Thursday, March 2. 2006Time for a Digital Divide: DL top-down, OA bottom-up
Richard Poynder, the astute, eloquent chronicler of scholarly communication in the online era has done it again, with a shrewd, original and insightful review of the short history of the institutional repository movement.
His conclusions are surprising, but (I think) very apt. His analysis, among other things, goes some way toward explaining why on earth a "Repository Comparison" such as the one Rachel Heery cites below, would have left the first and most widely used Institutional Repository (IR) software (GNU Eprints) out of its comparison. The answer is simple: Eprints is and always was very determinedly focused on the specific goal of 100% Open Access (OA), as soon as possible; it can of course also do everything that the other IR softwares can do (and vice versa!), but Eprints is focused on a very particular and urgent agenda: generating 100% OA to each institution's own research article output. Those who prefer leisurely fussing with the curation/preservation of arbitrary digital contents of any and every description will of course have plenty to keep them busy for decades to come. Eprints, in contrast, has an immediate, already-overdue mission to fulfil, and it is becoming clearer and clearer that -- with some prominent and invaluable exceptions -- the library community has found other rows to hoe. Richard has accordingly proposed that it might be time for a parting of paths between the Generic Digital Curation/Preservation IR movement and the OA IR movement, and he might be right. One has a diffuse, divergent goal, the other a focused, convergent -- and urgent and immediately reachable -- goal, a goal that might now be hamstrung if it is subordinated to or subsumed under the diffuse, divergent goal of the other. On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Rachel Heery wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:I think the optimal strategy is latent in Richard Poynder's very timely and perspicacious article. We should especially recommend using Eprints modularly, at the departmental level, via computing-services and/or library support, along the lines CalTech are doing it with CODA: Instead of building one monster-archive, Dspace/Fedora style, and then partitioning it top-down into "communities", CalTech have made natural and effective use of the OAI interoperability to create lots of Eprints modules, all harvested and integrated bottom-up into CODA. The rationale to be stressed in this is that this easy, light modularity can be used to get OA-specific archives going even in institutions that are slogging away at their own monster-archive, in parallel: Let the OA-specific movement and focus proceed full speed in its very specific target direction (100% OA, ASAP), supported by institutional self-archiving policies/mandates; and plan on integrating the (one or many) OA archives with the monster if/when it becomes desirable to do so. But let the two proceed and grow at their own pace for now, and in their own direction, rather than letting the monster slow down, hold back or divert the OA modules and specific, targeted OA growth. We certainly should not alienate the library community from this; there should simply be a division of labour: Let those in the library who are generic digital curation/preservation-minded devote their time and energy to the monster, and let those who are OA research-self-archiving-minded devote their time and energy to the OA modules. (Of course what CalTech still lacks is an institutional self-archiving mandate! I will soon make the Southampton policy recommendations generic (removing the partisan puffery!) so other universities can use them in their own efforts to implement a mandate. With Arthur Sale's permission, I hope we can couple this with the masterly risk-assessment document he is currently drafting!) Stevan Harnad Monday, February 20. 2006Providing One's Own Writings for Assessment is Unfair Use?
On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 Charles Oppenheim (CO) wrote in AmSci:
CO: : "I regret to say that Stevan is incorrect in some of his comments. For previous RAEs, there WERE licensing arrangements put in place to permit p/copies of articles to be passed to RAE panels. he is probably unaware of this because no great publicity was associated with the arrangements that were set up."There is no end to what people will do, if left to their own devices, safely out of reach of critical reflection. The only substantive question, though, is: What actually makes sense? (If more publicity had attended the low-profile RAE licensing arrangements last time, perhaps some voices of reason would have been raised earlier. As it stands, it seems to me that people in the self-regulating interstices of IP-never-neverland are making ad hoc decisions about what does and does not need permission without any particular answerability to fact or reason, one way or the other!) Unless I am mistaken, the RAE consists of the following: Researchers all over the UK submit N (4? 8? 12?) copies of their four most important articles, to be counted (and sometimes confirmed, and sometimes even read and pondered) by a panel of RAE assessors. I (and many others the world over) receive, every year, several times, copies of the articles of candidates at other institutions who are being evaluated for employment, promotion, tenure, chairs, prizes, or funding. Does anyone imagine that a license has been or needs to be sought in order to send someone's own work out to be evaluated? Reductio ad absurdum: Suppose the photocopies, which the author makes for his own private use, are temporarily lent to another individual, with the request that they then be returned to their owner: Does that too call for "licensing arrangements"? Well then let the evaluation copies be considered a loan, and let that be the end of it! (If still in doubt, run the same thought experiment through with a lent book, instead of an article, or one's own photocopy of one's own book, lent.) Still not absurd enough? Well then return to what would have been the most sensible thing to do in the first place: Not to use originals or photocopies of the publisher's version at all, but simply the author's own peer-reviewed final draft ("postprint"). Still think I need a license to send my own work to someone to assess it for a salary rise? CO: "Licences are likewise needed this time around because the Universities do not (in general) own the copyright in these items, so they are "dealing" with someone else's (usually a publisher's) copyright material. Such copying by Universities cannot be considered "fair dealing" as it is not for one of the permitted purposes, and indeed is not permitted under any other exception to copyright. So I am glad that PLS is arranging a licence so that institutions can pass copies of items to RAE panels without risk of copyright infringement."The solution to this rather absurd pseudo-problem -- "How can I provide a copy of my very own writing to be evaluated by someone who I would very much prefer not to oblige to go out and buy a copy for himself in exchange for the privilege of deciding whether or not to pay me more salary or research funding?" -- is super-simple: Let it not be (nominally) the "universities" that do the submitting to the RAE; let it instead be (nominally) the authors themselves. "Here is my work: Please assess me!" Let the authors either "lend" their own photocopies of their own published articles to the RAE assessors (with a postage stamp and a cheery request to return it to its rightful owner once assessed), or, better still, let them submit only their own final, corrected drafts, straight out of their own word-processors. (I had already pointed out that the fatal foolishness -- probably out of pointless pedantry if not paranoia -- was in RAE's insisting on the publisher's offprint rather than the author's postprint in the first place.) I am, of course, not proposing that these idiotic prophylactic measures actually be taken; I am just trying to use them as an intuition pump, to wash off the nonsensical notion that "institutions" (whether the author's university or HEFCE) are here making "unfair use" of the publisher's property: It is the authors who are doing the fair-using, of their own work, in their own interests. Anyone who insists on construing it in another way is simply giving HEFCE and the universities bad advice. (But, without publicity, bad advice risks being followed.) CO: "In summary, I'm afraid the law does require licensing this time around, as it did for the previous RAEs."The Law requires licensing if we put the question to the Law in the following form: The Law comes up with an altogether different answer if we instead ask:"May institutions make multiple photocopies of a published work to submit them to the RAE?" QED (or so it ought to be, but I expect there are more hermeneutic epicycles to be spun on this yet...)"May individuals lend/send personal copies of their own work to be evaluated?" CO: "My understanding is that the RAE panels want pdfs rather than author postprints because they need the reassurance that the thing they are reading is identical to that which was published. Since the RAE is an auditing exercise in which the onus is on the integrity of what is being submitted, HEFCE no doubt feel that the pdf offers the necessary security."That is indeed the heart of the matter, and just a little common sense and reflection will reveal -- as I have pointed out many times before -- that the onus is not on HEFCE but on the institutions, to make sure that what they are submitting is kosher. If it is discovered that someone has submitted a plagiarised or unpublished or altered work -- something that the electronic medium makes even easier to detect and expose than was possible in the paper medium (though even in the paper medium, the risk and consequences of exposure had been mighty) -- then the ones that are named, shamed, blamed and punished are of course the institutions, and ultimately the researchers, not HEFCE! To show that this is all pure pedantry and nothing more (except possibly paranoia), ask yourself whether it is really "safe" to trust even the journal offprint? After all, peer review being the frail human exercise it is, the only ones who may (or may not) have ensured that the paper met all dietetic laws were the referees: Is the onus of the integrity of the RAE exercise to be entrusted to one or two unidentified, fallible, corruptible referees? Surely RAE should re-do the peer review, and with more robust numbers, on whatever document the author submits! If this last compunction seems to call into question the value of having the RAE assessors re-do in any measure the assessment that has already been done by the peer reviewers, then I have succeeded in making myself understood! There is no need for most of the baroque trappings of this auditing exercise: Insofar as published journal articles are concerned, it is just an auditing exercise. The RAE should not be asking for copies of the papers to read at all -- god knows how many of them actually get read anyway -- it should simply be counting: journal articles, citations, downloads, and other objective indicators. (Charles himself has published a good deal of evidence that a goodly proportion of the variance in the RAE rankings is already predictable from that scientometric audit trail.) Instead, we find ourselves in the absurd position of twisting ourselves into knots in order to have the "legal right" to submit for re-assessment (inexpert re-assessment, and only on a spot-check basis), by an RAE panel, the publisher's proprietary page-images of a peer-reviewed article that has already been assessed (by purpose-picked, qualified peer experts -- within the vagaries of each journal's quality standards, competence, and conscientiousness, such as they are), when the resulting RAE outcome is already highly correlated with an objective audit we could have done without even needing to have the full-texts in hand! And, inasmuch as we may have felt impelled to give the full-texts a peek, we might just as well have had the author's peer-reviewed, corrected final draft (postprint), without the further pomp and circumstance, just duly certified by the already frantic and compulsive RAE preparation committee in each department of each university, eager to maximise their ranks, minimise their risks, and be compliant in every conceivable and inconceivable way.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. As I said, this will all be seen to be hilarious in hindsight: Once we are all making our postprints routinely accessible online free for all in our institutional repositories, the thought that we were agitating ourselves over "licensing arrangements" for RAE assessment way back in 2006 will be seen to have just been one of those quaint paleolithic quirks, like the erstwhile conviction that everyone needed a walking stick or a top hat in order to stay upright and avoid their death of a cold or sunstroke... CO: "Having said all that, things would have been so much simpler if, as Stevan has argued, mandated self-archived articles with copyright owned by the academic/HEI had been around years ago!"I hate to be so contrary again but, no, it is not copyright-retention that has been and is the problem. It is finger-retention: If/when researchers make (or get made to make) their fingers do the walking, to do at last those few keystrokes required to deposit their refereed postprints (and optionally also their pre-refereeing preprints) in their own IRs -- a practice to which 93% of journals have already given their blessing, though it was not really needed, yet only about 15% of authors are actually doing it unmandated (whereas 95% would do it if mandated) -- then all of this substance- and sense-free shadow-boxing will be at an end and... (After 12 long years I no longer say "the optimal and inevitable" will be upon us: I don't doubt that we will simply graduate to some new, higher level of tom-foolery.) On Mon, 20 Feb 2006, CO replied: CO:"With respect, Stevan has got the legal situation wrong. It is not the academics who are asked to provide copies of their articles to the RAE panels - it is their employing Universities."But that is the point! The absurd case for licensing RAE submissions is based on simply asking in the wrong way (whereas asking in the right way would yield the identical benefits, but without the spurious licensing requirement): (1) The objective is to have 4 articles from every participating researcher sent to RAE quadrennially for auditing and assessment. (2) If we (arbitrarily) say it is the university that is sending 4N (arbitrary) articles to RAE, then it sounds like the university is making unfair use of 3rd-party content. (3) If we instead (sensibly) say it is each author, sending his own 4 articles, for auditing and assessment, then it is crystal clear that it is fair (authorial) use. Hence (3) is not only the way the whole question should be put, but it is also the most accurate and transparent description of what is actually going on, and what the RAE is actually about: Researchers are sending their articles to RAE to be assessed so that they can get more money! I can only repeat, if RAE persists in putting it instead in an obtuse way, the results will be equally obtuse. CO:"So, saying it is just like being asked by a colleague for a copy of one of your articles is incorrect. It is the employer making multiple copies of multiple articles."Would it settle minds if a directive were circulated at all the UK universities stating that: "On no account must it be the Centre or its secretaries who photo-copy the articles! Each individual author must do so, personally..."? (Charles, with all due respect, I am doing a formal and functional reductio ad absurdum here, so it won't do to just repeat the one arbitrary formal way of characterising and implementing the exercise, when another way of characterising and implementing the very same thing would have precisely the same outcome, without the absurd consequences (i.e., without the ostensible need to license 3rd-party contents!). CO:"It's also not lending of the materials, because the RAE panels retain them, and don't return them to the HEI at the end of the RAE."Would it settle minds if the articles were lent, with the author doing the photocopying, the department merely coordinating ("auditing"!) its own individual authors' mailings, and each author solemnly requesting, in writing, that after "assessment" his personal property itemsd should either be mailed back or destroyed? I make no comment on the absurdity of RAE wanting to preserve the articles in their possession till kingdom come (whereas they are all already in the public record, duly published, and all that's needed for an audit is an audit-trail -- just as an accounting firm need not store the cash, just the bank-statements!). (The bright light who thought RAE needed a permanent store of the articles themselves after the assessment is no doubt the same one that insisted on the publisher's version instead of the author's final draft in the first place. I think we would all be better off if spared this illumination this time round...) CO:"Claiming the academics are lending the stuff to RAE panels does not stand up to serious scrutiny - a check of the RAE documentation makes it clear this is not what it is occurring."Vide supra, re. RAE storage. Arbitrary and absurd practises cannot be justified by simply saying "But look, we're doing it." "CO: I'm sorry to be a pedantic old bore, but what the HEIs are doing for the RAE panels is copyright infringement unless a licence has been agreed."Then let what the HEIs are doing instead be be formally "devolved" to each individual author. Then it's each individual author that's doing it. That's all that's needed (and it's merely a trivial formality; and it's been nothing but a trivial formal matter all along). CO:"Re. the pdf versus author version, the RAE panel are auditors. Just as a financial auditor would require printed invoices, bank statements, etc., the panel has to use the legally most robust version of the documentation it is validating. HEFCE will be bending over backwards to ensure everything it does is legally watertight. I'm afraid Word documents are much less likelyOn the contrary, the fact that HEIs would be the ones taking the risk if they allowed their authors to use a doctored Word document is the point! First, if it's going to be a financial-audit analogy, then let's keep the tertium comparationis straight: First, auditors audit bank-statements, not cash! (They don't need to read the writing on the money, weight the pounds sterling themselves, or stash the cash for future generations.) HEFCE itself is doling out cash on the strength of the research bank-statement audit. The bank-statements are provided by the author, via his institution. It is authors'/institutions' responsibility to ensure that their submitted bank-statement statements are valid. It is they who are liable if they are fraudulent, not HEFCE. And the sensible way for HEFCE to "validate" those bank-statements is precisely the same way any prospective lender would verify a client's bank-statements or credit rating: by consulting a central bank-asset database -- which in this case is ISI, for which the UK fortunately already has a national site-license! All that's needed for that is each article's reference metadata, not its full-text (let alone the full-text in the publisher's PDF format!). And -- ceterum censeo -- the reference metadata are all that needs to be submitted for auditing (i.e., counting). In contrast, "[re-]assessment" (i.e., substantive evaluation, as opposed to mere auditing) -- over and above the peer-review that these published articles have already undergone with their respective journals -- is another matter, and probably a superfluous one, but for the browsing and spot-checking that some of the re-assessors may actually wish to do, the authors' postprints are more than enough. And those postprints need sit merely in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), where the re-assessors may safely consult them at their leisure, 24/7, online... Am I the only one who sees that this is all an imperial tempest in a virtual teapot? Harrumph! Your weary archivangelist, with his sparse remaining vestiges of patience alas a-frayed... Stevan Harnad 1997 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> 2006 Saturday, February 18. 2006A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy
In Open Access News. Peter Suber describes a "New Elsevier policy on NIH-funded authors" which informs Elsevier authors:
"Elsevier will submit to PubMed Central on your behalf a version of your manuscript that will include peer-review comments, for public access posting 12 months after the final publication date. This will ensure that you will have responded fully to the NIH request policy. There will be no need for you to post your manuscript directly to PubMed Central, and any such posting is prohibited (although Elsevier will not request that manuscripts authored and posted by US government employees should be taken down from PubMed Central)."Peter criticizes this Elsevier policy, but I think it is the NIH policy, not the Elsevier policy, that needs the criticism (and correction). Elsevier's author self-archiving policy is as constructive and progressive as anyone could wish, and perfectly sufficient for 100% OA: "You can post your version of your article on your personal web page or the web site of your institution, provided that you include a link to the journal's home page or the article's DOI and include a complete citation for the article. This means that you can update your version (e.g. the Word or Tex form) to reflect changes made during the peer review and editing process."It is NIH that has been persistently and needlessly foolish, despite being fully forewarned. NIH has pointlessly insisted that the deposit must be in a 3rd-party central repository, PubMed Central (PMC), instead of the author's own institutional repository (from which PMC could easily harvest the metadata, linking to the full-text of the article). As a result, NIH has gotten itself stuck with a 12-month embargo as well as an interdiction against depositing directly in PMC. And besides insisting that (1) the deposit must be in PMC, NIH has not even put any muscle behind its "must" -- merely (2) requesting, rather than requiring, that its authors deposit -- and (3) deposit within 12 months, not immediately upon acceptance for publication. Hence the NIH policy has virtually invited both a low compliance rate and an embargo upon itself -- and for no reason whatsoever, as all the benefits of 100% OA can be had without (1) - (3) by simply requiring immediate deposit in the author's own IR (and simply harvesting and linking from PMC). The IR software allows would-be users to request the eprint from the author semi-automatically by email during any delay period. One can only hope that NIH will follow the lead of the UK Select Committee, RCUK and Berlin-3, and get it right the next time. (Note that although the CURES Act would be an improvement, a mandate is not enough: It must be a mandate for immediate deposit, and deposit in the author's own institutional repository.): Institutional Self-Archiving Policy ModelPertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: "Elsevier Science Policy on Public Web Archiving Needs Re-Thinking" Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Institutional Repositories, Research Assessment and Online Submission
Below, Kate Price of U. Surrey asks whether publishers would allow authors to make electronic versions of their articles available to the UK's assessors for its 4-yearly Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) (in place of the paper submissions that had been required in prior years). Alicia Wise of the Publishers Licensing Society replies that licensing arrangements are being made with HEFCE.
First, I would like to point out such a colossal absurdity in this that it takes one's breath away. Then, more constructively, I will point out what is likely to be the actual outcome, mooting the entire question. (1) The Absurdity: If for RAE 1996 and 2001 there was no need felt to make a "licensing arrangement" in order for authors to submit paper copies of their published articles for RAE assessment, why on earth would anyone imagine that a licensing arrangement is required for the electronic versions? I am not in the habit of asking my publisher for permission to send copies of my own article for evaluation, whether for RAE, salary review, or research grant funding. (What on earth were HEFCE thinking?). (On top of this, it is almost certain that it is HEFCE's completely arbitrary, unnecessary and dysfunctional insistence, to date, on the publisher's PDF for RAE assessment that is the source of all the fuss.) (2) The Constructive Alternative: Research Councils UK (RCUK) is, one hopes, on the verge of mandating that the final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft ("postprint") of all articles resulting from RCUK funding must be deposited in the fundee's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. UK Universities are also poised to follow suit, with mandatory depositing of all their research output. The solution is hence crystal clear. Forget about licensing! The postprints should be used for RAE assessment. The PDFs are infinitely more trouble than they are worth: their marginal value over the postprint is next to nothing. HEFCE should join the chorus (of research funding councils and research institutions themselves) in mandating that all postprints be deposited in the university's IR. Deposit mandates are wonderful things, for they cater for all tastes. Ninety-three percent of journals have already agreed that access to them can be set to Open Access (OA). (Note, again, that no permission is needed from anyone in order to deposit the postprints themselves!) The journal's endorsement of the author's making the deposit OA is welcome, but not necessary either. But if an author for some reason prefers not to make the deposited article OA, they can make it RA (restricted access) instead. The RAE assessors can then be given access to the RA deposit. Now, before everyone starts squawking about all sorts of legalistic and pedantic niceties, sit and think about it for a few moments, and try to sort out what really has substance in all this, and what is just officious fluff: No, the difference between PDF and postscript is not a problem. No, providing access to RAE assessors for a restricted access deposit is not a problem. No, mandating deposit is not a problem. In fact all of these are natural developments, optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and their assessors -- and they are also inevitable. So we can either keep talking ourselves through more epicycles, or we can just go ahead and do the optimal and inevitable (and obvious) at last. Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sent: 15 February 2006 17:46 Friday, February 17. 2006Researcher pages in repositories
Here are some commonsense replies to questions that have been raised repeatedly across the years:
On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Mary Steiner wrote in SPARC-IR: "Some repositories are starting to develop "researcher pages" or "selected works pages" that feature the scholarship of an individual (typically in addition to academic/research units). Regardless of your IR platform, what is your policy with regard to these pages?"It is of course an excellent policy for an institution to promote the research output of its researchers. The Dutch IRs are the most advanced in this regard. But the IR's primary function is to host digital documents, of which the primary target is research papers. Publicity and researcher pages and other "views" of the IR are spin-offs, not the mainstay (though very useful spin-offs). "Do researchers maintain the pages entirely on their own, including uploading citations + full-text content? "The logical and practical sequence is: Deposit in the IR and then extract views and harvest data, not vice versa. "If so, do you let them make the full-text work immediately available on your repository, or is it vetted first for copyright compliance (if appropriate)?"This is the author's own work. Don't let your 3rd-party IP/permissions specialists mistake this for their territory! Author self-archiving is different, and authors don't need anyone looking over their shoulders (though they can use help and encouragement when they are vacillating -- as long as the advice and information given them is sound -- which it very, very rarely is!) "Do you provide any metadata improvements on what is submitted, or take what is provided and leave it at that?"Papers should be deposited with the standard metadata tags that the OAI-compliant IR softwares demand. Further "improvements" are optional and certainly should not retard or weigh down deposits (especially at a time when IRs still have very little content). "What is your approach if a researcher leaves your institution? Do you leave the researcher page intact, with simply a note that the person has left?"Researcher pages are an institution's call. But the main target of an IR, the articles themselves, should certainly stay put, apart from updating metadata for the author's current affiliation. They are means of maximzing access to the author's work, and removing them when the author leaves is as absurd as removing books from a library's shelf. "Any insights or thoughts with regard to "researcher pages" in an institutional repository are appreciated. Much thanks,"Researcher pages should be generated "views" based on the content of the IR. But the IR itself is a repository for depositing research output (and other digital content). It should not be mixed up with home-page provision. And its publicizing functions are spin-offs; its primary function is to house the content, and the primary content is research output, pre- and postprints. Stevan Harnad Thursday, February 16. 2006OA IRs are not peer-reviewed publications: They are access-providers
On Wed, 13 Feb 2006, Sarah Kaufman wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:
"...having spoken to academics within this institution, it has become apparent that potential depositors may be wary of depositing into a digital repository as they fear that a repository that includes pre-prints may not appear 'credible'.The following may perhaps save people a lot of time that will otherwise be wasted re-inventing this superfluous wheel: (1) The right way to make the distinction between published, peer-reviewed material and unpublished material is the classical way: by tagging it as such.See the well-worn self-archiving FAQs on these questions: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#7.Peer http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#5.Certification http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#6.Evaluation http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#2.Authentication http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#3.Corruption http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#23.Version Stevan Harnad Sunday, February 5. 2006Open Access vs. Back Access
On 4-Feb-06, at 5:41 PM, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote in the AmSci Forum:
"In addition to self-archived papers and those in full OA journals, don't forget (a) those in hybrid/optional OA journals (which seem to average around 40 articles p.a) and (b) those in 'Delayed OA Journals'. I and others are currently trying to estimate the latter - over 1m articles from HighWire Press publishers alone (and 0.25m from the first 32 ALPSP members to respond to my enquiry...)"Lower tolls are preferable to higher tolls, shorter embargoes are preferable to longer embargoes, longer temporary access is preferable to shorter temporary access, wider access is preferable to narrower access, but Open Access is still Open Access, which means free, immediate, permanent online access to any would-be user webwide, and not just to those whose institutions can afford the access- tolls of the journal it happens to be published in. The measure of the percentage of OA is the percentage of current annual article output that is freely accessible online. The rest is merely measuring Back Access (BA). BA is welcome, but it is not OA; and not what the research community wants and needs most today. Research uptake, usage, impact and progress do not derive any benefit whatsoever from embargoes, delaying full access and usage. That is not what research is about, or for. But this is not the publishing community's problem, at all. As long as a journal is green on immediate self-archiving, it has done all it needs to do for OA at this time (i.e., it has not tried to get in OA's way, and in the way of its benefits to research and researchers). The rest is up to the research community now, and they will take care of it -- and not through spontaneous self-archiving alone (just as they do not publish through spontaneous publishing alone). Systematic Self-Archiving Policy is needed, in the form of self-archiving mandates by researchers' institutions and funders, the other two stake-holders in their joint research output and its impact. Both publishing itself and its citation impact are already linked to professional rewards, in the form of salary, promotion and research funding. A self-archiving mandate need merely be based on that existing contingency, and the existing publish-or- perish mandate, and designed simply to maximize it. http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.phpGold OA publishing is a welcome bonus; so is hybrid "open choice" optional gold. BA is welcome too; but it cannot and should not be reckoned as OA, any more than re-runs should be reckoned as fresh movies, hand-me-downs as fresh fashion, or left-overs as fresh fare. One of the biggest and most important components of the OA impact advantage, especially in fields that have already reached 100% OA, such as astrophysics, is EA (Early Access). One would think that earlier access merely brings earlier impact, not more impact. But Michael Kurtz's data shows that EA not only adds a permanent increment to citation counts, but to their continuing growth rate too. It is as if earlier usage branches early, and the branches keep branching and generating more usage and citations. Of course, this will vary with the uptake-latencies, time-constants and turn-around times of each field, but I doubt that progress in any field benefits from, or is even unaffected by, access delays, any more than it is likely to be immune to publication delays. If a work is worth publishing today, it is worth accessing today, not just in 6 months, 12 months, or still longer. That is what needs to be counted and tallied if we are tracking the growth of OA today. If we want to maintain a separate tally for BA too, that's fine, but beside the point, because after the fact, insofar as OA and immediate research progress -- research's immediate priority today -- are concerned. BA may be useful to students, teachers and historians, but it is OA that is needed by researchers, today. Researchers are both the providers and the primary users of research: They (and their institutions and funders) are also the ones in the position to provide -- and benefit from -- immediate OA. Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Nature 10 September on Public Archiving (1998) Stevan Harnad Sunday, January 29. 2006ROAR to DOAR
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Hélène Bosc wrote:
"Peux tu m'expliquer ce qu'il y a derrière Opendoar?"I'll reply in English to your question about what is behind OpenDoar, so I can post the reply more widely: "Manifestement [ça reprend] les réalisations dejà faites à Southampton..."It is true that -- so far -- DOAR is mostly just re-doing, funded, what Tim Brody had already done, unfunded (with ROAR). DOAR so far covers about 3/5 of the archives in ROAR and 1/2 the number in OAIster, and does not yet measure or provide a way to display the time-course of their growth in contents or number, as ROAR does. (DOAR will need Tim's Celestial to do that.) However, DOAR does provide an OAI Base URL in what looks (to my eyes: DOAR does not yet give tallies) to be a much larger proportion of archives than ROAR (c. 80%) does, and this is presumably because DOAR has contacted, directly and individually, each archive for which the OAI Base URL was missing. (This is something I had asked Tim to do, but it is perhaps too much to expect from an unfunded doctoral student, primarily working on his thesis! The solution of course is for archives to expose their own OAI Base URLs for harvesters to pick up automatically, and this will of course be the ultimate outcome. For now, there is no Registry that all archives use or aspire to be covered by. If DOAR incorporates all of the useful features of ROAR (especially celestial), and adds value, it may succeed in becoming that Registry. So far, ROAR's periodic calls to Archives to register have not inspired enough responsiveness. Most of ROAR's new archives for the past year or more have been hand-imported by me and Tim! At least DOAR will be funded to do that thankless task, from now on!) The second potentially useful feature of DOAR is that it seems to classify separately the different content types; and (I think -- I'm not sure) that DOAR has checked that those are all full-texts (rather than just bibiographic metadata: DOAR will need to make this more explicit in their documentation). If so, then DOAR can potentially provide size and growth-rate charts by content types (preprints, postprints, theses, etc.), though as of now there is no way to do this (or boolean combinations) in DOAR. (The Eprints software already tags and exposes content types as well as whether or not each entry is a full-text; I expect that the other archive softwares will soon follow suit. Then it's up to the archives to provide and expose those metadata, so the harvesters can pick up, telly, and do other useful things with them.) Right now, the DOAR entry for an archive looks a lot like a library card catalogue entry for a journal or a book (perhaps by analogy with DOAJ) or even a collection. This does not quite make sense to me, since users do not consult or use individual online institutional archives as they do when looking up card-catalogue entries for individual books or journals or collections. For one thing, most of the archives will be university IRs. Most universities produce contents of all of the types listed, and in all of the subjects listed; and rarely will any user want all/only, say, articles on subject X from individual institution Y: They will instead use an OAI harvester and service-provider like OAIster or citebase or citeseer or even google scholar, that searches across all institutions on that subject, or even across all subjects. Hence the only likely use for those type and subject classifications is either (1) for automatic pick-up by OAI harvesters, using them to mediate in harvesting the archives' metadata directly or (2) for individuals interested in gathering summary statistics on individual archive offerings. (And again, the optimal and most likely outcome is that the archives themselves will expose these metadata to be picked up directly by harvesters, rather than having to be mediated by a middle-service, hand-gathering and checking any missing data.) So there are still functionality issues to be thought through if DOAR is to provide a useful service. But I expect these things will be resolved, and that DOAR will build on ROAR something that provides genuine value to the OA community and the research community in general, helping to hasten the day of 100% OA. Ceterum censeo: "DOAJ, OAIster and Romeo should chart growth, as EPrints does" (Jan 2004) Stevan Harnad Thursday, January 19. 2006Publishing Reform, University Self-Publishing and Open Access
SH: Here is a quick summary of points of agreement and disagreement with the University of California (UC) view of Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) as described by Catherine Candee (CC) in her interview with Richard Poynder (RP) in Changing the paradigm:
(1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal and OA merely a means: I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform merely a hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow from OA. (2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts of published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs; I think they are the first priority. (3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving because of the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC faculty, assuming the low uptake was because it was "too difficult." It is far more likely that the low uptake was because UC did not adopt an institutional self-archiving mandate. Those institutions that have done so have dramatically higher self-archiving rates. (4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service that, being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of resources on following up rights problems for each published paper; the result so far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still not self-archiving more than the c. 15% worldwide self-archiving baseline for postprints. (5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint archiving is because of its publishing reform goals, including university self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think monographs are (for the time being) a separate matter, and should be handled separately from journal article OA, and that peer review needs to be implemented by a neutral 3rd party, not the author or the author's institution. The immediate priority is postprint OA. In summary, UC seems to be giving its own hypothetical conjectures on the future of scholarly publishing -- and its own aspirations for the hypothetical new publishing system -- priority over an immediate, pressing, and remediable practical problem: the needless, daily loss of 25% - 250% or more of the usage and impact of 85% of UC research output. Because researchers are relatively uninformed and uninvolved in all this, they do not have a clear sense of the implicit trade-off between (a) the actual daily, cumulative usage/impact loss for their own research output, with its tested and demonstrated remedy, and (b) the untested hypothetical possibilities with which some in the UC library community (and elsewhere) seem to be preoccupied. [Note: all hyperlinks have been added: they were not in the original RP interview] RP: Initially you built the eScholarship Repository with the EPrints software, which was developed at Southampton University in the UK?SH: I think here is where the strategic error occurred. Not in switching softwares (since the software makes absolutely no difference) but in abandoning the goal of 100% OA for UC postprint output. The reason is implicit in the words CC uses to describe it: The self-archiving of already published postprints is not publishing at all, but merely OA-provision -- except if the underlying goal is not OA, but self-publishing! CC: Around the same time we serendipitously encountered the bepress software, and right away we could see that it would allow us to do something much more important. We could see that if we used the bepress software the repository could also support peer-reviewed publications. Consequently, by the time we launched we had switched to a different model, and we had adopted the bepress software.SH: Again, it is hypotheses about publishing reform and aspirations for UC self-publishing that motivated the change of "model." (Model for what, one wonders? OA is not a model. It just a means of making journal articles free for all online. It is publishing reform that involves models. Better if UC had done the tested, demonstrated part first, by adopting an institutional self-archiving policy, as at least four other universities have since done, successfully, and once the doable part was successfully done, moved on to the hypothetical part...) RP: How was the model different?SH: There are two issues here: (1) Did the Eprints software allow departments or research units to be their own gate-keepers for self-archiving? Of course it did, either within one Eprints installation, or, optionally, across many, thanks to OAI interoperability. But much more important: (2) Is local gate-keeping the goal of UC researchers? Has the gate-keeping not already been done by the peer-reviewers for the journal in which it was published? It looks here as if, once again, the hypotheses about publishing reform and UC self-publishing are driving the agenda, not researchers' immediate needs (which are to maximize research access, usage and impact, via OA). RP: So where EPrints software assumed that researchers would do the inputting of papers themselves, bepress software was more suited to third-parties depositing them?SH: As this is not about defending the Eprints software in particular, I only note in passing that the difficulty was not the software but the fact that UC researchers were not required to self-archive, and hence didn't. In institutions where self-archiving is required, it is done, easily, by researchers themselves, not centrally. The central proxy self-archiving is a start-up strategy, used successfully by some institutions to set the practice firmly into motion; it is not a feature of the software: Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. CC:Additionally, the bepress software lent itself to the size of UC; and it allowed the University to decide exactly what it wanted to put in, and to brand everything in the way it wished.SH: All the free softwares are likewise configurable in exactly the same way. RP: You were also able to outsource the hosting of the eScholarship Repository to bepress?SH: So far, this is all excellent practice, and an ingenious start-up strategy (though only if coupled with an institutional self-archiving requirement). But it is the next step that defeats it: RP: And you have contracted bepress to do rights clearance on the papers?SH: So because UC have gotten into a 3rd-party publisher situation, they face rights problems they would not face if it were all in-house UC self-archiving. They are also incurring considerable additional expense needlessly (and at a time when institutions are being deterred from IRs and OA out of the false impression that it is expensive). Worst of all, so far the result is still not more UC postprints becoming OA than the global 15% average: RP: I'm told you have acquired about 1,000 papers in this way... 1,000 postprints is a small drop in the ocean I guess. How many researchers are there within the UC system?SH: Perhaps a UC self-archiving requirement would be worth considering after all, since several international surveys have now reported that 70% - 95% of faculty say they would comply with a self-archiving requirement, and the 4 institutions that have adopted such a policy so far confirm that it works. Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report, Key Perspectives Inc. RP: So you still have work to do in publicising the repository?SH: The missing element is the institutional requirement to deposit the final accepted, peer-reviewed draft (not the publisher's PDF) as an institutional record-keeping matter: a fulfillment condition for annual review, for research assessment, and for standard CV creation/submission. RP: As your experience shows, creating a repository is only half the task. You then have to fill it. For that reason there are growing calls for funders to mandate researchers to self-archive their papers. Do you think that that is the best way of filling institutional repositories?SH: Filling an OA IR with the institution's annual research article output may not be the only possible goal for an IR, but it is surely the most important priority at this moment for researchers, whose need is not for an alternative to the current publishing system but for OA and the enhanced research impact it brings. Copyright retention is not an end in itself for researchers either: OA is. And with OA, copyright retention becomes moot. CC: It may turn out that institutional repositories aren’t the way to go however. For that reason we are also interested in encouraging faculty to manage their copyrights differently, and to consider who they give their manuscripts to, and where they commit their editing and reviewing time. So our main focus is in accomplishing that, rather than filling repositories.SH: Why all this when, in and of itself, this is not what faculty want and need? It would be fine if copyright retention were an essential means to an end that faculty do want and need, but it is not. OA is an end in itself, and it does not require copyright retention when 93% of journals have already given OA author self-archiving their green light: RP: Do you nevertheless anticipate that funders will eventually introduce mandates?SH: But the UC proposal is for copyright retention, whereas what is needed is a self-archiving requirement. Copyright retention requires needless re-negotiation with the 93% of journals that have already endorsed OA self-archiving, and it puts 100% of authors at risk of an unsuccessful re-negotiation, instead of just requiring that 100% of them deposit, leaving the 7% to set access as restricted access instead of OA, pending negotiations, if they wish. RP: ...Given what you say about rights, I 'd be interested to hear more about the Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy white paper. This proposes that UC faculty "routinely grant to The Regents of the University of California a limited, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to place the faculty member's scholarly work in a non-commercial open-access online repository." Would this apply only to journal articles or all the works of faculty, including books?SH: Does it make sense to hold back (and weigh down) the sure research benefits of the self-archiving of published journal articles (postprints) for the much vaguer and more controversial case of books? RP: If it does go ahead would you envisage a postprint mandate following behind it?SH: A postprint mandate should not come behind a copyright blanket retention mandate! That is like making a local emission-reduction plan's adoption contigent on first getting all nations to agree to sign the Kyoto Accord! RP: And you would welcome that?SH: Then why not adopt a posprint self-archiving mandate immediately, instead of waiting for agreement on the much more demanding and controversial copyright-retention policy? CC: ... eScholarship Editions are scholarly monographs encoded in XML. ...As you know, the corollary to the serials crisis is that libraries have less money to buy monographs, and so fewer monographs are being published. The fact is, however, that an awful lot of monographs could be published if the UC Press had more editorial bandwidth. So we have been experimenting with empowering UC Press editorials boards, or faculty editorial boards, to become, essentially, publishers. In this way we can extend the work of UC Press.SH: This is the UC self-publishing agenda, and it is fine, but why is it being coupled with the OA IR issue? and worse, why is it being allowed to hold OA back? The (1) UC authors who publish their articles in established peer-reviewed journals may often be the same individuals as the (2) UC authors of monographs, but their situations are very different. The article authors already have publishers (not UC!) and need only OA. The monograph authors may or may not have a publisher, which may or may not be UC, and they may or may not want OA. Why should the straightforward solution for (1) be constrained by the much less straightforward solution for (2)? RP: It's clear you have a very broad view of the role of an institutional repository. Advocates of self-archiving, by contrast, insist that an institutional repository should only ever be viewed as a postprint archive. What's your response to that view?SH: The reasoning here is unclear: Postprint OA is clearly the heart of the OA movement, and an end in itself (even if there are further ends thereafter). CC agrees that "right now it is tactically extremely important to deposit postprints." Yet UC is not doing what needs to be done to achieve that "narrower" immediate goal. It is instead aiming at the "wider" hypothetical one, and the result is that only 1000 of the "extremely important" postprints have been deposited in the UC IR to date, five years after the IR was created, while white papers are being written about copyright retention, publishing reform, and UC self-publishing plans. If the narrower postprint target is indeed an important prerequisite for the rest, then why not make a concerted effort to reach it first and leave the more hypothetical phase for afterward? (Or at least do them in parallel.) RP: You believe universities should be in control of the publishing process, rather than managing papers that have been published by someone else?SH: This is all fine, but completely speculative. The course that will be taken by journal publishing and monograph publishing, whether published by universities or published by others, is right now a matter of pure speculation, whereas the course that is taken in access-provision for a university's own postprint output is a practical matter, entirely in the hands of the university and its researchers. Why is immediate OA to postprints being held hostage to hypotheses about eventual publishing reform? RP: What worries self-archiving advocates about this is that if universities try to make institutional repositories too broad in functionality they could delay the transition to an open access environment; that we need to stay focused on the narrower view until OA is achieved. You are arguing that we need to plan for the longer-term future from day one are you?SH: But we have a clear example of "why a broader view would slow OA down"! In 2001, UC adopted Eprints and waited to see whether its IR would fill spontaneously. It did not. So instead of adopting a self-archiving policy (as Southampton, QUT, Minho, and CERN have since done, successfully filling their archives -- Eprints, Eprints, Dspace, and CDSware, respectively), UC adopted another software -- and another agenda instead of OA: publishing reform, copyright retention, and university self-publishing. RP: I wonder if we might see increasing tension between researchers and librarians over the issue of institutional repositories? I ask because the primary aim of researchers is to achieve maximum impact for their research; librarians, by contrast, are looking to create large digital libraries or even, as in the case of UC, complete publishing systems. Could this threaten the historic relationship between librarians and researchers?SH: The only tension is about lost time. UC, the world's biggest university system, 5 years down the line after establishing one of the first IRs, has 10285 items therein, 1000 of them postprints of UC published journal articles. Meanwhile, tiny Minho has 3297 items, QUT has 2194, Southampton 7745 plus 9795 for its ECS department alone, and CERN, larger but nowhere near UC in size, has 73898 items. Assuming that (as reported by Southampton and CERN) 40-70% of these, at least, are postprints, it looks very much as if an institutional postprint self-archiving mandate has served these other institutions well. Particularly instructive is CERN: Now that it is firmly on the road to 100% postprint OA for its own vast annual output -- and only now -- CERN is turning to the question of publishing reform. If all other universities and research institutions (including the biggest, UC) were to do likewise (in that order!), we would already be there (at 100% OA) and in a far better position to contemplate the hypothetical horizons of ensuing publication reform. Stevan Harnad Open Access is not about copyright abolition or author reprint royalties
[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]
Dr. Raveendran, whose message appears at the end of this item, is Chief Editor, Indian Journal of Pharmacology, an OA ["gold") Journal, but he seems to be mistaken about what Open Access (OA) means: He seems to think OA is about "abolishing copyright"! That is certainly not what OA means, or advocates. I am puzzled as to where that erroneous idea came from (and offer 3 hypotheses below), but first, the meaning of OA needs to be made clear straight away (I. DEFINITION OF OA, below). Dr. Raveendran also recommends the journals pay author reprint royalties. I discuss this in the second part of this posting (II. AUTHOR REPRINT ROYALTIES?) I. DEFINITION OF OAOA (Open Access) is about making the full-texts of all published, peer-reviewed research journal articles accessible online toll-free for all would-be users, webwide, in order to maximise their research usage and impact. There are two ways to provide OA. One ("OA Green," also called BOAI-1) is for the author to publish the article in a traditional journal (with the usual copyright agreements) but also to make his own final draft freely accessible online by self-archiving it in on the web, free for all (usually in his own institutional repository). Of the nearly 9000 journals published by the 128 publishers processed by SHERPA/Romeo so far (including virtually all of the top international journals), 93% have already endorsed author self-archiving. The second way to provide OA ("OA Gold") is for the journal in which the article is published to make the published version freely accessible online. (Some, but not all, OA journals charge $500-$3000 per article to the author-institution for this service.) The total number of OA journals is currently 2000 (and Dr. Raveendra's IJP is one of them). As should now be clear, neither form of OA involves the abolition of copyright. Both forms continue to depend on it. OA green retains conventional copyright or licensing agreements; OA gold sometimes adopts a Creative Commons copyright license, sometimes not. The only three ways I can even imagine that Dr. Raveendran arrived at his mistaken idea that OA is about abolishing copyright are (1) from the minority of well-intentioned people who are unfamiliar with OA and have been (needlessly) urging researchers to retain copyright (or negotiate a Creative Commons License) rather than to transfer it to the journal in which they publish. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but it is neither OA nor necessary for OA (and implying that it is either OA or a necessary prerequisite of OA, is actually a disservice to OA, needlessly delaying it still longer, when it is already long overdue). The second possibility is that Dr. Raveendran heard the recommendations (2) from an even tinier number of well-meaning but misinformed individuals who have been urging authors to make their work "public domain." e.g., the ill-fated US Sabo Bill (2003) . That 2003 Bill was not well thought out, and has already failed. It has been replaced in the US by the (pending) 2005 CURES Act, and in the UK by the UK Government Science and Technology Committee 2004 recommendation which is soon (we hope) to be implemented as the 2006 RCUK self-archiving policy. My third and last hypothesis as to how Dr. Raveendran might have arrived at his mistaken impression of OA is that it was somehow a result of some early, unfortunate internal squabbling in the OA movement about so-called "Free Access" (FA) vs. "Open Access" (OA). That squabbling arose from two sources: the first was (i) an unnecessarily exacting initial "definition" of OA, defining it, needlessly, as not only the free online webwide access that it really is, but as also including the retention by the author of certain re-publishing/re-use rights, which the author then gives to all users. This over-exacting initial definition of OA (since replaced in practice by the more natural, simpler, and more realistic one: "free online access") had itself been inspired by what had at first glance appeared to be valid analogies between the OA movement and (a) the Open Source Initiative, (b) the Creative Commons movement and (c) the data-sharing of the Human Genome Project. Ultimately, however, all three analogies proved to be misleading and invalid, and the extra requirements they would have entailed (including author copyright retention/renegotiation and the granting of blanket re-use and re-publication rights to all users) proved to be both unnecessary and a retardant to OA, for the simple reason that for article texts (unlike software, data, and other kinds of content), all requisite and legitimate research uses already come with the territory when the full-texts are made immediately and permanently accessible for free for all online, webwide. (The second source of the squabbling was (ii) a green/gold dispute about whether green OA is "true" OA. This has, I think, now been settled affirmatively, and so we can forget about it.) "Free Access vs. Open Access" (2003) II. REPRINT ROYALTIES?The idea of peer-reviewed research journals offering to pay their authors "royalty" revenue from reprint sales is based on a misunderstanding of why researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximise the usage and impact of their findings, not in order to make pennies from their sales! (That is why researchers, as authors, give away their texts to their publishers as well as to all would-be users, and that is why researchers, as peer-reviewers, give away their refereeing services to publishers and authors for free.) "Authors 'Victorious' in UnCover Copyright Suit" (2000)Indeed, in the paper era, authors used to take upon themselves the time and expense of providing free reprints to all would-be users who mailed them a reprint request (based, often, on scanning ISI's weekly "Current Contents") -- so eager were authors to maximise the usage and impact of their work. Today the OA movement's main motivation is to end all access-denial to would-be users who cannot afford the access-tolls, thereby ending authors' needless impact loss. Harnad, S. (2006) Publish or Perish - Self-Archive to Flourish: The Green Route to Open Access. ERCIM News (January 2006)Indeed it was Thomas Walker's proposal that authors should pay journals for OA eprints (a precursor of OA gold) that launched the American Scientist Open Access Forum in 1998! Walker, T.J. (1998) Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals. American Scientist 86(5)I doubt, though, that reinforcing access-blocking tolls is what Dr. Raveendra had in mind, given that his is an OA (gold) journal! If I might make a suggestion, a better use of any journal reprint-sale revenue would to be to use it to cover the journal's own costs, to ensure that it remains a viable OA journal in the long term! If there is a surplus, why not use it to reduce the journal's paper subscription costs, or reprint costs themselves, thereby increasing access still more, rather than simply offering the author a share in the access-blocking tolls? R.Raveendran Chief Editor Indian Journal of Pharmacology JIPMER, Pondicherry - 605 006 Ph: 0413-2271969 Stevan Harnad
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