Wednesday, April 9. 2008Don't Risk Getting Less By Needlessly Demanding MoreI think it would be a big strategic mistake if today, when the cupboards are still 85% bare, we were to start insisting that deposits must all be Cordon Bleu ****. OA just means free online access to the full-text of refereed journal articles. Please let's not risk getting less by needlessly insisting on more. The rest will come in due time, but what is urgently needed today, and what is still 85% overdue by more than 10 years today, is free online access. Let the Green OA mandates provide that, and the rest will all come naturally with the territory soon enough of its own accord. But over-reach gratuitously now, and we will just delay the optimal and inevitable, already within our reach, still longer. Ceterum Censeo: The BBB "definitions" (which were not brought down to us by Moses from On High, but puttered together by muddled mortals, including myself) are not etched in stone, and need some tweaking to get them right. "Time to Update the BBB Definition of Open Access"OA is free online access. With that comes, automatically, the individual capability of linking, reading, downloading, storing, printing off, and data-mining (locally). The further "rights" for 3rd-party databases to data-mine and re-publish will come after universal Green OA mandates generate universal OA (free online access). But you'll never get universal Green OA mandates if you insist in advance that the 3rd-party re-use rights must be part of the mandate! (Notice that the Harvard mandate has an opt-out, which means it's not a mandate.) "On Patience, and Letting (Human) Nature Take Its Course"And as to demanding machine-readable XML from authors: 85% of authors cannot now be bothered to do even the few keystrokes it takes to deposit the drafts they already have: Does this sound like a reasonable time to ask them to upgrade their drafts to Cordon Bleu XML? Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, April 6. 2008Recommendations from the EUA Working Group on Open Access
Recommendations from the EUA Working Group on Open Access adopted by the EUA Council on 26th of March 2008 (University of Barcelona, Spain) [highlighting and links added]
EUA urges universities to develop clear strategies to advance open access
From the European University Association Newsletter about the EUA Spring Conference at the University of Barcelona [with thanks to Prof. Bernard Rentier]:
Saturday, April 5. 2008Publisher Tail Still Trying To Wag Research Dog![]() When will research journal publishers realize that research is conducted by researchers and funded by the tax-paying public for the sake of what is best for research, researchers, their institutions, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public? Research is not being conducted and funded as a service to the research journal publishing industry. Publicly elected officials and the NIH especially need to realize and remember this, rather than allowing themselves to be persuaded by the publisher lobby that there is some sort of "balance" issue here. Research publishing is a service industry: Publishers are given the results of funded research, by researchers, for free, to be refereed (by researchers, again for free) and then published for subscription sales revenue (in which the researchers ask no share), so that the refereed research can be made accessible to all those who can use, apply and build upon it -- once again, to the benefit of research, researchers, and the tax-paying public that funds them. Publishers' revenues come from subscription sales, which are currently making ends meet quite adequately. If and when it should ever come to pass that Green Open Access self-archiving mandates make subscriptions unsustainable, the obvious solution will be for journal publishers to convert to Gold Open Access publishing (which some publishers have done already). But AAP is pre-emptively lobbying (and now even threatening to sue!) to continue to restrict the very access for the sake of which research is being given to publishers to be published -- in order to protect their current cost-recovery model from the hypothetical risk of one day having to convert to Gold OA Publishing. Though the analogy is a bit shrill, it is very much as if tobacco companies were lobbying against no-smoking ordinances because they might hurt their sales (even though they protect public health) -- except that in the case of the no-smoking mandates, there isn't even Gold waiting at the end of the rainbow! ![]() (feel free to use to promote OA and to bait "pit-bulls") ![]() ![]() Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Open Repositories 2008 Video and EurOpenScholar Links![]() ![]() ![]() At the EurOpenScholar session the University of Southampton's university-wide OA self-archiving mandate was also officially announced on behalf of the Vice Chancellor by the Library Director, Mark Brown. (Dr. Alma Swan also gave a presentation -- handicapped by the fact that Prof. Rentier and Dr. Smith had already made brilliant use of her material! I too gave a talk, and likewise had nothing more I could add!) The OA momentum gathering in Europe is exceedingly gratifying (and about time!). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, April 2. 2008NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate
![]() If you feel (as I do) that it is important to implement the NIH mandate in a way that will maximize its efficiency and likelihood of success, as well as making it an optimal model for all research funder mandates worldwide to follow, I urge you to make your recommendations here. I append my own recommendation below. It is extremely simple, and designed not only to make the NIH mandate efficient and successful for both NIH and its fundees, but also to ensure that it reinforces and converges with the growing number of complementary university self-archiving mandates (such as Harvard's) rather than diverging, competing or complicating. The gist is that (1) NIH's preferred locus of direct deposit for the postprint should be the fundee's Institutional Repository (IR) (from which it can then be downloaded to NIH) and that (2) the fulfillment conditions on the NIH grant should stipulate that the fundee institution monitors that the deposit has been made. (There is also a Question 3 for you to recommend ways to improve NIH instructions to fundees, and a Question 4 where you can -- and I hope will -- reaffirm support for the NIH policy itself.) Here are my own recommendations for 1 and 2, and my expression of support for 4: Question 1: Do you have recommendations for alternative implementation approaches to those already reflected in the NIH Public Access Policy?Yes. Modify the procedure for fulfilling the deposit requirement of the NIH self-archiving mandate in order to make it compatible with, and to reinforce, university self-archiving mandates (such as Harvard's): In the NIH interface, at the point of deposit, add a feature that allows the full-text deposit to be downloaded from the URL where the full-text has already been deposited in the fundee's institution's Institutional Repository (IR). And stipulate in the overall instructions that the preferred way to fulfill NIH's self-archiving mandate is to deposit the full-text directly in the fundee's IR and then download it to the NIH deposit site. Question 2: In light of the change in law that makes NIH’s public access policy mandatory, do you have recommendations for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy?Yes. The optimal way to monitor and ensure compliance is by making it part of the grant fulfillment conditions for the fundee's institution that it must monitor and ensure that the deposit is made. The best and easiest way that an institution can monitor and ensure deposit -- and at the same time encourage or mandate the self-archiving of all the rest of its own institutional research output in all disciplines (not just NIH-funded research) -- is to require direct deposit in the institution's own IR. See: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates." Do not rely on direct deposit by publishers! It will only make the monitoring of compliance more divergent and difficult. Direct deposit should be convergent on the fundee's IR, to create a synergy with institutional mandates. Question 3: In addition to the information already posted at http://publicaccess.nih.gov/communications.htm, what additional information, training or communications related to the NIH Public Access Policy would be helpful to you?[See Public Access Communications and Training and suggest what would make it clearer and easier for you. The principal thing is that the deposit itself should be in your own university's IR. The deposit can then be downloaded to NIH.] Question 4: Do you have other comments related to the NIH Public Access Policy?The NIH Green OA Self-Archiving policy is splendid, timely, historic. But it can be made orders of magnitude more successful, effective, and worthy of emulation worldwide if the one small implementational detail recommended above is adopted. It will create a synergy between funder OA self-archiving mandates like NIH's and institutional OA self-archiving mandates like Harvard's, with one convergent point of direct deposit (the institution) and both the institution and NIH jointly monitoring and ensuring compliance. It will also maximize the contribution of the NIH OA mandate to the growth and success of OA mandates, and OA, in all fields, worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum The American Physical Society Is Not The Culprit: We Are (Part II)[See also the original posting to which this is a follow-up: Part I.] Re: "Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban" and "Traditional journals and copyright transfer" Following an exchange of correspondence with Jonathan Oppenheim and Bill Unruh about the above posting, I want to stress that I agree completely with Jonathan Oppenheim's and Bill Unruh's ends: (1) Derivative Works. Authors should be able to publish new articles which "differ in some reasonable way from the original work, even while possibly retaining much of the original." I also think APS authors can already do this, and that APS would no more try to prosecute its authors for this practice than it tried to prosecute them for practicing self-archiving (before APS went on to adapt to evolving practice by formally adopting its Green OA policy, the first Green OA publisher policy, and a model for them all). With derivative works too, formal APS policy will eventually adapt to evolving practice that is to the benefit of research progress in physics. Let practice again precede and guide precept. (Note that published postprints are in fact "derivative works" relative to unpublished preprints.) (2) Creative Commons Licensing. I am also fully in favor of CC licensing -- but not as a precondition for OA self-archiving today. All authors should adopt the CC license of their choice whenever they can. And where they cannot, they should just go ahead and self-archive under the Green publisher's current copyright agreement. (If the publisher is not Green, authors should immediately deposit anyway; and if they wish to set access to their deposit as Closed Access instead of OA during an embargo period, they should rely on their repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button to provide almost-immediate, almost-OA for all would-be users during any publisher embargo.) (I do believe, though, that CC licensing will prevail as a matter of natural course, after universal OA has prevailed.) So whereas I agree with Jonathan's and Bill's ends, I do not agree with their means. Rather than trying to force an immediate formal policy change (if APS feels it needs more time to think it through), I think Jonathan and Bill should just go ahead and practice what they seek to practice: publish new articles which differ in some reasonable way from the original work, even while possibly retaining much of the original, or post them to wikis like Quantiki if they wish. APS formal precept will again follow evolving practice in due course, as it did with author self-archiving. (By the way, the meaning of the enigmatic title "The American Physical Society is Not the Culprit: We Are" was of course that the reason we don't yet have universal OA [and all that follows from it] is that we are not yet universally self-archiving: I have dubbed this "Zeno's Paralysis.") Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, March 27. 2008Peter Suber's Talk at Harvard's Berkman Center: "What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?"![]() Peter Suber gave an excellent talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society entitled: "What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?" and the discussion was very interesting too. The video and powerpoints are here. I append eight comments stimulated by the talk and accompanying discussion; many are just elaborations on points Peter made: (1) Journals vs. books: For the OA movement it is ever so important to clearly separate the case of journal articles from the case of books. The reason is simple: OA is and has to be only about author give-away work. Peer-reviewed journal articles are all, without exception, author give-aways, written only for uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty revenues. Now although this may also be true of some scholarly books, it definitely is not true of all or most of them now. Hence not only can OA not be mandated for non-give-away books, but, at a time when OA itself is still so widely misunderstood, it is important to treat the clearcut, exception-free give-away case of peer-reviewed journal articles first, and separately, rather than to conflate it with the complicated hybrid case where the majority of the content is not author give-away at this time. Once OA for journal articles prevails, more authors will undoubtedly want the same for their monographs too. (2) Versions and Citability: The problems raised during the question period concerning the versions and citability problem are mostly a matter of misunderstanding: First, we are talking about journal articles only. The canonical version of a journal article is the final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft (the "postprint"). That is what researchers need, not necessarily the publisher's PDF. What is cited is always the published work (unless one is explicitly and deliberately referring to unrefereed, unpublished prior drafts [preprints] or corrected, revised postpublication updates [which we could call "post-postprints"]). The version and citation issue pertains only to the specific case where one deliberately wishes to cite either an unpublished draft or an unpublished revision. Otherwise, all citations of the peer-reviewed article itself -- whether based on reading the author's self-archived postprint of it, or the publisher's PDF of it -- are citations to the canonical published work itself (and point to the bibliographic data for the published work). In other words: there is no special version or citation problem for postprints. Now, as to the separate scholarly question of whether an author can be trusted if he says that "this draft of my published article is indeed the refereed final draft" -- that is a matter for scholarly practice and integrity. It is not an OA issue. It is not even a technical issue (although there are technical ways of computationally comparing versions to check whether and how a given draft diverges from the published PDF or XML text). The only relevant point is that the scholarly and scientific research world is infinitely better off if all those scholars and scientists who cannot access the publisher's official PDF of any given article can always access the author's self-archived postprint of it. The possibility that some authors may sometimes be either untruthful or sloppy can be handled on a case by case basis if/when it ever comes up. But that possibility is definitely no reason to call into question the basic principle that what researchers need today is access to the postprint. And that it is in the authors' and their institutions' and their funders' best interests that authors should provide access to their postprints, by self-archiving them in their IRs. Inasmuch as self-archiving the publisher's PDF creates obstacles to self-archiving (because the publisher does not allow it, or because access to it is embargoed), that should definitely not be grounds for delaying the immediate provision of the author's postprint -- or for delaying the adoption of mandates to deposit it. (3) First OA Self-Archiving Mandate: For the record: Queensland University of Technology's was indeed the world's first university-wide OA self-archiving mandate, as Peter noted, but not the world's first OA self-archiving mandate. The very first OA self-archiving mandate was that of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in 2003: That was also the model for the first formal description of an OA self-archiving mandate in the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ and the OSI EPrints Handbook. (4) Prior Evidence of Probability of Compliance With OA Self-Archiving Mandates: It is not correct to say that the Swan & Brown author surveys found that authors would comply, and comply willingly, with any OA mandate at all. Authors were asked specifically about a mandate to deposit, and 95% said they would comply, with 81% complying willingly. They were not asked, however, about how they would feel about a mandate to retain copyright (let alone a mandate with an opt-out). Harvard's is the first copyright-retention mandate, and there is no evidence at all on how many faculty would comply, or comply willingly. Arthur Sale's data on actual compliance rates likewise apply only to deposit mandates, not to copyright-retention mandates. (5) Deposit Mandates vs. Copyright-Retention Mandates: NIH's is not a copyright-retention mandate. It is a deposit mandate. It can be fulfilled by simply depositing the postprint of an article that was published in any of the 62% Green journals that have endorsed immediate OA self-archiving, or any of the remaining journals that have endorsed embargoed access within NIH's time limit. That is a deposit mandate -- plus a requirement (with no opt-out option) to negotiate deposit within the embargo period for any remaining articles, published in journals that don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving. (Harvard's in contrast, is, in its present form, purely a copyright-retention mandate, with an opt-out.) (6) Mandate Implementation Mechanisms: There are no sanctions on deposit mandates, but there are administrative incentives and contingencies, as Peter noted. Basically, if you wish to have your publications considered for institutional performance review, the official mechanism for doing so is to deposit them in your IR. (There is a similar rationale for fulfilling the Harvard copyright-retention mandate (for the non-opt-outs): one way to meet the condition of transmitting the postprint to the Provost is to deposit it directly in Harvard's IR.) (7) Peer Review, Journals and Repositories: Very minor point: OA is about providing OA to peer-reviewed journal articles. OA journals can provide OA to their articles, or authors can provide OA to their articles (by depositing them in their IR). Singling out the fact that an IR does not provide peer review is a bit of a red herring. It risks encouraging people to speculate about alternatives to journals, instead of just focussing on providing OA to peer-reviewed journal articles. (Peter himself is of course very clear on this.) (8) Journal Weighting in Researcher Performance Evaluation: In evaluating research performance, there need be no extra credit or weight accorded for publishing in a journal based on its OA policy or status. The weight should depend only, as always, on the journal's track-record for quality. OA can be provided by self-archiving articles published in any journal; there is no need for a researcher to select journals for any other reason than research quality. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum The American Physical Society Is Not The Culprit: We Are (Part I)[See also follow-up message: Part II.]
"Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban"I have some doubts about the accuracy of this New Scientist piece. What exactly is it that the American Physical Society (APS) is being alleged to be refusing to do? The APS is the first publisher that endorsed OA self-archiving. It is the greenest of green publishers. APS authors are encouraged to post their unrefereed preprints as well as their refereed postprints, free for all, on the web. So what exactly is the fuss about? "Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal.""Describe" their work on Wikipedia? What does that mean? Of course they can describe their work (published or unpublished) on Wikipedia, or anywhere else. And what has that to do with giving up the kudos of a respected journal? Does this passage really mean to say "post the author's version to Wikipedia verbatim?" APS does not mind, but Wikipedia minds, because Wikipedia does not allow the posting of copyrighted work to Wikipedia. Solution: Revise the text, so it's no longer the verbatim original but a new work the author has written, based on his original work. That can be posted to Wikipedia (but may soon be unrecognizably transformed -- for better or worse -- by legions of Wikimeddlers, some informed, some not). It's a good idea to cite the original canonical APS publication, though, just for the record. Still nothing to do with APS. "So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums."In a (free) online encyclopedia that would provide the author's original final draft, verbatim, and unalterable by users, there would be no problem (if the encyclopedia does not insist on copyright transfer) as long as there is a link to the original publication at the APS site. Blogs and Forums (again on condition that the text itself cannot be bowdlerized by users, or re-sold) will be treated by APS as just another e-print server. "The physicists were upset after the American Physical Society withdrew its offer to publish two studies in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia."This is now no longer about the right to post and re-post one's own published APS papers on the Web, it is about satisfying Wikipedia's copyright policy by going against APS's extremely liberal copyright policy. I side with APS. Let Wikipedia bend on this one, and let the text be posted (and then gang-rewritten as everyone sees fit). I see no reason why APS should have to alter its already sufficiently liberal policy to suit Wikipedia. "The APS asks scientists to transfer their copyright to the society before they can publish in an APS journal. This prevents scientists contributing illustrations or other "derivative works" of their papers to many websites without explicit permission."APS already says authors can post their entire work just about anywhere on the web without explicit permission. And they can rewrite and republish their work too. This fuss is about formality, not substance. "The authors of the rescinded papers and 38 other physicists are calling for the APS to change its policy. 'It is unreasonable and completely at odds with the practice in the field. Scientists want as broad an audience for their papers as possible,' says Bill Unruh at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who has been lobbying separately against strict copyright rules."What possible online audience is broader than the entire Web, which is what you get when you make your article OA? If we're going to lobby against strict copyright rules, let's pick any of the Gray, or even the Pale-Green publishers in Romeo. But lets leave the Green ones like APS alone until all publishers are at least as green as they are. And if you are going to lobby against copyright rules, make sure it is about a matter of substance and not just form. "'To tell us what we can do with our paper is completely at odds with practice in the field' Gene Sprouse, editor-in-chief of the APS journals, says the society plans to review its copyright policy at a meeting in May. 'A group of excellent scientists has asked us to consider revising our copyright, and we take them seriously,' he says."I am certain that the APS will accommodate all requests that are to the benefit of science, as they always have. I'm not always sure those who are lobbying for copyright reform really know what they want (or need) either. I trust them more if they say that they have made all their papers OA by self-archiving them. If they have not, yet they are still fussing, then they might be thinking of Disney re-mixes rather than science. "Some publishers, such as the UK's Royal Society, have already adopted copyright policies that allow online reproduction."The APS has long had a far more liberal OA policy than the Royal Society, a reluctant late-comer to OA. There is something being misreported or misunderstood here. A journal's copyright transfer agreement is only too restrictive if it tries to disallow author self-archiving of the accepted, refereed final draft (the "postprint"), free for all on the Web, where any user webwide can access, read, download, print-out, store, and data-mine the full-text for any research purpose whatsoever. That is what is called "Open Access." Journals that have a policy that formally endorses immediate and permanent author self-archiving of the postprint are called "Green" journals. There is a directory of the policies of the 10,000 principal journals regarding OA self-archiving: 62% of them are Green; 28% are "Pale-Green" (endorsing the self-archiving of pre-refereeing preprints, but not refereed postprints) and 9% are Gray (disallowing the self-archiving of either preprints or postprints). The American Physical Society (APS) is fully Green; it is the first Green publisher and helped set the example for the rest of the Green publishers. If anything needs changing today it's the policy of the 9% of journals that are Gray and the 28% that are Pale-Green, not the 62% that are Green. Once all publishers are Green, and all authors are making their papers OA by self-archiving them, copyright agreements will come into phase with the new OA reality, and everything that comes with that territory. For that to happen, authors doing -- and publishers endorsing -- OA self-archiving is all that is necessary. There is no need to over-reach and insist on reforming copyright agreements. NB: Whenever and wherever an author does succeed in retaining copyright, or a publisher does agree to just requesting a non-exclusive license rather than a total copyright transfer, that is always very welcome and valuable. But it is not necessary at this time, and over-reaching for it merely makes the task of securing the real necessity -- which is a Green self-archiving policy -- all the more difficult. In particular, pillorying the APS, which was the earliest and most progressive of Green publishers, is not only unjust, but weakens the case against Gray publishers, who will triumphantly point out that they are justified in not going Green, because the demands of authors are excessive, unnecessary, and unreasonable, as they are not even satisfied with Green OA (and most don't even bother to self-archive)! The problem for the worldwide research community is not the minority (about 15%, mostly concentrated in computer science and physics) who are already spontaneously making their articles OA by self-archiving them, but the vast majority (85%, across all disciplines, including even some areas of physics) who are not. Moreover, there is something special about the longstanding practice in some parts of physics of posting and sharing unrefereed preprints: That practice is definitely not for all fields. Hence the universally generalizable component of the physicists' practice is the OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint. Posting one's unrefereed preprints will always be a contingent matter, depending on subject matter and author temperament. (Personally, I'm all for it for my own papers!) There has been a big technical change since the first days of Arxiv. The online archives or repositories have been made interoperable by the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. Hence it is no longer necessary or even desirable to try to create an Arxiv-like central archive for each field, subfield, and interfield: Each researcher has an institution. Free software creates an OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR) where the authors in all fields at that institution can deposit all their papers. The OAI-compliant IRs are all interoperable (including Arxiv), and can then be searched and accessed through harvesters such as OAIster, Citebase, Citeseer or Google Scholar. Institutional IRs also have the advantage that institutions (like Harvard) can mandate self-archiving for all their disciplines, thereby raising the 15% spontaneous (postprint) self-archiving rate to 100%. Research funders (like NIH) can reinforce institutional OA self-archiving mandates too. The objective fact today is that all physicists, self-archiving or not, are still submitting their papers for refereeing and publication in peer-reviewed journals. Nothing whatsoever has changed in that regard. The only objective difference is that today (1) 15% of all authors self archive their postprints, and among some physics communities, (2) most are also self-archiving their preprints. The OA movement is dedicated to generalizing the former practice (1) (self-archiving peer-reviewed postprints, so they can be accessed and used by all potential users, not just those whose institutions happen to be able to afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published) to 100% of researchers, across all disciplines, worldwide. Radical publishing reform -- like radical copyright reform -- are another matter, and may or may not eventually follow after we first have 100% OA. But for now, it is a matter of speculation, whereas postprint self-archiving is a reachable matter of urgency. The physicists, from the very outset, had the good sense not to give it a second thought whether they were self-archiving with or without their journal's blessing. They just went ahead and did it! But most researchers in other fields did not; and still don't, even today, when 62% of journals have given it their official blessing. That's why self-archiving mandates are needed. (Author surveys have shown that over 90% of authors, in all fields, would comply, over 80% of them willingly -- but without a mandate they are simply too busy to bother -- just as in the case of the "publish or perish" mandate: if their promotion committees didn't require and reward publishing, many wouldn't bother to do that either!) What is needed now is not to make a campaign of trying to force APS to change its copyright policy. What is needed now is to generalize APS's Green OA self-archiving policy to all publishers. And to generalize the existing 39 university and funder Green OA (postprint) self-archiving mandates to all universities and funders. The rest (copyright reform and publishing reform) will then take care of itself. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, March 21. 2008One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind![]() PS: "It's one thing to argue that the NIH policy should mandate deposit in the author's institutional repository (when they have one)..." ![]() Even more would, if NIH mandated IR deposit as the preferred default option. And those universities who don't yet have an IR are only a piece of free software and a few days' sysad start-up time from having one -- and not just for their NIH output, but for all their research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines. The goal of the OA movement is to make all research output OA. But it is not just the OA content itself that needs to be "interoperable": OA mandates from funders need to be interoperable with OA mandates from institutions. Institutions are -- without exception -- the source, the providers, of all research output, worldwide. Hence funder OA mandates should not be competing with institutional OA mandates, needlessly and counterproductively, but adapting to, facilitating and reinforcing them. It is not at all too late to correct this small -- but crucial and easily-fixed -- bug in the recent, welcome, timely flowering of funder OA mandates, to create a synergy with the potentially far bigger blooming of institutional OA mandates that is also on the horizon (as heralded by Harvard's recent OA mandate). NIH need merely specify that the preferred means of fulfilling the NIH OA mandate is for NIH fundees to deposit their articles in their own institution's IR, and just send NIH each deposit's URL, so that PubMed Central can harvest it therefrom. One small step for NIH, one giant leap for mankind. PS: "But as long as the NIH is mandating deposit in PMC, and as long as a journal meets the NIH's criteria for depositing articles on behalf of authors, then I don't see any reason why authors shouldn't take advantage of the option."The reason is simple: The NIH mandate, as it stands, does not scale up to providing a systematic means of covering all of institutional research output, NIH and non-NIH, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines worldwide. NIH research output is just a small -- but extremely important -- subset of US and worldwide research output: NIH, the world's biggest (nonmilitary) research funder, is providing a model for research funder mandates worldwide, a model that will be influential, closely watched, and widely emulated. It is all the more critical, therefore, that the NIH mandate should be systematically scalable -- that it should interoperate coherently (rather than compete or conflict) with OA mandates from the research providers themselves -- the universities and research institutions worldwide -- as well as with other funder mandates, in other fields and other countries worldwide. If, instead, authors and their institutions were now to begin ceding responsibility for compliance with the NIH OA mandate to their publishers as their proxies, relying on them to deposit their work in PubMed Central in their place, this would deprive the NIH mandate of any possibility of growing to cover all of research output, in all fields, worldwide. (It would also add to the compliance-monitoring and fulfillment problem that the Wellcome Trust, which has a similar funder mandate, is just now discovering -- and NIH will soon discover it too.) Publisher proxy deposit would at the same time tighten the control of publishers over a process that should be entirely in the hands of authors themselves: the provision of supplementary free access to their give-away work for those who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version. (Proxy deposit would also encourage publishers to charge for compliance with the NIH mandate.) Publisher proxy deposit would also lose the three special, scalable strengths of the NIH mandate, which are (1) that the NIH mandate applies specifically to the researcher's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint, on which restrictions are the fewest), not necessarily to the publisher's proprietary PDF; (2) that the NIH mandate is a researcher self-archiving mandate, binding on researchers (not their publishers), and based on each researcher's right (and responsibility) to maximize access to his own give-away findings; and (3) that the NIH mandate is a coherent component of a universal mandate to provide OA to all research output, not just to NIH-funded research output, in PubMed Central. It is crucially important to remind ourselves very explicitly that what we are talking about here is just keystrokes -- i.e., about who should do the few keystrokes that make a piece of peer-reviewed research OA. We are talking, very specifically, about a few minutes' worth of keystrokes per paper (over and above the many keystrokes that already went into writing it in the first place). The natural ones to do those keystrokes are the authors themselves (or their assistants, students or assigns); and the natural place for them to do it is in their own IRs. It makes as little sense to consider offloading the task of performing those few keystrokes onto publishers (or even onto institutional librarians) as it would be to offload onto any other party the task of keying in the paper itself, in these days of personal word-processing. So although most authors today are still not doing those few extra keystrokes of their own accord (and that is precisely the problem that the OA mandates are meant to remedy) it would be exceedingly short-sighted to propose that the remedy is to invite authors' publishers to do those keystrokes for them (possibly even at additional cost). That dysfunctional remedy is remarkably reminiscent of the grotesque degree of control over the dissemination of our own giveaway research findings we have unwittingly been ceding to our publishers throughout the paper era (the "Faustian Bargain"): the very disease that OA is meant to cure, in the online era, at long last. And needlessly insisting on direct deposit in PubMed Central is the very heart of the problem. Yet the cure is ever so simple: NIH need merely stipulate that the preferred means of fulfilling the NIH OA mandate is for each researcher to deposit the postprint in his own university's IR and send NIH the URL. PS: "I did object to journal deposit under the older, voluntary policy, because it gave publishers the decision on the length of the embargo. Under the new policy, however, the length of the embargo is already set by the time the author signs the copyright transfer agreement. Hence, journal deposit cannot change the terms of the deal."That leaves only the six other serious reasons militating against publisher deposit: (1) Publisher proxy deposit in an external repository needlessly competes with institutional IR self-archiving mandates instead of facilitating them; (2) it defeats the benefits of an immediate-deposit mandate, where the IR's "email eprint request" button could have tided over worldwide research usage needs during any publisher embargo by providing almost-immediate, almost-OA; (3) it loses the benefits of having specified that the OA deposit target is the author's postprint, not necessarily the publisher's PDF; (4) it leaves publishers in control of providing OA (and even facilitates their charging for it); (5) it leaves IRs empty, and non-NIH content non-OA; (6) it leaves researchers' fingers paralyzed. PS: [update] "My response above was limited to publishers who do not charge fees, and I share Stevan's objections to those who would charge fees."My objections are not just limited to publishers who charge fees: They concern any publisher proxy deposit, and indeed any funder mandate that does not stipulate that the author's own institutional IR is the preferred default locus for deposit wherever possible. PS: "Or if there's some subtle way in which it can, then I'll join Stevan's call on authors to make the deposits themselves. I already agree with him that, if the policy were to mandate deposit in the author's IR, then author deposits would make much more sense than journal deposits."Peter, the ways in which both publisher proxy deposit and direct institution-external deposit are counterproductive for the growth of OA and OA mandates are far from subtle. I fervently hope that you will support my call on authors (or their collaborators) to make the deposits themselves, preferably in their own IRs, providing NIH with the URL. And of course also the call on NIH to allow -- indeed welcome -- IR deposit and PubMed Central harvesting rather than just direct PubMed Central deposit. (And, while we're at it, the call on universities, like Harvard, to mandate deposit, without opt-out, rather than just mandating copyright-retention, with opt-out!) This slight change in the implementational details of the NIH policy would be a small step for NIH, but a huge step for the growth of OA worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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