In Defense of the American Psychological Association's Green OA Policy

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SUMMARY: So the American Psychological Association (APA) is trying to charge $2500 per article to fulfill NIH's Green OA mandate by proxy-depositing in PubMed Central on the author's behalf? So maybe if NIH had sensibly mandated depositing in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), this awkward problem wouldn't have come up? Like the majority of journals, APA journals -- unlike ACS journals -- are Green on authors self-archiving in their own IRs. There's still time to fix the NIH mandate so good sense can prevail...

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Although it looks bad on the face of it -- the American Psychological Association (APA) charging the author's institution and/or research grant $2500, not even for Gold OA publishing, but just for depositing the author's refereed final draft in PubMed Central (PMC) on the author's behalf ("proxy self-archiving"), in order to fulfill the NIH mandate -- things are not always as they seem.

There is no culprit in this nonsense, but if I had to pinpoint its provenance, it would be the foolish form in which the NIH -- despite relentlessly repeated advice and reasons to the contrary -- insisted on drafting its policy:

To cut to the quick, there is no earthly reason NIH should insist on direct deposit in PMC. The mandate should be (and should all along have been) to deposit in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR). PMC can then harvest the metadata and link to the IR-deposited full-text itself from there.

Unlike the American Chemical Society journals (which have unswervingly opposed Green OA), the American Psychological Association journals (after initial opposition, and eventually the majority of other journals) -- for reasons they would have found it very hard to justify flouting -- have long given their green light to immediate deposit (no delay, no embargo, and of course no fee) in the author's own IR:

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APA Policy on Posting Articles on the Internet

Update effective June 1, 2002

Authors of articles published in APA journals may post a copy of the final manuscript, as a word processing, PDF, or other type file, on their Web site or their employer's server after it is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail:

• The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page.
• Further, the posted article must include the following statement: "This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record."
• APA does not permit archiving with any other non-APA repositories.
• APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA published version.

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To repeat, a publisher that is Green on immediate OA self-archiving in the author's own IR is squarely on the side of the angels. (If that publisher seeks to profit from NIH's gratuitous insistence on institution-external deposit, by treating PMC as a 3rd-party free-loader or rival publisher, hence legally requiring permission or payment to re-publish, I would say that NIH drew that upon itself. As noted many times, that technicality does not work with an author's own institution.)

And it is remediable: Simply revise the NIH mandate to require institutional IR deposit of the accepted final draft, immediately upon acceptance (with a cap on the permissible embargo length, if any). That is the sensible policy -- and nature will take care of the rest, with universal OA just around the corner.

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004)

Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy! (Jan 2005)

National Institutes of Health: Report on the NIH Public Access Policy. In: Department of Health and Human Services (Jan 2006, reporting 3.8% compliance rate after 8 months for its first, non-mandatory deposit policy)

Central versus institutional self-archiving (Sep 2006)

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? (Sep 2006)

THE FEEDER AND THE DRIVER: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)

Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)

Yet Another Reason for Institutional OA Mandates: To Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates (Feb 2008)

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates (Mar 2008)

One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind (Mar 2008)

NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate (Apr 2008)

Institutional Repositories vs Subject/Central Repositories (Jun 2008)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum