Self-Archiving Mandates

Stuart Shieber's recommendations in his "A proposal to simplify the University of North Texas open-access policy" are very good and their spirit should be followed, because that would indeed simplify and clarify the UNT policy, currently somewhat longer and more complicated than it needs to be.

But there is an even simpler way to put it (though it does involve three components, not just two): (1) Immediate deposit required. (2) Immediate OA strongly recommended, but not required. (3) Rights retention and license strongly recommended, but not required. That's all.

Stuart's recommendations for simplifying the rights reservation and licensing details are well taken; and they do make the policy as a whole more consistent and coherent. But (1) and (3) alone, leaving out (2), would not make it clear enough to authors what the real contingencies are, even though Stuart is quite right that, by implication, (2) is in a sense implicit in (3). Waiving (3), however, does not entail waiving (2), any more than waiving (2) or (3) implies waiving (1).

There is no "Harvard-style" vs "Harnad-style" approach. That initial difference vanished completely as soon as the Harvard mandate was upgraded to add an immediate-deposit requirement, without waiver, to its original license requirement, with waiver.

The rest is just about clarifying the contingencies. (1) Yes, you have to deposit immediately, no matter what. (2) No, you don't have to make the deposit OA immediately, if you have reason not to; it is just strongly recommended. (3) No, you don't have to reserve the specified rights and grant the license if you have reason not to, it is just strongly recommended.

I think the current Harvard version still does not make the three contingencies sufficiently clear and explicit (although they are latent in the Harvard FAQ), whereas the UNT version does. Streamlined along the lines Stuart suggests, UNT will do so even better.

Ceterum censeo, I am confident that the extra rights that Harvard seeks in (3) (basically amounting to "Libre OA") will eventually come with the IDOA territory, following as a natural matter of course, with time, once the IDOA version of the OA mandate becomes widely adopted. IDOA guarantees only about 63% immediate Gratis OA plus 37% "Almost-OA" today. But once it is universally adopted, the rest of the dominoes will fall, leading first to 100% Gratis OA, and then to as much Libre OA as authors and institutions want and need. The trick is to come up with a policy model, today, that is strong enough to do the trick -- not so strong as to impede or retard universal adoption, but strong enough to ensure compliance: I think the UNT version (with Stuart's recommended tightening) will prove to be that optimal model.

See: "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

It's too quick to see my relentless insistence on the priority of Green OA self-archiving by authors as monomaniacal!

The reasoning is this (and it's partly practical, partly ethical):

An AAA publications manager would be perfectly entitled and justified to say:

"If authors who purport to care so much about OA to their work do not even bother to provide OA by self-archiving it -- despite the fact that AAA has given them the green light to do so -- and their institutions and funders don't even bother to mandate it, then why on earth is the finger being pointed at AAA at all (and why should we regard their cares as credible)? Is AAA supposed to be the one to sacrifice its revenues to provide something that its authors don't even care about enough to sacrifice a few keystrokes to provide for themselves?"

As long as we keep focussing on where the key to providing OA isn't (i.e., the publisher-lamp-post) our research will remain in the dark.

We have to get the priorities straight. It is not enough to be ideologically "for" Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates. It is not even enough to do the keystrokes to self-archive one's own work (though that's a good start, and I wonder how many OA advocates are actually doing it? the global rate hovers at about 5-20%). One has to make sure that one's own institution adopts a Green OA mandate. Then, and only then, can one go on to the next step, which is to try to persuade one's publisher to go Gold (though persuading one's funder to mandate Green would probably help more; Gold OA will come of its own accord, once we have universal Green OA).

But perhaps the most egregious misconstrual of OA priorities is not authors impugning their publisher for not going Gold before they and their institutions (and funders) go Green. That dubious distinction is reserved for institutions (and funders) who commit pre-emptively to funding Gold without first mandating Green!

PS No need for yet another central repository either! Institutional repositories are enough. Fill them. Mandate filling them. And central collections can then be harvested from them to your hearts' content. Fussing about central collections, like fussing about publishers going Gold, or about finding funds to pay for Gold (or, for that matter, fussing about copyright reform, peer review reform, publishing reform or preservation) are all all an idle waste of time, energy and attention when institutional repositories are still gapingly empty and authors' fingers are still idle...

The University of North Texas is hosting an Open Access Symposium on Tuesday, May 18, 2010. The event features both nationally and internationally recognized leaders in the open access initiative. The symposium is intended as a catalyst to move UNT and other academic institutions in Texas forward in their consideration of institutional open access policies.

The UNT Open Access Policy Committee has just completed a first complete draft of a policy for open access to scholarly works at the University of North Texas. The Committee sees this as an initial step in broadening discussion by the UNT campus community on open access and the policy. The Policy on Open Access to Scholarly Works. This draft was distributed to the UNT Faculty Senate at its May 12, 2010 meeting:

POLICY STATEMENT (excerpts; full text here)

In support of long-term stewardship and preservation of UNT faculty members’ scholarly works in digital form, the UNT community members agree to the following:

• Each UNT community member deposits a final version of his/her scholarly works in to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions in the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works repository...

In support of greater access to scholarly works, the UNT community members agree to the following for peer-reviewed, accepted-for-publication, journal articles:

• Immediate Deposit: Each UNT community member deposits an electronic copy of his/her final edited version after peer review and acceptance of each article, no later than the date of its publication. Deposit is made into the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works repository. The author is encouraged to make the deposit available to the public by setting access to the deposit as Open Access Immediately Upon Deposit.

• Optional Delayed Open Access: Upon express direction by a UNT community member for an individual article, the Provost or Provost’s designate will adjust the Open Access Immediately Upon Deposit requirement to align with publishers’ policies regarding open access of self-archived works or the wishes of the community member

• Licensing: Where not prohibited by a publisher, each UNT community member grants to UNT permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available in the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works repository for the purpose of open dissemination. Each UNT community member grants to UNT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do so, provided that the articles are not sold. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a community member.

• Who Deposits: In the case of multiple authors from multiple institutions, where a UNT community member has made substantial intellectual contributions to the article, the UNT community member will deposit a copy of the article. In the case of multiple UNT authors, and where the lead author is from UNT, the lead author (or designate) will deposit a copy of the article.

In the case of the high-profile NIH Public Access Policy, the difference between a "Request" and a "Requirement" turned out to be substantial. Formulated initially as a "Request," the policy failed to elicit more than 5% compliance for two years. Within a year of being upgraded from a "Request" to a "Requirement," the compliance rate rose to 60%, and is since steadily approaching 100%.

It is for this reason that U. Athabasca's Open Access (OA) Policy is not listed as a mandate in ROARMAP, but only as a policy. By the very same token, however, U. Ottawa's policy is not listed at all in ROARMAP, since it is merely a commitment to provide some funds to pay to publish some U. Ottawa research output in OA journals ("Gold OA"), not a mandate to provide OA to all of U. Ottawa research output ("Green OA") by self-archiving it in an OA repository, as NIH requires and U. Athabasca recommends.

By this criterion, U. Concordia's is the first university-wide Green OA mandate in Canada. Canada also has 3 departmental OA mandates (Calgary, Guelph, Queens) and 8 funder mandates.

There is not much point in being the "first" to do something if one does not do it right: The only university that has done it right university-wide so far in Canada is Concordia. Let us hope that this will now inspire many emulators.

The other important course-correction Canada could benefit from making is to make sure that all OA mandates (university-wide, departmental and funder) are convergent and cooperative, not divergent and competitive. Here too, Concordia has adopted the right policy, promising not to require double-deposit on the part of their researchers (i.e., having to deposit in both the Concordia repository and, say, PubMed Central Canada). Universities (and research institutions) are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, across all fields.

PubMed Central Canada is a welcome advance if what Canada needed was more space (to make its research OA). But what Canada needed was to fill available space with OA content, not to make more space available -- and the only way to do that is by mandating (i.e., requiring) deposit.

Let us hope Canada's funders will have the good sense to mandate convergent university deposit rather than divergent central deposit. Central repositories like PubMed Central Canada can then harvest from Canada's network of university repositories. Deposit should be institutional; a central collection is just that -- a collection -- not a locus for direct deposit:

"Designing the Optimal Open Access Mandate"

"How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

"Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In "Open Access - if you build it (for them) they will come…," Jan R. writes:

"Robert Darnton['s]... "The Case for Open Access" makes the useful point that Universities will probably be much more effective in building their IRs if they mandate permission (i.e. require faculty to secure and then give the university non-exclusive permission to host their works on the institutional repository) as opposed to mandating deposit (i.e. requiring faculty to do the work of stocking the repository.)"

But what Professor Darnton actually wrote (in Feb 2008) was this:

"Many repositories already exist in other universities, but they have failed to get a large proportion of faculty members to submit their articles. The deposit rate at the University of California is 14 percent, and it is much lower in most other places. By mandating copyright retention and by placing those rights in the hands of the institution running the repository, the motion will create the conditions for a high deposit rate."

In other words, Darnton was not comparing deposit mandates to permission mandates: he was comparing (actual) repositories without deposit mandates to (hypothetical) repositories with permission mandates (not yet in existence at the time, the world's first being Harvard FAS's, adopted in that month).

There was then (and there still is now, two years later), no evidence at all that mandating permission would be more effective in generating Open Access than mandating deposit. Quite the opposite. Deposit mandates (of which there are more, and of longer standing than permission mandates) have been extremely effective, and that evidence was already there in 2008. In contrast, the effectiveness of permission mandates, which are more recent (beginning in 2008) and less numerous, is not yet known.

Moreover, permission mandates, because they in fact ask for more than just deposit, all have to allow an opt-out clause (for those authors who cannot or do not wish to negotiate permission with their publishers). Hence not only is the effectiveness of permission mandates not yet known: it is not even clear whether permission mandates are indeed mandates at all.

[MIT, the university with the planet's first university-wide permission mandate, had 850 deposits in March 2010, one year after adoption. This needs to be considered as a percentage of MIT's annual journal article output: the figure to beat is the current worldwide baseline 20% rate for spontaneous, unmandated deposit. Most deposit mandates are at about 60% within 2 years and well on the road toward 100%. -- But I've also heard recently that Harvard's longer-standing FAS policy has more promising compliance rates, which I hope will be reported publicly, by way of feedback and guidance on the effectiveness of the Harvard model.]

The bottom line is that deposit mandates are necessary for OA, whereas permission mandates are (desirable but) not necessary. The optimal solution is hence to mandate deposit, without opt-out, plus permission, with opt-out:

• "Upgrading Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause"

• "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?"

• "The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model"

• "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"

• "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"

• "On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

[This is Canada's 11th OA Mandate: 8 funder mandates and 2 departmental mandates, but it's Canada's first institution-wide one. Sweden's Blekinge Institute of Technology has also just adopted an institution-wide OA mandate, its second, alongside a funder mandate: See ROARMAP.]

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Concordia University Opens its Research Findings to the World; Senate Supports Free Internet Access to Faculty and Student Research

MONTREAL, April 22 (AScribe Newswire) -- Concordia University's academic community has passed a landmark Senate Resolution on Open Access that [requires] all of its faculty and students to make their peer-reviewed research and creative output freely accessible via the internet. Concordia is the first major university in Canada where faculty have given their overwhelming support to a concerted effort to make the full results of their research universally available.
      "Concordians have, once again, found a way to share their innovative findings and creativity with communities the world over", says Judith Woodsworth, President and Vice-Chancellor of Concordia. "As befits its role as host of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences next month, our university is now leading the way on this year's Congress theme: Connected Understanding/le savoir branche."
      Gerald Beasley, Concordia's University Librarian, was instrumental in the campus-wide dialogue on open access that began more than a year ago. "I am delighted that Senate voted to support the recommendations of all four Faculty Councils and the Council of the School of Graduate Studies. There are only a handful of precedents in North America for the kind of leadership that Concordia faculty have demonstrated by their determination to make publicly-funded research available to all rather than just the minority able to afford the rapidly rising subscription costs of scholarly databases, books and journals."
      This past year, Concordia launched Spectrum, an open access digital repository that continues to grow beyond its initial 6,000 dissertations submitted at Concordia, and at its predecessors Sir George Williams University and Loyola College. [In addition to requiring deposit of peer-reviewed journal articles, the] Senate Resolution encourages all of Concordia's researchers to deposit their research and creative work in Spectrum.

Here are the latest six Green OA Mandates. (Still keeping up, but looking forward to the day when I no longer can!)

149 Wake Forest Library Faculty
150 Telethon Italy
151 Harvard Business School
152 Duke University
153 University of Lincoln
154 University of Puerto Rico School Of Law