Optimizing the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) Open Access Mandate 2 (of 2)

Dear Falk,

First, I apologize for my school-masterish tone!

On a planet which still has far too few OA mandates and much too little OA, it cannot be repeated often enough that every single mandate is a step forward, and welcomed by all (in the research community!)

But I hope you will agree that optimizing these first pioneering mandates is very important too, to provide a tested, successful model for others to follow.

This is the reason for focusing here -- in this side-discussion that has arisen from the underlying discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the US's NIH mandate -- on the detailed breakdown of Austria's FWF mandate's compliance rate and the formal and implementational details that have been generating it.

You have kindly provided some very important benchmark data on the compliance rate for the FWF mandate in your previous postings:

The compliance rate for the FWF mandate in its current form is 65%.

Of this, half (32.5%) is Green OA self-archiving and half (32.5%) is from publishing in fee-based Gold OA journals, one third of them exclusively Gold OA (11%) and two thirds (22%) hybrid Gold (meaning the journal is still charging institutions for subscriptions, but authors can pay an additional fee to make their own individual article OA -- and FWF pays that extra fee for fundees).

The global baseline for the annual un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate worldwide is about 20% (although Yassine Gargouri will soon be reporting some new results suggesting that this worldwide un-mandated rate may have increased in the last few years).

So it has to be admitted that the FWF mandate's net gain from raising the baseline un-mandated rate of 20% to 32.5% for Green OA self-archiving is not very great (and much smaller than the Green OA rate generated by other current mandates -- such as Belgium's FNRS mandate -- that may be formulated and implemented in ways that could help Austria's FWF mandate increase its Green OA compliance rate too).

The bulk of the OA generated by the FWF mandate (32.5%) comes from articles published in Gold OA journals or in subscription journals offering optional ("hybrid") Gold OA publishing for an extra fee; FWF hence increases by 22.5% the global Gold OA baseline rate, which is under 10%.

But this Gold OA increase, as you will agree, has been bought at a price -- up to 3000 euros per paper. I ask you to keep that figure in mind in some of the replies I make, below, to the points you have raised.

It is also very important to know the discipline breakdown for Green and Gold compliance rates, because, as Andrew Adams has noted, PMC/UKPMC are just for biomedical research, and, as we all know, physicists have been self-archiving in Arxiv for over two decades at very high rates, un-mandated. Hence their contribution is not a result of the FWF mandate.

On 2012-05-21, Falk Reckling [FR] of Austria's FWF wrote on GOAL:

FR:
In 2006 no Austrian institution had a mandate or an IR. Today only some Austrian institutions have an IR [Institutional Repository] but no one has an OA mandate.

Austria's IR tally in 2006 and today, as well as Austria's mandate tally in 2006 and today are roughly comparable with those of other countries: Increase in the number of institutions with IRs (but with those IRs remaining near-empty) and still extremely few mandates (either from funders or from institutions) -- although Austria does seem to be unusually low in its number of IRs relative to its number of universities.

So the question is: What can be done to generate more IRs and more mandates in Austria?

This is precisely where the FWF can help, in three ways:

1. Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, whether or not it is published as Gold OA.

2. Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR).

3. Only offer to pay for Gold OA if conditions 1 and 2 have been fulfilled.

This will ensure that FWF fundees self-archive. 

It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. 

It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the FWF OA mandate.

It will motivate and facilitate the adoption by fundees' institution of a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just FWF-funded research.

It will ensure that most of the compliance with the FWF mandate is not just Gold OA paid for by FWF at 3000 euros per paper.

FR:
By organizing a nationwide network we now try to tackle these problems.

Before organizing a nationwide network in place of upgrading the FWF mandate with conditions that induce institutions to create their own IRs, it would be well to look at the experience of France's HAL, which is a nation-wide repository just as empty as individual IRs that have not mandated deposit.

Years more can be lost travelling down that garden path...

FR:
At the same time, we noted that a lot of Austrian scholars were/are voluntarily willing to deposit their articles in central disciplinary repositories like arxiv, Repec, SSRN, Citeseer or PMC.

I have already replied about the profound denominator error that you are making here. The un-mandated deposit rate for central disciplinary repositories is just as low as the un-mandated deposit rate for institutional repositories. The crucial factor is not the repository but the mandate. 

And convergent, collaborative mandates (from both institutions and funders) designating the author's IR as the locus of deposit will generate far more institutional mandates than divergent, conflicting ones, for the many reasons I've already described.

One also has to be careful how one counts one's central repositories: Arxiv, as noted, is one of the prominent exceptions to the global un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate. Physicists self-archive in Arxiv, un-mandated, at a much higher rate than other disciplines self-archive (anywhere) un-mandated. 

In over two decades, however, the only other discipline that seems to have followed the example of physicists un-mandated self-archiving) is mathematics. It would seem to be a strategic mistake to wait yet another two decades hoping that un-mandated self-archiving will generalize to other disciplines, rather than just to go ahead and mandate it.

Moreover, there is a third prominent exception to the global un-mandated self-archiving rate (20% overall, but much closer to 100% for physics and maths, in Arxiv) and that is computer science, which has been doing high rates of Green OA self-archiving without needing to be mandated to do so -- but they have not been depositing" in Citeseer (which is not a repository at all, but a harvester):

Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own institutional websites (since long before IRs were invented). But their admirable un-mandated practice has not generalized in over two decades either.

Citeseer does provide a good case in point, though, for the power and efficacy of central harvesting, navigation and search across distributed local deposits.

Google and Google Scholar are further examples of the power and functionality of central harvesting across webwide distributed contents: one does not deposit centrally in google. 

There are more examples of central harvesting and navigation/search over distributed content.

But there is no point in further developing the potential of metadata harvesting and functionality while OA content is still so sparce.

That, again, is what OA mandates are for -- and why it is so important to optimize them, so they maximize compliance and OA.

FR:
With BMC, PLoS and others the need for covering APC arose. And we found it useful to support an alternative business model, as other renown institutions did [see COPE] :

[On COPE, see these critiques of paying pre-emptively for Gold before or instead of [effectively] mandating Green OA.]

Paying the additional costs of Gold OA article processing charges (APCs) is fine, if one has already done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by one's OA mandate (and one has the spare cash). 

But (it seems to me), it is very far from fine to spend all that extra money without first having done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by the mandate.

FR:
I do not agree with your position that Gold OA is costly and Green OA is nearly for free. In practice, Green OA costs a lot of time and money for creating repositories, establishing mandates, having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers, e.g.

I would be very grateful to see what actual Green OA costs you have in mind, Falk. Like the denominator fallacy, it is crucial here to compare like with like. Gold OA costs are from 500-3000 euros per paper.

IR software casts nothing, server space costs next to nothing, IR one-time set-up time is a few days of sysad work, and annual IR maintenance is a few more days of sysad work, per year. IRs are set up for a variety of reasons, not just OA, but let us pretend as if the IR costs are just OA costs: How much do you think that adds up to, per paper deposited? (And bear in mind that adopting a mandate costs nothing, and greatly increases the number of papers deposited, hence decreases the cost per paper.)

Yes, extra money can be spent, and is being spent, on "having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers [in place of authors]".

But the very same thing can be said about these additional expenditures as what was just said about expenditures on Gold OA fees: It's fine to spend this extra money if you have the extra cash -- but not if you have not adopted a mandate that will maximize self-archiving. Most IRs are spending all this money without a mandate (since most IRs don't have a mandate, let alone an optimized one).

So we are again speaking apples and oranges, if we try to rationalize spending scarce cash on Gold OA instead of optimizing our OA mandate in the direction of institutional Green OA self-archiving on the grounds that IRs are costly:

If the costs of Green OA and Gold OA are compared on a per-paper basis (as they need to be, to make sense), there is no contest: Green OA is incomparably cheaper, and Green OA mandates generate incomparably more OA.

FR:
That might give you some reasons why we find, for example, that UKPMC offers a very good option to solve some these problems 

UKPMC, a central repository for UK biomedical research, populated mostly by funder mandates, does not even address the matter at hand here, which is about ways to optimize those funder mandates so that they will generate more OA.

The UK too, like Austria (and the US) would benefit from much greater funder mandate compliance and would also generate many more complementary institutional mandates were it to:

1. Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, whether or not it is published as Gold OA.

2. Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR.

3. Only offer to pay for Gold OA if those two conditions have been fulfilled.

This will ensure that fundees self-archive. 

It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. 

It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with funder OA mandate.

It will motivate and facilitate fundees' institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just funded research.

It will ensure that most of the compliance with the funder mandate is not just Gold OA paid for at 3000 euros per paper.

FR:
Finally, we see no contradiction to support both Green and Gold the same time, but we think in the end a change of the business model should be envisaged.

It is question of priorities, contingencies and timing.

Green OA self-archiving has to be made universal first, by both funder and institutional mandates, both designating institutions as the locus of deposit. That will generate 100% (Green) OA. That, in turn, will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable, reduce costs, and induce a conversion to Gold OA, while also freeing institutional subscription funds to pay for it.

All the best,

Stevan Harnad