There is always still the possibility of a miracle, which is a formal open statement by
RCUK that the
RIN study is not going to delay the long-overdue RCUK announcement, that the RCUK policy announcement is imminent and in no way contingent on the outcome of the RIN study (and that the announcement will be that the 7 councils have not all come to an agreement, but that 6 of them will now mandate self-archiving and the 7th, EPSRC, will continue thinking about it).
But I doubt that is quite the case, or that RCUK will straight-forwardly say so; nor is RCUK likely to admit they have simply been dithering aimlessly, and doing so precisely because they are under some sort of publisher/DTI pressure. They will instead pretend as if everything is more or less "on course" but that the course is "longer than expected." Whereas, in reality, RCUK are being intimidated into commissioning this joint RIN study in the vague hope that it will yield a more credible basis for drawing the unconscionable delay out still longer.
And -- again in reality -- this RIN study will produce absolutely nothing that we don't already know, several times over (apart from more irrelevant trifles, such as lower download counts at the publisher's website when the eprints are available free at the author's websites, which we also
know already and which means nothing, because it does not translate into detectable cancellations).
If there were any honest wish to collect objective data on whether a self-archiving mandate will generate cancellations, the only way to collect such data is
empirically: By adopting the RCUK self-archiving mandate and then seeing, objectively, whether it does generate any cancellations (and whether, if so, they are enough to warrant worrying about, rather than merely being a natural minor adjustment toward stable long-term co-existence between self-archiving and toll-publishing, or else part of a natural adaptive process of evolutionary transition from toll-publishing to OA publishing). Costs/benefits -- to research as well as to publishing -- could then be objectively and dispassionately (and empirically) weighed.
The RCUK mandate, pertaining only to UK research output, will almost certainly not generate cancellations, as the UK represents only a small fraction of the contents of major journals (and the few UK-only journals, besides not being the ones the big publisher lobby has in mind, are mostly subscribed to for local reasons, and for the paper edition, rather than for pressing scientific/scholarly reasons).
But without a mandate, there will be no relevant objective data at all, just speculation, rumour, and trifles, exactly as we already have now, all adding up to gratuitous delay, and absolutely nothing else.
As a consequence, it is alas almost certainly true -- barring a miracle non-sequitur announcement from RCUK -- that the UK has, with this foolish act, dropped the OA ball, and lost its historic lead in OA to the distributed network of universities worldwide (and possibly, just possibly, though I rather doubt it, to the
European Commission).
This is all the more unfortunate as the RCUK has been repeatedly advised that there is a
simple, natural way to implement the mandate that completely avoids all publisher contingencies, namely, to mandate only the immediate deposit of the full-text, and merely to
encourage (not mandate) the setting of access to Open Access, leaving it entirely up to the author.
Such a compromise policy would be -- superficially -- as weak a self-archiving policy as the failed
NIH "public access" policy has been (and surely the RCUK is not too craven to do what even the feckless NIH has already done, with its ineffectual "request" to deposit, if at all possible, within a year!) -- but with a difference: With the deposit itself mandated immediately upon acceptance in every case, semi-automated
eprint-emailing, done voluntarily by each author if/when they choose to, would give OA the real chance it deserves to show its benefits:
Effectively, this "Dual Keystroke" policy would simply reduce what it takes for an author to provide OA from the N keystrokes required to self-archive the full-text (keystrokes that 85% of authors are are
not now doing, and will not do, until/unless mandated -- at which point 95% will comply, as shown by the 2 international JISC author surveys conducted by
Swan & Brown) to merely the very last, Nth keystroke, which is what it takes in each individual case to decide whether or not to keep emailing the full-text individually to each requester -- or simply to hit the "OA" key and make the deposit OA for one and all, once and for all!
Just a little bit of reflection would have shown the RCUK that this dual immediate-mandated-deposit/optional-OA-setting "keystroke" policy would have been completely immune to any credible publisher objection (being merely Fair Use!) -- but the RCUK seems not to have reflected, merely to have cowed and caved in...
No nontrivial empirical outcome can possibly come out of this RIN study on the objective effects of a national mandate when the mandate has not been empirically tested! Hence the best that can be done is to wrap up this non-study as soon as possible and get back to facing the existing empirical facts, which are that (1) self-archiving is
highly beneficial to research and researchers in terms of usage and impact, but (2) it is only done spontaneously (unmandated) by 15% of researchers, except (3) in a few subfields -- such as some areas of physics -- where it has been at or near 100% for some time now, and that (4) in those 100% OA subfields it has not led to cancellations, as
already attested to publicly by the publishers in question (APS and IOPP).
Or to announce that the RCUK policy is
not to be contingent on the outcome of the RIN study, and to go ahead and announce the (
long, long overdue) policy at last!
Stevan Harnad
