STM Publisher Briefing on Institutional Repository Deposit Mandates

[Two members of STM have kindly, at my request, allowed me to see a copy of the STM Briefing on IRs and Deposit Mandates. I focused the commentary below on quoted excerpts, but before posting it I asked STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to include the quotes. As I do not yet have an answer, I am posting the commentary with paraphrases of the passages I had hoped to quote. If I receive permission from Michael, I will repost this with the verbatim quotes. As it stands, it is self-contained and self-explanatory.

(Permission since received. Please see the version with verbatim quotes HERE.)]

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The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again), there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of the PRISM/pitbull misadventure of 2007.

Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are unavoidably -- almost ritually -- repetitive, because the errors and misinformation themselves are so repetitive.

STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES

[Publisher policy on IRs is concerned with how IR deposit mandates might affect publishing and publishing revenues, particularly in the case of refereed final drafts.]

This is a fair statement: The issues for the research community are research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress. The issue for the publisher community is their financial bottom line.

[Publishing and distribution today is successful and adequate. IRs publish an inferior version.]

(1) IRs do not publish: peer-reviewed journal publishers publish. IRs provide access to their own authors' (peer-reviewed, published) output -- for all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's toll-based proprietary version -- so as to maximize the access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress of their research output.

(2) The version of the published article that the authors deposit in their IRs is the final, revised, peer-reviewed draft (the "postprint"), accepted for publication, but not the publisher's proprietary PDF. Hence deposit does have the quality controls provided (for free) by the peer-reviewers. (If the copy-editing should happen to detect any substantive errors -- which is exceedingly rare! -- these too can be corrected in the deposited postprint.)

[Publishing by IRs compromises quality, preservation and discoverability.]

IRs are not substitutes for publishing but supplements to it, providing access to research for access-denied would-be users, for the sake of maximizing research progress. The deposited postprints have undergone the essential quality-control for researchers: peer review.

The discoverability of postprints in IRs (via search engines like google, google scholar, citeseerx, scirus and scopus) is excellent. No problems, and no complaints from all the would-be users webwide who would otherwise lack access to them.

(Preservation is a red herring: Preservation of what? As supplements, rather than substitutes, authors' self-archived postprints are not the versions with the primary preservation burden (although IR deposits are of course being preserved). The primary preservation burden is on the publisher's proprietary version, the official version of record, as it always has been.)

[Exclusive copyright transfer is essential so the availability of alternative versions does not prevent publishers from making ends meet. Publishers add value in return for the exclusive rights.]

(a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, and impact, by maximizing access to them.

(b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

(c) But if and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

(d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) merely in order to insure publishers' current funding model against any possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

(e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them, for research purposes. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is not just publishers that think IRs pose risks; librarian Dorothea Salo has questioned IRs' costs and usefulness in “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel”.]

(Publishers might do better to pay serious attention to the substantive rationale and evidence concerning IR deposits and IR deposit mandates, rather than to the opining of roach motel keepers.)

[It is inaccurate to speak of IR policies as “authors’ rights” policies or “open access” policies.]

IR deposit mandates are accurately described as institutional open access policy. (But IR deposit mandates are certainly not "authors' rights" policies.)

[Talking points in responding to the media: subscription publishing does require exclusive copyright transfer; perhaps OA publishing doesn't.]

This mixes up issues: The only relevant issue here for IRs and IR deposit policies is whether or not the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication. (This is called a "Green" publisher policy on OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with author-pays/Gold OA publishing models. And authors paying for the "right" to deposit would be absurd and out of the question.)

[Should we endorse IR deposit? Under what conditions?]

If the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication, the publisher is Green. If there is no endorsement, or OA is embargoed, the publisher is Gray.

[Should we make distinctions between preprint repositories, unmandated IRs and mandated IRs?]

The only potential distinction is between authors' own institutional IRs and institution-external 3rd-party central repositories. Although OA is OA (and means free online accessibility webwide, irrespective of the locus of deposit), some publishers only endorse deposit in the author's own IR, in order not to endorse 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers: This limitation is innocuous, and no problem for OA. (In fact, there are many reasons why it is preferable for both kinds of Deposit mandates -- those from funders as well as from institutions -- to converge on institutional IR deposit, from which the metadata can then be harvested centrally.)

What would be arbitrary (and absurd, and unenforceable) would be to attempt to endorse only voluntary IR deposit and not mandatory IR deposit by authors!

[Should we only endorse IR deposits that are open only to institution-internal users?]

Let there be no ambiguity about this: Such a policy would be Gray, not Green, on OA IR self-archiving.

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only after an embargo period?]

Without an embargo, this policy would be fully Green, and neither IRs nor OA ask for anything more. With an embargo, it would be Gray.

[Should we only allow links from IRs to final versions on the publisher's website?]

If the posting on the publisher's website is done immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access to it is immediately open to all users webwide, that would be fully Green too. (For such cases, IRs could, for internal record-keeping purposes, mandate the deposit of the author's postprint in the IR, but in Closed Access, with the OA link going to the publisher's freely accessible version for the duration of the publisher's embargo on making the IR version OA too: no problem.)

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only for a fee?]

Paying to deposit in researchers' own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community.

[Inform the media that publishers have made journal articles more accessible today than ever before.]

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress by making all research accessible to all of its would-be users webwide (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe) that the OA movement was launched. And that is why Green OA self-archiving, generated by funder and institutional IR deposit mandates, is growing, to the great benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.)

[Online refereed journals are crucial for funders, universities, authors, and authors' careers.]

Correct. And both the research itself, and the peer review, are provided by the research community, free of charge, to the publishing community, in exchange for the neutral 3rd-party management of the peer review, and the certification of the outcome with the journal's name and track-record. The publishing community is compensated for the value it has added by receiving the exclusive right to sell the resultant joint product (and no need to pay authors royalties from the sales of their texts).

But that does not mean that researchers cannot and will not continue to give away their own peer-reviewed research findings also to those would-be users who cannot afford to buy the resultant joint product. Nor does it mean that researchers' institutions and funders cannot and will not mandate that they do so, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress for the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

[Depositing in an IR is not equivalent to journal publishing, with its editing, peer review, and other added values.]

Correct. And individual authors depositing the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their published articles in their IRs is not publication but supplementary access provision, for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version.

[IRs might provide a lower quality option that makes publishers unable or unwilling to perform their value-added services.]

This is merely the repetition of the same point made earlier:

No, IR deposits of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles are not publishing, nor substitutes for publishing, they are author supplements, provided for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version:

    (a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, impact, by maximizing access to them.

    (b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

    (c) If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

    (d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    (e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[IRs cost money and should only be created if they have a distinct goal rather than just parallel publishing and access-provision]

IRs are undertaken by universities and research institutions -- i.e., the research community. It is not at all clear why the publishing community is providing this advice to the research community on its undertaking...

[Researchers should be advised of the damage IRs could do to research publication and dissemination.]

Researchers can and should be fully briefed about the already demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and the researcher's institutions -- the benefits generated by maximizing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress through Green OA self-archiving and IR deposit mandates.

Researchers need this full briefing on research benefits, because it is based on actual facts and experience.

But is the publishing community suggesting that -- in addition to these empirical and practical facts -- researchers should also be briefed on publishers' speculations about how Green OA self-archiving might conceivably induce an eventual change in publishers' funding model?

Why?

    If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to protect publishers' current funding model from the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

[Researchers should stay free "to choose how and where to publish."]

By all means. And they should continue to exercise their freedom to supplement access to their published research by depositing their postprints in their IRs for all would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version.

[Institutions that want their employees to reserve certain rights for their published journal articles should collaborate with journal publishers so as not to damage their business.]

It would be excellent if all authors reserved OA self-archiving rights in their copyright agreements with their publishers. Then all authors could immediately deposit all their peer-reviewed research in their IRs, and immediately make them OA without any further ado. But for at least 63% of journals, formally reserving that right is already unnecessary, as those journals are already Green, so those articles can already be made immediately OA today by self-archiving them in the author's IR.

For the remaining 37%, their authors can likewise already deposit the postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance without the need of either copyright reservation or any formal endorsement or permission from the publisher: if they wish, they can set access to the deposit as "Closed Access" -- meaning only the author can access it. Then the authors can provide "Almost OA" to those deposits with the help of their IR's "email eprint request" button: Individual would-be users who reach a Closed Access deposit link (led there by the deposit's OA metadata) need merely press the Button and insert their email address in order to trigger an immediate automatic email to the author to request a single copy for personal research purposes; the author receives the eprint request, which contains a URL on which he can click to trigger an immediate automatic email to the would-be user containing a single copy of the requested postprint. This is not OA, but it is Almost-OA.

OA is indisputably better for research and researchers than Almost-OA. But 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA will tide over the worldwide research community's immediate usage needs for the time being, until the inevitable transition to 100% OA that will follow from the worldwide adoption of Immediate IR Deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

This is the information on which the research community needs to be clearly briefed. The publishing community's conjectures about funding models are important, and of undoubted interest to the publishing community itself, but they should in no way constrain the research community in maximizing access to its own refereed research output in the Web era by mandating IR deposit universally.

To repeat:

    What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is much harder, however, for institutions to successfully achieve consensus on adopting an IR deposit mandate at all if the mandate in question is a copyright-reservation mandate rather than an IR deposit mandate. And because it is even harder to ensure compliance with a copyright-reservation mandate (because of authors' worries that the negotiations with their publishers to reserve immediate-OA self-archiving rights might not succeed and might instead put at risk their right to "choose how and where to publish"), the one prominent institutional copyright reservation mandate (Harvard's) contains an author opt-out clause that makes the mandate into a non-mandate. The simple solution is to add an Immediate-Deposit requirement, without opt-out. Even simpler still, adopt an Immediate-Deposit mandate as the default mandate model suitable for all, worldwide, and strengthen the mandate only if and when there is successful consensus and compliance in favor of a stronger mandate.]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum