Tuesday, December 1. 2009Canada's 10th Green OA Mandate; Planet's 110th: U. Guelph Faculty Environmental Sciences
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![]() ![]() Faculty of Environmental Sciences ROARMAP Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (Please register your institution's or funder's mandate) Monday, November 30. 2009From Here to Eternity![]() It is too late now to do it early, but it's never too late to do it... La liberté libre...![]() Il y a non seulement deux voies vers la liberté d'accès -- la voie dorée de l'édition ouverte et la voie verte de l'autoarchivage ouvert -- mais il y a deux formes ou degrés de la liberté d'accès. (Leurs traductions -- maladroites -- seraient le libre accès « gratuit » [LAG] ("gratis open access") et le libre accès « libre » [LAL] ("libre open access").) Le LAG est l'accès gratuit en ligne. Le LAL est le LAG plus certains droits de réutilisation, donc la « libération » d'un texte non seulement des barrières d'accès mais aussi des barrières de permission. Mais la cible principale du mouvement pour le LA est la littérature lectorisée (contrôlée par les comités de lecture): les 2,5 millions d'articles publiés chaque année dans les 25,000 revues scientifiques qui se publient sur notre planète. Pour cette littérature-là, les auteurs/chercheurs ne souhaitent que ce que leurs textes soient accessibles gratuitement en ligne à tout utilisateur pour pouvoir les rechercher, télécharger, lire, imprimer, analyser, citer -- ![]() Donc vive la gratuité, le coeur du LA! Nous l'aurons dès que nos universités et nos subventionnaires de recherche adoptent des politiques obligatoires ( « mandats » ) tel qu'en font déja une centaine. Reportons la recherche de la liberté « libre » au lendemain de l'arrivée éventuelle de la gratuité pour laquelle nous sommes déja si longtemps en attente... Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, November 28. 2009Collini on "Impact on humanities" in Times Literary Supplement![]() Commentary on:One can agree whole-heartedly with Professor Collini that much of the spirit and the letter of the RAE and the REF and their acronymous successors are wrong-headed and wasteful -- while still holding that measures ("metrics") of scholarly/scientific impact are not without some potential redeeming value, even in the Humanities. After all, even expert peer judgment, if expressed rather than merely silently mentalized, is measurable. (Bradley's observation on the ineluctability of metaphysics applies just as aptly to metrics: "Show me someone who wishes to refute metaphysics and I'll show you a metaphysician with a rival system.") The key is to gather as rich, diverse and comprehensive a spectrum of candidate metrics as possible, and then test and validate them jointly, discipline by discipline, against the existing criteria that each discipline already knows and trusts (such as expert peer judgment) so as to derive initial weights for those metrics that prove to be well enough correlated with the discipline's trusted existing criteria to be useable for prediction on their own. Prediction of what? Prediction of future "success" by whatever a discipline's (or university's or funder's) criteria for success and value might be. There is room for putting a much greater weight on the kinds of writings that fellow-specialists within the discipline find useful, as Professor Collini has rightly singled out, rather than, say, success in promoting those writings to the general public. The general public may well derive more benefit indirectly, from the impact of specialised work on specialists, than from its direct impact on themselves. And of course industrial applications are an impact metric only for some disciplines, not others. Ceterum censeo: A book-citation impact metric is long overdue, and would be an especially useful metric for the Humanities. Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35. Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18. Harnad, S. (2008) Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics Open Access Archivangelism October 10, 2008. Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 Special Issue on "The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance" Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1) The Elephant in the Room
Fred Friend, Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL, wrote in liblicense:
![]() FF: "The phrase "the elephant in the room" was used by a librarian at a recent UK meeting to describe the big issues we were not allowed to discuss about how the current economic crisis is affecting scholarly communication. Representatives of all stakeholder groups present - including publishers - agreed that the economic crisis was hitting them badly, with cost-cutting happening across the board and hopes for growth put on hold. The curious feature of the conversation was that nobody present was able to discuss the one topic which could get us through the crisis and prevent the journals market collapsing, viz. the pricing structure for journal "big deals". Pricing can only be discussed in one-to-one meetings between suppliers and purchasers. It would be easy to blame legislators for anti-trust legislation and the dominance of contract law, but the legal web within which publishing is entwined is of our own making - and I include the academic community in that statement.The elephant in the room is not the prospect of journal subscription cancellations, because as long as researchers need access to peer-reviewed journals, and as long as peer-reviewed journals are accessible only via subscriptions, subscriptions will remain viable, and institutions will just have to keep paying for whatever fraction they can afford of them. ![]() As soon as the Slumbering Giant awakes to the fact that OA is fully within its reach -- all it has to do is to mandate it -- all the fuss about journal affordability, institutional serials crises, and publisher overpricing will fade, for researchers will have access to all refereed research, not just the fraction of it to which their institutions can afford to subscribe today. And then, maybe, institutions will start canceling, their users' needs no longer being inelastic, thanks to the OA mandates. And then publishers will cut costs, lower prices, and eventually make a transition to OA publishing, recovering the costs of peer review from institutional publication fees, paid out of a fraction of institutions' windfall subscription cancellation savings. That's the real elephant in the room, if you like. But as long as we persist in imagining instead that it's something to do with journal pricing, "Big Deals," and the need for pricing reform, we will not only fail to notice the elephant, we will fail to grasp its tail, which is fully within our reach. Instead, we will, like the drunk and the lamp-post, keep fumbling where the elephant isn't (or, like the blind men and the elephant, fail to grasp what it is)! Ganesh Loxodont Friday, November 27. 2009OA McMemberships, Dismemberment and MC Escher![]() ![]() Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, November 25. 2009Institutional vs. Central Repositories: 2 (of 2)![]() SW: "Lots of money is being spent on institutional repositories and, so far, the return on that investment is quite low."Low compared to what? It is undeniable that most of the thousands of institutional repositories are languishing near empty. The only exceptions are the fewer than a hundred mandated ones. But that's the point. What's needed is more mandates, not more "investment." Mandates are what will bring the return on the investment. And there is another crucial point, constantly overlooked: Most central repositories are languishing near-empty too! The only reason it looks otherwise is that usually a subject repository has more content than an institutional repository. But the reason for that is quite simple: The annual worldwide output of an entire field is incomparably bigger than the annual output of any single institution. So when an institution contains no more than the usual low baseline for annual unmandated self-archiving (c. 15% of total annual research output) it has a much smaller absolute number of annual deposits than a central repository (even though that too contains only the very same low baseline 15% of the annual output in the field as a whole, across all institutions, worldwide). (This is the "denominator fallacy.") Yes, I know the physics Arxiv is an exception (with an incomparably higher unmandated central deposit rate for several of its subfields). But that's the point: Arxiv is, and has been, an exception for nearly 20 years now. No point continuing to hold our breath and hope that the longstanding spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving practices of (some fields of) physics will be adopted by other fields. It's not happening, and 20 years is an awfully long time. PubMedCentral (PMC) might -- and I say might, because no one has actually done the calculation -- possibly be doing better than the 15% default baseline, but that's because PMC deposit is mandatory (by NIH and other funders), not because PMC is central! (Indeed, my whole point is that the NIH and kindred biomedical self-archiving mandates would get incomparably more bang for the buck if they mandated institutional deposit -- and then just harvested/imported to PMC -- rather than needlessly insisting on direct central (PMC) deposit. For if NIH mandated institutional deposit, it would help stir the Slumbering Giant -- the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, in all fields, namely, the world's universities and research institutes -- into mandating deposit for all the rest of their annual research output too. SW: "I am still optimistic that institutional repositories will become more useful but for that to happen there need to be useful worldwide (not just UK or European focused because that doesn't match research communities) disciplinary services and portals built on top them. The Catch 22 here is that disciplinary services have exactly the same funding and sustainability issues that disciplinary repositories have."What institutional repositories need is deposit mandates, so they can have content that is worth building services on top of. It's not the potential (or the funding) for services that's missing, it's the content (85%). And to get that content deposited, we need (convergent) institutional and funder deposit mandates. SW: "My group manages both Cornell's eCommons institutional repository and the arXiv.org disciplinary repository. The effective cost per item [footnote 1] submitted is more than 10 times higher for the institutional repository than the disciplinary repository and the benefit/utility/visibility is lower. However, I know exactly who should and will fund eCommons (Cornell), and that nicely matches the vested interest (Cornell). The community benefit from arXiv.org is enormous and the effective cost per new item very low (<$7/item), but given 60k new items per year that is a significant cost and sustainability is a challenge."The cost-per-item stats are funny-money. Cornell's problem is not that it costs too much per item to deposit, it's that the deposits are not being done, because Cornell has no mandate. That makes the ratio of IR costs to IR items unsatisfying, of course, but you are missing the real cause! Moreover, if all institutions had mandates, the (equally small) cost per deposited item would be distributed across the planet's 10K institutions, instead of concentrated on a few central repositories (most near-empty, just like Cornell's institutional one, plus a [very] few serendipitously overstocked central ones, like Arxiv). SW: "I think the best example of a disciplinary service over institutional repositories is RePEc in economics. This predates OAI and our current conception of IRs but fits the model: institutions (typically economics departments [footnote 2]) host articles and expose metadata/data via a standard interface. The institutionally held content is genuinely useful to the economics community because of the disciplinary services."All true. (And note that your "best example" is a central service over distributed institutional repositories, not a central repository in which authors deposit directly! Citeseer is another excellent example, in computer science, a field that has been self-archiving even longer than physics and economics.) But here again, we have a community that has been self-archiving (spontaneously, and institutionally) unmandated for almost as long as Arxiv users. And again, this admirable practice has not generalized to other fields. What physicists and economists (and computer scientists) seem to have in common is that they find the practice of publicly disseminating working papers -- unrefereed preprints -- useful and productive. That is splendid. I do too. But the majority of fields -- and hence of researchers -- do not find publicly disseminating their unrefereed drafts useful. And you certainly cannot mandate making authors' unrefereed drafts public; in some biomedical fields that might even be dangerous. But you can mandate making refereed final drafts (published or accepted for publication) public: they are already being made public, since they're being published. So all you need to do is make it mandatory that they also be made freely accessible online (OA), so that not only subscribers can access and use them but all potential users can. And that is what OA is about. SW: "At the end of the day, researchers want and will use disciplinary services (look at usage stats for arXiv, ADS, SPIRES, RePEc, PMC, SSRN vs IRs). They probably don't care whether the items themselves are stored centrally or institutionally."Correct, for users. But users do care whether the items are accessible at all. And that's what deposit mandates (and OA itself) are for. And authors do care about whether they need to do multiple deposits; and institutions do care about whether they host their own research output. So it does matter whether deposit is mandated institutionally or centrally, by both institutions and funders. The difference is not in functionality, but in content. And you have no functionality if you have no content! SW: "Some of Stevan's arguments miss key points:" sh: "(1) Institutions are the universal providers of all research output -- funded and unfunded, across all subjects, all institutions, and all nations." SW: "Not true, researchers are the universal providers of research output. They often work in teams that span multiple institutions and their first allegiance is often to their discipline rather than their institution."That is (sometimes) true, but trivial. Researchers are answerable to their own institutions (employers) when it comes to the tallying of their research output for research performance assessment. (You may be more loyal to "Physics" than to Cornell U, but it is Cornell, not "Physics," that hires you, pays your salary, and evaluates your productivity; it is "for" Cornell that you "publish or perish" even if your heart belongs to "Physics.") sh: "(3) OAI-compliant Repositories are all interoperable. SW: "Interoperable to a point, and I say that as one of the creators of OAI-PMH. There is plenty of experience showing how hard it is to maintain large harvested collections and merge varying metadata (e.g. OAIster, NSDL). Institutional repositories are often managed with scant attention to maintaining interoperability, managers change the OAI-PMH base URL on a whim or do not monitor for errors. Full-text often has copyright/license issues preventing import into other repositories. "All extremely minor (and readily remediable) points, compared to the real problem of institutional repositories, which is not that they are errorful but that they are EMPTY. (No point even fixing the errors while content is so impoverished. And once content is rich enough, there's the requisite motivation to clean up errors and maximize interoperability -- and services.) sh: "(11) The solution is to fix the funder locus-of-deposit specs, not to switch to central locus of deposit." SW: "The solution is to build disciplinary services (either on disciplinary repositories or over harvested content) that are sufficiently useful to motivate researchers to submit of their own free will."The solution to what problem? The problem I am addressing ('lo these nigh on 20 years) is the absence of the target content over which the putative services are built. Arxiv does not suffer from this problem -- and saints be praised for that -- but that doesn't help the rest of us! Yes, all kinds of powerful new services would be more than welcome (and will come) -- but they are useless in the absence of the content on which they are meant to operate. And it is not researchers as users that are the problem. It is researchers as authors -- hence content-providers, depositors -- that are the problem. The reason they are failing to deposit is not -- let me save you the trouble of waiting more years to find out that this is so -- because the user-services (or even the author-services) are not spiffy enough yet. They are failing to deposit because their fingers are "paralyzed" (for at least 34 reasons): And the cure for that paralysis is deposit mandates: "keystroke mandates" from their institutions and funders.Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos. And one of the (many) things holding up the universal adoption of those keystroke mandates is funders needlessly competing with institutions for their researchers' reluctant keystrokes by mandating central deposit, hence stoking instead of soothing paralyzed authors' (rightful) resistance to the prospect of having to do divergent multiple deposit at central sites instead of convergent one-time local deposit in their own institutional repository. SW: "(footnote 1) I think effective cost per new item is a good measure of repository cost because almost all effort beyond relatively fixed costs of keeping the system going tends to be dealing with new items. I calculate as operating budget over some period divided by number of new items in that period."But surely you also see that the cost per item deposited depends on the overall number of items deposited! SW: "(footnote 2) I'm pleased to say that the section of arXiv that overlaps with RePEc -- Quantitative Finance (q-fin) -- is also included in RePEc (http://ideas.repec.org/s/arx/papers.html)."Splendid. And I wish both Arxiv and RePec all the best in taking their very useful place among (many) central collections and service-providers. But let the one-time locus of deposit be where it belongs, and needs to be: in the researcher's own local institutional repository. And let that be the designated convergent locus of deposit for both institutional and funder mandates. Amen Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Institutional vs. Central Repositories: 1 (of 2)
Chris Armbruster wrote (in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):
CA: "Much hope and a lot of money has been invested in institutional repositories - but, for example, in the UK the significant mandates are now research funder mandates and all the life science RCUKs have joined UK PMC. It would thus seem important and urgent that IRs reconsider their strategy and take a closer look at the idea of being a research repository or joining forces for building a national (or regional) system."(1) It is not at all clear that the "significant mandates" are the funder mandates, especially in view of the past year's burst in institutional mandates (UCL, Harvard, MIT, Stanford...). See Alma Swan's latest graph of mandate growth in ROARMAP:
![]() (2) The ones who need to reconsider their strategy are the (few) research funders who have needlessly and counterproductively stipulated that locus of deposit should be central rather than institutional. (3) Institutions are the universal providers of all research output -- funded and unfunded, across all subjects, all institutions, and all nations. (4) Institutions have a vested interest in hosting, monitoring, showcasing and archiving their own research output. (5) OAI-compliant Repositories are all interoperable. (6) Either funders or institutions can in principle stipulate any locus of deposit for a mandate, either institutional or central. (7) But mandates are still growing too slowly, and one big reason is that no one wants to do -- or mandate -- multiple deposit. (8) There are potentially multiple, diverse and divergent central loci for any piece of research output: subject collections, national collections, funder collections, multidisciplinary collections, etc. (9) The metadata and/or full-text deposits of any OAI-compliant repository can be harvested, exported or imported to any OAI-compliant repository. (10) The natural, economical, rational and systematic solution (one-to-many, unitary-local -- multiple-distal) is for all researchers to deposit locally, in their own institional repository -- and for distal central collections to harvest, import or export -- not the reverse (many-to-one, distal to local, willy-nilly, with institutions having to back-harvest their very own output from here, there and everywhere!), or both, or neither. (11) The only thing that stands in the way of that optimal solution -- whereby institutional and funder mandates can collaborate, converge, and mutually reinforce one another instead of diverging and competing -- is the arbitrary and ill-thought-through requirement by some funders (but by no means all) to deposit centrally instead of institutionally. (12) This obstacle is neither a functional one (it has nothing whatsoever to do with the relative functionality of institutional and central repositories -- they are interoperable and equipotent in every respect) nor a "cultural" one (since self-archiving culture is still very new and all too rare): the problem is simply the needless adoption of arbitrary and ill-thought-out locus-of-deposit requirements by some of the initial funders. (13) The solution is to fix the funder locus-of-deposit specs, not to switch to central locus of deposit. (14) Prediction: The notion of a "central repository" -- new as it is -- is already obsolescent: Is Google a "central repository" or merely a harvester of local content? Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, November 24. 2009Open Access Mandate Sweepstakes: 109 And Growing
Latest Green Open Access Mandates in
![]() Oberlin College (institutional) University of Kansas (institutional total now 51) Brigham Young University 1, 2 (departmental total now 16) Institutional + Departmental + Funder: 109 University of Central Florida (thesis total now 37) All mandates: 146 adopted (15 more proposed -- including the blockbuster US Federal Research Public Access Act [FRPAA] multi-funder mandate proposal, for which momentum is growing) Monday, November 23. 2009Chronique du libre accès![]() « Accès libre et auto-archivage : carnet de bord de bonnes pratiques » Cet atelier porta sur la problématique de l'accès libre à la documentation scientifique sous format numérique. Y furent présentés l'historique de l'accès libre, les concepts qui le délimitent ainsi que les outils mis à la disposition de la communauté de recherche afin de rendre publics les résultats de la recherche subventionnée. Stevan Harnad, titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en sciences cognitives à l'UQAM, présenta ce portrait détaillé. Tanja Niemann, ÉRUDIT, et Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Professeur, UDEM, SYNERGIES de l'Université de Montréal présentèrent ces deux plateformes d'accès libre, instaurées grâce au soutien financier des fonds québécois et de la Fondation canadienne pour l'innovation (FCI). Comment un établissement de recherche peut-il par ailleurs établir une archive institutionnelle de publications numériques ? L'expérience d'Archipel, l'Archive de publications électroniques de l'UQAM, fut relatée par Magada Fusaro, titulaire de la Chaire Unesco-Bell en communication et développement international et présidente-fondatrice du Comité institutionnel sur l'auto-archivage qui a supervisé les travaux préliminaires au lancement d'Archipel, ainsi que par Marc Couture, Professeur à la TÉLUQ. Modératrice et responsable : Dominique Michaud, UQAM Participants : Stevan Harnad, Professeur, UQAM Chronique du Libre Accès
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