Self-Archiving Mandates

Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

RK: "we want to avoid a situation where a researcher is required to deposit papers in both an IR (to meet their institution's mandate) and a central repository, like PMC and UKPMC, (to meet the needs of a funder such as the Wellcome Trust)."

It is so gratifying to hear that the Wellcome Trust -- the very first research funder to mandate OA self-archiving -- is looking into resolving the problem of multiple deposit (IRs and multiple CRs, Central Repositories)..

The solution will have to be bottom-up (IRs to CRs) not top-down (CRs to IRs) for the simple reason that the world's institutions (i.e., universities and research institutes) are the providers of all research, not just funded research, and the solution has to be one that facilitates universal institutional deposit mandates, not just funder mandates.

IRs and CRs are interoperable. So, in principle, automatic import/export could be from/to either direction.

But since Institutions are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, it is of the greatest importance that the solution should be systematically compatible with inducing all institutions to mandate self-archiving.

For an institution that has already mandated self-archiving, the capability of automatically back-harvesting some of its own research output is fine but, if you think about it, not even necessary: If it has already mandated self-archiving for all of its output, back-harvesting is redundant, since forward harvesting (IR to CR) is the only thing that's still left to be done.

For an institution that has not yet mandated self-archiving, however (and that means most institutions on the planet, so far!) it makes an immense difference whether funders mandate IR deposit or CR deposit.

If funders mandate CR deposit (even with the possibility of automatic back-harvesting to the author's IR), institutions that have not yet mandated self-archiving are not only left high and dry (if they aren't mandating local self-archiving for any of their research output, they couldn't care less about back-harvesting the funded subset of it); but the synergistic opportunity for funder mandates to encourage the institutions to mandate self-archiving for the rest of their research output is also lost: Funders instead need to systematically mandate IR deposit: Funder-mandated IR deposit launches and seeds IRs, and makes the adoption of an institutional mandate for the rest of the institutional research output all the more natural and attractive.

In contrast, funder mandates requiring institute-external deposit (even if they offer an automatic back-harvesting option) not only fail to encourage institutional deposit and institutional deposit mandates, but they increase the disincentive to do so, and in two ways:

(1) Authors, already obliged to deposit funded research institution-externally, will resist all the more the prospect of having to do institutional deposit too (whether for funded or unfunded research); hence they will be less favorably disposed toward institutional mandates rather than more favorably (as they would be if they were already doing their funder deposits institutionally); consequently their institution's management, too, will be less rather than more favorably positioned for adopting an institutional mandate.

(2) Worse, some funder mandates (including, unfortunately, the Wellcome Trust mandate) allow the fulfillment of the conditions of the mandate to be done by publishers doing the (central) deposit instead of the authors that are actually bound by the mandate. That adds yet another layer of divergent confusion and diffusion of responsibility to deposit-mandates (apart from making it all the harder for funders to monitor compliance with their mandates), since fundee responsibility for "compliance" is offloaded onto publishers, who are not only not fundees (hence not bound by the mandate), but not all that motivated to deposit any sooner than absolutely necessary, if at all. (This is also, of course, a conflation with Gold OA publishing, where the funders are paying publishers for the OA.)

The natural, uniform, systematic and optimal solution that solves all these problems at one stroke -- including the funders' problem of systematically monitoring compliance with their mandate -- is for all self-archiving mandates -- institutional and funder -- to stipulate that deposit should be in the author's IR (convergent deposit). That way (i) each funded institution is maximally motivated to adopt a mandate of its own; (ii) authors have only one deposit to make, for all papers, in one place, their own IRs; (iii) institutions can monitor funder mandate compliance as part of grant fulfillment, and (iv) the automatic harvesting can be done in the sole direction it is really needed: IR to CR.

Robert mentions two other points below: publisher resistance to CR deposit and the question of XML:

(a) In the OAI-compliant, interoperable age, there is no need for the full-texts to be located in more than one place (except for redundancy, back-up and preservation, of course). If the full-text is already in the IR, all the CR needs to harvest is the metadata and the link.

(Besides, once universal OA mandates usher in universal Green OA, everything will change and optimize even further, But for now, the real hurdle is getting to universal Green OA, and the retardant is institutional sluggishness in mandating self-archiving. That is what makes convergent reinforcement -- instead of divergent competition -- from funder mandates so crucial at this time.)

(b) In the not too distant future, authors will all be providing XML anyway. What is urgently missing today is not XML but those all-important refereed-article full-texts (final refereed drafts), in any format. It would be exceedingly short-sighted to put extra needless hurdles in the path of getting that urgently needed full-text OA content today, just because we are in such an unnecessary hurry for XML!

(Again, once we have universal Green OA, all kinds good of things will happen, and happen fast, as a matter of natural course. But right now, we are needlessly -- and very short-sightedly -- over-reaching for inessentials like XML or the publisher's proprietary PDF, and for centrally deposited full-texts (and, for that matter, for the adoption of authors' addenda reserving copyright, as well as for the transition to Gold OA publishing) at the cost of continuing to fail, year after year, to do the little it would take to usher in universal Green OA.)

RK: "To... simply use the SWORD protocol to move content from repository A to repository B... does not address the rights issues....some publishers ... allow authors to self-archive papers in an IR, but... NOT [in a CR]"

But the question we need to clear-headedly ask ourselves about this fact is: So what?

What we urgently need now is universal Green OA, regardless of locus. There is no particular rush for CR full-texts, and Green publishers have already blessed immediate IR deposit. Why balk at that, and needlessly insist on more, only to get much less? (This is precisely what has been going on year after year now, with the myopic, counterproductive and gratuitous divergence of funder mandates from institutional mandates.)

RK: "In addition to the rights-management problem, there are other issues we need to address such as how a manuscript, ingested from an IR, could be attached to the relevant funder grant, and how a researcher could be motivated to "sign-off" the version of the document in PMC/UKPMC, given that they would have already deposited in the IR. [As you may be aware, every author manuscript in PMC and UKPMC is converted to XML. To ensure that no errors are introduced through this exercise, authors are required to sign-off the conversion before it can be released to the public archive.]"

But why, why all this? There's an urgent need for the full-texts. There's no urgent need for the XML. There's an urgent need for an OA version somewhere, but no urgent need that it must be in a CR. The CR need merely harvest the metadata. Nothing to sign off. Nothing to convert. And the eager institutions will be only too happy to monitor and ensure fundee compliance both for doing the deposit (which should be immediately upon acceptance of the final refereed draft for publication) and for setting access to the deposit as OA (whenever the allowable embargo, if any, elapses).

Gratuitous pseudo-problems are being allowed to get in the way of powerful immediate practical solutions in these complicated and arbitrary self-imposed criteria. (Let us not forget that this has all been hastily improvised in the past 4 years; we are not talking about longstanding, rational, time-tested canonical criteria here!)

RK: "In view of these issues our preferred approach is to encourage researchers to deposit centrally, and then provide IR's with a simple mechanism whereby this content can be ingested into their repository. Of course, even with the UKPMC to IR approach there may be rights management issues to address. This development work has only just begun but I will keep you (and this list) abreast of progress."

I hope some further thought will be given to the many reasons adduced here to explain how the proposed solution (CR deposit and automatic IR import capability) is still needlessly far from being the optimal solution, which is the simple, pragmatic alternative that would deliver far more OA at no loss whatsoever: both funders and institutions mandate IR deposit and CRs harvest the metadata from the IRs.


-- 2009 --

Where to Mandate Deposit: Proxy Deposit and the "Denominator Fallacy"

On the Wellcome Trust OA Mandate and Central vs. Institutional Deposit

Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and Central-Service Issues

Institutional vs. Central Repositories: 1 (of 2)

Institutional vs. Central Repositories: 2 (of 2)

Beyond Romary & Armbruster On Institutional Repositories

Funder Grant Conditions, Fundee/Institutional Compliance, and 3rd-Party Gobbledy-Gook

NIH Open to Closer Collaboration With Institutional Repositories

OA Mandates: Location, Location, Location

Universities and their IRs Can Help Monitor Compliance With Funder Mandates

Napoleon, the Hexagon, and the Question of Where to Mandate Deposit

Waking OA's Slumbering Giant: Why Locus-of-Deposit Matters for Open Access and Open Access Mandates

Repositories: Institutional or Central?

-- 2008 --

Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?

Institutional and Central Repositories: Interactions

Alma Swan on "Where researchers should deposit their articles"

Nature's Offer To "Let Us Archive It For You": Caveat Emptor

Institutional Repositories vs Subject/Central Repositories

Optimizing the European Commission's Open Access Mandate

NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate

One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind

How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

Institutional OA Mandates Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates

European Research Council Mandates Green OA Self-Archiving

Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally

-- 2007 --

Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally

-- 2006 --

Central versus Distributed Archives

Preprints, Postprints, Peer Review, and Institutional vs. Central Self-Archiving

France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories

The Wellcome Trust Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at Age One

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

Central versus institutional self-archiving

-- 2000 - 2006 --

American Scientist Open Access Forum Threads on:

Central versus institutional self-archiving

Central Versus Distributed Archives


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Chalmers University of Technology
Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate
Please register your own university's mandate in ROARMAP too, to track progress and to encourage other universities to adopt mandates of their own.

Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics Polish Academy of Sciences
Institutional Repository
Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate
Please register your own university's mandate in ROARMAP too, to track progress and to encourage other universities to adopt mandates of their own.

"All newly published manuscripts must be immediately deposited in the repository in the final reviewed version (not publisher's proprietary pdf). Deposits will become available immediately or after expiration of embargo..."

Royal Holloway, University of London
Institutional Repository
Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate

Please register your own university's mandate in ROARMAP too, to track progress and to encourage other universities to adopt mandates of their own.

Royal Holloway's Open Access Publications Policy was approved by its Academic Board in December 2009 to commence 1st September 2010 along with a new research information system. Implementation and evolution will be handled by a cross-College Working Group. With some local variations, the Policy used the University of Stirling as a starting point:

"All journal articles... are to be self-archived in the University’s Digital Research Repository... Articles are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication. The author's final accepted draft should be submitted."

University of Strathclyde
and
Brunel University

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Please register your own university's mandate in ROARMAP too, to track progress and to encourage other universities to adopt mandates of their own.

Belgium's 4th Green OA Mandate, UK's 29th, Planet's 140-141st

University of Ghentand University of Reading

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Please register your own university's mandate in ROARMAP too, to track progress and to encourage other universities to adopt mandates of their own.

Professor Steven Hyman, Provost of Harvard, the first US University to mandate Open Access, has submitted such a spot-on, point for point response to President Obama’s Request for Information on Public Access Policy that if his words are heeded, the beneficiaries will not only be US research progress and the US tax-paying public, by whom US research is funded and for whose benefit it is conducted, but research progress and its public benefits planet-wide, as US policy is globally reciprocated.

Reproduced below are just a few of the highlights of Professor Hyman’s response. Every one of the highlights has a special salience, and attests to the minute attention and keen insight into the subtle details of Open Access that went into the preparation of this invaluable set of recommendations.

[Hash-marks (#) indicate three extremely minor points on which the response could be ever so slightly clarified -- see end.]

“The public access policy should (1) be mandatory, not voluntary, (2) use the shortest practical embargo period, no longer than six months, (3) apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, as opposed to the published version, unless the publisher consents to provide public access to the published version, (4) [# require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository #] immediately upon acceptance for publication, where it would remain “dark” until the embargo period expired, and (5) avoid copyright problems by [## requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript ##]…

“If publishers believe they cannot afford to allow copies of their articles to be released under a public-access policy, they need not publish federally funded researchers. To date, however, it appears that no publishers have made that decision in response to the NIH policy. Hence, federally funded authors remain free to submit their work to the journals of their choice. Moreover, public access gives authors a much larger audience and much greater impact…

“If the United States extends a public-access mandate across the federal government, then lay citizens with no interest in reading this literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because researchers will benefit directly…. That is the primary problem for which public access is the solution…

“It doesn’t matter whether many lay readers, or few, are able to read peer-reviewed research literature or have reason to do so. But even if there are many, the primary beneficiaries of a public-access policy will be professional researchers, who constitute the intended audience for this literature and who depend on access to it for their own work….

“Among the metrics for measuring success, I can propose these: the compliance rate (how many articles that the policy intends to open up have actually been opened up); the number of downloads from the public-access repositories; and the number of citations to the public-access articles. As we use different metrics, we must accept that [### we will never have an adequate control group: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is no public access ###]….

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Three suggestions for clarifying the minor points indicated by the hash-marks (#):

[#”require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository” #]

(add: “preferably the fundee’s own institutional repository”)

[##”requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript” ##]

(add: “the rights retention and license are desirable and welcome, but not necessary if the publisher already endorses making the deposit publicly accessible immediately, or after the allowable embargo period”)

[### "we will never have an adequate control group [for measuring the mandate's success]: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is no public access" ###]

(add: “but closed-access articles published in the same journal and year as mandatorily open-access articles do provide an approximate matched control baseline for comparison”)


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Sixteen new Green Open Access Thesis Deposit Mandates adopted by Italian Universities have just been registered in ROARMAP:

Felicitazioni alle sedici!

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Please register your own university's mandate too, to track progress and to encourage other institutions to adopt mandates of their own.

University of Sassari (ITALY) thesis-mandate

Institution's Repository [growth data]

Institution's OA Self-Archiving Policy


Elisabetta Pilia (Repository manager)

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If your university has adopted or proposed an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate, please register it in ROARMAP to encourage other universities to adopt mandates too.

"Self Archive Unto Others As Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You"

Professor Henk Schmidt, Rector of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, in an interview about Open Access conducted by Leo Waaijers, has announced that he proposes to adopt a Green Open Access self-archiving mandate for Erasmus University's Institutional Repository, RePub:

HS: "I intend obliging our researchers to circulate their articles publicly, for example no more than six months after publication... if possible in collaboration with publishers via the 'Golden Road' and otherwise without the publishers via the 'Green Road'... [We] can’t just oblige researchers to publish in Open Access journals. It has not yet been established that there are enough prestigious Open Access journals, but – until there are – prescribing the 'Green Road' seems to me an excellent idea... even though it’s a bit of a problem that this will lead to two versions of the article being circulated."

This is excellent news, but let me dispel the misapprehension that it will entail even a "bit of a problem":

Professor Schmidt states, quite rightly, that since most journals are not Gold OA (and especially few of the top journals are Gold OA), universities (and funders) cannot achieve OA by obliging their authors to publish in Gold OA journals. 

However, as Professor Schmidt notes, universities (and funders) can require (mandate) that their authors make their articles Green OA by depositing them in their institutional OA repositories (of which every Dutch university now has one) immediately upon publication -- allowing an embargo on setting access to the deposit for a maximal permissible interval (say, 6 months) for those journals that do not yet already endorse immediate OA. (63% of journals already do endorse immediate OA, and that includes virtually all the top journals. And 79 institutions, 18 departments and 42 research funders worldwide already mandate Green OA).

All of this is extremely welcome, and spot-on. I would add only that the difference between the author's peer-reviewed, revised, and accepted final draft (the postprint) and the publisher's version-of-record (PDF) is negligible for active researchers (especially those for whom OA is really intended, namely, the many would-be users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the journal in which an article happens to be published); moreover, most researchers are already quite accustomed to receiving and using prepublication hard copies (and, lately, email versions) of final drafts rather than waiting for the journal to appear.

Professor Schmidt adds:

HS: "It may well take a year before your article appears in a journal. But I do expect the time pressure to increase. In that case, circulating your work by uploading it to a repository could speed things up." 

As noted, OA is not merely for the sake of earlier access during the publication lag (most journals now offer access to the online version immediately, and even to the author's final draft -- but to subscribers only). The primary motivation for OA is the need for access to journals to which the would-be user's institution cannot afford to subscribe.

HS: "I don’t... upload [my articles to] the university’s repository... I had never even consulted the repository. I did try it once a few weeks ago and realised that none of my publications are in there. It was just too awkward, and I’ll now probably wait quite a long time before I try it again. I’m just too busy for this kind of experimentation. It really does need to be made a lot simpler... it would make a difference if it were... easy to deposit your PDF... Either that or somebody has to do it for you. [Our researchers] are of course used to registering the metadata in Metis. But it would make a difference if it were then easy to deposit your PDF..."

This passage is a bit ambiguous as to whether Professor Schmidt is referring here to (1) consulting the repository, in search of an article, as a user, or to (2) depositing one's own articles in the repository, as an author.

(1) Consultation: Institutional repositories (IRs) can be consulted directly (for institution-internal record-keeping, monitoring or showcasing purposes) but that is certainly not the primary purpose of either IRs or OA. The way most OA IR deposits are consulted by potential users is not by going to each individual IR to search! The IRs are OAI-compliant, hence interoperable, and hence they are harvested by central search services (such as OAIster, Base, Scirus, Scopus, PubMed, Citeseer, Celestial, and even Google Scholar) so they become jointly searchable by users as if they were all in one and the same global repository.

(2) Deposit: To find out how quick and easy deposit really is, one must actually have deposited an article in an IR. It is certainly as simple as depositing the metadata in Metis -- moreover, software can easily import/export directly from one to the other (Metis to IR or IR to Metis), automatically. So the (few) keystrokes only ever need to be done once. 

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) "Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving." 

(It's fine to have the keystrokes done by proxy -- by an assistant, a student, a librarian -- if an institution wishes, but it is not clear that there is even the need to do so: Do researchers need proxies to deposit in Metis? It's virtually the same thing.)

Nor is the publisher's PDF needed. The author's final draft is what needs to be deposited, and the author has that at his fingertips as soon as a final draft is accepted for publication (i.e., when no more revisions are required).

Metadata are metadata, and the same metadata are needed for OA IR deposit as for Metis (author, title, date, journal, etc.) registration. The publisher's PDF is both unnecessary and undesirable (because it has more access restrictions than the author's refereed. accepted final draft.)

Moreover, the most successful university deposit mandates (such as the mandate at University of Liège) have combined the functions of the OA IR and (their equivalent of) Metis: The form that the deposit mandate takes is that it is in the IR that the researcher must deposit for performance review!

Here is how the Rector of U Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier, worded the Liège mandate:

-- deposit in ORBi will be mandatory as soon as the article is accepted by the journal

-- starting October 1st, 2009, only those references introduced in ORBi will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vitae for all evaluation procedures 'in house' (designations, promotions, grant applications, etc.) 

-- Wherever publisher agreement conditions are fulfilled, the author will authorize setting access to the deposit as open access 

-- For closed access deposits, the institutional repository will have an EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST BUTTON which allows the author to fulfill individual eprint requests. 

In response to the question "If uploading material to a repository were actually made a lot simpler, would they all do it, or would something else have to happen?" Professor Schmidt replied:

HS: "I think it will be necessary to impose an obligation so as to get them used to it. But if it were really simple and it took only a single action to upload the publication to the repository and register it in Metis for the annual report, then they’d come on board."

This reply is spot-on, on all counts: Researchers will not deposit unless it is mandated, but if it is mandated, they will indeed deposit (95%), and the vast majority will do so willingly (81%).

What Professor Schmidt may not have realized is that deposit is already easy, just a few minutes worth of keystrokes, and virtually identical to the keystrokes for registering in Metis. So all that needs to be done is to mandate deposit in the Erasmus IR, as the prerequisite for performance evaluation, and automatically export the metadata from the IR to Metis!

All universities considering the adoption of a Green Open Access mandate are urged to join EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship). The chairman of the EOS Board is Professor Bernard Rentier (Rector of the University of Liège), and the Coordinator is Dr. Alma Swan (of Southampton and Key Perspectives Inc). These are the two most far-sighted and dynamic leaders in the international OA mandate movement, and with their help university IRs and mandates will be the most effective they can be: 

EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is an organisation for universities and research institutions worldwide. The organisation is both an information service and a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities and research institutions, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings
 
The aim of EOS is to further the opening up of scholarship and research that we are now seeing through the growing open access, open education, open science and open innovation movements.

 
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum