Thursday, October 9. 2008
National Cancer Institute of Canada (CANADA* funder-mandate)
Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
Effective July 2009, all researchers supported in whole or in part through the NCIC are required to make their published results of NCIC supported work publicly available. Researchers are encouraged to make their work publicly available as soon as possible, but must do so no later than six months after the final publication date.
The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access at last puts some real practical policy content and substance into the Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin series, along the lines of the UK Select Committee Recommendation and Berlin 3. Please read what the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale, one if its main architects, has to say about the Brisbane Declaration. If this is implemented planet-wide, we have universal Open Access within a year.
Stevan Harnad From: Arthur Sale
Date: Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: Brisbane declaration on Open Access
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM
...May I tease out a few strands of the Brisbane Declaration for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference in Brisbane.
1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of the active members of the repository community in Australia.
2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what Australia should do about making its research accessible. It is not a policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are inevitably needed in a formal policy.
3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research.
4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data and knowledge (in the humanities and arts).
5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs ("Versions of Record") were not the preferred version of an article to hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft ("Accepted Manuscript") which is preferred. The "Version of Record" remains the citable object.
6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA when possible).
While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a cusp.
What are the chances of a matching declaration in other countries?
Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants. Brisbane Declaration Preamble: The participants recognise Open Access as a strategic enabling activity, on which research and inquiry will rely at international, national, university, group and individual levels.
Strategies: Therefore the participants resolve the following as a summary of the basic strategies that Australia must adopt:1. Every citizen should have free open access to publicly funded research, data and knowledge.
2. Every Australian university should have access to a digital repository to store its research outputs for this purpose.
3. As a minimum, this repository should contain all materials reported in the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).
4. The deposit of materials should take place as soon as possible, and in the case of published research articles should be of the author's final draft at the time of acceptance so as to maximize open access to the material. Brisbane, September, 2008
Sunday, October 5. 2008
Richard Poynder, a distinguished scientific journalist specializing in online-era scientific/scholarly communication and publication, has been the ablest, most prolific and most probing chronicler of the open access movement from its very beginning. He is widely respected for his independence, even-handedness, analysis, careful interviews, and detailed research.
Richard is currently conducting a series of investigations on the peer review practices of some newly formed open access journals and their publishers. In one case, when a publisher would not talk to him privately, Richard made his questions public in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: "Help sought on OA publisher Scientific Journals International" That posting elicited public and private threats of a libel suit and accusations of racism. "Lies, fear and smear campaigns against SJI and other OA journals" Those groundless threats and accusations appear to us to be attempts to intimidate. Moreover, Richard is being portrayed as an opponent of open access, which he is not. He is an even-handed, critically minded analyst of the open access movement (among other things), and his critical investigations are healthy for open access.
He has interviewed us both, at length. While the resulting pictures were largely favorable, he didn't hesitate to probe our weaknesses and the objections others have raised to our respective methods or styles of work. This kind of critical scrutiny is essential to a new and fast-growing movement and does not imply hostility to the subjects of his investigation or opposition to open access.
Trying to suppress Richard Poynder's investigations through threats of legal action is contemptible. We hope that the friends of open access in the legal community will attest to the lawfulness of his inquiries and that all friends of open access will attest to the value and legitimacy of his investigative journalism.
Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad
Tuesday, September 30. 2008
See this letter from 46 law professors and specialists in copyright law for a brilliant defense of the NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate against the absurd charges of the publisher's lobby and its attorneys in the Conyers Bill.
I generally avoid the legal aspects of OA because I can see so clearly that 100% Green OA can be quickly and easily achieved without having to waste a single minute on legal obstacles (via the IDOA Mandate). But this is such an articulate and rigorous set of legal arguments that I could not resist posting them further just for the delight of the ineluctable logic alone.
Read, enjoy, admire, and rest assured that whether via the legalisticroute or just good, practical sense, OA will prevail. It is optimal, inevitable, and irresistible. The anti-OA lobby is wasting its money in trying to invoke law or laws to stop it; at best, they can just buy a bit more time. (But if universities and funders opt directly for IDOA mandates, that will deny the anti-OA lobby even that.)
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
PS Unless I am mistaken, one detects the unseen legal hand and mind of Peter Suber, plus a goodly dose of the seen hand and mind of Michael Carroll in the drafting of this legal and logical masterpiece.
Friday, September 19. 2008
Those who said Green OA Self-Archiving could not be mandated in Germany please take notice. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has been the first to do the "impossible" (from ROARMAP, via Informationsplattform Open Access and Peter Suber's Open Access News): Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (GERMANY* institutional-mandate)
Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
The policy follows the Berlin Declaration definition of OA.
FG "makes every effort" to provide OA to the full-text articles by its employees.
When FG employees publish in TA journals, copies "shall" be deposited in the FG repository, Fraunhofer ePrints. If the publisher insists, FG will respect an embargo of up to one year.
When FG employees publish articles, they are "expressly required to demand" the "right to further use of their own works."
FG "wholeheartedly supports" publishing in peer-reviewed OA journals.
FG managers are "urged to take a proactive stance" to help FG researchers make use of green and gold OA.
FG "is committed to providing the necessary financial, organization and non-material support" to implement its policy.
Thursday, September 18. 2008
(By way of relief from the antics to lower the ante in the US Congress.)
"Australia ups the ante on global access to research"
Zoë Corbyn
Times Higher Education Supplement
18 September 2008
Stay tuned also for the Open Access and Research Conference
Brisbane, Australia
24-25 September 2008.
The Conference is hosted by Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project an Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations ( DEEWR) funded project, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Division of Technology, Information and Learning Support and the QUT Faculty of Law.
Wednesday, September 17. 2008
[Forwarding from SPARC via Peter Suber's SPARC OA Forum. Also see the PDF edition.]
An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress
Signed by 33 Nobel Prize Winners
September 9th, 2008
Dear Members of Congress:
As scientists and Nobel Laureates we are writing today to support the NIH Public Access Policy that was instituted earlier this year as a Congressional mandate. This is one of the most important public access initiatives ever undertaken. Finally, scientists, physicians, health care workers, libraries, students, researchers and thousands of academic institutions and companies will have access to the published work of scientists who have been supported by NIH.
For scientists working at the cutting edge of knowledge, it is essential that they have unhindered access to the world's scientific literature. Increasingly, scientists and researchers at all but the most well-financed universities are finding it difficult to pay the escalating costs of subscriptions to the journals that provide their life blood. A major result of the NIH public access initiative is that increasing amounts of scientific knowledge are being made freely available to those who need to use it and through the internet the dissemination of that knowledge is now facile.
The clientele for this knowledge are not just an esoteric group of university scientists and researchers who are pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. Increasingly, high school students preparing for their science fairs need access to this material so that they too can feel the thrill of research. Teachers preparing courses also need access to the most up-to-date science to augment the inevitably out-of-date textbooks. Most importantly, the lay public wants to know about research findings that may be pertinent to their own health diagnoses and treatment modalities.
The scientific literature is our communal heritage. It has been assembled by the painstaking work of hundreds of thousands of research scientists and the results are essential to the pursuit of science. The research breakthroughs that can lead to new treatments for disease, to better diagnostics or to innovative industrial applications depend completely on access not just to specialized literature, but rather to the complete published literature. A small finding in one field combined with a second finding in some completely unrelated field often triggers that "Eureka" moment that leads to a groundbreaking scientific advance. Public access makes this possible.
The current move by the publishers is wrong. The NIH came through with an enlightened policy that serves the best interest of science, the scientists who practice it, the students who read about it and the taxpayers who pay for it. The legislators who mandated this policy should be applauded and any attempts to weaken or reverse this policy should be halted.
Name, Category of Nobel Prize Awarded, Year
David Baltimore, Physiology or Medicine, 1975
Paul Berg, Chemistry, 1980
Michael Bishop, Physiology or Medicine, 1989
Gunter Blobel, Physiology or Medicine, 1999
Paul Boyer, Chemistry, 1997
Sydney Brenner, Physiology or Medicine, 2002
Mario Cappechi, Physiology or Medicine, 2007
Thomas Cech, Chemistry, 1989
Stanley Cohen, Physiology or Medicine, 1986
Robert Curl, Chemistry, 1996
Johann Deisenhofer, Chemistry, 1988
John Fenn, Chemistry, 2002
Edmond Fischer, Physiology or Medicine, 1992
Paul Greengard, Physiology or Medicine, 2000
Roger Guillemin, Physiology or Medicine, 1977
Leland Hartwell, Physiology or Medicine, 2001
Dudley Herschbach, Chemistry, 1986
Roald Hoffman, Chemistry, 1981
H. Robert Horvitz, Physiology or Medicine, 2002
Roger Kornberg, Chemistry, 2006
Harold Kroto, Chemistry, 1996
Roderick MacKinnon, Chemistry, 2003
Craig Mello, Physiology or Medicine, 2006
Kary Mullis, Chemistry, 1993
Joseph Murray, Physiology or Medicine, 1990
Marshall Nirenberg, Physiology or Medicine, 1968
Paul Nurse, Physiology or Medicine, 2001
Stanley Prusiner, Physiology or Medicine, 1997
Richard Roberts, Physiology or Medicine, 1993
Susumu Tonegawa, Physiology or Medicine, 1987
Hamilton Smith, Physiology or Medicine, 1978
Harold Varmus, Physiology or Medicine, 1989
James Watson, Physiology or Medicine, 1962
Press Contact:
Sir Richard Roberts
(Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,1993)
Tel: (978) 380-7405
Fax: (978) 380-7406
Email: roberts -- neb.com
Fred Friend (JISC) wrote: "Under your Plan B, what would stop publishers increasing the Closed Access embargo period to two years?" The question is a good one, a natural one, and a pertinent one:
(1) "Plan B" is a contingency plan, in case the Conyers Bill should defeat the current NIH OA Policy (i.e., "Plan A").
(2) If the Conyers Bill were to pass, not only Plan A but all protection from publisher embargoes would be dead in the water (hence embargoes could in principle be made infinitely long).
(3) Plan B is accordingly designed to free the NIH Mandate from any dependence at all on publishers to decide when research (postprints) may be deposited.
(4) Plan B is to make all research postprints OA as soon as they can be, but to require that the actual deposit of all postprints in authors' I nstitutional Repositories be made immediately upon acceptance for publication, and to rely on almost-OA (via the semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button) for deposits that for any reason cannot be made OA immediately.
(5) With Immediate-Deposit mandated universally, "Almost-OA" (via the Button) serves research and public needs almost as well as OA during any embargo period.
(6) Universal Deposit mandates, plus the resulting enormous growth in usage and impact via OA and Almost-OA, will make it harder and harder for publishers to justify embargoes, while at the same time making embargoes virtually ineffectual:
(7) Hence embargoes will die their natural and well-deserved deaths once universal Deposit (Plan B) is mandated, by all research institutions and funders, worldwide, paving the way for full, immediate OA.
(8) It is far less clear whether Plan A [Delayed, Post-Embargo Deposit] can or will be universally adopted, by all research institutions and funders, worldwide -- nor whether, even if it were, it would ever lead to immediate-OA.
(9) Even with the Button, Delayed-Post-Embargo Mandates cannot provide immediate almost-OA. (NIH requires immediate "submission" but it is deposited -- in PubMed Central -- only after the embargo.)
(10) Hence it is in fact Plan A that locks in publisher embargoes, not Plan B!
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Monday, September 15. 2008
Peter Suber wrote in OA News: PS: " I agree that [a Deposit Mandate [DM] plus the "email eprint request" Button] would be a good fallback in the (unlikely) event that the Conyers bill passes. But I can't agree that it would 'hasten universal OA more effectively than the current NIH mandate'" There are three issues here, not one!
(1) Replacing the current NIH mandate with a DM if the current mandate is defeated.
(2) Adding DM to the current NIH mandate even if it is not defeated.
(3) And the question of what would have been the effect of adopting DM in the first place.
On all three, I think the answer is very definitely that DM (whether added or substituted) would hasten universal OA more effectively. (And I actually think Peter would agree about all three of these; the seeming disagreement may be just a verbal one.)
Note that what I said was that an NIH Deposit Mandate (Immediate Deposit, with optional Closed Access plus the "Almost-OA" Button) would hasten universal OA far more effectively than the current NIH (Delayed OA-Deposit) Mandate.
I said universal OA because I was not referring merely to OA for NIH-funded research, nor to the effect of the NIH mandate only on NIH-funded research:
It is far easier for other funders and institutions to reach agreement on adopting Deposit Mandates of their own (Immediate Deposit of all articles, with the option of Closed Access and the "email eprint request" Button during any publisher embargo) because that completely removes copyright concerns, publishers, and the publisher's lobby from the decision loop. For embargoed articles, DM is merely an internal record-keeping mandate, yet with the Button it can also provide almost-OA -- and will almost certainly lead to full OA once the practice becomes universal.
So the first reason an NIH DM would be (and would have been) more effective is that, being free of legal obstacles, it is universally adoptable. Many funders and even institutions have instead copied, or tried to copy, the NIH Embargoed OA Mandate (with deposit mandated only after the publisher OA embargo has elapsed).
These legally encumbered mandates have either failed to be adopted elsewhere altogether, because of unresolved legal concerns (I know of many that have been under debate for years), or they have been adopted, cloning the NIH model, with the loss of the opportunity for Almost-OA during the embargoes (and an uncertainty about whether and when deposit actually takes place).
That represents a (i) a loss of any mandate at all, among the would-be mandates that failed to be adopted because of the avoidable copyright concerns, (ii) a loss of a good deal of Almost-OA during the embargo periods for the adopted mandates, and (iii) continuing delay in reaching universal OA, for which universal deposit is a necessary precondition!
So, yes, the NIH mandate would have been more effective, both for NIH OA and for universal OA, if it had been a DM: It would have generated immediate Almost-OA for NIH and more DMs worldwide. DM can still be added to the NIH mandate now, whether or not the Conyers Bill passes. If Conyers fails, that will make NIH an Immediate DM plus Embargoed OA Mandate -- which is much better than just an Embargoed OA Mandate. If Conyers passes, then it will make NIH just an Immediate DM, which is still better than no mandate for NIH, still provides Almost-OA during any embargo, and is far more conducive to consensus for universal adoption. PS: " The NIH mandate provides (or will soon provide) OA to 100% of NIH-funded research, not OA to 63% and almost-OA to 37%" If Conyers passes, then (as Peter agrees), DM is the right Plan B. But even if Conyers fails, why not add DM to the current NIH embargoed OA mandate, and have at least embargoed OA for 100% of NIH-funded research plus immediate almost-OA during the embargo (and a better mandate model for universal adoption)? PS: " [Nor can I agree that] "there is no way to stop [an NIH immediate DM plus the Button] legally". ...if Congress wanted to, it could block closed-access deposits too." Of course Congress can vote into law anything that the Supreme Court does not rule unconstitutional and the President does not veto. But it does seem a bit far-fetched to imagine that Congress would make a law to the effect that NIH is forbidden to require the deposit of a copy of the publications it funds, for internal record-keeping purposes. (And such a bizarre law would be sui generis, nothing to do with copyright.)
Nor does it seem likely that Congress would make a law that US researchers could no longer send reprints of their research to researchers requesting them, as researchers worldwide have been doing for a half century. (And this too would be an ad hoc law, though, at a stretch, it could be portrayed as a curb on Fair Use.) PS: "However, I would like to see the NIH add the email request button even if the Conyers bill goes down in flames. Then the policy would provide embargoed OA to 100% of NIH-funded research, and almost-OA during the embargo period." I think we are in complete agreement! Substitute DM + Button for the current NIH Mandate if Conyers fails, and add DM + Button even if it succeeds. (But that doesn't just mean the Button: It means adding the requirement to deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication.)
The only thing missing from this agreement is the one additional (but crucial) further facilitator of universal adoption of DMs: NIH should specify that its preferred mode of deposit is to deposit the postprint in the author's own Institutional Repository (if there is one) and then to port it automatically to NIH from there, via the SWORD protocol: "One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind" Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Saturday, September 13. 2008
Re: Conyers Bill: "Bill Would Block NIH Public Access Policy"
(Science, 11 September)
Plan B for NIH Public Access Mandate: A Deposit Mandate
(And It's Stronger Than Plan A!)
Let us hope that the Conyers Bill, resulting from the publisher lobby's attempt to overturn the NIH Public Access Mandate, will not succeed.
But in case it does, I would like to recommend making a small but far-reaching modification in the NIH mandate and its implementation that will effectively immunize it against any further publisher attempts to overturn it on legal grounds. And this Plan B will actually help hasten universal OA more effectively than the current NIH mandate: (1) NIH should mandate deposit of the refereed final draft of all NIH-funded research, immediately upon acceptance for publication.
(2) But access to that deposited draft need only be made Open Access when there is no publisher embargo on making it Open Access; otherwise it may be made Closed Access.
(3) Open Access means that the full text of the deposited draft is freely accessible to anyone, webwide, immediately.
(4) Closed Access means that the full text of the deposited draft is visible and accessible only to the depositor and the depositor's employer and funder, for internal record-keeping and grant-fulfillment purposes. (Publishers have no say whatsoever in institutional and funder internal record-keeping.)
(5) For all deposits, however, both Open Access and Closed Access, the deposited article's metadata (author, title, journal, date. etc.) are Open Access, hence visible and accessible to anyone, webwide.
(6) Now the essence of this strategy: NIH should also implement the "Email Eprint Request" Button, so that any would-be user, webwide, who reaches a link to a Closed Access article, can insert their email address in a box, indicate that a single copy of the postprint is being requested for research or health purposes, and click.
(7) That eprint request is then emailed by the repository software, automatically and immediately, to the author of the article, who receives an email with a URL in it that the author can then click if they wish to have the repository software automatically email one individual copy of that eprint to that individual requester.
(8) This is not Open Access (OA). But functionally, it is almost-OA.
(9) Many journals (63%) already endorse immediate OA.
(10) Closed Access plus the Button will further provide almost-OA for the remaining 37%.
(11) That means an NIH Deposit Mandate guarantees either immediate OA (63%) or almost-OA (37%) for 100% of NIH-funded research, and 100% of research's immediate-access needs are fulfilled, almost-immediately, during any embargo period, worldwide.
(12) In addition, an NIH Deposit Mandate will encourage universities in the US and worldwide to adopt Deposit Mandates too, for all of their research article output, not just NIH-funded biomedical research output.
(13) The spread of such Deposit Mandates across institutions and funders globally will inevitably lead to a transition to universal OA for all research output as a natural matter of course, as the mandates ensure the universal practice of immediate deposit, and the resultant pressure for the benefits of instant access becomes irresistible.
(14) Lastly, to make the almost-OA Button even more powerful and easier to implement, NIH should stipulate that the preferred locus of deposit is the author's own Institutional Repository, which can then export the deposit to PubMed Central using the automatized SWORD protocol. The fact is (and everyone will see this clearly in hindsight) that, all along, the online medium itself has made OA a foregone conclusion for research publications. There is no way to stop it legally.
It is only technological short-sightedness that is making publishers and OA advocates alike imagine that the outcome is somehow a matter of law and legislation. It is not, and never has been.
It is only because we have been taking an obsolete, paper-based view of it all that we have not realized that when authors wish it to be so, the Web itself has made it no longer possible to prevent researchers from freely distributing their own research findings, one way or the other. There is no law against an author giving away individual copies of his own writing for research purposes. Researchers have been doing it -- by mailing individual reprints to individual requesters -- for at least a half century.
And NIH need only mandate that authors deposit their (published research journal) writings: giving them away for free can be left to the individual author. The eventual outcome is obvious, optimal, natural, and inevitable.
I strongly urge OA advocates to united behind this back-up strategy. It will allow us to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
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