Self-Archiving Mandates

... And it's the right mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA). (The embargo ceiling -- 18 months -- is a bit too high, but that's minor, compared to the splendid and timely example set by adopting the optimal mandate.) Gefeliciteerd, Nederland!

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From ROARMAP

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science - KNAW (24 Oct 2011)

INSTITUTIONAL MANDATE

INSTITUTION's URL: http://www.knaw.nl

MANDATE URL and TEXT:

Brief outline of policy for publications: All Academy publications are basically made publicly accessible within eighteen months after publication.

What to preserve digitally? All publications, preferably the publisher’s version, otherwise the final author’s version.

Where to preserve digitally? In the Academy publications repository at http://depot.knaw.nl.

When should material be uploaded to the repository? Preferably immediately after the publication has been accepted, but no later than the official publication date. [emphasis added]

What material should be openly accessible? All publications are available within the Academy. Outside the Academy, the following exceptions are possible:

(1) The publisher does not approve open access. The researcher retains the correspondence with the publisher.

(2) The management of the institute chooses a publisher that applies a longer embargo period.

When should material be made openly accessible? Preferably immediately after it has been accepted. An embargo of at most eighteen months after publication is possible (determined by the management of the institute). [emphasis added]

Link to policy document: in English or in Dutch.

Policy

1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote.

2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.

3. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.

4. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation.

5. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not.

6. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.

7. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement.

[Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...]



Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

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Armbruster, Chris, Implementing Open Access Policy: First Case Studies. Chinese Journal of Library and Information Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.1-22, 2010. ["a concise summary of many of the pioneering (e.g. QUT, Wellcome, Zurich, HHMI, FWF), comprehensive (e.g. PMC, ukPMC, INRIA/France) and international (e.g. SCOAP3) implementation efforts."]

Armbruster, Chris, Open Access Policy Implementation: First Results Compared. Learned Publishing, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2011. ["a comparative evaluation discussing the most salient issues, such policy mandates and matching infrastructure requirements, content capture and the issue of scholarly compliance, benefits to authors, and efforts to provide access and enable usage"]

Armbruster, Chris, Implementing Open Access: Policy Case Studies (October 14, 2010). [original report]

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Chris Armbruster's policy cases, comparisons and conclusions make several useful points, some new, others already noted and published by others.

There is also a lot missing from Armstrong's policy cases, comparisons and conclusions, partly because they do not take into account what has already been observed and published on the subject of OA policy and outcome, and partly because Armstrong fails to cover several of the key institutional repositories and their policies, including the first of them all, and among the most successful: the U Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science green OA self-archiving mandate was adopted in 2003, provided the model for mandatory OA policies in the BOAI Handbook, and continues to provide both OA repository guidance and (free) OA repository software and services; it is also the source of most of the OA policy variants at the institutions that Armbruster does take into account.

There are also some rather important confusions in Armstrong's conclusions, notably about versions, embargoes, "digital infrastructure," and the nature of green vs. gold OA.

For those who seek a clear, practical picture of the woods, rather than a rather impressionistic sketch of some of the trees, what both institutions and funders need to do is:

1. Mandate deposit of the author's final refereed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, in the author's institutional repository.
2. Designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting refereed publications for institutional performance evaluation and for national research assessment.
3. Implement the email-eprint-request button to tide over researcher needs during the embargo, for any publisher-embargoed deposits.

Once institutions and funders have done that, all the rest will take care of itself (including versions, embargoes, "digital infrastructures" and gold OA.

Beginning this autumn, guidance to institutions and funders worldwide on implementing OA policies will begin to be provided by EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), founded by the rector of the University of Liege, another institution whose highly successful OA policy Chris Armbruster neglected to mention in his comparisons.

Stevan Harnad

Comments invited -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog.

1. Open access (OA) is not synonymous with OA publishing (gold OA). OA means free online access, and its primary target content is the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals. Currently, these articles are only accessible to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published. Research is hence losing potential usage and impact.

2. There are two ways to provide OA: The authors of the 2.5 million articles can self-archive their peer-reviewed final drafts online, free for all, in their institutional OA repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication (green OA); or the world’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals can convert to OA publishing (gold OA), publishing all their articles free for all online, with the author’s institution or funder paying the cost of publication..

3. Providing green OA to the final drafts of their published articles is entirely in the hands of the research community, the providers of the content; providing gold OA is in the hands of the publishing community, the purveyors of the content.

4. A transition to universal green OA can be mandated by the research community (its research institutions and research funders); a transition to gold OA cannot be mandated by the research community: it depends on the publishing community.

5. The costs of publishing today are being paid for, in full, by research institutions, through journal subscriptions.

6. That means the potential funds to pay for gold OA are locked into institutional journal subscriptions today.

7. It is hence an unnecessary waste of increasingly scarce research funds to pay pre-emptively for gold OA today.

8. What the research community — research institutions and research funders — accordingly need to do today is to mandate green OA.

9. As green OA becomes universal, it provides universal OA, solving the research access problem; it does not solve the journal affordability problem, but it makes it far, far less important and urgent, since universal online access is available to all, whether or not they can afford the journal subscription.

10. If and when users find universal green OA sufficient for their usage needs, institutions will be able to cancel the subscriptions in which they were locked as long as the contents were accessible to subscribers only.

11. If green OA-induced subscription cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of recovering the essential costs of publication, publishers will cut costs, downsize and convert to the gold OA cost-recovery model and institutions will have the annual windfall savings from their subscription savings out of which they can then pay the gold OA publishing costs for their individual outgoing articles, instead of paying for access to the incoming articles from other institutions, in the form of bundled journal subscriptions, as they do now.

12. The gold OA publication cost per article, however, post-green-OA, will be far lower than the asking price for pre-emptive gold OA today, because in converting from subscription publishing to gold OA publishing under the cancellation pressure of universal green OA, publishers will have downsized substantially, phasing out their print editions (and their costs) entirely and offloading all access provision and archiving (and their costs) onto the distributed worldwide network of institutional repositories and harvesters, with the green OA version now becoming the canonical version of record.

13. Hence post-green-OA gold-OA publishing costs will have scaled down to just the cost, per paper, of managing peer review (since the peers review for free), its outcome certified by the title and track-record for quality-standards of the journal that publishes the paper (exactly as now).

14. But all of this is contingent on institutions and funders mandating green OA first, rather than paying even more for gold OA, at today’s still-inflated asking prices, while still unable to cancel the subscriptions that are essential to their users.

So what needs to be lobbied for today is the adoption of green OA self-archiving mandates by research institutions (mostly universities) and funders instead of just the spending of scarce funds on paying pre-emptively for gold OA (and fulminating against inflated journal subscription prices). This is what Southampton ECS was the first in the world to do (and urge the rest of the research community to do) in 2002.

Carr, L., Swan, A. and Harnad, S. (2011) Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution. In: Curating the European University.

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

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FOURTEEN PRIMA FACIE OBJECTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. What evidence is there that “research is losing potential usage and impact” because “articles are only accessible to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published”?

2. Who says “there are two ways to provide OA” [green OA self-archiving of non-OA journal articles or publishing in a gold OA journals]? Why can’t researchers just post articles online instead of publishing them in a journal at all?

3. Why is only green OA “in the hands of the research community”? Can’t the research community just stop publishing in and subscribing to journals that don’t convert to gold OA?

4. Why is it that only “green OA can be mandated by the research community”? Can’t the research community just stop publishing in and subscribing to journals that don’t convert to gold OA?

5. Why are publication costs paid only by “institutions, through journal subscriptions.” What about individual subscribers?

6. What ensures that the “funds to pay for gold OA” will be used for that purpose, if they are no longer “locked into institutional journal subscriptions”?

7. Why is it “a waste of… funds to pay pre-emptively for gold OA today.” OA is OA, isn’t it?

8. Why does “the research community… need to… mandate green OA”? If they need/want OA so much, can’t they just provide it, unmandated?

9. How is it that “universal green OA” makes “journal affordability… far, far less important and urgent”? Journals still need to be paid for, don’t they?

10. How do institutions know whether “users find universal green OA sufficient for their usage needs” so they can “cancel the subscriptions in which they were locked”?

11. How do we know that all “institutions will have the… subscription [cancelation] savings [to] pay the gold OA publishing costs for their individual outgoing articles”? Won’t those that have more “individual outgoing articles” be paying more?

12. If publishers “phas[e] out… print editions… and offload access provision and archiving (and their costs) onto… institutional repositories…[and] the green OA version… becom[es] the… version of record,” don’t institutions still bear the costs? And is the author’s final draft fit for the record?

13. “If publishing costs… scale down to just… peer review,” what keeps those costs from rising — and keeps the peer review quality standards from falling?

14. Why do “institutions and funders [need to] mandat[e] green OA first, rather than [just] paying… for gold OA? Can’t the research community just stop publishing in and subscribing to journals that don’t convert to gold OA?

[ANSWERS SOON: COMMENTS WELCOME -- but please don't post them here but in the Higher EDucation Development Association (HEDDA) blog]

I am going to make this as brief and as simple as possible, in the fervent hope that it will be read, understood and acted upon by authors and their institutions:

A Green publisher is a publisher that endorses immediate self-archiving of their authors' accepted final drafts (but not necessarily the publisher's version of record) free for all on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That's all it takes for a publisher to be Green (and to be on the Side of the Angels).

In the new language that some Green publishers have jointly adopted for their copyright transfer agreements recently, some new conditions have been added, based on three distinctions. Not all Green publishers have added all three conditions (Elsevier, for example, has only added two of them, IOP all three), but it does not matter, because all three distinctions are incoherent: They have no legal, logical, technical nor practical substance whatsoever. The only thing that a sensible person can and should do with them is to ignore them completely.

Here they are. (The actual wording in the agreement will vary, but I am giving just the relevant gist.)

(1) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but you may only do it on your personal institutional website, not in your institutional repository.

This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website and your institutional repository are just institutional disk sectors with different (arbitrary) names.

(2) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but you may not do it where there is "systematic distribution."

All websites are systematically harvested by google and other search engines, and that's how most users search and access them.

(I think what the drafters of this absurd condition may have had in mind is that you may not deposit your paper on a website that tries to systematically reconstruct the contents of the entire journal. They are perfectly right about that. But an institutional repository certainly does not do that; it simply displays its own authors' papers, which are an arbitrary fraction of any particular journal. If there is anyone that publishers can -- and should -- go after, it is 3rd party harvesters that reconstruct the contents of the entire journal.)

(3) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but not if you are mandated to do it (i.e., you may if you may but you may not if you must).

Authors are advised to advise their publishers, if ever asked, hand on heart, that everything they do, they do out of their own free will, and not out of coercion (and that includes the mandate to publish or perish).

If anyone is minded to spend any more time on this nonsense than the time it took to read this message, then they deserve everything that's coming (and not coming) to them.

Elsevier and IOP authors: Just keep self-archiving in your IRs, exactly as before, and ignore these three silly new clauses, secure in the knowledge that they contain nothing of substance.

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship

SUMMARY: Calling for Green Gratis OA Mandates makes sense. Calling for Libre OA, extra Gold OA funds, or double-standards for journal quality does not. Call for the reasonable. Grasp the reachable. And trust nature to take care of the rest.

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SPARC Europe's OA suggestions to the EC are part sense, part nonsense, part irrelevance:

Sense:

- Open Access means immediate access, without delaying mechanisms

- strive for the shortest embargo period possible

- help in increasing awareness among researchers

- Open Access via Institutional Repositories (green road) and Open Access via publishing (gold road) are complementary strategies

- extend the [EC] Open Access policies to all research areas

[assuming that what is meant here is to extend the EC Green OA self-archiving mandates]

Nonsense:

- Open Access in Institutional Open Access Policies should refer to “Libre” Open Access: free to access and free to re-use

[Libre OA asks for much more than Gratis OA (free online access) and we are nowhere near having Gratis OA yet. It is counter-productive to over-reach and ask for more when you don't even have the less. Mandating Green Gratis OA will eventually lead to Libre OA too, but demanding Libre OA now will lead nowhere for many more years to come.]

- communicate that the quality of Open Access peer-reviewed journals is equal to the quality of subscription peer-reviewed journals

[Utter, utter nonsense, parroted year in and year out by an endless succession of well-meaning know-naughts: The quality of a peer-reviewed journal is what it is, regardless of its cost-recovery model. Is the EC supposed to give a-priori quality bonuses to journals, based on whether or not they happen to be OA, rather than letting them earn it, with their peer-review standards and quality track-records, like all other journals?]

- call for subscription-based publishers to allow authors and institutions to deposit metadata into Open Access repositories and to support Creative Commons licensing of these materials

[Why call for this, since authors can already deposit their metadata? What publishers should be called upon to do is simply to endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, as over 60% of journals already do ("being on the side of the angels"]

Irrelevance:

- make funding available to cover the costs of Open Access publishing

[Does the EC have spare funds for this? What is needed is OA, not more money to pay publishers. Institutional subscriptions are paying for publication already. What is needed is to mandate Green Gratis OA self-archiving. If and when funds are needed to pay for Gold OA publishing, they will come from the release of the institutional subscription funds through cancelation.]

- call for subscription-based publishers to start the transition of subscription journals towards Open Access

["Calling on publishers to start the transition" will have no effect and is hence irrelevant. Mandating Green OA, in contrast, will generate OA, and then the publishers will start planning for a transition of their own accord as a natural matter of course if and when mandated Green OA begins causing cancelation pressure.]

- provide an infrastructure enabling publisher content to be harvested and deposited into institutional repositories

[What is needed is not an infrastructure. What is needed is a mandate to deposit.]

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship

Why is U Liege's ORBi Repository #1 out of 1414 institutional repositories indexed by ROAR (in the medium activity range: 10-100 deposits daily)?

Richard Poynder interviews U Liege's Rector, Bernard Rentier, to find out why. (Hint: Immediate Deposit [ID/OA] Mandate, with repository deposit also serving as the mechanism for submitting publications for researchers' annual performance review: See ROARMAP.)

Professor Rentier is also founder and chairman of the board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS), an organisation helping universities and research institutions worldwide develop an OA policy.

The OA Interviews: Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège

With the mandates of Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, ROARMAP has now passed the 200 mark. Many more are on the way. Please do register yours, if it is not yet registered.

Institutional Mandates (122)
      Proposed Institutional Mandates (5)
Sub-Institutional Mandates (32)
      Proposed Sub-Institutional Mandates (3)
Multi-Institutional Mandates (1)
      Proposed Multi-Institutional Mandates (5)
Funder Mandates (48)
      Proposed Funder Mandates (8)
Thesis Mandates (76)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship