Friday, March 21. 2008Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse: IIIPaul Gherman: "At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant work contacting publishers to find out what their policy and procedures are. One discovery is that some of them intend to charge authors between $900 and $3,000 to submit articles to NIH. Some will allow for early posting, if the fee is paid."Such are the wages of whim. But they are easily fixed, free of charge: (1) NIH specifies the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR) as the locus for the mandated direct deposit. (PubMed Central can then harvest the metadata or full-text.)The (outrageous) notion of being charged $900 - $3000 per paper for complying with the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is something the NIH has invited upon itself by not thinking through the details of the mandate sufficiently, and mandating direct 3rd-party repository deposit instead of integrating the NIH mandate with Harvard-style university mandates, requiring immediate deposit in the university employee's own IR, without exceptions or opt-outs, and with embargoed OA access-setting the only (temporary) compromise. I am confident that this will be the ultimate outcome in any case. The only question is: How long will it take all the wise and well-intentioned parties involved to take a deep breath, think it through, and do it, instead of hurtling ahead with alternatives they have already committed themselves to, without thinking them through sufficiently rigorously...? See: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse: II
Ann Okerson [AO] wrote in liblicense:
AO: "Right now we have a kind of mess that needs time to sort out: trying to achieve compliance for literally thousands of authors and articles in a couple of months (since the mandate was announced in January) is a herculean task, when the institutional underpinnings (the list of these is substantial) are mostly not yet present. We have a situation in which articles can be submitted by (1) authors, many of whom would rather just have someone else do it, like the publishers -- btw, the NIH instructions for authors are not as helpful as they could be; (2) the research institutions, i.e., the ones that already have everything in place to do so; or (3) the publishers. The potential for redundancy is huge and it is wasteful. The publishers, most of whom are willing to help if given half a chance, are the ones with the redacted articles... seem like the most logical funnel to the NIH, if this can be worked out.The institutions who "already have everything in place to do so" can sort this out in one simple, sensible swoop: Institutions mandate deposit in their own Institutional Repositories and invite NIH to harvest from there (or hack up an export of NIH content to PubMed Central). The institutions whose "institutional underpinnings [they are not substantial] are... not yet present" are only a piece of free software plus a few days of sysad time away from having the requisite institutional underpinnings present. A hasty stopgap strategy of relying on proxy deposit by publishers would be the very worst possible solution. It not only doesn't scale, but it positively obstructs the goal of systematically making all institutional research output OA (playing into the hands of those like-minded publishers who have that very goal). We must think beyond just the NIH OA mandate to mandating OA for all all university research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, March 19. 2008Open Access Now: On the Virtues of Not Over-Reaching, Needlessly
Sandy Thatcher (President, American Association of University Presses) wrote in liblicense:
"If peer-reviewed papers are allowed to be posted on IRs and personal web sites, how is this not open access? My understanding is that this is what Stevan Harnad calls Green OA."Yes indeed, peer-reviewed papers, being deposited and made freely accessible in an IR, is indeed Open Access (OA) -- 100% full-blooded OA (and there's only one OA: Green OA self-archiving and Gold OA publishing are just two different ways to provide OA). I think I can sort out the confusion (and disagreement): The original BOAI definition went a little overboard in "defining" OA. (I am co-culpable, since I was one of the co-drafters and co-signers, but I confess I was inattentive to these details at the time. If I had been thinking more carefully, I could have anticipated the consequences and dissented from the definition before it was co-signed. As it happened, I dissented later.) The original definition of OA did not just require that the full-text be accessible free for all on the web; it also required author-licensed user re-use and re-publication rights (presumably both online and on-paper). If I had not been too addle-brained to realize it at the time, it would have been obvious that this could not possibly be the definition of OA, if we were not going to price ourselves right off the market: We had (rightly) claimed that what had made OA possible was the new medium (the Net and the Web), which had for the first time made it possible for the authors of peer-reviewed journal articles (all of them, always, author give-aways, written only for usage and impact, not access-toll income) to give away their give-away work big-time, at last, as they had always wanted to do (and had already been doing for decades, in a much more limited way, in mailing reprints to requesters). That fundamental new fact would have been turned into just an empty epiphenomenal totem if our punch-line had been that on-paper [i.e., print] re-publication rights are part of OA! For one could just as well have claimed that in the paper era (and no one would have listened, rightly). Third-party paper re-publication rights have absolutely nothing to do with OA -- directly. OA is an online matter. Of course, once Green OA prevails, and all peer-reviewed papers are accessible for free, worldwide, 24/7, online, then on-paper re-publication rights will simply become moot, because there will be no use for them! And that's why I was so obtuse about the original BOAI definition of OA: Because although it was premature to talk about paper re-publication rights, those would obviously come with the OA territory, eventually; so (I must have mused, foolishly) we might as well make them part of our definition of OA from the outset. Well, no, that was a mistake, and is now one of the (many) reasons the onset of the "outset" is taking so long to set in! Because here we are, over-reaching, needlessly, for rights we don't need (and that will in any case eventually come with the OA territory of their own accord) at the cost of continuing to delay OA by demanding more than we need. The same is true about the other aspects of this unnecessary and counterproductive over-reaching: Just about all of what some of us are insisting on demanding formally and legalistically already comes with the free online (i.e., OA) territory (and immediately, today, not later, as re-publishing rights will, after OA prevails): We don't need to license the right to download, store, print-off and (locally) data-mine OA content. That's already part of what it means for a text to be freely accessible online. Nor do we need to insist on the right to re-publish the text in course-packs for teaching purposes: Distributing just the URL has exactly the same effect! Re-publishing by a third party (neither the publisher, nor the author, nor the author's employer) is another matter, however, whether online or on paper. Simple online re-publishing is vacuous, because, again, harvesting the URLs and linking to the OA version in the IR is virtually the same thing (and will hence dissolve this barrier completely soon enough, with no need of advance formalities or legalities). Third-party re-publishing on-paper (print) will have to wait its turn; it is definitely not part of OA itself -- but, as noted, to the extent that there is any use left for it at all, it will eventually follow too, once all peer-reviewed research is OA, for purely functional reasons. Finally, Google can and will immediately machine-harvest and data-mine OA content, just as it harvests all other freely accessible online content. It will also reverse-index it and "re-publish" it in bits, online. Other data-mined database providers may not get away with that initially -- but again, once we reach 100% OA this barrier too will dissolve soon thereafter, for purely functional reasons. It is not, however, part of OA itself; and insisting on it now, pre-emptively (and unnecessarily) will simply delay OA, by demanding more than we need -- because more is always harder to get than less. And (to finish this rant) this is why I have urgently urged a small but critical change in the Harvard-style copyright-retention mandates (which, because they ask for more than necessary, need to add an opt-out clause, which means they end up getting less than necessary): We don't need to mandate copyright retention at this time. It's wonderful and highly desirable to have it if/when you can have it, but it is not necessary for OA. And OA itself will soon bring on all the rest. All that's necessary for OA is free online access. Indeed -- and I'm afraid I risk getting Sandy's hackles up with this one again, so I will avoid using the controversial phrase "Fair Use" -- mandating immediate full-text deposit, without opt-out, with the option of making access to the full text OA wherever already endorsed by the journal (62%) and "almost OA" (i.e., Closed Access plus the semi-automatic "email eprint request") for the rest will be sufficient to get us to 100% OA not too long thereafter. Holding out instead for copyright-retention, with an author opt-out option, in order to try to ensure getting 100% OA from the outset, is simply a way to ensure getting nowhere near 100% OA-plus-almost-OA from the outset, because of author opt-outs. Summary: OA is free online access, and the necessary and sufficient condition for reliably reaching 100% OA soon after the mandate is implemented is to mandate immediate deposit with no opt-out. There is no need for licensed re-use and re-publication rights; copyright retention should just be described as a highly recommended option (which is what a "mandate with an opt-out" amounts to anyway). All the rest will happen of its own accord after 100% immediate-deposit is achieved. (The only obstacle to 100% OA all along has been keystrokes, nothing but keystrokes, for which all that is needed is a keystroke mandate.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 18. 2008Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse: II suggest not colluding with publishers offering to "Let us do the [mandated] deposit for you".Ann Okerson: "If your publishing organization is providing for your authors the service of deposit of their articles according to various mandates, particularly NIH (beginning on 4/7) could you kindly describe the nature or extent of these services"Paul Gherman: "At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant work contacting publishers to find out what their policy and procedures are. One discovery is that some of them intend to charge authors between $900 and $3,000 to submit articles to NIH. Some will allow for early posting, if the fee is paid." The reason is simple, if we take the moment to think it through: (1) The OA movement's goal is to provide Open Access (OA) to 100% of the world's peer-reviewed research article output.[Similar considerations, but on a much lesser scale, militate against the strategy of universities out-sourcing the creation and management of their IRs and self-archiving policies to external contractors: accounting, archiving, record-keeping and asset management should surely be kept under direct local control by universities. There's nothing so complicated or daunting about self-archiving and IRs as to require resorting to an external service. (More tentatively, I am also sceptical that library proxy self-archiving rather than direct author self-archiving is a wise choice in the long run -- though it is definitely a useful option as a start-up supplement, if coupled with a mandate, and has been successfully implemented in several cases, including QUT and CERN.)] Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, March 12. 2008The Special Case of Law Reviews
Law Library Director and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law, Carol Parker, has published an article in the New Mexico Law Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2007 (just blogged by Peter Suber in Open Access News), entitled "Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship."
Though a bit out of date now in some of its statistics, because things are moving so fast, this article gives a very good overview of OA and concludes that, no, Law Reviews are not a special case: Those articles, too, and their authors and institutions, would benefit from being self-archived in each author's Institutional Repository to make them OA. Professor Parker conjectures that most potential users worldwide already have affordable subscription access to all the law journal articles they need via Westlaw and Lexis, so the advantage of OA in Law might be just one of speed and convenience, not a remedy for access-denial. (This might be the case, but I wonder if anyone actually has quantitative evidence, canvassing users across institutions worldwide for research accessibility, and comparing Law with other disciplines?) In any case, if you haven't already seen it, Professor Parker's article is highly recommended and in light of the recent NIH, ERC, and Harvard self-archiving mandates and ongoing deliberations about further mandates worldwide, the article is especially timely. Prior Topic Thread on American Scientist Open Access Forum:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, March 9. 2008Open Access Koans, Mantras and Mandates
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andy Powell [AP] wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:
AP: You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true.Plenty of figures have been posted on how much money institutions have wasted on their (empty) IRs in the eight years since IRs began. People needlessly waste a lot of money on lots of needless things. The amount wasted is of no intrinsic interest in and of itself. The relevant figure is this: For the answer, you do not have to go far: Just ask the dozen universities that have so far done both: The very first IR-plus-mandate was a departmental one (at Southampton ECS); but the most relevant figures will come from university-wide mandated IRs, and for those figures you should ask Tom Cochrane at QUT and Eloy Rodrigues at Minho (distinguishing the one-time start-up cost from the annual maintenance cost).How much does it actually cost just to set up an OA IR and to implement a self-archiving mandate to fill it? And then compare the cost of that (relative to each university's annual research output) with what it would have cost (someone: whom?) to set up subject-based CRs (which? where? how many?) for all of that same university annual research output, in every subject, willy-nilly worldwide, and to ensure (how?) that it was all deposited in its respective CR. (Please do not reply with social-theoretic mantras but with precisely what data you propose to base your comparative estimate upon!) AP: most [IRs] remain largely unfilled and our only response is to say that funding bodies and institutions need to force researchers to deposit when they clearly don't want to of their own free will. We haven't (yet) succeeded in building services that researchers find compelling to use.We haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish of their own free will: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to publish of their own free will, we audit and reward their research performance according to whether and what they publish ("publish or perish"). We also haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish research that is important and useful to research progress: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to maximise their research impact, we review and reward research performance on the basis not just of how much research they publish, but also its research impact metrics. Mandating that researchers maximise the potential usage and impact of their research by self-archiving it in their own IR, and auditing and rewarding that they do so, seems a quite natural (though long overdue) extension of what universities are all doing already. AP: If we want to build compelling scholarly social networks (which is essentially what any 'repository' system should be) then we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community - social networks that are largely independent of the institution.Some of us have been thinking about building on these "social networks" since the early 1990's and we have noted that -- apart from the very few communities where these self-archiver networks formed spontaneously early on -- most disciplines have not followed the examples of those few communities in the ensuing decade and a half, even after repeatedly hearing the mantra (Mantra 1) urging them to do so, along with the growing empirical evidence of self-archiving's beneficial effects on research usage and impact (Mantra 2). Then the evidence from the homologous precedent and example of (a) the institutional incentive system underlying publish-or-perish as well as (b) research metric assessment was reinforced by Alma Swan's JISC surveys: These found that (c) the vast majority of researchers report that they would not self-archive spontaneously of their own accord if their institutions and/or funders did not require it (mainly because they were busy with their institutions' and funders' other priorities), but 95% of them would self-archive their research if their institutions and/or funders were to require it -- and over 80% of them would do so willingly (Mantra 3). And then Arthur Sale's empirical comparisons of what researchers actually do when such requirements are and are not implemented fully confirmed what the surveys said that the researchers (across all disciplines and "social networks" worldwide) had said they would and would not do, and under what conditions (Mantra 4). So I'd say we should not waste another decade and a half waiting for those fabled "social networks" to form spontaneously so the research community can at last have the OA that has not only already been demonstrated to be feasible and beneficial to them, but that they themselves have signed countless petitions to demand. Indeed it is more a koan than a mantra that the only thing the researchers are not doing for the OA they overwhelmingly purport to desire is the few keystrokes per paper that it would it take to do a deposit rather than just sign a petition! (And it is in order to generate those keystrokes that the mandates are needed.) AP: Oddly, to do that we might do well to change our thinking about how best to surface scholarly content on the Web to be both 1) user-centric (acknowledging that individual researchers want to take responsibility for how they surface their content, as happens, say, in the blogsphere) and 2) globally-centric (acknowledging that the infrastructure is now available that allows us to realise the efficiency savings and social network effects of large-scale globally concentrated services, as happens in, say, Slideshare, Flickr and so on).It is odd indeed that all these wonders of technology, so readily taken up spontaneously when people are playing computer games or blabbing in the blogosphere have not yet been systematically applied to their ergonomic practices, but the fact is that (aside from a few longstanding social networks) they have not been, and we have waited more than long enough. That systematic application is precisely what the now-growing wave of OA self-archiving mandates by funders (such as RCUK and NIH) and universities (such as Southampton ECS and Harvard) is meant to accelerate and ensure. AP: Such a change in thinking does not rule the institution out of the picture, since the institution remains a significant stakeholder with significant interests... but it certainly does change the emphasis and direction and it hopefully stops us putting institutional needs higher up the agenda than the needs of the individual researcher.Individual researchers do not work in a vacuum. That is why we have institutions and funders. Those "research networks" already exist. As much as we may all admire the spontaneous, anonymous way in which (for example) Wikipedia is growing, we also have to note the repeatedly voiced laments of those academics who devote large portions of their time to such web-based activities without being rewarded for it by their institutions and funders (Mantra 5). OA self-archiving mandates are precisely the bridge between (i) the existing canonical "social networks" and reward systems of the scholarly and scientific community -- their universities and research funders -- and (ii) the new world that is open before them. It is time we crossed that bridge, at long last (Mantra 6). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 4. 2008Surf Foundation Publisher Policy Survey
The Surf Foundation has released a survey on "Acceptance of the JISC/SURF Licence to Publish & accompanying Principles by traditional publishers of journals."
The gist of the survey result is that more and more publishers are moving toward explicitly endorsing author open-access self-archiving, and that the majority already endorse it. This is good to know, but it was already evident from the EPrint Romeo statistics (derived by clarifying the SHERPA-Romeo data, and presenting it at the individual journal level). These statistics have been available and regularly updated for several years now. Two comments: (1) The Surf Foundation survey obscures the results somewhat, because it uses the needlessly profligate, irrelevant and confusing colour codes of SHERPA-Romeo ("green", "blue", "yellow", "white") when all we need to know is:Stevan HarnadGREEN (62%) (journals that endorse immediate open-access self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint)(2) There is some confusion about what is meant by "open access" in the Surf report (whether (i) Gold Open Access journal publishing, (ii) Green Open Access author self-archiving, or (iii) the adoption of the JISC/SURF licensing recommendations). American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, March 2. 2008How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access MandatesSUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's and RCUK's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's and U. Liege's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate funder mandates and university mandates to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing: Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output: Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research providers of all research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake, usage and impact. Universities (and research institutions) also have a direct interest in ensuring that their researchers fulfill their funders' conditions for awarding grants. Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication, for both institutional and funder monitoring and record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing. As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time, if they wish. There is a simple, natural, universal way to integrate (a) funder open-access mandates and (b) university open-access mandates, reconciling the NIH and Harvard OA mandates, as well as making the two kinds of mandate synergistic and mutually reinforcing: (i) Separate the deposit requirement from the open access requirement.Both universities and funders should mandate immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed final draft (postprint), in the author's own university's Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exceptions or opt-outs, for institutional record-keeping purposes. Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions permit it. Otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes (with only the metadata visible and accessible webwide, not the postprint full-texts). All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders should accordingly apply only to (ii) the timing and copyright conditions for providing open access to the deposit, not to (i) the depositing itself, its locus or its timing. That way: (1) there will be a systematic (and natural) common locus of direct deposit for all research output worldwide;Right now, the NIH mandate requires that the postprint must be "submitted" immediately upon acceptance for publication (which is excellent!), but it does not specify how or where to submit it! The obvious solution is that the postprint should be directly deposited, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into the researcher's own university's (or institution's) IR -- possibly as Closed Access rather than Open Access, depending on copyright and embargo conditions and negotiations. (NIH can then be sent the URL, and given access privileges.) The recommendations of the SPARC/Science Commons/ARL joint white paper "Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright Considerations and Options" by Michael Carroll are all excellent: Their only flaw is in not separating those valid and helpful considerations and options from the question of the locus and timing of the deposit itself. That locus should always be the author's IR, and the timing should always be immediately upon acceptance for publication. None of the copyright considerations are pertinent to the deposit itself: They apply only to the provision of open access to the deposits. In exactly the same way, the Harvard mandate is excellent in every respect except that it too conflates the deposit itself with the copyright and embargo considerations and options: Those considerations and options should only apply to whether and when open access to the deposit is provided, not whether and when the deposit itself is done. The Harvard mandate offers the option of opting out of the requirement to negotiate copyright retention. That makes the Harvard mandate into a non-mandate unless the copyright requirement, with opt-out, is separated from a deposit requirement, without opt-out. The solution proposed here is simple, natural, solves both the NIH and Harvard problems at once, makes the funder and university mandates complementary and convergent, and provides an integrated, synergistic OA mandate model for both funders and universities that will systematically scale to all worldwide research input. I hope that funders and universities will give this integrative proposal serious thought, rather than just pressing ahead with the current NIH and Harvard models, both of them welcome and timely, but both in need of this small yet crucial revision to ensure their coherence and success. It is noteworthy that three recommendations were made to NIH three years ago: (1) mandate immediate deposit, with no opt-out, (2) specify direct deposit in the fundee's university IR, and (3) harvest into PubMed Central. Those recommendations were not followed, and after three years the NIH policy was acknowledged to have failed. Because of that failure, the policy has very recently been upgraded to an immediate-deposit mandate (1). But there are already signs (from the very similar Wellcome Trust mandate) that systematic monitoring mechanisms are needed to ensure compliance with funder mandates. University mandates are the obvious means of reinforcing and monitoring compliance with funder mandates (as part of the fulfillment conditions for receiving the grant overheads and indirect costs allotments). Moreover, university IRs are also the natural, convergent locus for direct deposit of all research output: The universities are the providers of the research, both funded and unfunded, and they have a direct institutional interest in archiving, recording, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing their own research output as well as in maximizing its uptake, usage and impact. Funder mandates like NIH's will naturally reinforce university mandates, like Harvard's. The two mandating parties simply have to agree on separating the universal issue of deposit itself (and the locus and timing of that direct deposit) from the independent, item-specific issue of the timing of the provision of Open Access to that deposit, its copyright conditions, embargo duration, and whatever central repositories may wish to harvest that OA deposit or its metadata, where and when. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Insure the Harvard OA Policy Against the First NIH OA Policy's Failure
Peter Suber [PS] wrote in the March 2008 OA Newsletter:
My question to my closest OA ally, Peter Suber, is this:PS: "My argument in a nutshell is that the [Harvard] policy won't need revision if the rate of opt-outs is low and the speed of deposits is high." In what respect could that precise same argument, in precisely the same words, not have been made about the first NIH OA policy of three years ago (which went on to fail, dramatically, achieving only a 4% "opt-in" rate after 3 years)? Does it not make more sense to immunize the Harvard policy against a similar failure in advance, instead of waiting to perhaps have to remedy the Harvard policy, too, three years hence, just as the failed NIH policy had to be remedied? This seems particularly straightforward now that the simple remedy, which has since been tried, tested, and demonstrated to be successful (a deposit mandate without opt-out) needs merely to be added to Harvard's current permission mandate with opt-out to immunize it against uncertainty or failure. Hence none of the untested new permission mandate's potential benefits would be lost: The deposit mandate's compliance rate would simply be added to the permission mandate's compliance rate. Is there any independent rationale for embarking on yet another 3-year experiment, this time with an untested permission mandate alone, with opt-out, rather than shoring it up pre-emptively with an already tried, tested and successful deposit mandate, without opt-out? I just don't see how more is learned, or gained, by voluntarily renouncing a cost-free insurance policy (and possibly three years of maximized research impact), to instead wait and see whether an untested permission mandate with opt-out might be able to manage to go it alone. (Haven't we already been waiting for OA more than long enough?) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, February 22. 2008Harvard's OA Policy and the Hybrid Copyright Retention and Deposit MandateSUMMARY: My OA comrade-at-arms, Peter Suber, in an OA News posting that I quote and comment upon below, compares Harvard's (CMo) Copyright-Retention Mandate with opt-out and (DMn) an Immediate Deposit Mandate with no-opt-out. The amendment of the Harvard draft policy that I am urging, however, is not to substitute DMn for CMo but to upgrade CMo to CMo+DMn so as to jointly mandate BOTH CMo AND DMn (the former with an opt-out option, the latter without). That way the Harvard policy will not only capture (1) all the deposits that would have been made by authors who did not opt out of the CMo clause but also (2) all the deposits that would otherwise not have been made at all, because the authors had opted out of the CMo-only mandate. The amended mandate loses nothing at all of what would have been generated by the original Harvard mandate alone, it only adds further gains, while still allowing opt-out from copyright retention. Peter Suber: I'm not saying that the Harvard-style mandate will generate a higher level of compliance and OA than a dual deposit-release style mandate (or what Stevan calls immediate deposit/optional access). I think this remains to be seen.I agree that whether it would be CMo or DMn that generated a higher level of compliance and of OA would remain to be seen (after Harvard's proposed CMo trial period of three years -- although we do already know from Arthur Sale's data that DMn approaches 80-100% within two years). But that is not what I propose. I propose adding the Deposit Mandate (with no opt-out) (DMn) to Harvard's current Copyright Retention Mandate (CMo) (with opt-out, exactly as it already is now): Not CMo vs. DMn, but CMo vs. CMo+DMn. That will insure the Harvard mandate against the possibility of another needless loss of three years of research usage and impact (as happened with the unsuccessful first version of the NIH OA policy, until it was upgraded, three years later). And as the Harvard policy is likely to have many emulators worldwide during the three-year trial period (as the NIH policy did), it is especially important to give them them the right model to follow. Peter Suber: At Harvard, faculty will give the institution permission to host copies of their articles in the institutional repository, when they don't opt out, and Harvard will take responsibility for making the actual deposits.There are two components here: (1) the CMo mandate itself, with its all-important question of how great its opt-out rate will be, plus (2) an implementational detail: Harvard engages to do the deposit on the author's behalf (this is elsewhere called mediated or "proxy" deposit). There are things to be said for and against the implementational detail (mediated deposit): Yes, it's easier for an author if all he needs to do is pass his digital paper to someone else to deposit it for him. Many repositories have tried that, with a certain amount of success. But authors depositing for themselves (or their students or assistants doing it for them) is a more direct way of doing it then putting the paper in a central queue, and it has some perks of its own: potentially faster turnaround time, more direct author control, and, perhaps most important, assimilation into the author's standard work-flow for drafting and publishing a paper. In reality, the deposit only takes a few extra minutes' worth of keystrokes per paper, over and above all the keystrokes already performed in writing it and submitting it for publication. Direct author deposit moots the risk of delay in waiting for indirect deposit mediated by a third party (neither the author nor the journal). The jury is still out on which of the two ways of implementing deposit is the more reliable and efficient procedure (but my guess is that it will prove to be direct author deposit, just as it did with word-processing, email, and online searching). Peter Suber: If Harvard is fleet and efficient in making these deposits, then it could provide immediate OA to all the articles not subject to opt-outs (which, for the sake of argument, let's peg at 95% of the total).The implementational detail (of direct vs mediated deposit) can be set aside as an open empirical question. It does not seem to me to be sufficient, however, to assume, for the sake of argument, a 95% non-opt-out rate -- especially in weighing CMo vs. CMo+DMn. If, three years hence, the non-opt-out rate turned out to have been 75%, 50% or 25% (let alone 4%, as in the case of the failed first policy of NIH), the implications concerning whether it would have been better to adopt CMo or CMo+DMn from the outset would be very different. So everything rides on what the opt-out rate for CMo would actually turn out to be. And no one has any idea, as this would be the first CMo mandate. But since the comparison is CMo vs. CMo+DMn (rather than CMo vs. DMn), it is not clear that we even need to know how the deposit rate and the OA rate for CMo alone would have compared with the OA rate for DMn alone. We do already know from Arthur Sale's empirical analyses as well as the growth data on the other mandated IRs, that the compliance rate for DMn mandates approaches 100% within 2 years. So with CMo+DMn we know we would have at least 80-100% deposits -- plus whatever deposits CMo alone would have generated, over and above that. (There is no need to know or assume how many that would have been: CNo+DMn would inherit them all!) Peter Suber: If Harvard is slow to make these deposits, then it will miss a beautiful opportunity arising from the permissions it will have in hand, and may as well defer to publisher embargoes.Peter is expressing concern here about the possible delay in mediated deposit (I share that concern) and comparing that delay to the delay arising from publisher embargoes. But a far bigger worry is the opt-out rate, hence the size of the loss in deposits (both the OA deposits and Closed Access, almost-OA deposits) with CMo alone. (As it happens, my proposed amendment, CMo+DMn, did include an implementational suggestion too, one that would help remedy this: The Harvard Mandate does not currently stipulate how the paper is to be provided to the Provost's office for mediated deposit. One potential way is by email. But another is by the author depositing it directly in a Harvard Institutional Repository and then just emailing the Provost's office the URL plus the permission. That would cover all those cases where the author does not opt-out of the CMo component of CMo+DMn -- as well as all the direct deposits that opt out of the CMo clause but comply with the DMn clause.) So even in cases where the author elects to opt out of the CMo clause of CMo+DMn, there would still be the binding DMn clause, requiring the deposit in the Institutional Repository; and hence there would be the resultant OA and almost-OA that that in turn generates. (The CMo+DMn's no-opt-out DMn clause alone would contribute 80-100% deposits within two years.) Peter Suber: Likewise, if opt-outs are rare, the level of OA could approach 100%; if they are common, it would be much lower.We indeed have no idea what the opt-out rates of a CMo mandate would be, with or without mediated deposit. If opt-out is low, it's low, if it's high, it's high. Unlike with DMn, we do not know in advance what it will be. (But we do know that another prominent policy with an opt-out -- the initial NIH non-mandate -- failed dramatically until the opt-out was removed by upgrading it to a mandate -- but only after the attendant loss of another three years of research access, usage and impact. Hence the pre-emptive strategy for Harvard's proposed CMo mandate, to avoid the needless extra risk during the three-year trial period, would be to upgrade to CMo+DMn from the outset.) Peter Suber: By contrast, under a dual deposit-release strategy, Harvard could have 100% of the articles on deposit. But a good percentage of them would be subject to publisher embargoes and about one-third of them would be subject to flat publisher prohibitions on OA archiving.First, we must again recall that we are talking here about adding the no-opt-out DMn clause to CMo, not about replacing CMo with DMn. The current publisher policy figures are the following: 62% of journals endorse making postprint deposits OA immediately (and an additional 29% for preprints); about 38% only endorse making postprint deposits OA after an embargo period -- which ranges from 6 months to forever. (Let's round off the immediate/embargo ratio at 60% of deposits set as immediate OA and the remaining 40% of deposits set as "Closed Access," but with almost-OA provided for that 40% during the embargo by means of the semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button.) Now here is the crucial point: Peter is here comparing the deposit rate (100%) and OA rate (60%) for a no-opt-out DMn-only mandate with the corresponding deposit and OA rate for a CMo-only mandate allowing opt-out (in the latter case both the deposit and OA percentages being, identically, the unknown CMo non-opt-out percentage: XX%). But the relevant comparison for my proposed amendment would be this deposit percentage and OA percentage (both identically XX%) for CMo-alone versus the total deposit and OA percentages for CMo+DMn: Those total CMo+DMn percentages are, respectively, XX% + 100% = 100% and XX% + 60% (which is at least 60%, plus whatever the non-opt-out copyright retention rate is for the articles that are not already part of that 60%). In other words, compared to CMo alone, there would be no loss in copyright retention and only potential gain in OA with CMo+DMn. And let's not forget that, with 100% deposit, there will also be systematic almost-immediate, almost-OA for all the non-OA deposits (thanks to the semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button). That too is a pure gain, with no accompanying loss, compared to the current CMo-only policy. Peter Suber: Hence, each type of policy risks delayed OA (one through institutional sluggishness, one through publisher embargoes), and each risks incomplete OA (one through faculty opt outs and one through deference to publisher policies).Peter is here comparing (1) delay because of mediated deposit arising from CMo alone with (2) delay because of publisher embargoes arising DMn alone. But for the proposed amendment, the pertinent comparison would be between CMo alone and CMo+DMn. And that comparison shows that there would be no losses and only gains, if CMo were upgraded to CMo+DMn, whether we reckon in terms of opt-outs, deposits, OA, almost-OA or delays. Here's another way to put this same point. The comparison between CMo and CMo+DMn must take into consideration: Hence it is essential to include in one's reckoning the (1) unknown Green opt-outs and their resulting non-deposits and OA loss, plus the (2) unknown Pale-Green and Gray opt-outs and their resulting non-deposits and loss of almost-OA. Both of these would arise from opt-out because of unwillingness or failure to renegotiate copyright as required by CMo.(1) Green publishers that endorse immediate author postprint self-archiving but do not agree to rights-retention (i.e., they insist on exclusive rights transfer despite the pressure from CMo mandates like Harvard's): Authors who would not want to renounce those journals, would opt out of CMo. Hence no deposit and no OA, even for those Green journals. (Harvard's speed in doing mediated deposit, though salient too, is not, I think, nearly as critical as the risk of loss from (1) and (2).) Peter Suber: If the two key variables -- speed of deposit and level of opt-outs-- work in Harvard's favor, then its policy could be better than a dual deposit-release strategy. But if not, not. Because this is contingent, I can't recommend one type of policy over the other without knowing more about the probabilities.Again, this empirical uncertainty is only pertinent to a comparison between the CMo policy and the DMn policy. But the comparison I am recommending is between the CMo policy and the CMo+DMn policy. There we can already calculate apriori that CMo+DMn can only do better, not worse, than CMo alone, on all points of comparson: deposits, delays, opt-outs, OA, and almost-OA. Peter Suber: Because Harvard's is the first university-level mandate to focus on permissions rather than deposits, it deserves a chance to show how well it can work.Yes it does. But adopting CMo+DMn instead of CMo alone will not diminish that chance one bit: It will just add additional, independent likelihood of success to it. Or, to put it another way, CMo+DMn makes it possible to experiment with a Copyright Mandate without any need to sacrifice the already demonstrated success and benefits of a Deposit Mandate in exchange. Peter Suber: Can the two types of policy be blended, so that Harvard faculty give permissions (subject to an opt-out) and make deposits (not subject an opt-out)? Yes. But if Harvard is fleet and efficient in making the deposits, that won't be necessary.The degree to which CMo+DMn would generate (1) more deposits, (2) more OA and (3) more almost-OA than CMo alone depends not on Harvard's speed of mediating deposit but on what the (unknown) opt-out rate for CMo alone would prove to be. CMo+DMn is accordingly an insurance policy. Whether an insurance policy was indeed necessary is only known after the insured period has elapsed. But in this case, since the insurance policy would cost nothing but a consensus from Harvard on upgrading to CMo+DMn, I think Harvard has nothing to lose and everything to gain if it upgrades now, from the outset, rather than waiting for the three year trial period to elapse, and another three years of research usage and impact to be needlessly lost, as NIH did. The following is not from Peter's blog posting but from an off-line email exchange (reproduced with permission): Peter Suber (email): "I'd have no objection to the addition of [a DMn] mandate (indeed, I'd be among the first to call for the addition of such a mandate) if it would improve upon the procedures Harvard puts in place to make the deposits itself."CMo+DMn would not only improve on the implementation of the submission and deposit process, but -- incomparably more important -- it would improve on the deposit rate, the OA rate, and the almost-OA rate! All the gains would be from the (unknown) percentage of authors who would opt out of the present CMo-only mandate. And CMo+DMn would not lose anything from what the present CMo-only mandate would generate from the authors (XX%) who would not opt out. Peter Suber (email): However, it's certainly possible that if the original resolution had included a deposit mandate, it would not have been adopted by faculty. We'll never know."Peter, when you give your talk at Harvard's Berkman Center on March 17 (assuming that the CMo policy has not been miraculously upgraded to CMo+DMn in the meanwhile!), would you consider explicitly raising the following three questions: Because if CMo+DMn was not even considered in the Harvard FAS deliberations -- or if it was not adopted because of concern that a policy without an opt-out would not be complied with -- then it might be helpful to point out to your hosts (1) Alma's Swan's international, cross-discipline author survey results, which found that 95% of researchers report they would comply with an OA self-archiving mandate from their universities or their funders (81% of them willingly); and (2) Arthur Sale's comparative studies on actual author behaviour, which confirmed that the OA self-archiving rates for universities with an OA self-archiving mandate (with no opt-out!) approach 80-100% within 2 years of adoption, whereas universities where deposit is not mandatory languish at deposit rates of c. 15%.(i) Was Harvard's successful consensus on adopting CMo reached because of the "C" (Copyright Retention) or the "o" (the option to opt out)? With CMo+DMn Harvard has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Perhaps if this is made sufficiently clear now, an immediate upgrade is still possible, rather than having to wait for a 3-year trial period to decide (as with the first, failed NIH policy). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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