How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

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SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's and RCUK's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's and U. Liege's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate funder mandates and university mandates to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
      Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact.
      Universities (and research institutions) also have a direct interest in ensuring that their researchers fulfill their funders' conditions for awarding grants.
      Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for both institutional and funder monitoring and record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

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There is a simple, natural, universal way to integrate (a) funder open-access mandates and (b) university open-access mandates, reconciling the NIH and Harvard OA mandates, as well as making the two kinds of mandate synergistic and mutually reinforcing:

(i) Separate the deposit requirement from the open access requirement.

(ii) Separate the issue of the locus and timing of the deposit from the issue of the locus and timing and copyright conditions for providing open access to the deposit.

Both universities and funders should mandate immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed final draft (postprint), in the author's own university's Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exceptions or opt-outs, for institutional record-keeping purposes.

Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions permit it. Otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes (with only the metadata visible and accessible webwide, not the postprint full-texts).

All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to (ii) the timing and copyright conditions for providing open access to the deposit, not to (i) the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.

That way:

(1) there will be a systematic (and natural) common locus of direct deposit for all research output worldwide;
(2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates;
(3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates;
(4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes can be applied independently of the deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of the mandate (instead of needlessly making (1)-(3) contingent on each case);
(5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and
(6) central OA repositories (like PubMed Central) can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

Right now, the NIH mandate requires that the postprint must be "submitted" immediately upon acceptance for publication (which is excellent!), but it does not specify how or where to submit it!

The obvious solution is that the postprint should be directly deposited, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into the researcher's own university's (or institution's) IR -- possibly as Closed Access rather than Open Access, depending on copyright and embargo conditions and negotiations. (NIH can then be sent the URL, and given access privileges.)

The recommendations of the SPARC/Science Commons/ARL joint white paper "Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright Considerations and Options" by Michael Carroll are all excellent: Their only flaw is in not separating those valid and helpful considerations and options from the question of the locus and timing of the deposit itself. That locus should always be the author's IR, and the timing should always be immediately upon acceptance for publication. None of the copyright considerations are pertinent to the deposit itself: They apply only to the provision of open access to the deposits.

In exactly the same way, the Harvard mandate is excellent in every respect except that it too conflates the deposit itself with the copyright and embargo considerations and options: Those considerations and options should only apply to whether and when open access to the deposit is provided, not whether and when the deposit itself is done. The Harvard mandate offers the option of opting out of the requirement to negotiate copyright retention. That makes the Harvard mandate into a non-mandate unless the copyright requirement, with opt-out, is separated from a deposit requirement, without opt-out.

The solution proposed here is simple, natural, solves both the NIH and Harvard problems at once, makes the funder and university mandates complementary and convergent, and provides an integrated, synergistic OA mandate model for both funders and universities that will systematically scale to all worldwide research input.

I hope that funders and universities will give this integrative proposal serious thought, rather than just pressing ahead with the current NIH and Harvard models, both of them welcome and timely, but both in need of this small yet crucial revision to ensure their coherence and success.

It is noteworthy that three recommendations were made to NIH three years ago: (1) mandate immediate deposit, with no opt-out, (2) specify direct deposit in the fundee's university IR, and (3) harvest into PubMed Central.

Those recommendations were not followed, and after three years the NIH policy was acknowledged to have failed. Because of that failure, the policy has very recently been upgraded to an immediate-deposit mandate (1). But there are already signs (from the very similar Wellcome Trust mandate) that systematic monitoring mechanisms are needed to ensure compliance with funder mandates.

University mandates are the obvious means of reinforcing and monitoring compliance with funder mandates (as part of the fulfillment conditions for receiving the grant overheads and indirect costs allotments). Moreover, university IRs are also the natural, convergent locus for direct deposit of all research output: The universities are the providers of the research, both funded and unfunded, and they have a direct institutional interest in archiving, recording, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research output as well as in maximizing its uptake, usage and impact.

Funder mandates like NIH's will naturally reinforce university mandates, like Harvard's. The two mandating parties simply have to agree on separating the universal issue of deposit itself (and the locus and timing of that direct deposit) from the independent, item-specific issue of the timing of the provision of Open Access to that deposit, its copyright conditions, embargo duration, and whatever central repositories may wish to harvest that OA deposit or its metadata, where and when.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum