Institutional OA Mandates Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates

Commentary on: Zoe Corbyn "Low compliance with open-access rule criticised" Times Higher Education Supplement 21 February 2008

A study of the compliance rate for the Wellcome Trust's Green Open Access Self Archiving Mandate presented at the 2008 Boston AAAS meeting reported a self-archiving rate of around 30% eight months after the policy came into effect. This is considerably higher than the NIH non-mandate's 4% rate (recently upgraded to a mandate), and it is above the overall 5-15% spontaneous baseline rate for self-archiving, but it is not clear whether it is climbing as high or as fast as the compliance rate for institutional mandates (approaching 80-100% within 2 years). If it is not, then this is yet another reason for mandating institutional rather than central deposit, and deposit by the author rather than by the author-or-publisher. That way each institution can add its own weight to the funder mandates, and can monitor compliance.

(1) The spontaneous baseline rate for unmandated OA self-archiving is between 5% and 15%, depending on field. Anything above that is an improvement.

(2) Arthur Sale's analyses comparing deposit rates for mandated and unmandated Institutional Repositories (IRs) show that (2a) unmandated deposits hover between 5-15%, (2b) encouraged and incentivized deposits climb toward 30% but not much higher, whereas (2c) mandated deposits approach 80-100% within about two years of adoption of the mandate.

(3) Sale's data are for author self-archiving, in the author's own institutional repository (IR), mandated and monitored by the author's own institution.

(4) The funder mandates have not been in place long enough for a good estimate of their rate of success, but three things are already evident:

(4a) A researcher's funder is not in as good a position to monitor and enforce compliance with a self-archiving mandate as a researcher's institution is: Institutions conduct annual reviews of their employees' publication output and can easily determine whether or not articles are deposited in their own IR. Funders do not conduct such annual publication audits (though they could).

(4b) If the funder requires central deposit (as Wellcome does, in PubMed Central) this means funders cannot rely on the researcher's institution to monitor and enforce compliance with the terms of the grant, insofar as author self-archiving is concerned.

(4c) With the funder's deposit requirement fulfillable in two different ways -- through author self-archiving or through publisher deposit -- it makes it even more difficult to coordinate, monitor and verify compliance.

The solution is quite obvious: Funders should not be mandating deposit in central repositories, such as PubMed Central. They should be mandating deposit in the author's own Institution's Repository (from which central indexing services or central repositories like PubMed Central can harvest it). And the depositing should be done by the author, not the publisher. That way the author's institution can systematically monitor and enforce compliance, feeding back to the funder; and the central repository need merely harvest the deposits from the distributed IRs, if it wishes.

It was absurd all along to insist on central self-archiving, in the age of OAI-compliant, interoperable IRs, designed specifically in order to facilitate central harvesting! It was also absurd to have institutional and funder mandates pulling in different directions, toward different repositories, instead of pooling resources and collaborating, as funders and institutions do in all other respects.

Perhaps most relevant to Wellcome's apparently slow rate of compliance are the exciting recent developments concerning the Sleeping Giant of Open Access: the Institutions (Universities, mostly), and their actual and future self-archiving mandates:

There are now 22 funder mandates (including, recently, NIH) and 16 institutional and departmental mandates (including, even more recently, Harvard) plus the unanimous recommendation of the Council of the European Universities Association that its 791 universities in 46 countries should adopt OA self-archiving mandates.

Institutions are the providers of all research output -- funded and unfunded -- in all disciplines. It makes no sense for funders to mandate that the researchers they fund should deposit directly in arbitrary central repositories. The rational, coherent way to mandate OA -- the one that will systematically scale up to cover 100% of research output, across all disciplines, worldwide -- is for both funders and institutions to mandate institutional deposit, and then for institutions to monitor compliance (as part of the conditions for receiving the funder's grant in the first place!).

In sum, Wellcome's mandate compliance rate may be coming along, it's too early to say; but funders need to get compliance and fulfillment conditions in place. The most efficient and practical way to do that is to collaborate with their own fundees' institutions (who are usually co-recipients of the grants anyway), to make sure they monitor compliance; deposit should be by the author, in the author's own institution's IR (then PubMed Central and any other central service can harvest from there).

This will create a systematic synergy between funder and institution mandates, and ensure that they facilitate one another and converge (on the institutionally mandated and monitored IRs) rather than diverging willy-nilly, somewhere in an arbitrary array of criss-crossing IRs and/or CRs.

Stevan Harnad