Funder Grant Conditions, Fundee/Institutional Compliance, and 3rd-Party Gobbledy-Gook

There is a very simple fix for the (self-created) problem of "noncompliant" publishers -- i.e., those who are paid for Gold OA by funders like Wellcome and then fail to deposit the paid-up article:

Gold OA fees are paid for Gold OA. That means the publisher makes the article OA on his own website (and, of course, since all Gold OA journals are also Green, the Gold OA publisher also endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving by the author in any repositories he chooses).

Let us not castigate publishers if they do not immediately also jump through the arbitrary hoop of further depositing their Gold OA article in some designated repository or other on behalf of the author or the funder. That is an extra (and as far as I know, it is not part of the definition of Gold OA publication, nor of the service that the Gold OA publisher is being paid to provide).

So if not the publisher, who is at fault if the article fails to be deposited?

(I pause to let you reflect a few moments...)

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Well of course the fault is the absurd, again-not-thought-through mandate requiring fundees to make their articles OA, but relying on a 3rd party (unfunded by the funder, and merely paid to make the article OA) to do the deposit!

Not only does that make no sense at all for Gold OA articles, but it also makes compliance and grant fulfillment a gratuitously complicated overall affair, complicated to comply with, even more complicated to monitor compliance with. For articles published in non-OA journals, the fundee must do the deposit; for articles published in Gold OA journals (or only those that are paid-OA? or only those whose paid-OA is paid by the funder?) the publisher must do the deposit.

I truly hope that the sensible reader will see at once that the rational way for a funder to mandate deposit is to put the onus for compliance exclusively on the grantee and the grantee's institution, as with all other funding conditions, rather than to offload it willy-nilly onto non-grantee 3rd parties (whose services may be paid for, but who certainly are not being paid for repository deposit but for Gold OA publishing).

And while we're at it, this is yet another reason why the locus of the default repository for direct deposit specified by the funder should be the grantee's own Institutional Repository (IR) and not, again, institution-external repositories. For with local, one-stop deposit, the institution can collaborate, as usual, in ensuring compliance with grant fulfillment conditions, by monitoring the deposits in its own repository, making sure that every grant-funded article has been deposited, regardless of whether it happens to be published in a Gold or non-Gold journal. (And, as a bonus, the institution is then also more likely to go on to adopt an IR deposit mandate of its own, for the rest of its research output, in all fields, whether or not funded by that funder.)

Chasing after 3rd parties -- whether publishers or institution-external repositories -- creates gratuitous complications for absolutely no extra gain, only needless extra pain.

Is there any hope at all that funders who have committed to these dysfunctional and counterproductive stipulations will be enlightened enough to fix them at this point (it's easy) rather than (as I fear), just digging in deeper with a "harrumph" and "we know what we're doing" and "mind your own business"...?

With a sigh of resignation,

Your weary archivangelist

PS If you want to find the origin of much of this easily remedied confusion, look again at that mixed blessing, the well-meaning, timely, welcome and highly influential -- but relentlessly unreflective -- ebiomed proposal and its subsequent incarnations across the years...