Monday, April 28. 2008Optimal Institutional Open Access Mandate: SPARC/SCIENCE-COMMONS White Paper
![]() ![]() OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS:Bravo to the drafters of this SPARC/SCIENCE-COMMONS White Paper! It is such a pleasure (and relief!) to be able to endorse this paper unreservedly. There are distinct signs in the text that the drafters have been attentive, and paying close heed to what has proved empirically to work and not work elsewhere, and why. Here are the three crucial paragraphs: The first two, I and II (numbering and emphasis added), give the basic context for the landmark Harvard Mandate. But the third (III) gives the key modification that upgrades the Harvard model to the optimal alternative -- a universal no-opt-out Deposit Mandate, plus a licensing clause with an opt-out option -- now suitable for adoption by all universities and funders worldwide: [I] Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy under which (1) faculty are required to deposit a copy of their scholarly journal articles in an institutional repository and (2) automatically to grant to the University a University License... to make those articles openly accessible on the Internet.The difference between the above alternative (III) and the current Harvard policy, though a tiny one, is the difference between night and day for the success and power of the mandate, and hence its suitability to serve as a model for other universities (and research funders) worldwide: The difference is that the deposit clause must be no-opt-out -- a true mandate. (It is no-opt-out deposit mandates that have generated the high levels of deposit elsewhere; it is hence crucial to restrict the opt-out option only to the license clause.) "Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate:I (and many others) will now strongly support and promote this alternative mandate model, for universal adoption. (I hope Harvard too will consider the tiny change that would be required in order to upgrade its mandate to this optimal alternative.) The strength and scope of this alternative mandate is, if anything, understated by the White Paper. The no-opt-out Deposit Mandate plus the License Clause is far more powerful even than what the White Paper states, but never mind! What the White Paper states (and its excellent practical suggestions) should be more than enough to encourage the universities of the world to adopt this model mandate. (One ever so tiny quibble that I feel churlish even to mention, concerns the timing of the deposit, and which draft to deposit: The optimal timing for deposit is immediately upon acceptance of the refereed draft for publication. (There is no earthly reason for science and scholarship to wait till the time of publication.) And the draft to deposit is the author's final, refereed, accepted draft ["postprint"]. Of course that draft is citable [as author/title/journal -- in press]; and the citation can be updated as soon as the full year/volume/issue/page-span information is available. And of course quoted passages can be specified by section-heading plus paragraph number: no overwhelming need for the pagination of the publisher's final PDF.) "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"I hope that this optimal university mandate will now also make it more evident why it is so important to integrate university and funder mandates (attention NIH!), so that the university IR is the convergent locus of direct deposit for both: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Optimizing the European Commission's Open Access Mandate![]() SUMMARY: The European Commission (EC) Grant Agreement mandates that "an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission" but does not specify how to provide it. This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR). That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requests direct central deposit, should adopt exactly the same implementational detail. Institutional IR deposit and central harvesting would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates. N. Miradon wrote on the American Scientist Open Access Forum: NM: Professor Harnad advises that "...It should be a part of the fulfillment condition on the recipients of all EC research funding -- both the funded researchers and their institutions -- that all refereed research publications resulting from the funding must be self-archived in the fundee's institutional repository. They (or their metadata) can then be harvested/collected/ imported/exported to the EC from the IRs..."[1]Not even a minor rewrite of the Grant Agreement is needed (and a great deal is at stake): The EC Grant Agreement does not specify how "...an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission..." This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify (in form-letters or instructions to the FP7 grant recipients) that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR). That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR. It is infinitely more useful, sensible, and conducive to the growth of OA IRs, OA self-archiving mandates and OA itself for the Commission's collection to harvest from the recipients' IRs -- rather than just for EC-funded research to be back-harvestable by authors and institutions from the EC's central collection: Authors and their institutions already have copies of their own research output. The objective is to get all that research output deposited, whether EC-funded or not. The power of the EC mandate can easily be extended far beyond merely the research that the EC funds, by simply specifying the recipient's own IR as the preferred locus of the direct deposit, with the EC simply harvesting the deposits for its central collection therefrom. Exactly the same recommendation -- on how this minor detail in the implementation of its OA mandate would make a vast difference for the growth to OA -- has been made to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requested direct central deposit instead of the institutional IR deposit and central harvesting that would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates. The OA mandates of: have already specified institutional deposit either as the sole mode of direct deposit, or as one of the options.European Research Council, I did not say the EC should not run its own repository. I said they should not mandate direct deposit therein. They should mandate direct deposit in the author's IR and then harvest to the EC repository from there.How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access MandatesNM: The proposal that the European Commission should "set up a web-based repository for published project results" was suggested by EURAB and subsequently supported by the Cour des Comptes [footnote 1 of page 17 of [0]). And EURAB did not insist on direct central deposit: "The repository may be a local institutional and/or a subject repository". NM: This would be fine, if all 100% of those institutional repositories were up and running. But are they?Each of the universities and research institutions of Europe is only a free piece of software and a couple of days of sysad time away from having its own IR. If the Commission specified the recipient's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, most of the institutions that don't yet have an IR would set one up. (And for those institutions that don't yet have an IR, there are always interim IRs like DEPOT (and, I hope, soon, through Prof. Bernard Rentier's EurOpenScholar and U. Southampton, "EurOpenDepot") as well as consortial IRs, to tide them over.) The problem is not and never has been getting an IR, but getting the IR filled with its intended OA content. That's why funder mandates need to complement institutional mandates, with both systematically converging on the IR as the locus of deposit. NM: I just looked for ["Seventh Framework Programme" projects] in Google. The first hit was the "WELTEMP" project (Water Electrolysis at Elevated Temperatures) [2].The reason IRs are running fallow today is because neither their institutions nor their funders are mandating deposit in them. That is my point! All research originates from institutions. If the Commission mandates deposit of its EC-funded research institution-externally, it is needlessly doing far less than it easily can, in order to generate 100% OA for all European research, from all disciplines and all institutions, whether EC-funded or not. NM: I have nothing against WELTREMP or any of its partners. On the contrary, I suspect that they are representative of quite a lot of grant recipients, i.e. that somewhat less than 100% of Framework Programme 7 grantees have got a fully functional Institutional Repository. This may have changed by the time we get to the next Framework Programme - lets hope that it has. But for the moment, since the Commission already has a repository with 100% coverage, I cannot think that EURAB and the Cour des Comptes are wrong to suggest that this repository simply be put on the web.The objective is not to get EC-funded research into a central EC repository (though that is welcome too). The objective is to get all EC-funded research OA (along with all EC-unfunded research). An extremely minor detail in the implementation of the EC's deposit mandate -- namely, depositing institutionally and then harvesting centrally -- would make a very major difference for OA growth in Europe. The concern about institutions that do not yet have IRs can be accommodated by stipulating that direct deposit in the grant recipient's own IR (and sending the URL to the EC) is the EC's preferred means of submission, but direct submission is permissible too. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, April 17. 2008Peter Suber on NIH Mandate Misconceptions![]() ![]() Peter also corrects the common error about locus of deposit: the NIH deposit needs to be made in PubMed Central, not in PubMed. [I would add, however, that it would be infinitely better for worldwide OA if NIH's stipulated locus for the direct deposit were the fundee's own Institutional Repository (from which it could simply be harvested/imported/exported to PubMed Central). That would help enormously to integrate and universalize all Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates, from universities as well as funders, systematically scaling them up to all universities and research institutions worldwide, covering all research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, in a convergent, mutually reinforcing synergy.] More on the OA mandate at the NIH
Peter Suber: This table is based on the most common misconceptions I'd heard in the first month after the policy's adoption. Now I'd add at least one more. Wednesday, April 16. 2008Data exchange among disparate repositories
[re-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News]
ECS developers win $5000 repository challenge, a press release from the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), April 15, 2008.Comment from Stevan Harnad: The demonstration of the bulk transferability of the contents of one OAI-compliant repository to another is indeed welcome. It shows that it does not really matter from the point of view of either accessibility or harvestability where a research output is deposited (as long as it's in an OAI-compliant repository). But where it is deposited still matters a great deal for the probability of research output being deposited at all, and especially for the probability of deposit mandates being adopted at all -- particularly deposit mandates on the part of institutions, who are the providers of all the research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines. The importance of the new OR08 demonstration of the transferability of Institutional Repository (IR) contents is hence greatest for confirming that both institutional and funder mandates can and should require deposit in the author's institutional IR, from which central harvesters, indexers and search engines, as well as Central Repositories (CRs) like PubMed Central, can then harvest/import them. This convergent synergy would be best for the progress of OA. (The fact that external deposits can also be back-harvested to the depositor's own institutional IR is also welcome and useful, but it certainly does not imply that depositing willy-nilly anywhere is as likely to scale up to systematic OA policies, generating universal OA, as depositing, systematically and convergently at the universal source: the researcher's own IR -- and then, where desired, harvesting/exporting externally therefrom.) Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R. and Rowland, F. (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Technical report. Tuesday, April 15. 2008How to Upgrade Sweden's New UCB Open Access Policy to a Green OA Mandate![]() ![]() The pertinent current passages are these: 3. All employees at the University College of Boras must register their publications in BADA.The all-important distinction UCB has failed to make is the one between (a) depositing a document and (b) making it Open Access. The full text of a document can always be deposited in an Institutional Repository and made Closed Access, which means that no one can access it except the author and the webmaster. No legal restrictions can be placed on such internal institutional record-keeping for an institution's own research output. The metadata are accessible and visible webwide, but the full text is not. Then there is the option to make the deposit Open Access. This can be done in accordance with the journal's copyright policy. 62% of journals already endorse immediately making the deposit Open Access. (See Romeo [n.b, it is momentarily malfunctioning!]) ![]() All that needs to be done is to change the word "register" in clause 3 above to "deposit", and in clause 5, in the first sentence, the phase should not be "published in an open digital archive" but "made Open Access"; and then replace "deposit manuscripts to BADA" with: "make the deposited manuscript Open Access" according to... etc., as follows: 3. All employees at the University College of Boras must deposit their publications in BADA -- [the final refereed draft ("postprint") immediately upon acceptance for publication].With the above changes the UCB policy not only becomes a mandate (which has been demonstrated by Professor Arthur Sale in Australia to work successfully to generate 100% OA within about 2 years) rather than just a request or invitation, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to fail. But such a policy would be in conformity with the unanimous recommendation of the Council of the European University Association, representing 791 universities in 46 countries. It would also be in line with the policy of the European Research Council and the flagship of the European universities' Open Access mandate: University of Liege, of which the Rector, Professor Bernard Rentier, is also founder and director of EurOpenScholar, which is dedicated to promoting OA mandates all over Europe. I urge UCB to make the few small changes required to make UCB's current policy into the model Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access ((DOA) mandate, the optimal OA policy for UCB, a model for the rest of Scandinavia, and the 42nd Green OA mandate worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, April 11. 2008EUA urges universities to develop clear strategies to advance open access![]() Universities need to do more to develop institutional policies and strategies that increase access to their peer-reviewed research results to the widest range of users, to maximise the impact and visibility of university research. This is one of the key recommendations published by EUA’s Working Group on Open Access, which aim to raise awareness of the importance of the open access issue within the university community, both in terms of its impact upon the research process but also its financial implications for university libraries. EUA is recommending that universities across Europe set up an ‘institutional repository’ (or take part in a shared repository) as a key first step to achieving this goal. These repositories should be established and managed according to current best practices and policies developed by universities should ensure that researchers deposit their publications in the repository on acceptance of publication. Embargoes should only apply to the date of open access provision and not the date of deposit. University policies should also take better account of copyright and the institutional intellectual property rights (IPR) management. The recommendations were published following a meeting of the EUA Council, which took place before the opening of the EUA Spring Conference at the University of Barcelona. The working group’s recommendations are based on the core premises: the university’s role and responsibility as guardian of research knowledge as a “public good” and that the results of publicly funded research should be publicly available as soon as possible; and that quality assurance peer review processes are pre-conditions for scholarly publishing. Please click here to read the full recommendations. Thursday, April 10. 2008On Paying Publishers Extra For Extra Usage Rights![]() "Conscious that this licence only extends to "gold" OA articles, the Trust is continuing to work with publishers to explore the possibility of developing a similar licence for author manuscripts." It's important that everyone understand clearly what is at issue here: (1) The Wellcome Trust, the world's first research funder to mandate OA, has not only mandated Green OA self-archiving, but has also made funds available to authors to pay their publishers to make their articles Gold OA, in order to make them not just price-barrier-free (Green OA) but also permissions-barrier-free. (2) This means that non-OA publishers, while continuing to receive full subscription revenue, are paid extra fees by Wellcome in exchange for the extra usage rights. (3) There is no question that these extra usage rights are welcome and useful. (4) The question is whether they are worth the extra money at this time. (5) The problem is not only that the extra money is being diverted from research funds (at a time when research funds are getting ever scarcer and harder to come by). (6) The problem is also that paying the publishers extra money is not a solution that scales: Wellcome may be able to afford it, but what about all the rest of the world's research output, unfunded by Wellcome? (7) Can all funders afford (and do they wish) to divert scarce research funds to pay for extra publisher costs? (8) And what about unfunded research? (9) Can universities afford (and do they wish) to adopt OA mandates that also entail paying publishers extra fees? Should they want to? (10) Perhaps most important: Are these extra (welcome, useful) usage rights worth making a fuss about just now, when we do not yet even have universal Green OA, or universal Green OA mandates? (11) Will fussing about "fair use is not enough" at this time increase or decrease the probability that the world's research institutions and funders converge on a scaleable strategy that will at least deliver universal Green OA (at long last)? (12) To repeat: It is not that the extra usage rights are not useful, desirable and welcome, nor that a large private research funder like Wellcome is not to be commended for being willing to put both their efforts and their money behind securing them. (13) It is that this is not the time to focus on what universal Green OA mandates will not deliver. (14) It is the time to put our full collective weight behind the solution that will scale up to deliver universal Green OA. (15) (It is virtually certain that universal Green OA itself will then go on to usher in the extra usage rights -- at no extra charge.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum On the Risks of Over-Reaching and Over-DefiningKlaus Graf wrote: Umm, a bit shrill! But here's my (6-step) answer:"How many people must die because an OA guru says 'There is a need to update BBB' and denies the need of re-use?" (1) We have neither price-freedom nor permission-freedom today. (So if people are dying because of that, they're dying.)So "How many people must die"? Klaus thinks it will be fewer if we reach further, trying for both price-freedom and permission-freedom in the same swoop (at the risk of getting neither). I think it will be fewer if we first grasp what is already within our reach, because that is not only sure to give us most of what we want and need immediately (price-freedom), but it is also the most likely way to get us the rest (permission-freedom) thereafter too. (By the way, if we don't update BBB, then Green OA is not OA, and Green OA mandates are not providing what they say and think they are providing, but something else. Nor have I been talking about OA for a decade and a half now, but about something else. "If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever wooed...") Amen."Kripke (1980) gives a good example of how "gold" might be baptized on the shiny yellow metal in question, used for trade, decoration and discourse, and then we might discover "fool's gold," which would make all the sensory features we had used until then inadequate, forcing us to find new ones. [Kripke] points out that it is even possible in principle for "gold" to have been inadvertently baptized on "fool's gold"! Of interest here are not the ontological aspects of this possibility, but the epistemic ones: We could bootstrap successfully to real gold even if every prior case had been fool's gold. "Gold" would still be the right word for what we had been trying to pick out all along, and its original provisional features would still have provided a close enough approximation to ground it, even if later information were to pull the ground out from under it, so to speak." [Harnad 1990] Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, April 9. 2008Scotland's First University-Wide Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate![]() ![]() This is actually Scotland's second Green OA self-archiving mandate: The first was a funder mandate: Scottish Executive Health Department.[A]ll journal articles, published from January 2007, are to be self-archived in the University’s Digital Research Repository, Stirling Online Research Repository (STORRE). This is also the 17th UK Green OA mandate (13 funder mandates, 2 institutional mandates, 2 departmental mandates: Southampton ECS (2 Jan 2003), Brunel ICSM (6 Dec 2006), U Southampton (squeeking in 4 Apr 2008), and now U Stirling) (9 April 2008). There are now 41 mandates in all, worldwide. (The UK continues to lead the world in both funder and institutional mandates, but watch out for the waking giant! The 791 universities in 46 countries in the European University Association (EUA), whose Council has unanimously recommended that its individual universities mandate Green OA self-archiving.) Harold Varmus on the NIH Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate![]()
Varmus, Harold (2008) Progress toward Public Access to Science. PLoS Biol 6(4): e101 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060101Harold Varmus welcomes the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate and the increased access it brings, but says it isn't enough because (1) it doesn't provide enough usage rights, (2) it is subject to embargoes, (3) it only covers research from mandating funders, (4) it doesn't reform copyright transfer. He instead stresses his preference for publishing in Gold OA journals, which provide (1) - (4). (He has said elsewhere that he does not consider Green OA to be OA.) I believe Professor Varmus is mistaken on all four counts because of a miscalculation of practical priorities and an underestimation of the technical power of Green OA. Green OA can be mandated, whereas Gold OA cannot (and need not be). What is urgently needed by research and researchers today is OA, and that is provided immediately by Green OA. (Green OA is also likely to lead eventually to a transition to Gold OA.) Professor Varmus also speaks of Green OA self-archiving as if it were a matter of central "public libraries" (like PubMed Central, which he co-founded, along with co-founding PLoS) that are "inherently archival" and provide only embargoed access rather than immediate access. In reality the greatest power of Green OA self-archiving mandates resides mostly in self-mandates by institutions (such as Harvard's), rather than just funder mandates like NIH's. Institutions are the producers of all research output, and their Green OA self-mandates ensure the self-archiving of all their own published article output, in all disciplines, funded or unfunded, in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs). Those IRs are neither libraries nor archives. They are providers of immediate research access for would-be users worldwide, and they also provide an interim solution for usage needs during embargoes: (1) USAGE RIGHTS. Self-archiving the author's final refereed draft (the "postprint") makes it possible for any user, webwide, to access, link, read, download, store, print-off, and data-mine the full text, as well as for search engines like google to harvest and invert it, for Google Scholar and OAIster to make it jointly searchable, for Citebase and Citeseer to provide download, citation and other ranking metrics, and for "public libraries" like PubMed Central to harvest them into archival central collections. This provides for all the immediate access and usage needs of all individual researchers. Certain 3rd-party database, data-mining, and republication rights are still uncertain, but once Green OA mandates generate universal Green OA, these enhanced uses will follow naturally under the growing pressure generated by OA's demonstrated power and benefits to the worldwide research community. Over-reaching for Gold now risks losing the Green that is within our immediate grasp. ![]() This provides for all the immediate access and usage needs of all individual researchers during any access embargo. Once Green OA mandates generate universal Green OA, access embargoes will die their well-deserved natural deaths of their own accord under the growing pressure generated by OA's demonstrated power and benefits to the worldwide research community. Again, grasp what is within reach first. (3) UNFUNDED RESEARCH. Funder mandates only cover funded research, but they also encourage, complement and reinforce institutional mandates, which cover all research output, in all disciplines. Institutions' own IRs are also the natural, convergent locus for mandating direct deposit by both institutional and funder mandates. All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable, so their contents can be exported to funder repositories such as PubMed Central, and institutions can help monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates as well as with their own institutional mandates -- but only if direct deposit itself is systematically convergent rather than diverging to multiple, arbitrary, institution-external deposit sites. (4) COPYRIGHT RETENTION. Copyright retention is always welcome, but it is not only not necessary for providing Green OA, but, in asking for more than necessary, it risks making authors feel that it may put acceptance by their journal of choice at risk. Consequently, Harvard, for example, has found it necessary to add an opt-out clause to its copyright-retention mandate, which not only means that it is not really a mandate, but that it is not ensured of providing OA for all of its research output. An immediate deposit IR mandate without opt-out (and with the Button) provides for all the immediate access and usage needs of all individual researchers, and once Green OA mandates generate universal Green OA, copyright retention will follow naturally of its own accord. First things first. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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