Entries by Stevan Harnad

Wouter Gerritsma, wrote in GOAL:

"For two working groups of the Dutch University libraries I was asked to make a calculation for the costs of a 100% Gold open access model. It will only costs 10.5 million euro extra was my conclusion. Blogged at http://wowter.net/2014/03/05/costs-going-gold-netherlands/"

Unless I have misunderstand, this "10.5 million euro extra” for Dutch University Libraries means 10.5 million euro extra over and above what Dutch University Libraries are paying for subscriptions (34 million euros).

In other words, for a surcharge of 10.5 million dollars, Dutch University libraries can purchase gold OA for Dutch research output (assuming that suitable gold OA journals exist for all Dutch research output, and that all Dutch researchers are willing to publish in them).

But, at the same time, Dutch University libraries also have to continue to pay to subscribe to the research input from all other universities and research institutions worldwide, as long as the latter publish in subscription-based journals rather than gold OA journals (or are unwilling or unable to pay for gold OA).

This pre-emptive double-payment for gold OA I have come to call “Fool’s Gold."

What is being left out of this calculation, of course, is that the Netherlands, like all countries, can have OA at no extra cost at all by mandating green OA self-archiving of all of its research output in Dutch universities’ institutional repositories.

In other words, Wouter's calculations sound like a response to Sander Dekker's Dutch echo of the UK Finch Committee recommendations to pay extra for gold OA instead of just mandating green OA.

Such recommendations originate, not coincidentally, from the two countries with the heaviest concentration of the journal publishing industry, and hence the journal publishing industry lobby, as repeatedly voiced in the Netherlands by Sander Dekker, Netherlands State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

All the published objections to the Finch recommendations would apply to Dekker’s Dutch recommendations if they were ever to become a policy (mandate). Fortunately they are not mandatory and can and should be ignored in favor of mandating green OA, as the European Commission has done. The UK mandate will also (it is to be hoped) shortly shored up with an immediate-deposit requirement from HEFCE.

To understand why green OA needs to be mandated first, and how it will first provide OA, and then make subscriptions unsustainable, inducing publishers to cut costs and convert to Fair Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price by offloading all archiving and access provision onto the worldwide network of mandatory green OA institutional repositories, see:

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

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Wouter Gerritsma replied:

Stevan,
 
Yes we could have green with the current subscription models and repository infrastructure. But still some important players don’t allow green (Wiley, Nature and ACS to mention a few)
 
But all I wanted to do, and was requested to do, to make a calculation to see what it would cost if our junior minister Sander Dekker would get what he wanted. Complete Gold OA for the Netherlands.
 
It would cost us 43 instead of 34 million euro.
Currently we are spending already 34 (subscriptions) plus 4 million (OA APC). So we are rapidly falling into a trap of paying twice http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/30/paying-twice-or-paying-thrice-brienza/
 
Wouter  

Wouter,

Yes, of course I knew that you were only the messenger, and doing the calculation! It is the pressure from Sander Dekker (or, rather, from those who are putting the pressure on Sander Dekker!) that is behind the foolish idea of increasing the already overstretched Dutch research publication budget by 30% from 34M euros for subscriptions to 43M by adding payment for pre-emptive, over-priced, double-paid Fool's Gold OA!

But there is a solution for green OA embargoes: In the case of Elsevier, they're no problem, because Elsevier does not have a green OA embargo -- just a lot of empty, non-binding pseudo-legalistic double-talk about authors retaining the right to self-archive unembargoed "except if they are required [mandated] to exercise that retained right." 

That is of course patent nonsense. But for those timid authors who don't realize it, they can still be mandated to deposit the final refereed draft of their articles in their IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to keep it under "Closed Access" if they wish to comply with an embargo. The author can then provide individual access on a case-by-case basis: Users click the IR's eprint-request Button to request an individual copy, and the author can then comply with the request with one click.

Needless extra clicks for the (timid) author, but extra access too, and extra usage, uptake, and impact. (And a lot better than paying a needless extra 10M!)

And of course the result after a few years of mandatory immediate deposit, providing 60% immediate OA for the unembargoed deposits and 40% Button-mediated access will be that embargoes will quietly die their inevitable, well-deserved deaths, as more and more authors provide immediate OA instead of clicks.

Green OA embargoes, in other words, are illusory impediments, bits of FUD to confound timid authors. No sensible person on the planet believes they have any chance of actually holding back the Green OA dam (something the citizens of the Netherlands should understand!).

Best wishes,

Stevan

In the Society for Scholarly Publishing's Scholarly Kitchen, Rick Anderson complains of "errors and misinformation” in the ROARMAP registry of OA mandates and David Crotty calls for publishers to provide this service instead ("I think the publishing community would be better served by creating (and supporting) a resource of this kind").

ROARMAP is a registry for institutional and funder OA policies:

X-Other (Non-Mandates) (86)
Proposed Institutional Mandates (6)
Proposed Sub-Institutional Mandate (4)
Proposed Multi-Institutional Mandates (5)
Proposed Funder Mandates (12)
Institutional Mandates (202)
Sub-Institutional Mandates (43)
Multi-Institutional Mandates (9)
Funder Mandates (87)
Thesis Mandates (109)

The distinction between a mandate and a non-mandate is fuzzy, because mandates vary in strength.

For a classification of the ROARMAP policies in terms of WHERE and WHEN to deposit, and whether the deposit is REQUIRED or REQUESTED, see El CSIC’s (la Universitat de Barcelona, la Universitat de València & la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) MELIBEA.

For analyses of mandate strength and effectiveness, see:

Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L., & Harnad, S. (2012). Testing the finch hypothesis on green OA mandate ineffectiveness. arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.8174.

Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent & Harnad, Stevan (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, A Swan & AA Baptista, Eds. Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na UMinho no Mundo).

Further analyses are underway. For those interested in analyzing the growth of OA mandate types and how much OA they generate, ROARMAP and MELIBEA, which index OA policies, can be used in conjunction with ROAR and BASE, which index repository contents.

"Leave providing the OA to us..."

If there is any party whose interests it serves to debate the necessary and sufficient conditions for calling an institutional or funder OA policy an OA “mandate,” it’s not institutions, funders or OA advocates, whose only concern is with making sure that their policies (whatever they are called) are successful in that they generate as close to 100% OA as possible, as soon as possible.

The boundary between a mandate and a non-mandate is most definitely fuzzy. A REQUEST is certainly not a mandate, nor is it effective, as the history of the NIH policy has shown. (The 2004 NIH policy was unsuccessful until REQUEST was upgraded to REQUIRE in 2007.)

But (as our analyses show), even requirements come in degrees of strength. There can be a requirement with or without the monitoring of compliance, with or without consequences for non-compliance, and with consequences of varying degrees. Also, all of these can come with or without the possibility of exceptions, waivers or opt-outs, which can be granted under conditions varying in their exactingness and specificity.

All these combinations actually occur, and, as I said, they are being analyzed in relation to their success in generating OA. It is in the interests of institutions, funders and OA itself to ascertain which mandates are optimal for generating as much OA as possible, as soon as possible.

I am not sure whose interests it serves to ponder the semantics of the word “mandate” or to portray as sources of “errors and misinformation” the databases that are indexing in good faith the actual OA policies being adopted by institutions and funders.

(It is charges of "error and misinformation" that sound a bit more like propaganda to me, especially if they come from parties whose interests are decidedly not in generating as much OA as possible, as soon as possible.)

But whatever those other interests may be, I rather doubt that they are the ones to be entrusted with indexing the actual OA policies being adopted by institutions and funders -- any more than they are to be entrusted with providing the OA.

I think it is not only appropriate but essential that services like the University of Southampton's ROAR, ROARMAP, the Universities of Barcelona, Valencia and Catalunya's MELIBEA and University of Bielefeld's BASE are hosted and provided by scholarly institutions rather than by publishers. I also think the reasons for this are obvious.

"Leave providing the OA to us..." 2

On the charitable assumption that some Schol Kitch readers are researchers, interested in maximizing OA, rather than just publishers interested in persuading the research community to “leave providing the OA [and the OA mandate information] to us [publishers],” here is some further information about OA mandates:

The objective of OA mandates is to generate as much OA as possible, as soon as possible. There are many different mandate models, varying in strength and success.

The Emory and OSU mandates are variants of the Harvard default copyright-reservation mandate model. This is not a very strong mandate model, because in principle it allows opt-out on an individual case-by-case basis. The opt-out rate at Harvard is only about 5%, however.

The version of the Harvard model adopted by Harvard FAS was upgraded so the opt-out applies only to the copyright-reservation clause, not to the immediate-deposit clause, but it still has no provisions for monitoring compliance, and no consequences for non-compliance. The Harvard FAS deposit rate is hence not much higher than the opt-out rate — despite the fact that about 60% of Harvard’s annual research article output is being made freely accessible somewhere on the web within a year of publication.

The UK has stronger mandates, such as the Southampton ECS mandate, but the strongest and most effective mandate model is the Liege/FNRS/HEFCE model in which immediate repository deposit (though not necessarily immediate OA) is officially designated as the submission mechanism for both research performance evaluation and research funding. Its annual deposit rate is over 80% and still rising. As a consequence, other institutions are now upgrading to this mandate model.

All these parametric variations of OA mandates are currently being systematically tested statistically for their success in generating OA in ongoing studies. ROARMAP is just a database for registering and linking the policies themselves, not for classifying or testing them. MELIBEA classifies the policy details in more detail, but there is no point trying to catalogue every possible mandate nuance in an index. These are not publisher copyright-restriction details: they are pragmatic institutional and funder policies, intended to generate as much OA as possible, as soon as possible. And their current full text is always linked and available together with each mandate’s specific details.

I have already posted some of the references for this ongoing research above. Anyone interested in mandate strength and success (rather than just in decrying “errors and misinformation” and in calling into question the research community’s competence to adopt and index its own OA policies) can consult these and other references — or, better still, they can use ROAR, ROAR, MELIBEA and BASE to do further analyses. All findings are welcomed by all who are interested in reaching 100% OA as soon as possible.

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David Wojick: "The question is whether this upgrade will include accurately describing the rule systems being collected, along the lines Rick presents here, beginning with not calling them mandates. It might be better if publishers did this as a service to their authors. The number of variables in these rules may or may not be large but the number of combinations is probably huge, as is the potential for confusion. Thus accurate representation is not trivial."

Reme Melero's much-improved directory MELIBEA already does this classification extremely well. The most relevant parameters are:

requirement?
opt-out (waiver)?
when?
where?
version?
embargo?
copyright reservation?

This generates a weighted estimate of mandate strength. The weighting parameters will have to be adjusted according to actual studies of the correlation between these parameters and deposit rate. This is what Dr. Swan's database will add, together with growth charts.

So, no discernible need for a version from "publishers... as a service to their authors" -- but they're welcome to do it, as I've mentioned. All these databases are OA, harvestable and remixable.

I suggest, though, that the ScholKitch chefs stop fussing about the word "mandate": A simple dictionary look-up will show that it is polysemous (as between permitting, sanctioning and requiring). So the pertinent features are whether or not OA is required (i.e., "mandatory") and whether or not the requirement can be waived.

Some further parameters that will need to be added are:

compliance monitoring (how)?
consequences for non-compliance?
deposit as condition for evaluation?

The primary need for these parameters, however, is not so much "as a service to authors" (who need only know whether, when, where, what and how to deposit [and why!]) but as a service to policy-makers (institutions and funders), in order to demonstrate quantitatively the importance and effectiveness of the various policy parameters for optimizing their mandates.

David Crotty: “Your characterization of my suggestion is also inaccurate. By using the word "instead" you suggest a zero sum game where any actions or contributions from publishers would eliminate or prevent resources from other groups.”

No, as I keep saying, anyone is free and welcome to provide a mandate registry, and can harvest whatever they want of ROARMAP, which is OA and OAI-compliant.

You suggest that your statement that “I think the publishing community would be better served by creating (and supporting) a resource of this kind” is inaccurately described as “instead.” How about “rather” or “preferably”? (There seems to be a preoccupation in the Scholarly Kitchen with terminology rather than substance, wrapped in the rhetoric of “errors and misinformation.”)

You go on to say “I would worry about any researcher who would rely on this sort of database [ROARMAP], rather than going directly to one’s funding agency or institution and carefully reading through every single detail of any relavant policy. So if these resources are inadequate for those directly affected by the policies tracked, who are they for?”

All policies are linked in ROARMAP, so anyone who wishes can read every word of them… It seems the gripe is just with the word “mandate” — and perhaps with what was or wasn’t selected in the ROARMAP policy excerpts (often furnished by the registrants rather than ROARMAP).

My own view is that authors are far better served by consulting ROARMAP rather than anything provided by publishers, who are in a profound conflict of interest with green OA mandates, and heavily lobbying against their adoption (except when they provide extra funds to pay for gold OA).

The research community’s research is already locked into publishers’ grip with subscriptions; publishers would like to keep it that way with hybrid gold OA journals; they would also like to be the ones “complying” with those green OA mandates that they don’t manage to prevent from being adopted in the first place, via their lobbying and that they are delaying as long as possible with their embargoes, if they slip past the lobbying. Far better for publishers to see to it that the unblockable mandates are at least kept to their minimum conditions, while again locked into publishers’ grip rather than left to researchers.

It fits well into this “leave it to us” pattern that publishers would also like to host the definitive OA mandate registry that researchers consult. Deprecating ROARMAP as “errors and misinformation” is a good step in this direction…

So, is it indeed “instead,” “rather,” “preferably” or just “in addition”? Take your pick. The motivation and conflict of interest are exactly the same.

David Crotty: “This ‘us against them’ mentality continues to plague some advocates who have been unable to move past what Cameron Neylon calls the ‘angry protest movement’ stage of OA to the practical implementation stage. Having a listing of policies created by publishers would in no way harm ROARMAP, just as MELIBEA does not harm ROARMAP.”

There is no conflict of interest with MELIBEA, likewise a project of the research community: We collaborate happily (as illustrated by the 2010 link I provided). ROARMAP and MELIBEA (and BASE) have the very same objective: 100% OA, as soon as possible, which means via mandatory Green OA. In contrast, there is a profound conflict of interest between the research community and the publishing community, which persists in embargoing Green OA and lobbying against Green OA mandates. No “angry protest”: just rational, practical measures to resolve this conflict of interest in favour of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders and for whose benefits — not publishers’ — the research is being funded and conducted.

And I’m not angry — I’m just tired, and impatient for 100% OA after so many years needlessly lost already,

David Crotty: “I remain confused by a movement that calls itself "open" while only selectively allowing those who pass a litmus test to participate.”

Who is stopping anyone from participating? I keep telling you that ROARMAP is open, and so is the web. Publishers can do what they like.

But if publishing interest advocates can criticize ROARMAP as “errors and misinformation” and argue that a publisher-provided mandate-registry is hence needed, surely I can respond with corrections, counterarguments and further information, can I not? That’s what’s meant by “open.”

Comment on:
Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles
Open and Shut Feb 4 2014]

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1. Sixty percent of journals (including Elsevier) state formally in their copyright agreements that their authors retain the right to make their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version (Green) Open Access (OA) immediately, without embargo, by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories.

2. The Elsevier take-down notices did not pertain to the author’s final version but to the publisher’s version of record (and in the case of 3rd party sites like academia.edu they concerned not only the version but the location).

3. The IDOA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate is formally immune to take-down notices, because it separates deposit from OA:

4. For articles published in the 60% of journals in which authors formally retain their right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA, they can be self-archived immediately in the institutional repository and also made OA immediately.

5. For articles published in the 40% of journals that formally embargo OA, if authors wish to comply with the publisher’s embargo, the final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version can still be deposited immediately in the institutional repository, with access set as Closed Access (CA) during any embargo: only the title and abstract are accessible to all users; the full text is accessible only to the author.

6. For CA deposits, institutional repositories have an email-eprint-request Button with which individual users can launch an automated email request to the author for an individual copy for research purposes, with one click; the author can then decide, on an individual case by case basis, with one click, whether or not the repository software should email a copy to that requestor.

7. It is the IDOA + Button Strategy that is the update of the “Harnad-Oppenheim Prepint + Corrigenda” Strategy.

8. But of course even the IDOA + Button Strategy is unnecessary, as is definitively demonstrated by what I would like to dub the “Computer Science + Physics Strategy”:

9. Computer scientists since the 1980’s and Physicists since the 1990’s have been making both their preprints and their final drafts freely accessibly online immediately, without embargo (the former in institutional FTP archives and then institutional websites, and the latter in Arxiv, a 3rd-party website) without any take-down notices (and, after over a quarter century, even the mention of the prospect of author take-down notices for these papers is rightly considered ludicrous).

10. I accordingly recommend the following: Let realistic authors practice the Computer Science + Physics Strategy and let formalistic authors practice the IDOA + Button Strategy — but let them all deposit their their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted versions immediately.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

In a very silly opinion piece in the Times Literary Supplement, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate -- despite noting that until at least 2020 HEFCE has not mandated only for journal articles, not for books -- decries shrilly the doom and gloom that the HEFCE mandate portends for book-based humanity scholarship. The gratuitous cavilling is, as usual, cloaked in shrill alarums about academic freedom infringement...

Peterson, G. M. (2013). Characteristics of retracted open access biomedical literature: A bibliographic analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(12), 2428-2436.

Abstract: The author analyzes retracted biomedical literature to determine if open access and fee-for-access works differ in terms of the practice and effectiveness of retraction. Citation and content analysis were applied to articles grouped by accessibility (libre, gratis, and fee for access) for various bibliometric attributes. Open access literature does not differ from fee-for-access literature in terms of impact factor, detection of error, or change in postretraction citation rates. Literature found in the PubMed Central Open Access subset provides detailed information about the nature of the anomaly more often than less accessible works. Open access literature appears to be of similar reliability and integrity as the population of biomedical literature in general, with the added value of being more forthcoming about the nature of errors when they are identified.

Can't read the article because it wasn't OA -- but what was being compared here? I doubt it was OA vs non-OA articles. More likely it was articles in Gold OA journals vs articles in toll journals. But the articles in toll journals might have been Green OA. And comparing Gold OA journal articles with toll journal articles is not comparing OA with non-OA. (And if you compare OA articles with non-OA articles, you can't draw conclusions about journal impact factor, error detection rates or retraction rates.)

Addendum: Someone kindly sent me a copy of the full text, so I now see that Green OA was taken into account in this study after all, although the author persists in describing the non-differences found as pertaining to OA publishing vs. non-OA publishing, whereas they do not: They pertain to whether or not the article is OA -- and it can be OA whether it is published in a Gold OA journal or in a non-OA journal. The author writes:

"the increasingly prominent body of open access literature is as reliable (and maybe more so) and of the same quality as the literature published under the model that was the gold standard for scholarly communications in the previous century"

This continues to be a comparison of apples versus fruit, since at least as much of the literature that is open access today is "published under the gold standard for scholarly communications in the previous century" -- namely, the subscription-access (i.e., non-OA) publishing model (here confusingly called the "gold standard" publishing model, which is of course the opposite of the Gold OA publishing model) -- as is published under the Gold OA publishing model.

Open access is a property of the article, not necessarily of the journal. Hence OA articles are not necessarily being published under a different publishing model.

The study compared biomedical articles that were Gratis OA (free online), Libre OA (free online plus re-use rights) and non-OA, based on the PubMed Central (Libre OA), PubMed (Gratis OA and non-OA), Google Scholar (Gratis OA and non-OA) and Web of Science (journal impact factor and article citation rates) databases, for the proportion of retracted articles (under 1%) and for their post-retraction citation rate drops.

The outcome was mostly the finding of no differences. The only exception was a higher average impact factor for the journals in which Gratis OA articles were published compared to the (mostly Gold) journals in which Libre OA articles were published (not surprising, since most high impact journals are still non-OA journals today). No difference at all between the journals in which the Gratis Green OA articles were published and non-OA journals (not surprising, since this was a comparison of apples with fruit).

Stevan Harnad

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!

But we don't even have free online access yet...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access is part of free online access with re-use rights...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access is already within immediate reach and free online access with re-use rights is not...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access today will pave the way for free online access with re-use rights tomorrow...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But re-use rights to only a fragment of the research in a field are near-useless...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But publishers allowing authors to provide free online access and re-use rights can immediately be undercut by free-riding rival publishers; publishers allowing authors to provide free online access alone cannot...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But publishers will sooner allow authors to provide free online access than allow them to provide free online access with re-use rights…

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But institutions and funders can sooner mandate free online access than free online access with re-use rights…

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But all non-subscribing users need free online access; not all or even most or many users need re-use rights...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But all authors already want all non-subscribing users to have immediate free online access; not all or even most or many authors know or care about re-use rights yet...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access with re-use rights today entails paying publishers even more, over and above uncancellable subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, whereas free online access entails no extra cost...

"I don't want free online access: I want free online access with re-use rights!"

But free online access is better, even if free online access with re-use rights is best...

"I don't want the better: I want the best!"

But the better will pave the way for the best...

"I don't want the better: I want the best!"

But the better is already within reach and the best is not: why not grasp it?

"I don't want the better: I want the best!"

See Exchange on Elsevier Website regarding Elsevier Take-Down Notices (and please note that this concerns only authors' final drafts, not Elsevier's PDF version-of-record):

December 17, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Stevan Harnad: Tom, I wonder if it would be possible to drop the double-talk and answer a simple question: Do or do not Elsevier authors retain the right to make their peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites immediately, with no embargo? Just a Yes or No, please… Stevan

December 18, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Tom Reller (Elsevier): Hello Dr. Harnad. I don’t agree with your characterization of our explanation here, but nevertheless as requested, there is a simple answer to your question – yes. Thank you.

December 20, 2013
Stevan Harnad: Tom, thank you. Then I suggest that the institutions [and funders] of Elsevier authors ignore the Elsevier take-down notices (and also adopt an immediate-deposit mandate that is immune to all publisher take-down notices by requiring immediate deposit, whether or not access to the immediate-deposit is made immediately OA)… Stevan 

Do follow Peter Suber's wise advice to authors to try to retain their right to self-archive with OA un-embargoed -- but also deposit your final draft immediately upon acceptance whether or not you make your deposit OA immediately; and make sure your institution and funder both adopt an immediate institutional deposit mandate to ensure that all researchers deposit immediately. (And remember that this all concerns the author's final draft, not the publisher's PDF version-of-record.)

Paradoxically, publisher take-down notices for the publisher's proprietary PDF version-of-record are a good thing for the adoption of sensible, effective OA policies and practices: Sleep-walking authors and their institutions need to be awakened to the pragmatics and implications of the difference between the author's final, peer-reviewed, revised, accepted version and the publisher's PDF version-of-record: Green OA mandates are all about the former, not the latter.

Stevan Harnad

"The University of Calgary has been contacted by a company representing the publisher, Elsevier Reed, regarding certain Elsevier journal articles posted on our publicly accessible university web pages. We have been provided with examples of these articles and reviewed the situation. Elsevier has put the University of Calgary on notice that these publicly posted Elsevier journal articles are an infringement of Elsevier Reed’s copyright and must be taken down."

If Elsevier sends a take-down notice to a university, you have two simple options:

(1) Leave it up, and send the notice back to Elsevier with a copy of Elsevier’s policy on self-archiving.

or

(2) Re-set access as Closed Access and rely on the repository’s copy-request Button.

(If the take-down notice was because you deposited the publisher’s PDF, make the publisher’s PDF Closed Access and deposit the author’s final draft instead, and make that OA.)

And fix your mandate to make sure it specifies that the author’s final draft should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, not the publisher’s PDF.

(Calgary would have done better to respond pragmatically to this latest round of Elsevier FUD and bluff -- but, after all, this is exactly what FUD's for, isn't it?)

Rick Anderson [RA] wrote:

"[A] policy that actually makes deposit mandatory is a mandate… But it appears that many of the institutional policies listed on the ROARMAP site... as "mandates"… actually require no deposit at all. A few examples would be those of MIT ("The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author"), the University of Oregon library ("The Dean of the Libraries will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author"), and the University of Glasgow ("Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication.")… [T]hey are policies that require no deposit… [W]hy the insistence on calling such policies "mandates"? If they make no action mandatory, then why not simply call them policies? 

I agree that some of the "mandates" in ROARMAP are not really mandatory, although Merriam-Webster does give two senses of "mandate":

1  : an authoritative command...
2 :  an authorization to act...

Academics do need both: an official requirement (similar to publish or perish) (1) and official backing from their institutions and funders (2), to empower them to deal with their publishers.

But many of the first wave of mandates are indeed weak, and some are not even mandates at all. 

They are, however, increasingly being upgraded to ID/OA (immediate-deposit/optional-access) (Liège/FNRS model):

In the UK, HEFCE/REF's new policy will effectively make all funded research in the UK ID/OA, and the institutions will have to be the ones to ensure that researchers comply. 

The EC's new Horizon2020 is likewise an immediate-deposit mandate. 

Many (including me) are working hard to try to ensure that the US OSTP mandate and the Canadian Tri-Agency mandate will be ID/OA too. 

Both Minho and QUT have recently upgraded their institutional mandates to ID/OA. And several institutional mandate adoptions have lately been ID/OA.

The hope had originally been that the Harvard/MIT-style OA mandates, because they were (i) self-imposed faculty consensus policies, would be even more effective than administrative mandates, and that because they (ii) formally pre-assigned certain rights by default to their institutions in advance of submission for publication, they would strengthen authors' negotiating position with publishers. 

"Each Faculty member grants to (university name) permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles… Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author’s final version of each article no later than the date of its publication [e.g., by depositing it in the institutional repository]…"

But in practice the Harvard/MIT-model OA mandates (often just called OA "policies") seem to have turned out to be less effective than had been hoped: 

First, the Harvard model had (a) had to allow author waivers, which in and of itself rendered the policy non-mandatory; but this in itself is not the problem, because only about 5% of authors formally request a waiver. 

The problem is that (b) most authors neither waive nor deposit. 

The exact proportion of compliance is not known, because the policy is not binding on all faculty (because at Harvard not all Faculties have adopted it, and because at MIT a lot of collaborative project research is not bound by it) and (c) universities in general currently have no way of knowing what their total published research output is. (Enabling institutions to keep track of their  own research output was in fact one of the secondary purposes of OA mandates and institutional repositories.)

So, as with other OA policies, implementation at Harvard and MIT has been reduced to librarians trying to chase after authors to provide their papers, or trying to retrieve their authors' published papers from the web (where they have sometimes been made OA on institution-external sites). I believe librarians even try to retrieve their institutional authors'  papers from publishers' websites, when the library has licensed access -- but then they languish while the library or repository staff try to figure out whether or when they have the right to deposit them. (This, despite the fact that there are only 5% waivers of the default rights-retention clause!)

It is quite problematic that because of its distinguished source the Harvard OA policy model is being widely emulated in the US even though it is now 5 years since it was first adopted in 2008 and yet there are no data available on how well it works compared to other mandate models (or no mandate at all).

In principle, if Harvard takes it seriously that 95% of Harvard faculty have not waived a default rights-assignment policy, then they can make 95% of Harvard papers OA in Harvard's institutional repository immediately. The question is: which version? If authors have not provided their final refereed drafts, it is unclear what can be done with the publisher's PDF.

The Glasgow policy -- I agree it's not really a mandate, and I have just downgraded it to a non-mandate in ROARMAP -- is the weakest kind of OA policy of all: "Deposit if and when your publisher says you can!"

This is why it's so important that institutional and funder mandates should be (I) upgraded to all require immediate deposit and (II) harmonized to all require institutional deposit, with (III) deposit designated as the sole official mechanism for submitting refereed journal articles for individual performance review, institutional research assessment, research funding applications and fulfillment, and official academic CVs. 

(If institutional rights assignment is waived, the publisher has an OA embargo, and the author wishes to comply with the embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access instead of OA, and the repository's automated request-a-copy Button can provide "Almost-OA" during the embargo with one click each from each requestor and the author. But the deposit must be immediate in any case.)

The UK's HEFCE REF2020 and the EU's EC Horizon2020 mandates should soon both be harmonizing institutional mandates in this direction. Let's hope the US, Canada, Latin America, Australia and the rest of the research world will soon follow suit. OA is already fully within reach and absurdly overdue. Let's this time have the good sense to grasp it.

Stevan Harnad

I like Scott Pluchak's posting. We share a vision...

If you're interested in some of the objective evidence on the adoption rate (still too slow) and the effectiveness (quite remarkable, though depending on mandate-type) of OA self-archiving mandates, have a look at ROARMAP and the references below.

(You might also have heard of the US OSTP, EU Horizon2020 and UK HEFCE/REF2020 mandates, soon to come.)

Scott is certainly right that my thinking has been magical:

1. In 1994: I thought it would be enough to just just say "self-archive" and next day all researchers on the planet would do it. (Next day came, and nothing happened.)

2. It was magical thinking also to create CogPrints in 1997, in case researchers in my field weren't self-archiving because they didn't have a central place to self-archive (no success).

3. Magical thought too, that creating EPrints in 2000 (from which DSpace too emerged) -- so that all institutions could create their own OA repositories -- would do the trick (no dice).

4. A series of studies inspired by Lawrence 2001 -- demonstrating that OA increases citations -- made no significant difference either.

5. But then in 2003, things began to pick up, with the adoption of the very first Green OA mandate (Southampton ECS), followed by several more (notably QUT in Australia and U Minho in Portugal). ROARMAP launched, but adoptions were still just a trickle: decidedly unmagical.

6. Then in 2004 the UK Select Committee recommended that all UK institutions and funders mandate Green OA. And the trickle became a trend -- but still a very sluggish one. And most of the mandates were weak, ineffective ones. It would have taken magic to make them work.

7. So in 2006, Peter Suber and I independently proposed the immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA) (Peter called it the "dual-deposit-release" mandate), Southampton designed the automated request-a-copy Button for EPrints and Eloy Rodrigues designed its counterpart for DSpace. (Perhaps it was still magical thinking to imagine they would work -- or would even be adopted.)

8. But then in 2007, Bernard Rentier, rector of the University of Liège, became the first to adopt the ID/OA mandate and the Button.

9. We then waited a few years to see whether it would work.

10. And by 2010 it became evident that ID/OA + Button was working, and generating over 80% OA compared to about 30% for the weaker mandates and even less without mandates. And no magic was needed.

Meanwhile, Gold OA had been making some headway too, but even more slowly than Green, because it required authors to switch journals and because it cost them extra money; and in 2013 the economist John Houghton (in collaboration with publishing consultant Alma Swan) described exactly why Green needed to come first.

Is it magical to think the adoption of ID/OA + Button will become universal in the next few years? Perhaps. But let's be empirical, and wait for the evidence.

Meanwhile, I -- and many others -- will keep "tirelessly trotting out the facts" rather than just waiting passively… And does 1-10 really sound all that hedgehoggy to you? Seems more foxy to me (and a fox who is more of a pragmatist than just a preacher, polemicist or prestidigitator). -- But then I love both of those little creatures (the foxes and the hedgehogs), and would never either wear their hides or eat their flesh, any more than I would those of any other feeling creature (including pragmatists, preachers, polemicists and prestidigitators). And that's a lot bigger and more important thing than OA...

Gargouri, Y., Larivière, V., & Harnad, S. (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, Ed. title to come) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In Open Access Week 2012

Hitchcock, S. (2013) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. & Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)