Sunday, September 3. 2006The Geeks and the Irrational
A promise: If it should turn out that the spontaneous author uptake rate for the "hybrid gold open access" option (i.e., journals that give authors a choice between either conventional subscription-based publication or paying to make their own article open access) significantly exceeds the spontaneous author uptake rate for "green open access" self-archiving (currently only about 15%, averaged across all fields, even though 94% of journals have given authors their green light for immediate OA self-archiving), then this weary archivangelist will retire to his tent, in defeat and dismay, at having wasted a decade and a half on trying to maximize the impact of human rationality, only to discover that the sole thing that had been missing all along -- as Thomas Walker had suggested in 1998, in the proposal that launched the American Scientist Open Access Forum -- was the option to purchase the extra visibility at a price!
My own guess, though, is that researchers are no more likely to do, spontaneously, for a fee, what they would not do, spontaneously, for free, for well over a decade now, despite its substantial benefits to themselves and their research. As 95% of researchers sampled predicted, repeatedly, when surveyed by Alma Swan (2006) of Key Perspectives and others; and as researchers confirmed by their actual behaviour when submission rates for IRs with and without self-archiving mandates were compared (Sale 2006): Most researchers will not bother to self-archive until and unless they are required to do so by their institutions and/or funders: Not for free, and even less likely for a fee! Growth rates for self-archived articles (red) relative to annual article output (green) for three different IRs (with Library Help = +L; with Mandate = +M): (1) -L -M (2) +L -M (3) +L +M (Data and graphs from A. Sale; all figures accompanying this posting are from Key Perspectives) Hence it is Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access Self-Archiving Mandates (ID/OA) by researchers' institutions and funders that will propel self-archiving rates from their current spontaneous 15% rut into unstoppable growth toward 100% -- given that Rationality and Rational Self-Interest alone did not prove to be enough to inspire researchers to self-archive, but they did prove to be enough to inspire their institutions and funders to extend their existing "publish-or-perish" mandates to "publish-and-self-archive"; and given that few will choose to pay for what they could have for free but couldn't be bothered to provide till mandated to do so... The outcome would be 100% OA either way, of course, but there would be some consolation if it turned out to be mandated Rationality, rather than muddled Irrationality that prevailed! (Only IF AND WHEN the urgent question should ever become (1) how to pay publication costs (subscriptions having been cancelled) rather than (2) how to end access-denial and impact-loss (as now), THEN the windfall savings from the subscription cancellations will be the rational source out of which to pay the publication costs. To pay for OA now, in advance, when all the money is all still tied up in subscriptions, when all costs are still being covered, and when catastrophic cancellations are only a hypothetical possibility -- well, you find your own preferred i-word for describing it...) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum References Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47. Sale, Arthur (2006a) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited. Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos. Saturday, September 2. 2006No OA Yet? Don't Blame Elsevier!
On LIS-ELIB, Mike McGrath [MM], British Library, wrote: MM: "The posting from Stevan [Harnad] on self archiving below sounds good. I extract one element of it below and highlight the bit I am querying": 'There is a growing national and international movement for authors of peer-reviewed journal articles to self-archive their work in repositories that are openly accessible.'This quote was actually from the OhioLINK recommendation, not from me (though I of course fully concur!). Read on: MM: "In Library Connect Vol 2 No 2 (2004) Elsevier state:Elsevier is perfectly right in every single one of its stipulations: each stipulation is reasonable, and perfectly compatible with providing 100% OA to peer-reviewed research output for all would-be users, webwide, including visibility and findability via OAI search engines or google, without the searcher's needing to know the deposit's locus in advance or to go directly to the site where it is self-archived to seek it.MM: "I commented that 'Some have suggested that the implication of this is that one would need to search each institution's web site separately in order to locate relevant material - clearly not often a practical option. (Interlending and Document Supply Vol 33 No 1 page 44). It seems to be a murky but important area. I suspect that Elsevier would not be keen to push the issue as the whole area of copyright assignment is itself pretty murky."'The posting cannot be for commercial purposes (such as systematic distribution or creating links for customers to articles) and it is not permitted to post to Web sites outside of their institution ....Similarly posting of the journal's PDF or HTML files is not permitted.' ("Interlending," by the way, is completely obsolete for the Open Access [OA] corpus!) Elsevier: The posting cannot be for commercial purposesThis is perfectly fine, and justified. Self-archiving is done by authors in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs), which are not commercial, and do not sell access, but provide it, to their own research output only, free for all, webwide. That is the meaning and purpose of OA, nothing else. Elsevier: such as systematic distributionAgain, a university's own IR is not a database selling any systematic redistribution of a journal's contents. The IR is making only the author's own final drafts -- of those individual papers that were written by the institution's own employees -- freely available to would-be users the world over who cannot afford access to the official published version. The metadata are of course also harvested by google, OAIster and other search engines, as are all free contents on the web. The full-texts are also harvested, inverted and cached by google, as are all free contents on the web. That all comes with the WWW territory. Elsevier: or creating links for customers to articlesNeither the author nor the author's institution is creating any links to articles for "customers." (Indeed, the self-archived draft's metadata include, where available, links to the official version at the publisher's website.) If there are commercial harvesters on the web, creating and selling links from X to Y, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the author or his institution. Those who may wish to go after such commercial services legally can go ahead and try to do so (but it would be rather difficult to pursue, because linking too comes with the WWW territory). The point is irrelevant to author self-archiving in particular. Elsevier: it is not permitted to post to Web sites outside of their institutionThe optimal way to self-archive is to deposit ("post") the author's own final draft and metadata in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR). Then central "virtual" repositories need merely harvest the metadata (or full-text, if desired). This is one of the main reasons the OAI metadata harvesting protocol was created and why the IR software makes the IRs OAI-compliant. The era of direct depositing in central repositories such as Arxiv or PubMed Central is already obsolete, even though well-meaning people still don't understand or realise it (and suboptimal interim practices do persist in the few fields where they have become habitual in the past decade and a half). There is not only no need to deposit centrally any longer in the OAI-interoperable era of distributed OA IRs and central harvesting, but depositing centrally is in fact a needless retardant and complication in the process of systematically providing OA to all research output through self-archiving. It is a relic of the obsolete paper-era notion that documents all need to be "in one place" in order to be accessed, curated, classified and searched. The optimal system in the OA/OAI age is for the research-provider to self-archive its own output, and for harvesting services to take care of distributed search. Distributed local institutional self-archiving, for all of its own research subjects, is also the system that will most simply and naturally cover all of research space worldwide. An overlapping (and arbitrary) system of central subject-based repositories to deposit into directly would only create needless confusion, compliance-monitoring problems, and gaps as well as redundancies. Elsevier is hence actually helping OA progress by opposing central self-archiving: By self-archiving only in their own institution's IR, authors ensure that they are not redistributing the journal's contents to a potential free-rider or rival publisher. Reaching 100% OA worldwide is in no way compromised thereby. And universities and funders who adopt self-archiving policies are thereby encouraged to adopt rational policies, that will scale up to systematically to cover all of research output, by specifically mandating that the deposit be done in the author/fundee's own institutional IR rather than a site outside of their institutions. OAI harvesting will take care of all the rest. Elsevier: posting of the journal's PDF or HTML files is not permitted.This too is perfectly reasonable: The publisher's XML and PDF are his own proprietary product and OA by no means requires that that version be the one that is deposited in the author's IR: The author's own peer-reviewed final draft (postprint) is the one that can and should be deposited. A link should also point to the publisher's official version. MM: "Some have suggested that the implication of this is that one would need to search each institution's web site separately in order to locate relevant material - clearly not often a practical option".And clearly completely nonsense, being based on a lack of understanding of the nature of the web, of web search, or OAI-interoperability. All of this will become clearer with time. At the moment, though, misunderstandings like this, freely propagated from one misunderstander to another, are among the remaining obstacles in the path of OA. Elsevier is certainly not the source or cause of these misconstruals of the online medium! MM: "It seems to be a murky but important area. I suspect that Elsevier would not be keen to push the issue as the whole area of copyright assignment is itself pretty murky."I am not sure what this comment means. It is not for Elsevier to push self-archiving: It is enough that they do not attempt to stand in its way. It is for researchers' institutions and funders to push self-archiving, by mandating it. The murkiness in all this is in the technical and practical grasp of what it means to self-archive an article in an OAI-compliant OA IR. But that murkiness will all clear up as more and more researchers do it, and more and more universities and funders mandate it. And copyright assignment has next to nothing to do with it any more (if it ever did, which I doubt!): Ninety-four percent of journals -- including all of Elsevier's c. 2000 journals -- have already given their green light to author self-archiving. It's now up to the authors (or their designees) to go ahead and do it and their institutions and funders to ensure that they (or their designees) do it, for their own good, by mandating it. It is always good to retain copyright where desired and possible, but it is most definitely not a prerequisite -- either for self-archiving, or for mandating self-archiving, or for reaching 100% OA -- to retain copyright. Pertinent Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Threads; Milestones Along the Road To OA Mandates: 1998: "Elsevier Science Policy on Public Web Archiving Needs Re-Thinking" 1999: "Central vs. Distributed Archives" 2002: "Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving" 2003: "Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output" "A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times" "Central versus institutional self-archiving" "What Provosts Need to Mandate" "Written evidence for UK Select Committee's Inquiry into Scientific Publications" "Recommendations for UK Open-Access Provision Policy" 2004: "University policy mandating self-archiving of research output" "Meeting: National Policies on Open Access Provision for University Research Output" "Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving" "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: "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" "International meeting could create a worldwide policy for Open Access" "How to Word Institutional Self-Archiving Policy" "Comparing the Wellcome OA Policy and the RCUK (draft) Policy" "New international study demonstrates worldwide readiness for Open Access mandate" "Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research" "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" "Optimizing MIT's Open Access Policy" "How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate" Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, September 1. 2006Perelman and Peerlessness
The lion's share of science and scholarship is founded on peer review:
The findings of experts are vetted by qualified fellow-experts for correctness, importance and originality before being published; this validates the results and serves as a filter, to protect other scientists and scholars from risking their time and effort reading and trying to apply or build upon work that may not be sound. That's the lion's share of science and scholarship. But some scientists and scholars are peerless: Their work is at such a high level that only they, or a very few like them, are even equipped to test and attest to its soundness. Such is the case with the work of Grigori Perelman. It is a mistake to try to generalize this in any way: it doesn't scale. It does not follow from the fact that a rare genius like Perelman can transmit his huge and profound contribution by simpling posting it publicly on the Web -- without refereeing or publication -- that anything at all has changed about the way the overwhelming majority of scientific and scholarly research continues to need to be quality-controlled: via classical peer review. Nor has this anything at all to do with Open Access. In paper days, Perelman could just as well have snail-mailed his proofs to the few people on the planet qualified to check them, and if, having done that, he was content to leave it at that, he could have done so. They would have been cited in articles and would have made their way into textbooks as "unpublished results by G. Perelman (2003)." For the quotidial minor and major contributions that are researchers' daily bread and butter, formal publication is essential, for both credibility and credit. For the occasional rare monumental contribution or masterpiece, they are supererogatory. Nothing follows from this. OA continues to mean free online access to peer-reviewed research (after -- and sometimes before -- peer review), not to research free of peer review! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Self-Archive Now: No Need to Negotiate Rights
OhioLINK has made a very welcome recommendation to self-archive.
What is missing from the otherwise useful information that OhioLINK lists, curiously, is a link to the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ, which has been in place since 2002! And whereas it is always good to negotiate the retention of rights if an author can and wishes, it is erroneous to imply that that is a necessary precondition for self-archiving. Ninety-four percent of journals already endorse immediate (non-embargoed) OA self-archiving; for articles published in the remaining 6% there is the readily available optionof depositing their full-texts and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication, but making only their metadata immediately accessible webwide, while provisionally setting access to their full-text as "Closed Access" during any publisher embargo period: Meanwhile almost-immediate, almost-OA for each individual would-be user can still be provided by the author on one-on-one basis, via the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button now being added to the principle Institutional Repository (IR) softwares. Hence it is now possible to self-archive 100% of the final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles whether or not the author can or wishes to successfully negotiate the retention of rights. Do not wait for successful rights negotiation before self-archiving -- or before mandating self-archiving. Self-archive now, for the sake of research impact and progress (and negotiate after, if you wish). And on no account feel that you need to switch journals in order to do this! Original American Scientist Open Access Forum Thread began:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, August 22. 2006US Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Report on Institutional RepositoriesI wonder why ARL refers to 2002 when EPrints, the first and most widely used IR software, was created in 2000! (Both EPrints and DSpace were created by the same developer, by the way: then Southampton doctoral student Rob Tansley. Rob created EPrints first, according to our specs for OA, at Southampton -- before he was poached by HP and MIT! Since then, EPrints has continued to evolve to meet the emerging needs of the worldwide OA movement, still under Southampton's specs, but now under the tender care of Rob's successor and Eprints' current award-winning developer, Southampton's Chris Gutteridge. Rob has since moved on to google.) "The survey was distributed to the 123 ARL member libraries in January 2006. Eighty-seven libraries (71%) responded to the survey. Of those, 37 (43%) have an operational IR..."According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), there are at least 200 OAI-compliant archives in the US, 115 of them institutional or departmental IRs, 18 of them e-thesis IRs. "By a large majority, the most frequently used local IR software was DSpace, with DigitalCommons (or the bepress software it is based on) being the system of choice for vendor-hosted systems."Out of the current ROAR total for US OAI archives (200): The corresponding worldwide figures are:DSpace: 55 What percentage of those were full texts of OA target content (peer-reviewed research)?EPrints: 210"The mean number of digital objects in implementers' IRs was 3,844." "The average IR start-up cost has been around $182,500 and its average ongoing operation budget is about $113,500."That would be a figure worth breaking down by software used. For some less daunting cost estimates (for OA-focussed IRs that know their target content -- institutional peer-reviewed research output -- and know how and why to get it deposited) see here and here. [A calculation by IR policy and content, with a quick calculation of the cost per paper (full text!) might prove revealing too.] "Only 41% of implementers had no review of deposited documents. While review by designated departmental or unit officials was the most common method (35%), IR staff reviewed documents 21% of the time."It would be interesting to calculate the correlation between whether an IR had a review-bottleneck in depositing and the number of full-text deposits (eliminating proxy deposits). (Prediction: The unbottlenecked IRs will be much fuller.) "60% of implementers said that IR staff entered simple metadata for authorized users and 57% said that they enhanced such data. Thirty-one percent said that they catalogued IR materials completely using local standards."Obviously library proxy depositing has to be analyzed separately from direct deposits by authors (or their assigns). "IR and library staff use a variety of strategies to recruit content: 83% made presentations to faculty and others, 78% identified and encouraged likely depositors, 78% had library subject specialists act as advocates, 64% offered to deposit materials for authors, and 50% offered to digitize materials and deposit them."No US university yet has a self-archiving mandate. US Provosts ought to try that: They might find it trumps all other factors in recruiting content (as Arthur Sale's analyses have been showing)! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, August 20. 2006Open access jeremiads, archivangelism and self-archiving mandates< jeremiad >Porter, George (2006) Let's Get it Started! Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47."...Stevan Harnad is into the second decade of his jeremiad on the subject of self-archiving. A number of platforms have been created to support institutional repositories [IRs]... If librarians and academicians agree on the desirability of institutional repositories, and software platforms and services are available to make repositories technically feasible, one is left to ponder a few questions. Why are there so few institutional repositories up and running? Why are the existing institutional repositories generally not well filled with the intellectual output of their respective institutions?..." J1:1 Yes, conducting jeremiads for self-archiving is not enough. J1:2 Yes, creating IR software is not enough. J1:3 Yes, creating IRs is not enough. J1:4 Yes, library activism is not enough. (See Book of Ezekiel.) J1:5 Not even providing the evidence on how self-archiving enhances research impact is enough: J1:6 Only (institutional and funder) self-archiving mandates are sufficient (and necessary) for achieving 100% OA self-archiving -- yet that's precisely what George Porter fails even to mention! (See Book of Ruth.) J1:7 Nor are jeremiads to mandate self-archiving enough to generate self-archiving mandates either: J1:8 Only the empirical example of those institutions and funders that already mandate self-archiving -- and have thus demonstrated both the feasibility and the success of mandated self-archiving -- will generate self-archiving mandates. And self-archiving. And 100% OA. Amen. < /jeremiad > Dixit Friday, August 11. 2006Publishing vs. Access-Provision; Unrefereed Preprints vs. Refereed Postprints; IRs vs. CRs vs. VRsFirst, the (many) points of agreement with Simeon: (1) Yes, all things being equal, it is greatly preferable not to remove deposited documents, whether preprint or postprint, hence removal should not be encouraged. (2) Yes, depositing a pre-refereeing preprint is a good way to establish priority, even before formal publication. (3) Yes, depositing pre-refereeing preprints is in any case a good practice, beneficial to research progress, especially in fast-moving, early-uptake fields, and is to be encouraged. (4) Yes, a scholarly record of pre-publication stages of research reports is of interest and value in and of itself. But now the disagreements: (i) An Institutional Repository (IR) is not the same thing as a Central (uni-disciplinary or multidisciplinary) Repository (CR) like arXiv or PubMed Central. (ii) A pre-refereeing preprint is not the same as a refereed postprint. (iii) The first and most fundamental goal of the Open Access movement is to provide Open Access to the published, peer-reviewed research literature. (iv) Open Access to pre-refereeing preprints is and must remain an optional bonus that the author may or may not provide, temporarily or permanently, over and above access to the refereed postprint. (v) Open Access to the peer-reviewed postprint is a necessity, across all disciplines, to supplement Toll Access (via journal subscription/license/pay-per-view). (vi) Open Access to the unrefereed preprint is not a necessity, not necessarily discipline-universal, and should not be portrayed as such. (vii) Central Repositories (CRs) evolved on the basis of spontaneous, voluntary self-archiving, of both preprints and postprints. (viii) Institutional self-archiving is a matter of systematic institutional policy, and pertains specifically to refereed, published postprints. (ix) Institutional self-archiving is (largely) restricted to the institution's own authors self-archiving their own work: preprints and postprints. (x) Institutions can and should control the content of their own IRs (mainly by restricting it to their own researchers' output and by ensuring that it includes all of the institution's published postprint output). (xi) The fact that institutional employees are the self-archivers gives IRs a level of control and answerability that superordinate CRs like arxiv -- in which anyone in the world can deposit -- do not and cannot have (although research-funder CRs are a partial exception). (xii) But for neither IRs or CRs should access-provision (self-archiving), be conflated with publication, nor, preprints (provisional) with postprints (peer-reviewed, published, and permanent). No. The reasonable way to establish priority is to deposit the unrefereed preprint in your IR (or CR) to establish priority and then to get it refereed and published in a refereed journal. If the author of the published version is no longer interested in asserting or preserving pre-publication priority (for some unfathomable reason), he can remove the unrefereed preprint (although downloaded, cached and harvested residues may still perdure). The canonical version is, always was, and will continue for the foreseeable future to be the published, peer-reviewed, "certified" version: the postprint.SW: "For a thought experiment to help with this, imagine [depositing] multiple solutions to some problem to an archive and then removing all but the correct one at some later date. Is that a reasonable way to establish priority?" Corrections are another matter. In principle, any version could turn out to contain an error, detected later: the unrefereed preprint or the refereed postprint. The difference is that the unrefereed preprint can (in principle) be deleted (not necessarily in practice, as ghostly remnants, downloaded or cached elsewhere, can return to haunt the author). The published version can only be formally "retracted," but it cannot be "unpublished." It cannot be withdrawn from the bookshelves and the hard-disks of the world, nor from the annals of the journal in which it was published. Corrected post-publication updates, however, can be disseminated too. So please don't conflate preprint self-archiving, which is a (possibly temporary and ephemeral) way of providing early (risky) access to unrefereed research, with postprint self-archiving, which is a way of supplementing access to refereed, published research. Again, unrefereed, unpublished preprints and refereed, published postprints are being conflated here, as is preservation-archiving and access-archiving:SW: "I think the option to allow authors to remove e-prints is simply an unpleasant compromise that may be necessary to help populate repositories." Self-archived drafts can be disinterred from the archive: "un-archived." I agree that this should be discouraged, wherever it is unnecessary, but I don't find it at all unpleasant to allow authors the permanent option of withdrawing unpublished work from public view if they so wish (and not merely as a sop for enticing reluctant self-archivers to go ahead and self-archive!). That's the difference between publishing something and merely providing access to it. Publishing is archival, permanent and irreversible. Access-provision is not. With all due respect, I think arxiv was an important milestone in the evolution of self-archiving, Open Access, and Institutional Repositories, but it is neither the optimal model nor (I believe) the wave of the future for research self-archiving. The wave of the future (thanks to OAI-interoperability) is (I believe) distributed local-institutional self-archiving of each institution's own research output in its own IR, not central, arxiv-style self-archiving. Central harvesting -- Oaister-, citebase-, citeseer-, scirus- and google-scholar-style -- will take care of the rest, harvesting the distributed OA IR contents seamlessly into searchable central "virtual archives ("VRs")."SW: "One could hope that the option might later be removed in a bait-and-switch move. This was how it played out in arXiv though it was not thought of in that way. Versions have been stored since 1997 but before that a revision overwrote the previous version." Research institutions (universities, mostly) have an interest in two things: (1) maximising the usage and impact of their research output, by maximising access to it, and (2) preserving a permanent record of their research output. Self-archiving institutional research output (preprint and postprint) serves the purposes of both (1) and (2), but only (1) requires that the output be made Open Access; (2) would be equally well-served by Closed Access self-archiving. And the only thing an institution can insist upon being deposited in its permanent archive is the author's final, refereed, published drafts; authors are well within their rights and reason to reserve the prerogative to decide for themselves what pre-refereeing drafts they wish to grant access to, and which of them, if any, they wish to retain in the permanent record. This being the online, networked age, however, the following unprecedented sequence can happen (and no doubt has and will): An unrefereed preprint is posted publicly only, read, used and cited, and then withdrawn without being published, orphaning links and citations (unless the users/citers preserved a draft). This is not good for scholarly progress, and a solution will evolve. The most likely solution is that institutions will make their authors answerable for what they post publicly in their IR at least insofar as concerns requiring them to leave at least a Closed Access version of it in the archive permanently -- with a URL or DOI that permanently identifies it, but does not necessarily provide public access to the full text itself. Under special circumstances, referees, official auditors, etc., should be able to apply to the institutions for access to the full text, in cases of scholarly dispute about what it had contained. Why leave the option to allow the publicly posted preprint to revert to Closed Access status? Because if it did contain an error, leaving it publicly accessible -- even if there are links and pointers to corrected versions and updates -- leaves open the possibility that an unwitting user will access the erroneous version. The probability is low; and even withdrawal does not reduce that probability to zero (because of likely downloaded and harvested residues persisting here and there); but the sensible, scholarly policy for an IR is to support the withdrawal of unrefereed, unpublished work, while formally discouraging its withdrawal. That is the long and short of it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "unpublishing" published work. And, yes, the difference between peer-reviewed publications and unrefereed self-postings is a profound and important one, even in the OA age. The official scholarly record is the published record, not the "posted" record. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Optimal OA IR Preprint and Postprint Deposit and Withdrawal PolicyTechnically speaking, the GNU EPrints software allows deposited papers to be removed instantly by the author/depositor. But whether it is the author/depositor who can remove the paper or a mediator/moderator/approver is a matter of individual IR (Institutional Repository) policy, not of software capability. It is merely a permissions parameter-setting on the software. Given that IRs' principal problem today is not withdrawal but deposit (IRs are still mostly empty), I strongly recommend that departments and institutions drop the foolish and unnecessary mediator/moderator/approver phase, and set the parameter so that authorised institutional users (i.e., all employed researcher/authors) can deposit/approve and delete/approve their own papers, instantaneously. There is no need to make the simple deposit process seem complicated or threatening by interposing a moderator into either the deposit or the withdrawal procedure. (If it is felt that there is a need for vetting deposits, let the deposits be monitored subsequently, not moderated antecedently, and let the deposits [not the removals] be over-ruled by the monitor, as and when needed (plagiarism, libel, quackery), after the deposit by the authorised institutional researcher/author or proxy has been made, not before [when it would needlessly hold up the deposit and frustrate authors, who need encouragement today -- not the opposite, with foolish, arbitrary rules and delays].) As to the worry about withdrawal in general: We are talking here about (i) unrefereed preprints and (ii) refereed postprints of published articles. This distinction needs to be borne clearly in mind, in setting IR policy: UNREFEREED PREPRINTS: If you want authors to be willing to deposit their unrefereed preprints at all, you must allow them to remove them at will, instantaneously. (Discourage removal, by all means, but don't disallow it.)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, August 10. 2006Maximising the Return on Resource Investment in Research
In a recent preprint, Houghton & Sheehan (2006), using estimates from economic modeling, have confirmed the substantial potential enhancement of the return on resource investment in research if the resulting articles are made Open Access:
These estimates agree substantially with prior estimates that have been made (e.g., for the UK, Canada and Australia, see references below: Harnad 2005a,b,c).The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings Research Funding Councils and Universities worldwide are at last beginning to realise that it is high time (indeed well overdue) to maximise the returns on their research investment by mandating Open Access self-archiving (see references below: Harnad et al. 2003; Sale 2006a,b,c,d; Swan 2006). References Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003). Harnad, S. (2005a) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16). Harnad, S. (2005b) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research. Harnad, Stevan (2005c) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research Investment. In Steele, Prof Colin, Eds. Proceedings National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney, Australia. Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos. Sale, Arthur (2006a) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited. Sale, Arthur (2006b) Comparison of IR content policies in Australia. First Monday 11(4). Sale, Arthur (2006c) The impact of mandatory policies on ETD acquisition. D-Lib Magazine 12(4). Sale, Arthur (2006d) Generic Risk Analysis - Open Access for your institution. Technical Report, School of Computing, University of Tasmania. Sale, Arthur (2006e) Maximizing the research impact of your publications. Technical Report, School of Computing, University of Tasmania. Sale, Arthur (2006f) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday 11(10) October Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 20. Chandos. Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos. Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Threads:"What Provosts Need to Mandate" (2003) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, August 3. 2006Putting Provost Principles into Practice: II
More US university provosts (22) have now joined the prior pride of provosts (25) to register their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). But having now expressed their support for a federal self-archiving mandate, there is absolutely no need for the provosts to wait for the Act's adoption in order to act! This would be an excellent time for the provosts to put their principled support for the FRPAA into practice by each adopting an institutional self-archiving mandate of their own, at their own respective universities, and by registering and describing their mandates, for other universities to see and emulate, at ROARMAP.
Some Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: "Chron. High. Ed. 18 September on Cal Tech & Copyright" (Sep 1998) "Scholars' Forum: A New Model For Scholarly Communication" (Mar 1999) "The Need To Re-Activate the Provosts' Initiative" (Feb 2001) "Written evidence for UK Select Committee's Inquiry into Scientific Publications" (Dec 2003) "What Provosts Need to Mandate" (Dec 2003) "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004) "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" (Jan 2005) "Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research" (Sep 2005) "Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate" (Mar 2006) "How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate" (Sep 2006) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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