Napoleon, the Hexagon, and the Question of Where to Mandate Deposit

SUMMARY: What France -- exactly like every other country -- needs is both funder and institutional Open Access (OA) mandates, requiring the self-archiving of all refereed research output immediately upon acceptance for publication, and all converging on single-locus deposit in the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR). (It is completely irrelevant to this whether or not the IR happens to be hosted by HAL, France's national Central Repository [CR], which is designed so as to be able in principle to give every university or institution in France its own "virtual IR" if the institution so wishes.) But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, then OA's slumbering giant -- the universities and institutions that are the providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, in all fields, virtually none of which yet mandate the deposit of their institutional research output in their IRs -- will just keep hibernating: Institutional (and departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, most researchers (85%) will not self-archive anywhere (in either an IR or a CR), and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow. Apart from the funder-mandated research -- and the few fields (such as computer science, economics and physics) where researchers have already been self-archiving spontaneously for years worldwide -- the CRs will of course be in exactly the same state as the IRs.

---

Thierry Chanier wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

TC: The question of tools for central repositories (CRs) is central. It is preferable to avoid opposing CRs and IRs.

They are not opposed. Both are welcome and useful. What is under discussion is locus of deposit. (The deposited document itself, once deposited, may be exported, imported, harvested to/from as many repositories as desired. The crucial question is where it is actually deposited, and especially where deposit mandates from funders stipulate that it should be deposited.)

The issues for locus-of-deposit are:

(1) Single or multiple deposit? 

I think everyone would agree that at a time when most authors (85% ) are not yet depositing at all, this is not the time to talk about depositing the same paper more than once.

(2) If single deposit: where, institution-internally or institution-externally? 

The author's institutional repository (IR) might be his university's IR, or his research institute's IR, or the IR of some subset of his institution, such as his department's IR or his laboratory's IR. The point is that the locus of production of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines and worldwide -- is the author's institution. The author's institution also has a shared stake and interest with its authors in hosting and showcasing their joint research output.

All other links to the author's research are fragmented: Some of it will be funded by some funders, some by others, and some will be unfunded. Some will be in some discipline or subdiscipline, some in another, some in several. There is much scope for collecting it together in various combinations into such institution-external collections, but it makes no sense at all to deposit directly in some or all of them: One deposit is enough, and the rest can be harvested automatically. The natural and optimal locus for that one deposit is at the universal source: the author's own institution.

(3) Import/Export/Harvest from where to where?

The natural and optimal procedure is: deposit institution-internally and then, where desired, import/export/harvest institution-externally. This one-to-many procedure makes sense from every standpoint: Single convergent deposit, convergent mandates, maximal flexibility and efficiency, minimal effort and complication (hence maximal willingness and compliance from authors). The alternative, of many-to-one importation, or many-to-many import/export means multiple, divergent deposit, divergent mandates, reduced flexibility and efficiency, increased effort and complications (and hence reduced willingness and compliance from authors).

TC: In some countries, CRs may be prominent (particularly because local institutions have a low status, so IRs may not mean much to researchers ... when they exist), because centralized procedures for evaluating research may offer opportunity to researchers to start depositing - see below about France.

Institutional status-level is irrelevant, because research is not searched at the individual IR level but at the harvester (CR) level. We are discussing here what is the optimal locus of deposit, so as to capture (and mandate the capture of) all of OA's target content, worldwide, and as quickly and efficiently as possible. What matters for this is to find a procedure for systematically capturing all research output, and the natural and exhaustive locus for that is at the source: the institution (university, research institute, department, laboratory) that hosts the researcher, pays his salary, and provides his institutional affiliation.

There is of course research evaluation at the institution-internal as well as the institution-external (funder and national) level. But even for national research assessment exercises, such as the RAE in the UK, the institution and department are the "unit of assessment"; they are local, and distributed. And the natural locus for their research output is their own IRs. And that is exactly how it is that many UK universities provided their submissions to RAE 2008. See the IRRA .

TC: Researchers should be free to choose where they deposit but with requirements to deposit. They may do it in different repositories (I mean one document is only in one place, but depending on the nature of the document/data, one may choose various repositories)

I am afraid that it is here that we reach the gist of the matter (and the height of the misunderstanding and equivocation):

First, the only kind of deposit under discussion here is OA's primary target content: refereed journal articles. That is also the only deposit requirement (mandate) under discussion here, because although there are many other things an author might choose to deposit too -- books, software, multimedia, courseware, research data -- those are optional contents insofar as OA deposit mandates are concerned. And it is specifically the locus of deposit of the required contents (refereed journal articles) that matters so much, particularly in funder mandate policies.

It might sound optimal for a funder to simply require deposit in some OA repository or other, leaving it up to the author to choose which (and such a funder mandate is certainly preferable to a mandate that specifies deposit in a CR, or to no mandate at all). But this is in fact far from being the optimal mandate, for the reasons discussed by Prof. Rentier: 

Most researchers (85%) do not deposit unless they are required to. Funders can only mandate the deposit of the research that they fund. If they require that it must be deposited in a specific CR, they are in direct competition with institutional mandates (necessitating double or divergent deposit). If funder mandates simply leave it open where authors deposit, then they are not in competition with IR mandates, but they are not helping them either. As noted, institutions are the producers of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines, worldwide. Only 30 institutions mandate deposit so far, worldwide (out of tens of thousands). If a funder mandates deposit, but is open-ended about locus of deposit, it leaves institutions in their current state of inertia. But if funders specifically stipulate IR deposit, they thereby immediately increase the probability and the motivation for creating an IR as well as adopting an institutional deposit mandate for the rest of the research output of every one of the institutions that have a researcher funded by that funder.

TC: It is a tactical decision for OA supporters, knowing the local habits, to advertise ways of deposit to colleagues

But we already know that advertisement, encouragement, exhortation, evidence of benefits, assistance -- none of these is sufficient to get most researchers to deposit. Only requirements (mandates) work (and you seem to agree).

Now institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, because they are the universal providers of all of OA's target content. So to induce the "slumbering giant" to wake up and mandate OA for all of his research output, there has to be something in it for him (or rather them, because the "slumbering giant" is in fact a global network of universities and research institutions). What is in it for each of them? A collection of its own institutional research output that it can host, manage, audit, assess and showcase. What use is it to each of them if their research output is scattered globally willy-nilly, in diverse CRs? It increases the research impact of the institution's research output, to be sure, but how to measure, credit, showcase and benefit from that, institutionally, when it is scattered willy-nilly? 

Now, as noted, importation/exportation/harvesting can in principle work both ways. But if a university that might wish to host its own research assets has to go out and find and harvest them back from all over the web, because they were deposited institution-externally, instead of being deposited institutionally in the first place, the time and effort involved is considerably greater than simply mandating direct institutional deposit would have been -- and that back-harvest does not even yield all of the university's output: only whatever institutional research output happened to be funded by funders that also mandate OA! Yet if those funders had mandated IR deposit, all that work would already be done, and the university would have a strong incentive to adopt a mandate requiring the rest of its research output to be deposited too.

Meanwhile, for a mandating funder, harvesting the distributed IR content of all of its fundees into a CR is far easier; part of the fulfillment conditions for the grant need only specify that the author should send the funder the URL for the IR deposit of all articles resulting from the grant. The rest can be done automatically by software.

TC:  We have to make sure that people in charge of funding research (EU, National) do not oblige researchers to deposit in one specific place (their CR or any other).

On the contrary, there is every reason that funders should specify the fundee's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, for the reasons just adduced. Open-ended mandates are better than competing CR mandates, but they are not nearly as good as convergent, synergistic IR mandates (to help awaken the slumbering giant).

(As I was writing this posting, two new funder mandates have been announced -- FRSQ in Canada and NRC in Norway: Both are welcome, but both are open-ended about deposit locus, and consequently both miss the opportunity to have a far greater positive effect on global OA growth, by stipulating IR deposit.)
 

TC:  But I understand funders, because when they ask researchers to provide access to their work and advertise the fact that they have been paid by them, there is currently no practical way of doing so (labels put on deposit with the name of the program which gave the money, and harvesters able to compute this information)

Yes, precisely. Funding metadata can easily be added as a field in the IR deposit software -- and institutions will be only too happy to help in monitoring grant fulfillment conditions in this way, in exchange for the jump-start it provides for the filling of their own IRs.

TC: I also understand funders because I feel that they want to add interesting tools (search, computation, meta-engine), tools which could be developed by central harvesters (CH). We are late on this issue and harvesters have not made much progress (see below).

To repeat: Locus of direct deposit has nothing whatever to do with harvester-level search. Search is not done at the IR level but at the harvester (e.g., CR)  level.

TC: 1. HAL and research evaluation: 3 years ago I tried to convince my former lab to open a sub-archive within HAL (same repository, but URL specific to the lab, with proper interface). I also tried to convince my university to have a general meeting with directors of local labs in order to invite them to do the same and, at another level, to manage the sub-archive in HAL for the university (a solution somewhere in between CR and IR). My lab colleague  agreed, started the work but gave up because of lack of time. My university never replied to my proposal.

HAL is a nationwide resource that can in principle be used (much the way the Web itself is used) to allow an institution to create and manage its own "virtual IR". As such, HAL is partly a platform for creating virtual IRs, rather than a CR.

So, essentially, what you and your colleague tried to do (and only partly succeeded) was to create and manage an IR. That's splendid, and welcome, but we already know that IRs alone are not enough. Without a mandate, they idle at the usual 15% baseline.

(Please note that a lab repository is an IR.)

TC:  Now, thanks to procedures for evaluating research in France, labs will have to choose the way they want to be evaluated (I mean the technical procedure to achieve it). Some software used by the national board will do the computation out of HAL. Consequently, my lab decided this week to urgently re-open and manage its sub-archive in HAL. Of course, the first thing they have to do is deposit metadata. The actual deposit of the corresponding full-text is not mandatory. But they will take the opportunity to suggest to researchers to deposit as well their full papers.

It won't work; it's been tried many times before. So this is a great opportunity lost. As you see, the IR clearly languishes neglected without a mandate. With a mandate -- particularly one in which evaluation is based on what is deposited, as in Prof. Rentier's mandate at Liège -- researchers perk up and deposit. But if all they have to deposit is metadata, that's all they will deposit (even though adding the full-text is just one more keystroke).

The reason is that the effect of mandates is mostly not coercive. Researchers don't jump to deposit just because they are required to deposit. They actually want to deposit, but they are held back by two main constraints, one small, the other big: 

(1) The small constraint is ergonomic. Researchers are overloaded, and they will not do something extra unless it really has a high priority. A deposit mandate, especially one tied to funding and/or evaluation, gives the few minutes-worth of keystrokes per paper (which is all that a deposit amounts to) the requisite priority that they otherwise lack.

(2) The big constraint is psychological: Researchers are (groundlessly) afraid to deposit their papers (even the 63% for which the journal already gives them its explicit blessing to do so) -- afraid until and unless their institutions and/or their funders tell them they must, because then they know it is officially okay to do so! The mandate unburdens their souls, and unlocks their fingers.

TC:  Last thing: I do not mean that in France, only HAL should be used. We should make sure we have the choice to deposit where we please.

What France needs, like every other country, is funder and institutional mandates converging on single-locus IR deposit (irrespective of whether the IR is hosted by HAL). But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, the giant will keep hibernating, institutional (departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow.

TC:  2. Harversters : advantages and current limits:  Just a personal experience. Till recently I used to advertise my list of publications by giving the URL of an open archive, Edutice (a thematic one, VERY USEFUL in our domain, a sub-part of HAL but with its local procedures, interface, etc.). Now I give colleagues the OAISTER URL (with the path to follow) to get all my publications (because some of them are in other archives). The problem is: deposits in Edutice appear twice in the OAISTER list (as deposits of Edutice and of HAL - but there is one only deposit). It is a concrete example of progress which should be made to avoid repetitions in harvesters (among many other new features).

If they had all been deposited in your own IR you would have had an automatic listing of all your works (without duplications) through a simple google IR site-search "chanier site:http-IR-etc." -- and your institutions would have it all too. And so would OAIster. And you could have exported to Edutice with SWORD if you wished.

De-duplication and version-comparator software is already being developed (though it's hardly worth it yet, when the problem is not the presence of duplicates but the absence of even a singleton for 85% global refereed research output) -- and that's what mandates in general -- and convergent IR mandates in particular, to awaken the slumbering giant -- are needed for.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum