Optimizing the European Commission's Recommendation for Open Access Archiving of Publicly-Funded Research

The European Commission "Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe" has made the following policy recommendation:

RECOMMENDATION A1.
GUARANTEE PUBLIC ACCESS TO PUBLICLY-FUNDED RESEARCH RESULTS SHORTLY AFTER PUBLICATION.
"Research funding agencies have a central role in determining researchers' publishing practices. Following the lead of the NIH and other institutions, they should promote and support the archiving of publications in open repositories, after a (possibly domain-specific) time period to be discussed with publishers. This archiving could become a condition for funding. The following actions could be taken at the European level: (i) Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives, and (ii) Explore with Member States and with European research and academic associations whether and how such policies and open repositories could be implemented."

There is a very simple way to make this very welcome recommendation even more effective: Separate deposit from OA access-setting: Specify that the deposit must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, in all cases, and apply all reference to delay to the timing of the access-setting not the deposit. The full-text plus its bibliographic metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.) can and should always be deposited in the author's Institutional Repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, without a moment's delay.

Access to the metadata can always be made immediately Open Access, webwide. What can be delayed (for the 7% of articles in journals that do not yet explicitly give immediate author self-archiving their official green light) is the setting of access to the full-text to Open Access.

It is of course preferable that access to the full-text too should be set as Open Access immediately upon deposit. But, if the author wishes, access-privileges to the full-text can instead be set as Restricted Access (author-only) rather than Open Access for "a (possibly domain-specific) time period to be discussed with publishers."

(During that delay-period, would-be users who access the metadata but find they cannot access the full-text can email the author to request an eprint, and the author can email the eprint to the requester if he wishes, exactly as he did in paper reprint days.)

The European Commission is urged to make this small but extremely important change in their policy recommendation. It means the difference between immediate 100% Open Access and delayed, embargoed access for years to come.

Stevan Harnad

      Pertinent Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Threads:

2002:
      "Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving"
2003:
      "Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output"
      "What Provosts Need to Mandate"
      "Recommendations for UK Open-Access Provision Policy"
2004:
      "University policy mandating self-archiving of research output"
      "Mandating OA around the corner?"
      "Implementing the US/UK recommendation to mandate OA Self-Archiving"
      "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy"
2005:
      "Comparing the Wellcome OA Policy and the RCUK (draft) Policy"
      "New international study demonstrates worldwide readiness for Open Access mandate"
      "DASER 2 IR Meeting and NIH Public Access Policy"
      "Mandated OA for publicly-funded medical research in the US"
2006:
      "Mandatory policy report" (2)
      "The U.S. CURES Act would mandate OA"
      "Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Mandate"