John Wiley on RoMEO and John the Baptist on Supererogation

SUMMARY: Publishers are increasingly adapting to the growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates now being adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide. Some of the conditions they impose are reasonable (such as endorsing the self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft but not the publisher's proprietary PDF, or endorsing institutional repository deposit but not institution-external, 3rd-party repository deposit) and pose no problem for authors, their institutions or their funders. Some conditions are less reasonable (such as 6-12-month embargoes on making access to the deposit Open Access), but these can be adapted to by authors, institutions and funders for the time being, with the help of the Institutional Repositories' "email eprint request" Button. Some of the conditions, however, are technically arbitrary or even incoherent (such as the distinction between the author's institutional website and the author's institutional repository, or conditions based on metadata or metadata harvestability, rather than the full-text). Technically arbitrary or incoherent conditions should accordingly be ignored by authors, institutions and funders. They are merely leftovers of paper-based thinking that simply do not make sense in the digital medium.

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[Excerpted from JISC-REPOSITORIES]

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Les Carr:
[O]ne step away (literally) from the [Wiley-Blackwell] "Best Practice document" is the [Wiley-Blackwell] "Copyright FAQ" in which they elaborate that although the ELF [Exclusive Licence Form] is used for societies, the wholly owned journals still retain the practice of Copyright Assignment. The sample Copyright Assignment document (for the aptly chosen International Headache Society) contains the following text:

Such preprints may be posted as electronic files on the author's own website for personal or professional use, or on the author's internal university, college or corporate networks/intranet, or secure external website at the author's institution, but not for commercial sale or for any systematic external distribution by a third party (e.g. a listserve or database connected to a public access server).

I think that an institutional repository is OK by that definition. After all, it is a secure external website at the author's institution which is not offering the item for sale nor run by a third party.

Ian Stuart:
Where does this leave the Subject Repository (e.g., arXiv)?

It's not the authors own website, or an intranet at the authors local institution, or an external server at the authors institution... yet it also doesn't offer commercial sales or systematic [my emphasis] distribution to a third party

Where does this leave the Depot?

It's /effectively/ an Institutional Repository, but like arXiv it's not at the authors institution.

.... or is this one of those questions one shouldn't really ask?

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Stevan Harnad:
Here's my tuppence worth on this one -- and it's never failed me (or anyone who has applied it, since the late 1980's. when the possibilities first presented themselves) as a practical guide for action: (A shorter version of this heuristic would be "If the physicists had been foolish enough to worry about it in 1991, or the computer scientists still earlier, would we have the half-million papers in Arxiv or three-quarter million in Citeseerx that we have, unchallenged, in 2009?"):

When a publisher starts to make distinctions that are more minute and arbitrary than can even be made sense of technologically, and are unenforceable, ignore them:

The distinction between making or not-making something freely available on the Web is coherent (if often wrong-headed).

The distinction between making something freely available on the web here but not there is beginning to sound silly (since if it's free on the web, it's effectively free everywhere), but we swallow it, if the "there" is a 3rd-party rival free-riding publisher, whereas the "here" is the website of the author's own institution. Avec les dieux il y a des accommodements: Just deposit in your IR and port metadata to CRs.

But when it comes to DEPOT -- which is an interim "holding space" provided (for free) to each author's institution, to hold deposits remotely until the institution creates its own IR, at which time they are ported home and removed from DEPOT -- it is now bordering on abject absurdity to try to construe DEPOT as a "3rd-party rival free-riding publisher".

We are, dear colleagues, in the grip of an orgy of pseudo-juridical and decidedly supererogatory hair-splitting on which nothing whatsoever hinges but the time, effort and brainware we perversely persist in dissipating on it. 

This sort of futile obsessiveness is -- in my amateur's guess only -- perhaps the consequence of two contributing factors:

(1) The agonizingly (and equally absurdly) long time during which the research community persists in its inertial state of Zeno's Paralysis about self-archiving (a paralysis of which this very obsession with trivial and ineffectual formal contingencies is itself one of the symptoms and causes). It has driven many of us bonkers, in many ways, and this formalistic obsessive-compulsive tendency is simply one of the ways. (In me, it has simply fostered an increasingly curmudgeonly impatience.) The cure, of course, is deposit mandates.

and

(2) The substantial change in mind-set that is apparently required in order to realize that OA is not the sort of thing governed by the usual concerns of either library cataloguing/indexing or library rights-management: It's something profoundly different because of the very nature of OA.

Rest your souls. Universal OA is a foregone conclusion. It is optimal, and it is inevitable. The fact that it is also proving to be so excruciatingly -- and needlessly -- slow in coming is something we should work to remedy, rather than simply becoming complicit in and compounding it, by giving ourselves still more formalistic trivia with which to while away the time we are losing until the obvious happens at long last.

Bref: Yes, this is "one of those questions one shouldn't really ask"!

Yours curmudgeonly,

Your importunate Archivangelist

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Talat Chaudhri:
...Clearly the copyright system is incoherent and difficult, but nonetheless these publishers have indisputable copyright and may licence it as they please, even incoherently...

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Stevan Harnad:
Even incoherently? I think Talat underestimates the supra-legal power of the Law of the Excluded Middle.

Example:

"You may deposit this article on the web if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle AND you may not deposit this article on the web if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle."

Unverifiable, unenforcable, and incoherent. But Talat feels it would be "frankly inappropriate to tell others to break the law at their own risk" by ignoring something like this.

There's no accounting for feelings.

Be sensible (as the half-million physicists and three-quarter million computer scientists have been, for two decades now): Take the "risk."

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Charles Oppenheim:
Let me make my position clear. Comments that I make have no legal authority. I take no responsibility for any actions a reader might take (or not take) as a result of reading my opinion, and that in any cases of doubt, readers should take formal legal advice. Anyone who advises third parties to do something that is potentially infringing without such a health warning could find themselves accused by rights owners of authorising infringement, which means they would be just as liable to pay damages as the person who took the advice.

I agree with Talat that 100% OA is not necessarily inevitable, despite my hope that it does come to pass. Just because something is technically possible and makes economic sense does not mean it is bound to occur.

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Stevan Harnad:
Let me make my position clear.

Comments that I make have no legal authority.

Nor am I addressing 3rd parties.

(I am addressing only the authors of refereed journal articles.)

And all I am advising is that they not take leave of their common sense in favor of far-fetched flights of formal fancy -- especially incoherent ones.

Amen.

Johannes
American Scientist Open Access Forum