer-reviewed publication. This archive forms the official record of the Department's research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source.
3. Our policy is compatible with publishers' copyright agreements as follows:
3a. The copyright for the unrefereed preprint resides entirely with the author before it is submitted for peer-reviewed publication, hence it can be self-archived irrespective of the copyright policy of the journal to which it is eventually submitted.
3b. The copyright for the peer-reviewed postprint will depend on the wording of the copyright agreement which the author signs with the publisher.
3c. Many publishers will allow the peer-reviewed postprint to be self-archived. The copyright transfer agreement will either specify this right explicitly or the author can inquire about it directly. If you are uncertain about the terms of your agreement, a directory of journal self-archiving policies -- http://romeo.eprints.org -- is available to guide you. Wherever possible, you are advised to modify your copyright agreement so that it does not disallow self-archiving.
3d. In the rare case where you have signed a very restrictive copyright transfer form in which you have agreed explicitly not to self-archive the peer-reviewed postprint, you are encouraged to self-archive, alongside your already-archived preprint, a "corrigenda" file, listing the substantive changes the user would need to make in order to turn the unrefereed preprint into the refereed postprint.
3e. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department's infrastructure for your personal homepage.
4. We do not require you to archive the full text of books or research monographs. It is sufficient to archive the references along with the usual metadata.
5. Some journals still maintain submission policies which state that a preprint will not be considered for publication if it has been previously 'publicised' by making it accessible online. Unlike copyright transfer agreements, such policies are not a matter of law. If you have concerns about submitting an archived paper to a journal which still maintains such a restrictive submission policy, please discuss it with the Department's IPR and Copyright Advisor.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum