Thursday, February 21. 2008Institutional OA Mandates Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA MandatesCommentary on: Zoe Corbyn "Low compliance with open-access rule criticised" Times Higher Education Supplement 21 February 2008A study of the compliance rate for the Wellcome Trust's Green Open Access Self Archiving Mandate presented at the 2008 Boston AAAS meeting reported a self-archiving rate of around 30% eight months after the policy came into effect. This is considerably higher than the NIH non-mandate's 4% rate (recently upgraded to a mandate), and it is above the overall 5-15% spontaneous baseline rate for self-archiving, but it is not clear whether it is climbing as high or as fast as the compliance rate for institutional mandates (approaching 80-100% within 2 years). If it is not, then this is yet another reason for mandating institutional rather than central deposit, and deposit by the author rather than by the author-or-publisher. That way each institution can add its own weight to the funder mandates, and can monitor compliance. (1) The spontaneous baseline rate for unmandated OA self-archiving is between 5% and 15%, depending on field. Anything above that is an improvement. (2) Arthur Sale's analyses comparing deposit rates for mandated and unmandated Institutional Repositories (IRs) show that (2a) unmandated deposits hover between 5-15%, (2b) encouraged and incentivized deposits climb toward 30% but not much higher, whereas (2c) mandated deposits approach 80-100% within about two years of adoption of the mandate. (3) Sale's data are for author self-archiving, in the author's own institutional repository (IR), mandated and monitored by the author's own institution. (4) The funder mandates have not been in place long enough for a good estimate of their rate of success, but three things are already evident: (4a) A researcher's funder is not in as good a position to monitor and enforce compliance with a self-archiving mandate as a researcher's institution is: Institutions conduct annual reviews of their employees' publication output and can easily determine whether or not articles are deposited in their own IR. Funders do not conduct such annual publication audits (though they could).The solution is quite obvious: Funders should not be mandating deposit in central repositories, such as PubMed Central. They should be mandating deposit in the author's own Institution's Repository (from which central indexing services or central repositories like PubMed Central can harvest it). And the depositing should be done by the author, not the publisher. That way the author's institution can systematically monitor and enforce compliance, feeding back to the funder; and the central repository need merely harvest the deposits from the distributed IRs, if it wishes. It was absurd all along to insist on central self-archiving, in the age of OAI-compliant, interoperable IRs, designed specifically in order to facilitate central harvesting! It was also absurd to have institutional and funder mandates pulling in different directions, toward different repositories, instead of pooling resources and collaborating, as funders and institutions do in all other respects. Perhaps most relevant to Wellcome's apparently slow rate of compliance are the exciting recent developments concerning the Sleeping Giant of Open Access: the Institutions (Universities, mostly), and their actual and future self-archiving mandates: There are now 22 funder mandates (including, recently, NIH) and 16 institutional and departmental mandates (including, even more recently, Harvard) plus the unanimous recommendation of the Council of the European Universities Association that its 791 universities in 46 countries should adopt OA self-archiving mandates. Institutions are the providers of all research output -- funded and unfunded -- in all disciplines. It makes no sense for funders to mandate that the researchers they fund should deposit directly in arbitrary central repositories. The rational, coherent way to mandate OA -- the one that will systematically scale up to cover 100% of research output, across all disciplines, worldwide -- is for both funders and institutions to mandate institutional deposit, and then for institutions to monitor compliance (as part of the conditions for receiving the funder's grant in the first place!). In sum, Wellcome's mandate compliance rate may be coming along, it's too early to say; but funders need to get compliance and fulfillment conditions in place. The most efficient and practical way to do that is to collaborate with their own fundees' institutions (who are usually co-recipients of the grants anyway), to make sure they monitor compliance; deposit should be by the author, in the author's own institution's IR (then PubMed Central and any other central service can harvest from there). This will create a systematic synergy between funder and institution mandates, and ensure that they facilitate one another and converge (on the institutionally mandated and monitored IRs) rather than diverging willy-nilly, somewhere in an arbitrary array of criss-crossing IRs and/or CRs. Stevan Harnad Wednesday, February 20. 2008Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit ClauseSome Journals (Alas) Still Demand Exclusive Copyright Transfer I think I understand fully what Michael Carroll, Peter Suber and the current draft of the Harvard Policy are saying. My shorthand descriptor -- "copyright retention" -- captures precisely the feature of the Harvard policy that should, I urge, be modified (ever so slightly). Many journals currently require authors to transfer exclusive rights to the publisher in exchange for publication. Let me hasten to add: I think this is deplorable. I don't think authors should have to do it. And I am certain publishers will cease to make this a condition of publication once OA prevails: some have already ceased demanding it. But some have not. And among the some who have not are some of the journals that authors (including Harvard authors) most want to publish in. And that's the point: In order to be able to grant Harvard the license that the current Harvard OA Mandate requires, Harvard authors would have to successfully renegotiate the retention of their rights (i.e., they must negotiate a non-exclusive license) with those journals. (Under the transfer of exclusive rights to the publisher, it is not the author to whom users must apply to seek permission or license for the sorts of re-use rights that the Harvard author's addendum asks authors to transfer to Harvard -- it is to the publisher, the holder of all exclusive rights.) And if the journal is their journal of choice, and the negotiation is unsuccessful, then the Harvard author must either opt out of the Harvard mandate or not publish in his journal of choice. And that's exactly what my recommended amendment is intended to avert: by requiring deposit independently of requiring copyright retention (or reservation, or renegotiation). Then the opt-out can be from the copyright renegotiation requirement only, and not from the deposit requirement too. This preserves all the virtues and intended benefits of the current Harvard mandate, and adds the further benefit of 100% deposit, with no opt-out. (Access to two thirds of those deposits can then immediately be set as Open Access, because their journals already officially endorse it; and the remaining third can be set to Closed Access for the time being, with the Institutional Repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" ["Fair Use"] button providing almost-immediate almost-OA during any access embargo period -- until the growing OA ushers in the natural, inevitable and well-deserved death of access embargoes as well as exclusive copyright transfer.) But co-bundle the Harvard mandate instead with the copyright retention requirement, and its opt-out clause, and it is hardly even a mandate at all, its probability of success, deposit rate, and adoptability by other universities is diminished -- all needlessly, with no corresponding gain, just a loss. Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate By Adding a No-Opt-Out Deposit Mandate: No Loss, Only Gain Michael Carroll, Peter Suber and I are in complete agreement on every point of substance save one: What is the mandate that is the most likely to generate the most OA? Michael and Peter (and Harvard!) think it is a Copyright Retention Mandate with opt-out (CRM). I think it is a Deposit Mandate without opt-out (DM), which can be trivially added to the Copyright Retention Mandate with opt-out (CRM). In other words, Harvard can have its (CRM) cake, and eat it (DR) too! That contingency is completely missing in Michael's analysis of my proposal. Michael points out that even if a Harvard author opts out of CRM, he can still deposit his article if he wishes to. But if voluntary deposit -- just for the sake of the benefits of OA, or just because one's university or funder had invited deposit -- had been capable of generating enough OA, then (1) mandates would not have proved necessary, (2) NIH's invitation policy would not have failed and would not now have had to be upgraded to an immediate deposit mandate, and (3) the hundreds of institutional repositories with invitations instead of mandates worldwide would not be hovering for years at spontaneous deposit rates of 5-15% while the (still few) mandated repositories approach 100% within two years. An opt-out mandate is not a mandate. That is why I urge that the Harvard opt-out CRM mandate be upgraded to add a non-opt-out DM clause. Absolutely nothing is lost, and a great deal is gained. For the papers whose authors can and do opt for CRM, Harvard will have immediate OA. For the papers whose authors opt out of CRM, Harvard will still have 100% immediate deposit, with immediate OA for about two thirds of it and almost-OA for the remaining third. (Even if it is assumed that the articles for which the authors opt for CRM are identical to the deposits that could have been set to immediate OA anyway, there is still the gain of one third almost-OA and 100% deposit with DM+CRM but not with CRM alone.) I hope that makes the logic and the contingencies of my proposal still clearer. I might add that exactly the same logic was used in designing the ID/OA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate itself (the one Peter calls the Dual Deposit/Release mandate): There the logic was that if an institution could not reach agreement on adopting the stronger immediate OA mandate (for copyright reasons, say), then it makes no sense to adopt a delayed-deposit mandate, or, worse, an opt-out "mandate," which allows the publisher's embargo policy to determine that date at which the deposit is made: It makes far more sense to mandate immediate deposit in every instance, with the publisher's embargo policy applicable only to the date on which the deposit is made OA ("released"), thereby allowing almost-OA to tide over the embargo, thanks to the Button. Last point: my position would be closest to Michael Carroll's option "(c) even if they would marginally improve scholalry communication, the costs of negotiating copyright with publishers is not worth this benefit" -- except that it is not exactly the benefits of OA I am talking about here but the benefits of a successful OA mandate. (Because every opt-out means no OA.) Once immediate deposit is safely mandated universally, and it has generated free online access for researchers worldwide to all refereed postprints, we can examine at our leisure what else researchers needed that didn't already come with that free online territory. But please, let's get there first, and not be held back by pre-emptively over-reaching (and thus inviting opt-out) when 100% free online access is already within our grasp -- if only we manage to mandate the keystrokes! Stevan Harnad Thursday, February 14. 2008Weaken the Harvard OA Mandate To Strengthen It
Terry Martin (Law Librarian and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School) wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
Terry, the Harvard OA Mandate is potentially so important that I hope both political sense and pragmatism still have time to prevail, so as to remedy the few but fundamental flaws in the current draft Mandate.Stevan, I'm sure your version is preferable to the one actually passed by FAS. Some of us urged a more forceful approach. However, those with a better political sense thought otherwise. The irony is that the Harvard Mandate needs a less forceful approach, not a more forceful one, in order to be much more powerful and effective. Remedying Flaws in the NIH and Harvard OA Mandates. An analogy with the history of the NIH OA policy is especially instructive and revealing here: The original draft of that NIH policy also had (three) fundamental flaws -- (1) that it was not a mandate (it was a request rather than a requirement), (2) that it allowed deposit itself to be delayed as long as a year, and (3) that it insisted on direct central deposit (in PubMed Central) instead of deposit in the author's own university's Institutional Repository (IR) (and then central harvesting to PubMed Central). The NIH policy failed, completely, but it took three years to realize and remedy this failure. The remedy was (1) to upgrade the NIH policy to a mandate and (2) to require immediate -- not delayed -- deposit (allowing an embargo of up to one year, but applicable only to the date at which access to the deposit was set as OA; the deposit itself had to be immediate). (The NIH insistence on central deposit (3), instead of institutional deposit and central harvesting, has not yet been remedied. But Harvard's institutional mandate, if its own flaws can be corrected so its policy can be adopted by all universities, US and worldwide, will also remedy this last of the three NIH mandate's flaws.) Four years ago I went to Washington to try to explain to Norka Ruiz Bravo's group at NIH exactly how and why the three small but crucial changes (1)-(3) in the draft NIH policy needed to be made if it was to succeed. It was decided not to heed the advice, and to go ahead and adopt the draft policy as it was. As a result, three more years of NIH research access and impact were then lost, needlessly. (And during those three years, all the biomedical funders on the planet were reflexively imitating the failed NIH policy!) Mandate Immediate Deposit. Now NIH has it almost right. The two most important corrections have been made: (1) It is now upgraded to a requirement rather than just a request, and the (2) requirement is for immediate deposit, not delayed deposit. That's called the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate. (The access embargo is applicable only to the date of OA-setting, not the date of deposit -- which is just fine, because of the potential power of repositories' automatized "email eprint request" Buttons to fulfill all research usage needs for Closed Access deposits during any embargo interval). The one remaining flaw in the NIH mandate is the one that the right mandate from Harvard now would help to remedy: Mandate Institutional Deposit. Funder and University OA Mandates need to be complementary and convergent. NIH still insists on mandating direct central deposit in PubMed Central -- instead of reinforcing and building upon university mandates; it should instead likewise mandate deposit in each author's own University Institution Repository (IR). (From there, PubMed Central -- and any other central repository or indexer -- could harvest the deposits, with the author needing only to provide NIH with the URL!). Universities and research institutions are, after all, the providers of all research output, both funded and unfunded. A realistic, viable mandate from Harvard now would be taken up by all universities worldwide. And it would ensure that funder mandates, too, would begin stipulating direct, convergent deposit in authors' own University IRs, instead of divergent deposit, helter-skelter, in diverse CRs. Then any central collections and indexes we desire could automatically be harvested (or exported) from the worldwide distributed network of OA IRs -- using the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol, with which all IRs are compliant, and which was created for that specific purpose. Funder/University Collaboration to Make All Research Output OA. Then universities and research institutions will not only be able to help funders implement and monitor compliance with the funders' self-archiving mandates (as part of their fulfillment conditions for receiving the institutional overheads from those grants): They will also be able to complement and universalize those funder OA mandates (which only cover the self-archiving of funded research output) with (Harvard-style) institutional OA mandates of their own, for self-archiving all of their institutional research output, both funded and unfunded. That is the natural synergy that will systematically scale up to make all of the planet's research output OA -- across all disciplines, institutions, languages and nations. Mandating Copyright-Retention is a Needless Deterrent. But if NIH's mistake had been to make its mandate too weak (only (1) a request, with (2) an allowable year-long delay in deposit), Harvard's mistake now is needlessly making its mandate too strong, thereby necessitating the further addition of a compensatory "opt-out" clause -- which in turn makes the Harvard policy needlessly weak (indeed, no longer a mandate at all)! The reason Harvard had to add its opt-out clause is obvious: Otherwise the policy would have faced a predictable (and justified) author revolt: (That is the sense in which "better political sense" prevailed!) It is one thing to demand that the article be deposited in Harvard's IR. That just costs a few keystrokes, and brings palpable benefits to the author and institution. But it's quite another thing to demand that the author accept the risk of failure to successfully negotiate copyright retention with his journal of choice, and thereby being forced to publish in a lesser journal. An Opt-Out Mandate Is Not a Mandate. (Whether or not this risk is real, it is definitely a reasonable, perceived risk for publish-or-perish authors, even at Harvard, and hence a risk that rightly obliged those with "better political sense" at Harvard to add the opt-out clause. Without the opt-out clause it is unlikely that the policy motion could have passed at all.) But with an opt-out clause, a mandate is no longer a mandate: it's just a request! And the reason the NIH request had failed was that it had been just a request rather than a mandate! Allow Opt-Out Only From Copyright Retention. The right remedy is hence to modularize the Harvard mandate, so as separately (a) to require immediate deposit, with no opt-out, and also (b) to request/require copyright-retention -- but to allow an opt-out from the latter. Copyright Retention Is Desirable But Unnecessary for OA. In reality, for at least 62% of refereed postprints and a further 29% of pre-refereeing preprints, there is no need for copyright retention at all in order to provide OA because this 91% of journals have already officially endorsed immediate OA self-archiving in one form or the other. (Online access, free for all, by the way, moots all of the other uses for the sake of which authors -- and lawyers and librarians -- imagine that copyright would need to be retained and licensed: Virtually all the other uses already come with the territory, once a paper is made free online; and whatever doesn't, soon will, once all papers are made free online.) To fulfill all immediate research usage needs for any of the articles from those journals that have not yet endorsed immediate OA self-archiving (38% for postprints, 9% for preprints), the IRs will all have the semi-automatic almost-immediate, almost-OA Button. (This will not only provide for all immediate usage needs during any embargoes, but it will also soon bring the rest of the journal policies into line with those that already endorse immediate OA self-archiving, under mounting pressure from the worldwide research community's growing experience with -- and increasing reliance and eventual insistence upon -- the palpable benefits of OA, thanks to the growing number of mandates.) Weaken the Harvard OA Mandate To Strengthen It. So nothing is lost by weakening the Harvard policy, as recommended, so as to make immediate deposit mandatory, with no opt-out, allowing opt-out only on the (unnecessary) requirement to retain copyright. Eliminate Need For Opt-Out Loophole. In the current draft of its mandate, by bundling the two together, and allowing opt-out on the entire package, Harvard instead gets the worst of both: the author deterrent effect of insisting on copyright retention, plus the resultant loophole from Harvard authors simply choosing to opt out of depositing altogether. Harvard's rationale was that its authors, if they have to opt out paper by paper, will find it too tiresome to keep opting out, and will prefer to try to renegotiate copyright with their journals instead. Much more likely, authors will draft standard form letters for the Provost's office saying "The right journal for this work is journal X, and journal X does not allow copyright retention, so I regret but I must opt out for this work."). An opt-out letter is ar easier (and more likely of success) than the (real and apparent) risks of trying to renegotiate copyright. And the Provost's Office is certainly in no position to argue with Harvard authors on the appropriate outlet for their work. Authors Will Not Deposit Unless Mandated. Journals would no doubt be quite pleased if Harvard decided to over-reach and needlessly mandate copyright retention, with opt-out, instead of just mandating immediate deposit, without opt-out: That way the journals that have endorsed immediate OA self-archiving could appear progressive on OA, confident that absent a deposit mandate very few authors bother to self-archive spontaneously (as the first NIH policy and many other non-mandatory policies have repeatedly shown: indeed, that was exactly what gave rise to the deposit mandate movement). So because the current wording of the Harvard policy does not mandate the deposit itself, but only the copyright retention, along with the option of opting out, the journals can again count on most authors taking the path of least resistance: opting out. (Publishers are already singing the praises of this opt-out option as "author choice.") Don't Wait Three Years to Correct the Flaws, as NIH Did. As with the failed NIH policy, if Harvard does not upgrade its policy now, it will take three years to confirm empirically that the draft policy has failed. Yet Harvard's mandate is so easy to fix pre-emptively now, with no loss at all in any of its intended effects, only the gain of a far greater likelihood of compliance and more OA. The ground has already been tested by other universities who have as already adopted a deposit mandate. There Are Already 37 Successful Deposit Mandates. It is not even clear why Harvard feels it needs to independently re-invent the OA-mandate wheel, when there are 15 successful university mandates and 22 successful funder mandates adopted already, not one of them needing to mandate copyright retention or to allow opt-out. All that is needed is for Harvard to adopt ID/OA, and all the other universities of the world would follow suit! The notion that copyright retention is the solution to the research accessibility problem is far from new: It was prominently mooted a decade ago in Science magazine by 12 co-authors and has gotten precisely nowhere since then, despite being repeatedly revived, notionally, in university after university, by either the library or legal staff, year after year. Copyright Retention is a Needless, Disabling Deterrent. The reason requiring copyright retention is a nonstarter is that it contains a gratuitous, disabling deterrent: needlessly putting at risk the actual and perceived probability of being accepted by the author's journal of choice. Hence the need to allow opt-out, which in turn effectively reduces any mandate to a mere request. An ID/OA mandate does not have that deterrent. Deposit mandates have already been demonstrated, repeatedly, to successfully approach 100% compliance within two years of adoption. ID/OA does not require copyright retention, nor an opt-out clause. Deposit Mandate Will Eventually Lead to Copyright Retention Too; But OA First! And, most ironically of all, ID/OA will almost certainly lead, eventually, to copyright retention too! But to do that, it must first reach 100% OA. And universal Deposit Mandates will ensure that. Needlessly attempting instead to impose the stronger mandate first will not. I hope Harvard will make the small parametric adjustments needed to maximize the likelihood that its historic mandate will succeed, and will be emulated by all other universities worldwide. I close with a re-posting of the specific small but crucial changes in the wording of the mandate that are needed to prevent the copyright-retention requirement from compromising the deposit requirement. Current Draft of Harvard OA Mandate. First, here is the draft Harvard OA mandate as it now stands. [passages that are flagged for modification are in brackets]: Text of Motion on behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing:Proposed Revised Draft. Now here are the small but crucial changes that will immunize the deposit requirement against any opt-outs from the copyright-retention requirement. Note the re-ordering of the clauses, and the addition of the underscored passages. (Other universities may also omit the two indented clauses preceded by asterisk ** if they wish): Proposed revision:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, February 13. 2008Harvard Adopts 38th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate
Absent any new information (or amendments) to the contrary, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday February 12 adopted the world's 38th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate -- the 16th of the institutional or departmental mandates.
An OA mandate from Harvard is especially significant, timely and welcome for the worldwide Open Access movement, as Harvard will of course be widely emulated, and many other universities are now proposing to adopt OA mandates. The objective of the Harvard (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) mandate is to provide Open Access (OA) to its own scholarly article output. This objective is accomplished by making those articles freely accessible on the web by depositing them in a Harvard OA Institutional Repository. The means of attaining this objective is to mandate OA, which Harvard has now done. But Harvard has gone further, and mandated copyright retention as well. Copyright retention is highly desirable and welcome, but it is not necessary in order to provide OA, and mandating copyright retention has also necessitated the adoption of an opt-out clause because of potential author resistance to perceived or actual constraints on their choice of which journal to publish in. What follows below is a recommendation for a few small but crucial changes in the wording of the mandate. They are designed to prevent the copyright-retention requirement from compromising the deposit requirement (thereby causing the Harvard OA Mandate to fail, as the original NIH policy failed, until its flaws were corrected three years later). First, here is the draft Harvard OA mandate as it now stands. [passages that are flagged for modification are in brackets]: Text of Motion on behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing:Now here are the small but crucial changes that will immunize the deposit requirement against any opt-outs from the copyright-retention requirement. Note the re-ordering of the clauses, and the addition of the underscored passages. (Other universities may also omit the two indented clauses preceded by asterisk ** if they wish): Proposed revision:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, February 12. 2008Optimizing Harvard's Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving MandateIt is a great (and widespread) mistake to treat the problems of (1) journal overpricing, (2) publishing reform, and (3) copyright reform as if they were all the same thing as the problem of (4) research access. They are not. Open Access (OA) to research can be provided, quickly, easily, and directly, without first having to solve (1)-(3). And, once provided, OA can help pave the way toward solving (1)-(3). But conflate OA with (1)-(3) from the outset, and all you do is delay and handicap OA.Harvard faculty are voting today on an Open Access (OA) Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal. The Harvard proposal is to try the opyright-retention strategy: Retain copyright so faculty can (among other things) deposit their writings in Harvard's OA Institutional Repository. Let me try to say why I think this is the wrong strategy, whereas something not so different from it would not only have much greater probability of success, but would serve as a model that would generalize much more readily to the worldwide academic community. [Note: The first two concerns I raised yesterday have since proved unfounded: [I had not yet seen the exact wording of the motion when I first posted this on Tuesday.] The mandate -- successfully adopted Tuesday afternoon -- applies only to articles, and only to the final, refereed draft of those articles. But the 3rd and principle concern (about mandatory copyright retention) stands.(3) Copyright Retention is Unnecessary for OA and Needlessly Handicaps Both the Probability of Adoption of the Policy and the Probability of Success If Adopted. Copyright retention is always welcome wherever it is desired and successfully negotiated by the author. But there is no need to require retention of copyright in order to provide OA. Sixty-two percent of journals already officially endorse authors making their postprints OA immediately upon acceptance for publication by depositing them in their Institutional Repository, and a further 30% already endorse making preprints OA. That already covers 92% of Harvard's intended target. For the remaining 8% (and indeed for 38%, because OA's primary target is postprints, not just preprints), they too can be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, with access set as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access. To provide for worldwide research usage needs for such embargoed papers, both the EPrints and the DSpace IR software now have an "email eprint request" button that allows any would-be user who reaches a Closed Access postprint to paste in his email address and click, which sends an immediate automatized email request to the author, containing a URL, on which the author need merely click to have an eprint automatically emailed to the requester. (Mailing article reprints to requesters has been standard academic practice for decades and is merely made more powerful, immediate, ubiquitous and effective with the help of email, an IR, and the semi-automatic button; it likewise does not require permission or copyright retention.) This means that it is already possible to adopt a universal, exception-free mandate to deposit all postprints immediately upon acceptance for publication, without the author's having to decide whether or not to deposit the unrefereed preprint and whether or not to retain copyright (hence whether or not to opt out). This blanket mandate provides immediate OA to at least 62% of OA's target content, and almost-immediate, almost-OA to the rest. This not only provides for all immediate usage needs for 100% of research output, worldwide, but it will soon usher in the natural and well-deserved death of the remaining minority of access embargoes under the growing global pressure from OA's and almost-OA's increasingly palpable benefits to research and researchers. (With it will come copyright retention too, as a matter of course.) It is also a policy with no legal problems, no author risk, and hence no need for loopholes and opt-outs. Needlessly requiring authors instead to deposit their unrefereed preprints and to commit themselves to retaining copyright today puts at risk both the consensus for adoption -- [note that this first worry is now moot insofar as adoption by Harvard itself is concerned, because the Harvard mandate was successfully adopted!, but it still stands for adoption by other universities] -- and, if adopted, the efficacy of the Harvard policy itself at risk, because of author resistance either to exposing unrefereed work publicly or to putting their work's acceptance and publication by their journal of choice at risk. It also opens up an opt-out loophole that is likely to reduce the policy compliance rate to minority levels for years, just as did NIH's initial, unsuccessful non-mandate (since upgraded to an immediate deposit mandate), with the needless loss of 3 more years of research usage and impact. I strongly urge Harvard to reconsider, and to adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access mandate (ID/OA) that is now being adopted by a growing number of universities and research funders worldwide, instead of the copyright-retention policy now being contemplated. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, February 8. 2008New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories
The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities has created a new Ranking of Repositories, but in the announcement, a few salient points are overlooked:
Yes, as noted, the three first ranks go to "thematic" (i.e., discipline- or or subject-based) Central Repositories (CRs): (1) Arxiv (Physics), (2) Repec (Economics) and (3) E-Lis (Library Science). That is to be expected, because such CRs are fed from institutions all over the world. But the fourth-ranked repository -- and the first of the university-based Institutional Repositories (IRs), displaying only its own institutional output -- is (4) U Southampton EPrints (even though Southampton's University rank is 77th). Moreover, the fifteenth place repository -- and the first of the department-based IRs -- is (15) U Southampton ECS EPrints (making it 10th ranked even relative to university-wide IRs!). None of this is surprising: In 2000 Southampton created the world's first free, OAI-compliant IR-creating software -- EPrints -- now used (and imitated) worldwide. But Southampton's ECS also adopted the world's first Green OA self-archiving mandate, now also being emulated worldwide. And that first mandate was a departmental mandate, which partly explains the remarkably high rank of Southampton's ECS departmental IR. But these repository rankings (by Webometrics as well as by ROAR) should be interpreted with caution, because not all the CRs and IRs contain full-texts. Some only contain metadata. Southampton's university-wide IR, although 4th among repositories and 1st among IRs, is still mostly just metadata, because the university-wide mandate that U. Southampton has since adopted still has not been officially announced or implemented (because the university had been preparing for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise returns). As soon as the mandate is implemented, that will change. (Southampton's ECS departmental IR, in contrast, mandated since 2002, is already virtually 100% full-text.) But the moral of the story is that what Southampton is right now enjoying is not just the well-earned visibility of its research output, but also a competitive advantage over other institutions, because of its head-start, both in creating IRs and in adopting a mandate to fill them. (This head-start is also reflected in Southampton's unusually high University Metrics "G Factor," and probably in its University Webometric rank too. Citebase is likewise constrained by who has and has not begun to systematically self-archive. And Citeseer has alas stopped updating as of about 2003.) I am not saying all this by way of bragging! I am begging other institutions to take advantage of the fact that it's still early days: Get a competitive head start too -- by creating an IR, and, most important of all, by adopting a Green OA self-archiving mandate! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, February 7. 2008Berkeley Press's Advice to Universities on Institutional RepositoriesThis article is rather out of date. The authors, B&P, note (correctly) that Institutional Repositories (IRs) did not fill spontaneously upon creation. But their article does not mention or take into account today's swelling tide of funder and university Green OA self-archiving mandates. This oversight is perhaps partly because some of the most recent mandates (European Research Council, NIH, and the unanimous recommendation for a Green OA self-archiving mandate by the Council of the European University Association, with 791 universities in 46 countries) came after B&P's article -- which is very thin on citation or discussion of actual mandate progress or rationale -- went to press. So, instead of supporting the current mandates for universities to fill their IRs with their own published research journal articles, B&P argue that universities should become Gold OA publishers of their own research output. It is not clear whether each university, according to B&P, should become the in-house publisher of its own output (in which case one wonders about peer review and neutrality) or whether university presses should simply try to take over more of the existing journals from commercial and society publishers. Either way, Berkeley Press is here again recommending spontaneous Gold OA publishing reform (which, in terms of number of articles for which it has provided OA has been even slower than spontaneous Green OA self-archiving by authors). Recommendations have proved resoundingly ineffective (across what will soon be a decade) in accelerating the transition to 100% OA, whether the recommendation has been to publishers to convert to Gold OA or to authors to provide Green OA to what they have published. Mandates, in contrast, have consistently proved highly effective, in every instance where they were adopted, and mandates are now growing rapidly. Researchers comply, and comply willingly. It is apparent that mandates play the role of welcome facilitation, not unwelcome coercion, serving to allay author fears about copyright and author uncertainty about priorities. But Gold OA cannot be mandated: Only Green OA can be. So advocates of Gold OA are advised to be patient, and to allow Green OA mandates to have their beneficial effect, generating 100% OA. Then we can talk about whether, when and how to convert journals to Gold OA. Not before. As to advice to universities on how to make better use of their IRs in managing and showcasing their research assets: for a much more current and realistic article, see: Swan, A. and Carr, L. (2008) Institutions, their repositories and the Web. Serials Review, 34 (1) (in press).Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, January 30. 2008The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access
This is a guest posting (written at the invitation of Gavin Baker) for the new blog
"Open Students: Students for Open Access to Research." Other OA activists are also encouraged to contribute to the Open Students blog. My guess is that Open Access (OA) already sounds old hat to the current generation of students, and that you are puzzled more about why we are still talking about OA happening in the future, rather than in the distant past (as the 80's and 90's must appear to you!). Well, you're right to be both puzzled and impatient, but let me try to explain why it's been taking so long. (I say "try" because I have to admit that I too am still somewhat perplexed by the slowness of OA growth, even after sampling the sluggishness of its pace for nearly 2 decades now!) And then I'll try to suggest what you students can do to help speed OA on its way to its obvious, optimal, and long overdue destination. What OA Is Not First, what is Open Access (OA)? It's not about Open Source (OS) software -- i.e., it's not about making computer programs either open or free (though of course OA is in favor of and compatible with OS). It's not about Creative Commons (CC) Licensing either -- i.e., it is not about making all digital creations re-usable and re-publishable (though again OA is in favor of and compatible with CC licensing). Nor is it about "freedom of information" or "freedom of digital information" in general. (That's much too broad and vague: OA has a very specific kind of information as its target.) And, I regret to say, OA is not about helping you get or share free access to commercial audio or video products, whether analog or digital: OA is completely neutral about that. OA's target is only author give-aways, not "consumer sharing" (though of course free user access webwide will be the outcome, for OA's special target content). What Is OA's Target Content? So let's start by being very explicit about OA's target content: It is the 2.5 million articles a year that are published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. Eventually OA might also extend to some scientific and scholarly books (the ones that authors want to give away) and also to scholarly scientific data (if and when the researchers that collected them are ready to give them away); it may also extend to some software, some audio and some video. But the only content to which OA applies without a single exception today is peer-reviewed journal articles. They are the works that their authors always wrote just so they should be read, used, applied, cited and built upon (mostly by their fellow researchers, worldwide). This is called "research impact". They were never written in order to earn their authors income from their sale. These special authors -- researchers -- never sought or received any revenue from the sale of their journal articles. Indeed, the fact that there was a price-tag attached to accessing their articles (a price-tag usually paid through institutional library subscriptions) meant that these researcher-authors, and research itself, were losing research impact, because subscriptions to these journals were expensive, and most institutions could only afford access to a small fraction of them. What Is OA? To try to compensate for these access barriers in the old days of paper, these special give-away authors would provide supplementary access, by mailing free individual reprints of their articles, at their own expense, to any would-be user who had written to request a reprint. You can imagine, though, how slow, expensive and inefficient it must have been to have to supplement access in this way, in light of what the web has since made possible: First, the possibility of emailing eprints was an improvement, but the obvious and optimal solution was to put the eprint on the web directly, so any would-be user, webwide, could instantly access it directly, at any time. And that, dear students, is the essence of OA: free, immediate, permanent, webwide access to peer-reviewed research journal articles: give-away content -- written purely for usage and impact, not for sales revenue -- finding, at last, the medium in which it can be given away, free for all, globally, big-time. OA = Gold OA or Green OA You thought OA was something else? Another form of publishing, maybe? with the author-institution paying to publish the article rather than the user-institution paying to access it? That is OA journal publishing. But OA itself just means: free online access to the article itself. There are clearly two ways an author can provide free online access to an article: One is by publishing it in an OA journal (this is called the "golden road" to OA, or simply "Gold OA") and the other is by publishing it in a conventional subscription journal, but also self-archiving a supplementary version, free for all, on the web (this is called the "green road" to OA, or simply "Green OA"). OA ≠ Gold OA Only (or even Primarily) Gold OA publishing is probably what peer-reviewed journal publishing will eventually settle on. But for now, only about 3000 of the 25,000 journals are Gold OA, and the majority of the most important journals are not among that 3000. Moreover, most of the potential institutional money for paying for Gold OA is currently still tied up in each university's ongoing subscriptions to non-OA journals. So if Gold OA is to be paid for today, extra money needs to be found to pay for it (most likely out of already insufficient research funds). Yet what is urgently needed by research and researchers today is not more money to pay for Gold OA, nor a conversion to Gold OA publishing, but OA itself. And 100% OA can already be provided by authors -- through Green OA self-archiving -- virtually overnight. It has therefore been a big mistake -- and is still one of the big obstacles slowing progress toward OA -- to imagine that OA means only, or primarily, Gold OA publishing. (This mistake will keep getting made, repeatedly, in the Open Student blog too -- mark my words!) The "Subversive Proposal" It was in 1994 that the explicit "subversive proposal" was first made that if a supplementary copy of each peer-reviewed journal article were self-archived online by its author, free for all, as soon as it was published (as some authors in computer science and physics had already been doing for years), then we could have (what we would now call) 100% (Green) OA virtually overnight. But that magic night hasn't arrived -- not then, in 1994, not in the ensuing decade and a half, and not yet today. Why not? "Zeno's Paralysis" There are at least 34 reasons why it has not yet happened, all of them psychological, and all of them groundless. The syndrome even has a name: "Zeno's Paralysis": "I worry about self-archiving my article because it would violate copyright... or because it would bypass peer review... or because it would destroy journals... or because the online medium is not reliable... or because I have no time to self-archive..."Meanwhile, evidence (demonstrating the obvious) was growing that making your article OA greatly increases its usage and impact: Yet still most authors' fingers (85%) remained paralyzed. The solution again seemed obvious: The cure for Zeno's Paralysis was a mandate from authors' institutions and funders, officially stating that it is not only OK for their employees and fundees to self-archive, but that it is expected of them, as a crucial new part of the process of doing research and publishing their findings in the online era. "Publish or Perish: Self-Archive to Flourish!" The first explicit proposals to mandate self-archiving began appearing at least as early as 2000; and recommendations for institutional and funder Green OA self-archiving mandates were already in the Self-Archiving FAQ even before it became the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ in 2002, as well as in the OSI EPrints Handbook. But as far as I know the first officially adopted self-archiving mandate was that of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in 2002-2003. Since then, 91% of journals have already given self-archiving their official blessing: Yet Alma Swan's surveys of authors' attitudes toward OA and OA self-archiving mandates -- across disciplines and around the world -- have found that although authors are in favor of OA, most will not self-archive until and unless it is mandated by their universities and/or their funders. If self-archiving were mandated, however, 95% of authors state that they would comply, over 80% of them stating they would comply willingly. Arthur Sale's analyses of what authors actually do with and without a mandate have since confirmed that if unmandated, self-archiving in institutional repositories hovers at around 15% or lower, but with a mandate it approaches 100% within about 2 years: What Students Can Do to Hasten the Optimal and Inevitable but Long Overdue Outcome: To date, 37 Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted worldwide, and 9 more have been proposed. Some of those mandates (such as that of NIH in the US, RCUK in the UK and ERC in Europe) have been very big ones, but most have been research funder mandates (22) rather than university mandates (12), even though virtually all research originates from universities, not all of it is funded, and universities share with their own researchers and students the benefits of showcasing and maximizing the uptake of their joint research output. Among the proposed mandates, two are very big multi-university proposals (one for all 791 universities in the 46 countries of the European University Association and one for all the universities and research institutions of Brazil), but those mandate proposals have yet to be adopted. The world's universities are OA's sleeping giant. They have everything to gain from mandating OA, but they are being extremely slow to realize it and to do something about it. Unlike you students, they have not grown up in the online age, and to them the online medium's potential is not yet as transparent and natural as it is to you. You can help awaken your university's sense of its own need for OA, as well as its awareness of the benefits of OA, and the means of attaining them, by making yourselves heard: 1. OA Self-Archiving Begins At Home: First, let the professors and administration of your university know that you need and want (and expect!) research articles to be freely accessible to you on the web -- the entire research output of your own university to begin with (and not just the fraction of its total research output that your university can afford to buy-back in the form of journal subscriptions!) -- so that you know what research is being done at your own university, whom to study with, whom to do research projects with (and even to help you select a university for undergraduate or graduate study in the first place). 2. Self-Archive Unto Others As You Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You: Second, point out the "Golden [or rather Green!] Rule" to the professors and administration of your university: If each university self-archives its own research output, this will not only make it possible for you, as students, to access the research output of all other universities (and not just the fraction of the total research output of other universities that your own university can afford to buy-in in the form of journal subscriptions!), so that you can use any of it in your own studies and research projects. Far more important, it will also make it possible for all researchers, at all universities (including your own), to access all research findings, and use and apply them in their own research and teaching, thereby maximizing research productivity and progress for the entire university community worldwide -- as well as for the tax-paying public that funds it all, the ones for whose benefit the research is being conducted. But please make sure you get the rationale and priorities straight! The (successful) lobbying for the NIH self-archiving mandate was based in part on a premise that may have gone over well with politicians, and perhaps even with voters, but if thought through, it would not be able to stand up to close scrutiny. The slogan had been: We need to have OA so that taxpayers can have access to health research findings that they themselves paid for. True. And sounds good. But how many of the annual 2.5 million peer-reviewed research journal articles published every year in the 25,000 journals across all disciplines does that really apply to? How many of those specialized articles are taxpaying citizens likely ever to want (or even be able) to read! Most of them are not even relevant or comprehensible to undergraduate students. Peer-To-Peer Access So the overarching rationale for OA cannot be public access (though of course public access comes with the territory). It has to be peer-to-peer access. The peers are the research specialists worldwide for whom most of the peer-reviewed literature is written. Graduate students are entering this peer community; undergraduates are on the boundaries of it. But the general tax-paying public has next to no interest in it at all. By the very same token, you will not be able to persuade your professors and administration that OA to the peer-reviewed research literature needs to be mandated because students have a burning need and desire to read it all! Students benefit from OA, but that cannot be the primary rationale for OA. Peer-to-peer (i.e., researcher to researcher) access is what has to be stressed. It is researchers worldwide who are today being denied access to the research findings they need in order to advance their research for the benefit of us all -- for the benefit of present and future students for whom the findings will be digested and integrated in textbooks, and for the benefit of the general public for whom the findings will be applied in the form of technological advances and medicines for illnesses. So it is daily, weekly, monthly research impact that is needlessly being lost, cumulatively, while we keep dragging our feet about providing OA. That's what you need to stress to your professors and administration: all those findings that could not be used and applied and built upon because they could not be accessed by all or even most of their potential users, because it simply costs too much to subscribe to all or most of the journals in which they were published. Updating the Academic Mandate for the Online Era Point out also that OA policies always fail if they are merely recommendations or requests. The only thing that will embolden and motivate all researchers to self-archive is self-archiving mandates. "Mandate" is not a bad word. It doesn't mean "coercion" or punishment. It's all carrots, not sticks. Professors have a mandate to teach, and test, and give marks. They also have a mandate to do research, and publish (or perish!). If they teach well and do good research, they earn promotions, salary increases, tenure, research funding, prizes. If they don't fulfill their mandate, they don't. It's the same with students: You have a mandate to study and acquire knowledge and skills. If you don't fulfill your mandate, you don't earn good marks. Mandates and Metrics So it is not so much a matter of adopting a new "Green OA self-archiving mandate" for faculty, but of adapting the existing mandate. OA self-archiving is a natural adaptation to the PostGutenberg Galaxy and its technical potential (just as we adapted to reading and writing, printing, libraries and photocopying). It is no longer enough to just do, write up, and publish research: It has to be self-archived too. And the carrots are already there to reward doing it: Faculty are already evaluated on how well they fulfill their research performance mandate not only by counting their publications, but by assessing their impact -- for which one of the most important metrics is how much it is taken up, used and cited by further research. And citation counts are among the things that OA has been shown to increase. It's rather as if -- as a part of your mandate as students -- you now had to submit your work online (as most of you already do!) instead of on paper in order to be evaluated and graded. Except it's even better than that for faculty, because self-archiving their work will actually increase their "grades." In short, it's a win/win/win situation for your university, for your professors and for you, the students -- if only your university gets round, at long last, to fast-forwarding us to the optimal and inevitable: by mandating Green OA self-archiving. Rather than be puzzled and impatient that they have not done it already, you should provide a strong show of support for their doing it now. Be ready with the answers to the inevitable questions about how and why (and when and where). And beware, the 34-headed monster of "Zeno's Paralysis" is still at large, and growing back each head the minute you lop one off... Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, January 27. 2008On Open Access, Self-Interest and Coercion
On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, James J. O'Donnell [JJO'D] wrote (on liblicense):
JJO'D: "...Whether to include [books] in OA "mandates" is Stevan Harnad's question, and since I regard such mandates with skepticism, that question doesn't concern me."But the question of mandates does concern a bigger and bigger constituency, now that the Australian Research Council, 6 of 7 UK Research Councils, the European Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the US National Institutes of Health, and a growing number of universities have already mandated OA self-archiving -- and the vast sleeping giant of universities worldwide is just about to awaken and follow suit: plus22 funder mandates, That's a total of5 proposed funder mandates, So this might be an opportune time to re-examine the basis of one's skepticism about OA mandates...37 mandates already adopted and JJO'D: "I am struck by the assertion that "all authors would want OA for their articles" if certain conditions are met. That's an interesting hypothesis, but I would simply underscore that the number of authors who currently do want OA for their articles is low enough that Harnad and others recommend they be coerced to achieve the goal. That fundamental disjuncture is important to understand and is advanced by empirical work, not by thought experiments."(1) "Coerced" is a rather shrill term! (Is every rule that is in the public interest -- smoking bans? seatbelt laws? breathalyzer tests? taxes? -- coercion? Is academia's "publish or perish" mandate "coercion"?) (2) It is empirically incorrect to assume that the number of authors that do want OA for their articles is the same as the number who spontaneously self-archive or publish in an OA journal today: (3) Considerable empirical work has been done on these questions: The surveys by Alma Swan and others have repeatedly shown that (a) many authors still don't know about OA, and (b) many of those who know about it agree that they would want it for their articles, but they fear (wrongly) that it might be illegal, prejudicial to their publishing in their journal of choice, or just plain (c) too complicated and time-consuming to do it. (4) As a matter of empirical fact, (a) - (c) are all wrong. (5) More important, the surveys have found that although most authors still do not self-archive, 95% report that they would self-archive if their institutions and/or funders mandated it -- and 81% of them report they would do so willingly. (6) In other words, most authors regard Green OA self-archiving mandates not as coercion, but as facilitation, for doing what they would want to do, but otherwise daren't (or otherwise could not assign it the proper priority in their academic publish-or-perish obligations). (7) By way of still further empirical confirmation, Arthur Sale's many studies have shown that institutional self-archiving policies are successful -- and institutional OA repositories successfully approach capture of 100% of institutional research output -- if and only if they are mandates. (8) All of that is empirical; there is one thought-experiment, however, and that is the various speculations and counter-speculations about whether or not Green OA self-archiving mandates will "destroy peer-reviewed journal publication" (see APPENDIX below). (9) I fully agree that the only way to settle that question too, is empirically -- and the mandates will do just that. (10) All indications are that if and when mandated Green OA should ever make the journal subscription model unsustainable, the only thing that will happen is a natural transition to Gold OA publishing, with (a portion of) the institutional subscription savings simply redirected to paying the (reduced but nonzero) costs of Gold OA: implementing peer review. Would all peer-reviewed journal article authors indeed want OA for their published articles if they knew copyright was no obstacle and knew that self-archiving time/effort was trivial?APPENDIX: As noted above, I think we already know the answer to that question, indirectly, from the multidisciplinary surveys that have already been conducted and published. But suppose we wanted a still more direct answer: Suppose we were to ask authors -- only about peer-reviewed journal articles (not books, irrespective of whether books are peer-reviewed) -- the following question (which needs to be as detailed as it is, in order to short-circuit irrelevancies, enthymemes, and incorrect assumptions): I am willing to wager that the vast majority of authors in all disciplines would reply FOR (and that if we added a box "if AGAINST, please state WHY," the reasons given by the minority who were AGAINST would all, without exception, be either factually incorrect, logically incoherent, or simply irrelevant)."IF there existed no legal or practical copyright obstacles to doing it, and IF doing it involved negligibly little time and effort on your part (< 5 minutes of keystrokes per paper over and above all the time it took to write it), THEN would you be FOR or AGAINST making your own published journal articles Open Access so that all their potential users could access them, rather than just those whose institutions could afford paid access to the journal in which your article happened to be published?" That, I think, is the only real issue (especially given that a huge wave of institutional and funder self-archiving mandates is now growing worldwide: See Peter Suber's forthcoming SPARC Open Access Newsletter on February 2, 2008). Some critics of OA mandates still seem to be seeing the self-archiving and the self-archiving mandate question as somehow imperiling the publication of articles in the author's peer-reviewed journal of choice: But articles published in the author's chosen peer-reviewed journal were part of the conditional (IF/THEN) in the above conditional question. Hence any remaining reluctance about self-archiving can only be based on speculations ("thought experiments") about the future of journal publishing; those speculations would go into the "WHY" box, and then each one (they are all well-known by now!) could easily be shown to be groundless, empirically and logically: (a) Self-archiving would bypass peer review. (Incorrect: The premise of the question had been that you deposit your published, peer-reviewed journal articles.)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum European University Association Unanimously Recommends OA Self-Archiving Mandates for its 791 Universities in 46 Countries
These recommendations by the EUA Working Group on Open Access were adopted unanimously on January 25 2008 by the Council of the European University Association, representing 791 universities in 46 countries throughout Europe.
Many thanks to Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege and founder of EurOpenScholar, who forwarded the report to the American Scientist Open Access Forum for posting, with permission. This clearly represents a new era for Green OA self-archiving mandates, moving now from funder mandates to university mandates, thereby covering all research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, worldwide, at its source. Below are the highlights of the recommendations, followed by the recommendations in full. In essence, the recommendation is that all European Universities should create institutional repositories and should mandate that all research publications must be deposited in them immediately upon publication (and made Open Access as soon as possible thereafter)as already mandated by RCUK, ERC, and NIH, and as recommended by EURAB. In addition, the EUA recommends that these (funder) self-archiving mandates should also be extended to all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding.HIGHLIGHTS: A. Recommendations for University Leadership The basic approach... should be the creation of an institutional repository. These repositories should be established and managed according to current best practices (following recommendations and guidelines from DRIVER and similar projects) complying with the OAI-PMH protocol and allowing inter-operability and future networking for wider usage....B. Recommendations for National Rectors' Conferences All National Rectors' Conferences should work with national research funding agencies and governments in their countries to implement the requirement for self-archiving of research publications in institutional repositories and other appropriate open access repositories according to best practice models of the ERC and existing national research funding agencies operating open access mandates...C. Recommendations for the European University Association EUA should continue to contribute actively to the policy dialogue on Open Access at the European level with a view to a self-archiving mandate for all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding, hence in support of and building upon the ERC position and other international initiatives such as that of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Recommendations from the European University Association Working Group on Open Access I. WG: Aims and Scope In January 2007 EUA established a 'Working Group on Open Access' for a one year period as a platform of expert opinion to provide both a voice for, and visibility to European universities as stakeholders in the policy debate. Its mission was dual-fold: to raise awareness of the importance of 'open access' issues to the wider university community, both in terms of its impact upon the research process and its financial implications for university libraries, and to develop recommendations for a common strategy for the university sector as key stakeholders in policy development in the field. The decision to set up the Working Group had reflected the general view that the interests of universities were not being heard in the growing policy debate on the issue of the wide implications of rapid development of digital ICT for publishing which tended to be dominated by the commercial interests of the major scientific publishing companies. The Working Group membership drew upon the range of different university perspectives on the concept of 'Open Access' from those of academic researchers, librarians and university management. In the course of its three meetings in 2007 the Working Group gathered expert opinion on open access publishing business models, legal and copyright issues, technical development of national digital repositories and their European networking, and the policies being developed towards open access publishing by funding agencies at the national level and the European Commission. Professor Sijbolt Noorda (Chair of the WG) and members contributed also to several European Conferences held in 2007 including the major conference on 'Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age' held jointly by the European Commission DG Research and DG Information and Media in Brussels in February 2007 in which the university sector were recognised formally as a major 'stakeholder' in the open access policy debate. In reaching its recommendations that are addressed to three audiences - university leaders at the institutional level, National Rectors Conferences and the EUA - the Working Group has borne in mind the full spectrum of issues involved; these range from the clear opportunity offered to widen access to the results of research, to the implications of open access publishing for peer eview and quality assurance in academic research and the rapidly rising costs of scientific publications for university libraries (through high subscription prices for both electronic and printed journals, including 'bundling' marketing strategies by publishers). II. European and Global Context of the Recommendations The WG recommendations seek to build upon the findings of the 'Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of Scientific Publications Markets in Europe' (European Commission, DG Research, project report, January 2006), and public statements issued by the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) on Open Access as well as the current practices of some funding agencies such as UK Research Councils and the newly adopted policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States concerning open access mandates for peer-reviewed publications arising from grants. In the European context the most recent significant development has been the ERC announcement on 17th December 2007 of its position on open access, as follows: "The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMedCentral, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication."WG recommendations seek also to provide support to European level initiatives promoting institutional repositories, their networking and wider accessibility through the future Confederation of European Repositories being developed by the DRIVER project consortium (funded under the European Commission 7th Research Framework Programme) and other university-led initiatives such as EurOpenScholar and the UNICA network. III. Recommendations The WG recommendations (below) are based upon the following core premises: the university's role and responsibility as guardian of research knowledge as a 'public good'; the results of publicly-funded research should be publicly-available as soon as possible; and quality assurance peer review processes are pre-conditions for scholarly publishing and therefore are essential to be maintained in the digital publishing mode. It is important to emphasise that the scope of the WG recommendations cover as a priority the need for the enhancement of open access to peer-reviewed published research literature only, and not scientific research data, teaching materials etc. Issues of access to research data, its archiving and preservation need further attention from universities, funding agencies and scientific professional bodies, and are subject to several initiatives at the national and European level which are not addressed here (e.g. the Alliance for Permanent Access and European Digital Information Infrastructure). A. Recommendations for University Leadership 1. Universities should develop institutional policies and strategies that foster the availability of their quality controlled research results for the broadest possible range of users, maximising their visibility, accessibility and scientific impact. 2. The basic approach for achieving this should be the creation of an institutional repository. These repositories should be established and managed according to current best practices (following recommendations and guidelines from DRIVER and similar projects) complying with the OAI-PMH protocol and allowing inter-operability and future networking for wider usage. 3. University institutional policies should require that their researchers deposit (self-archive) their scientific publications in their institutional repository upon acceptance for publication. Permissible embargoes should apply only to the date of open access provision and not the date of deposit. Such policies would be in compliance with evolving policies of research funding agencies at the national and European level such as the ERC. 4. University policies should include copyright in the institutional intellectual property rights (IPR) management. It should be the responsibility of the university to inform their faculty researchers about IPR and copyright management in order to ensure the wider sharing and re-use of the digital research content they have produced. This should include a clear policy on ownership and management of copyright covering scholarly publications and define procedures for ensuring that the institution has the right to use the material produced by its staff for further research, educational and instructional purposes. 5. University institutional policies should explore also how own resources could be found for author fees if 'author pays model' of open access publishing prevails in the future in some scientific fields/domains. B. Recommendations for National Rectors' Conferences 1. All National Rectors' Conferences should work with national research funding agencies and governments in their countries to implement the requirement for self-archiving of research publications in institutional repositories and other appropriate open access repositories according to best practice models of the ERC and existing national research funding agencies operating open access mandates. National Rectors' Conferences should encourage government to work within the framework of the Council of the European Union Conclusions on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation" adopted at the EU Competitiveness Council meeting on 22nd-23rd November 2007. 2. National Rectors' Conferences should attach high priority to raising the awareness of university leadership to the importance of open access policies in terms of enhanced visibility, access and impact of their research results. C. Recommendations for the European University Association 1. EUA should continue to contribute actively to the policy dialogue on Open Access at the European level with a view to a self-archiving mandate for all research results arising from EU research programme/project funding, hence in support of and building upon the ERC position and other international initiatives such as that of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). 2. EUA should continue to be visible and to rally expertise from Europe's universities on Open Access issues to provide input to European and International events advancing open access to scientific publications, research data and their preservation.
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