Self-Archiving Mandates

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Stuart Shieber, the tireless architect of the historic Harvard self-archiving mandate that may at last have tipped the scale for global Open Access, has been traveling to spread the message, to Caltech on March 26th and to Berkeley on March 30th.

Click here to see the video of his CalTech talk. It was very clear and articulate (and often funny, too!).

I would add one strategic suggestion on how to make the message and priorities crystal clear to the 10,000 minus 76 institutions and funders worldwide that have not yet mandated OA:

Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving First
as Harvard FAS and 75 other universities/departments and funders have done
(and only then consider funding gold OA publishing,
if you wish).

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More than half of the CalTech talk (and just about all of the subsequent discussion session) was focused on journal costs, OA journal business models, and Harvard's "Compact" to subsidize "reasonable" gold OA publishing fees for Harvard authors that need it. There was next to no mention of mandates in the discussion session, although I'm certain that Stuart hoped, as I do, that CalTech too would consider adopting a self-archiving mandate like Harvard's.

The talk was of course addressed to a librarian audience rather than a researcher audience, and libraries are most interested in serials budget and pricing problems. But I think it is still a strategic mistake to focus on journal economics, and on new "compacts" for university funding of OA journal publication fees, instead of stressing the all-important priority:

To date, there exist 76 OA self-archiving mandates (40 of them adopted before the Harvard Mandate, 35 since), out of at least 10,000 universities and research funders worldwide.

For the universal OA that is now within reach, mandate adoption has to be significantly accelerated globally.

After over 20 long years of experience with this it is crystal clear to me that focusing instead on journal business models simply takes and keeps everyone's eyes off the ball.

If one can just manage to get mandates to propagate across universities worldwide, all the rest will take care of itself, quite naturally, of its own accord.

The Harvard mandate (now that it has been upgraded to include an immediate-deposit requirement even if the author opts-out of rights-retention, hence OA) is just wonderful: Thus revised, Harvard's is now the optimal mandate model for global adoption.

My suggestion to Stuart and to all others who are promoting OA is hence to promote the mandate very directly and exclusively, presenting the evidence of all of its advantages for research access and impact, and to talk about potential future business models for journals only if and when the (inevitable) question gets raised, rather than letting the urgent and immediate and solvable research accessibility problem get subsumed, yet again, by the journal affordability problem.

Once mandates become universal, even if the journal affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which universal mandates will have solved, completely! (Once everyone has online access to everything, it matters incomparably less how much journal subscriptions cost, and how many of them a university can afford to subscribe to.)

Apart from this basic strategic suggestion about priorities and focus, I have just two small comments, one on "branding" and one on what "reasonable" gold OA publishing charges would/will be:

1. Branding: What authors really care about in choosing a journal -- and what it is that they really mean by "imprimatur" or "brand" -- is the journal's known track-record for article and author quality. It is not a mysterious property of the "brand-name" but an empirical running average that the journal must earn, and sustain. It basically refers to the journal's ongoing quality standards for peer review (what portion and proportion of the overall quality distribution curve they accept for publication).

I think Stuart knows all this. It was latent in the very interesting data he presented in the video by way of reply to the familiar "vanity-press/plummeting-standards" argument -- though, again, the talk put the accent on pricing issues, whereas the real point is that authors try to publish in the journals that have the track-record for the highest quality-standards, and quality standards mean selectivity, based on quality alone: any lowering of peer-review standards so as to accept more articles will simply lower the journal's quality, and hence its attractiveness to authors seeking the highest-quality journals. As Stuart notes in the video, there are both subscription and OA journals at all quality levels (and, one might add, there are articles and authors at all quality levels).

But the urgent issue now is access -- and especially access to the higher quality journals.

(There are are about 4000 OA journals, out of a total of perhaps 25,000 refereed journals in all, and there are OA journals among the top journals too. However, it is also a fact that the proportion of OA journals among the top journals is far lower today than their proportion among journals as a whole. This simply re-emphasizes that what is urgent today is to make all articles in all journals openly accessible -- by mandating self-archiving -- rather than to find ways of paying for publication in OA journals.)

2. "Reasonable" gold OA publishing charges: Stuart also speaks in the video about what would be "reasonable" charges for publishing in OA journals. But surely this depends on what the true costs will turn out to be: Today, subscription journals publish both online and print editions and (as Stuart notes) they charge whatever they can get. But now let us focus just on what universal self-archiving mandates will bring, entirely independent of journal price:

With OA self-archiving mandated universally, all articles will be accessible to all users online for free. This, in and of itself, solves the research access/impact problem, completely, and with certainty. Its other side-effects are only a matter for speculation, but here are the possibilities:

2a. Nothing else changes: Universities continue to subscribe to the print and/or online edition of whatever journals they can afford, and journal costs (and prices, and price increases) continue as before, unchanged.

So what? The access problem is completely solved. Everyone has online access to everything they need. So university subscriptions are now decided on the basis of other considerations (demand for the print edition, demand for the luxury PDF edition, preservation, prestige, habit, charity, superstition). These are all worthy supply/demand issues, but there would certainly be nothing left that could be described with the urgency of the "serials crisis," because that crisis derived all of its urgency from the need to provide access, and the universal OA mandates will already have taken care of that need, completely.

2b. More likely, the availability of the authors' OA versions will eventually reduce the demand for the publisher's print and online versions, and subscription cancellations will grow. The publishers' first response will probably be to try to raise prices, but if that just further increases cancellations, supply/demand implies that they will instead have to try to cut costs by doing away with inessential products and services. The ways are many. Cancel the online edition: If print subscriptions still cover costs sustainably, fine, it stops there. If cancellations continue to grow, then journals will have to cancel the print edition too. But then there is nothing left to sell via subscription. So journals must then convert to gold OA publishing, which means charging for their only remaining service: managing peer review.

It is that eventual price -- the price for managing peer review alone -- that is really at issue here. That, and that alone, is the "reasonable" (indeed essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing, once all access-provision and archiving has been offloaded onto the distributed network of (mandated) institutional repositories.

Not a single gold OA publisher today is operating on -- or even knows -- that irreducible, essential cost, because none of them have downsized yet to doing peer-review alone (because they have not yet had to do so, out of necessity, because universal Green OA is not yet there, exerting the pressure to do so, while at the same time providing the distributed infrastructure on which to offload all access-provision and archiving, and their associated costs). For this reason, it does not make sense to speak of (let alone subsidize) this "reasonable" price today, when the necessary precondition for downsizing to it (namely, universal OA mandates) has not yet been provided:

In other words, today's asking-prices are necessarily inflated, and will remain so, until universal OA itself forces the requisite downsizing.

So this, it seems to me, is yet another reason for not putting the accent on a pre-emptive "compact" to cover "reasonable" gold OA publication fees today, in the absence of universal OA mandates.

I hasten to add that Harvard, having already mandated OA, is of course entitled and welcome to do whatever it likes with its spare cash! But this should be separated completely from the really urgent message, which still needs to be communicated to the remaining 10,000 not-yet-mandating universities of the world, which is first to mandate OA, as Harvard did, before making plans on how to spend their spare cash. Otherwise they are just subsidizing an arbitrary gold OA publishing fee, for a minority of the journals (and an even smaller minority of the top journals) without first doing their essential part toward solving the research access problem.

(Lest it's not self-evident, however, let me reaffirm that all this carping and unsolicited advice on my part in no way diminishes my great admiration and appreciation for the enormous contribution Stuart Shieber has made, and continues to make, in having gotten a mandate adopted at Harvard, and now promoting mandate adoption globally!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Two more Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates from the Russian Academy of Sciences (KAM and VSSC), as reported in eifl.net by Iryna Kuchma. (The other two eIFL mandates -- CEMI and TSTU (Ukraine) -- had already been announced.)

Pozdravlenia!

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Open access institutional mandates in the eIFL countries

by Iryna Kuchma

A great news about open access institutional mandate from Ternopil State Ivan Pul'uj Technical University, Ukraine, encouraged us to count open access institutional mandates in eIFL countries. And there are three mandates in Russia (thanks to Sergey Parinov, Socionet, and the person who registered the first Russian open access institutional mandate, for the information about Russian institutions below) and as already mentioned one mandate in Ukraine:

- Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences:

“All researchers of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences are mandated by director's decree to immediately deposit their papers/articles in the institutional Open Archive. ["...mandate researchers of CEMI RAS to deposit all completed research (in working paper form), including the full text, in institutional OA (repository) not later than 6 months after completion."]

(http://www.cemi.rssi.ru and http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup) 

- Vologda scientific-coordination center of the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences and http://socionet.ru.

- Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences and http://socionet.ru.

- And the most recent open access policy adopted by Ternopil State Ivan Pul'uj Technical University (TSTU), Ukraine, mandates that all published journal articles and conference papers must be deposited in Electronic Archive of TSTU (ELARTU) if there are no legal objections by publishers. ELARTU also encourages and fully supports self-archiving of other research outputs produced by scientists and students of the university as well as other members of the scientific community. Congratulations to the repository team – Serhij Dubyk and Halyna Onysko!

If you know about other open access institutional mandates in the eIFL countries – please register them in the ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies) and write to me (iryna.kuchma[--]eifl.net).

Depending on how you count and clock it, the Ukraine's Ternopil State Ivan Puluj Technical University (ELARTU) has adopted the planet's 73rd Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate and Belgium's Académie 'Louvain' (consisting of the Facultés universitaires catholiques de Mons, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix à Namur, Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, and the Université catholique de Louvain) has adopted the planet's 74th Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate.

(The Académie 'Louvain' is actually three universities, so this might be three mandates rather than one, and although Fabrizio Tinti alerted Peter Suber to the mandate on March 31 2009, the mandate was apparently adopted a year earlier (July 7, 2008).)

Following University of Michigan's Library's Open Access Week
Molly Kleinman has blogged Lessons from Open Access Week


Some Responses:

Question: Surely there was some discussion of Michigan congressman John Conyer's Bill HR 801 attempting to overturn the NIH OA mandate?

Comment 1: Whether one accepts the definition of the two kinds of Open Access ("gratis" and "libre") or one prefers to deny free access the honorific of "open," the fact is that we do not even have free online access (whatever we choose to call it), and that asking nonproviding authors to do more, and asking institutions and funders to mandate that they do more is even more difficult than just getting them to provide the free online access, which only 72 institutions and funders -- out of perhaps 10,000 worldwide -- are so far doing. (Without even that, it's all just a name-game.)

(Whether there is really any burning need for "re-use rights" for the verbatim texts of peer-reviewed research journal articles (as opposed to research data, or Disney cartoons) is perhaps also worth giving some more thought.)

Comment 2: For how students can help OA, see: "The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access."

Comment 3: Before getting too caught up in the theory of the "Great Conversation," it might be a good idea to make sure free access (at the very least) is provided to its target content -- by mandating OA (for example, at University of Michigan!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Pre-emptive Gold Fever seems to be spreading.

Following hard on the heels of University of California's Gilded New Deal with Springer -- UC subscribes to the Springer fleet of journals for an undisclosed fee, but, as part of the Deal, UC authors get to publish their articles as Gold OA for free in those same Springer journals -- now Universities UK (UUK) and the Research Information Network (RIN) are jointly dispensing advice on the payment of Gold OA fees (which is fine) but without first giving the most important piece of advice:

A university should on no account spend a single penny on Gold OA fees until and unless it has first adopted a Green OA mandate to deposit all of its own refereed journal article output in its own institutional repository.

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There is still time for UUK and RIN to remedy this, by prominently setting the priorities and contingencies straight. I fervently hope they will do so!

(Peter Suber is expressing the very same hope, but in his characteristically gentler and less curmudgeonly way.)

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 4:30 AM, David Prosser, Director of SPARC-Europe, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

As all of the UK research councils, as well as some of the major UK funding charities, have green mandates in place I don’t see how this can possibly be described as ‘pre-emptive gold fever’.

I'm so glad you said that, David! Here is the very specific reply that should fully elucidate this question, which cuts to the very heart of what is at issue:

(1) There are two kinds of Green OA mandates: funder mandates and university mandates.

(2) Yes, the UK is the only country in the world in which all 7 of its national research funders (plus 7 more charities and intercouncils) mandate Green OA (and that is just wonderful: a global inspiration and example in every respect!).

(3) However, UK funder mandates only cover funded research output.

(4) UK university (and research institution) mandates, in contrast, cover all UK research output, funded or unfunded, across all fields.

(5) And the UUK/RIN advice on Gold OA funding was from and to UK universities, not funders.

(6) Most UK universities do not yet mandate Green OA. (Only 6 UK universities plus two departments do -- although that is still the largest number of university mandates of any country in the world today!).

(7) Therefore my point -- that on no account should funding Gold OA be recommended until and unless Green OA has been mandated -- stands, for the intended recipients of the UUK/RIN advice: UK universities.

(I might add that even funding councils that mandate Green OA for the research they fund can help more by stipulating that the default locus of the mandated Green deposit should be the fundee's own institutional repository -- from which it can be exported/harvested to central repositories if desired -- rather than mandating direct central deposit. That creates a synergy between the two kinds of mandates, with the funder mandates encouraging and facilitating the adoption of university mandates at each of the fundees' institutions, so as to cover their unfunded research output too.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

A second university mandate (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) plus a second funder mandate (Madrid Autonomous Community) from Spain, raising the worldwide total of Green OA self-archiving mandates to 72!

¡Viva España!

One more of Richard Poynder's revealing and insightful OA Interviews, this time of France's first and foremost OA champion, Hélène Bosc.

         For the full Poynder/Bosc interview, click here.

Peter Suber, writes:

"This is another richly textured interview, unearthing details about the early history of OA, OA in France, OA in Europe, and the career of one of Europe's first and most influential OA activists.... It's difficult to excerpt, but here's a little to whet your appetite..."

Here are some excerpts from Peter's excerpts:

Former INRA librarian, [convenor for the EuroScience Working Group on Science Publishing,] and passionate champion of Open Access (OA) in France, Hélène Bosc began advocating for OA in 1995, before the term even existed...

Like other librarians who have embraced OA, Bosc's starting point was the so-called serials crisis....

RP: So how would you present the case for self-archiving mandates both generally, and within the context of France?

HB: Mandates are necessary to fill up repositories. All the author surveys and outcome studies that have been undertaken worldwide show this to be so, including studies in France: In a study I did, for instance, I showed that by assisting researchers to archive Ifremer has managed to capture 80% of recently published papers in the institution's repository, Archimer. By contrast HAL has captured only 10-15 % of French research output....

RP: How would you describe France's take-up of OA as compared to other Western countries?

HB: As we said, HAL was created over seven years ago, and following the signing of the protocole d'accord in July 2006, all French researchers were supposed to deposit their publications in HAL. That would seem to suggest that we were ahead of other countries, and yet today we are not: In spite of our technical lead, HAL has achieved the global default deposit rate of only 10-15 %....

RP: What is at stake?

HB: What is at stake is that if France wants to be in the research vanguard, it must embrace OA quickly, before all the other countries pull ahead.

My view is that as the first French universities see the deposit rate in their repositories approach 100% they will understand the OA citation advantage, and start to benefit from all the other advantages provided by OA....

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[With many thanks to Professor Hal Abelson for the information]

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OA Self-Archiving Policy: Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 

Full list of institutions

Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (US* institutional-mandate)
http://web.mit.edu/

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data] http://dspace.mit.edu/

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy

Passed by Unanimous of the Faculty, March 18, 2009

The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.

To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost's Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office.


The Provost's Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty.

The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.

The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible.

Many thanks to Amy Brand, Program Manager of the Harvard University Library Office for Scientific Communication (OSC), for forwarding this press release announcing the adoption of Harvard's 3rd Green OA Mandate, this time by the John F. Kennedy School of Government. 

And yet another well-deserved round of congratulations to Stuart Shieber, Faculty Director of the OSC and the architect of this remarkable (and seemingly unending) series of Green OA mandates from Harvard! (Harvard Medical School looks like it will be next!)

One can only echo what is stated at the end of the press release, which is that although this is the world's 69th Green OA self-archiving mandate, "none are... as far-reaching as the one put forth at Harvard"! (Nor, I might add, is there now any better model for emulation worldwide.)        -- S.H.

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For Immediate Release: March 16, 2009 
Media Contact: Doug Gavel (617) 495-1115 Harvard Kennedy School Communications

Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Votes for Open Access for Scholarly Articles

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University voted overwhelmingly last week to make all faculty members’ scholarly articles publically available online at no charge, providing for the widest possible dissemination of faculty research and scholarship. The historic vote adds Harvard Kennedy School to a growing list of faculties at the university to endorse the initiative.

“The scholarly articles authored by Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) faculty members enhance the understanding of many critical and urgent public policy issues, and by embracing open access we seek to maximize the avenues by which these ideas are shared,” said Kennedy School Dean David T. Ellwood. “In the developing world especially, where access to expensive journals is rare, there is a pressing need for access to the latest policy advice and scholarship coming from HKS faculty.”

Under the new policy, HKS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an open access online repository, the contents of which will be searchable through web tools such as Google Scholar. Authors will maintain the right to distribute articles on their own websites, and educators will have the right to freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit. Faculty members will have the ability to “opt out” of the requirements of the new policy in the case of specific articles in which the policy proves to be incompatible with the obligations under a particular publisher’s contract.

The vote at HKS follows a proposal by a university-wide committee aimed at encouraging wider dissemination of scholarly work. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and faculty at Harvard Law School (HLS) each voted last year to endorse legislation similar to that approved by the HKS faculty.

Stuart M. Shieber, the James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch professor of computer science (FAS) and faculty director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, who introduced the legislation last year said, “I am delighted that the faculty of yet another school at Harvard has chosen to embrace open access and that momentum is spreading on campus. Now that the Office for Scholarly Communication is staffed, the DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) repository is in development, and we have experience working with both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Law School, we look forward to working with the Harvard Kennedy School to implement their faculty’s important decision smoothly and efficiently.”

Although other academic institutions have considered similar open access policies, none are considered as far-reaching as the one put forth at Harvard.

From Peter Suber's OA News:  This is the planet's first Green OA Mandate by a Library Faculty. Librarians have been at the vanguard of the Open Access movement, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince other faculty university-wide to deposit, as well as to convince the university to mandate deposit. Here is something they can do on their own, to provide an example and show the way: mandate deposit within their own department or faculty. (This is also an instance if Arthur's Sale's suggestion that "patchwork mandates" be adopted at the laboratory, department or faculty level, rather than waiting for university-wide mandates)

The OSU mandate is even the optimal ID/OA (DDR) mandate, as Peter notes below. To the Library Faculty at Oregon State University, who have now put their own work where their heart (and hard work) is, kudos! -- SH

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An OA mandate for the OSU library faculty

The library faculty at Oregon State University have adopted an OA mandate (text and guidelines).

From today's announcement:

On March 6, library faculty adopted a policy that requires deposit of final published versions of scholarly works in ScholarsArchive@OSU, the libraries' institutional repository. This is the first open access mandate adopted by a library faculty in the United States, according to Michael Boock, head of digital access services for OSU Libraries.

Since 2004, OSU Libraries has worked to collect the university’s scholarship in digital form to ensure greater accessibility and long-term preservation of the scholarship. ScholarsArchive@OSU, which recently ranked fourth among U.S. digital repositories, contains dissertations, theses, a wide variety of university technical reports, working papers and series and increasingly, published articles, papers and presentations. The current contributions come from across campus, and are contributed on a voluntary basis.

The new policy means that the 42 library faculty will automatically contribute all of their scholarship to the archive, which will not be the case for faculty in other departments, who can continue to contribute on a voluntary basis.

No later than the date of publication or distribution, library faculty members will deposit an electronic copy of the final published version of their works in an appropriate format (such as PDF) to ScholarsArchive@OSU. The policy applies to articles, conference papers and proceedings, substantial presentations and internal reports of interest to a broader audience that are authored or co-authored by library faculty members.

“As faculty members at Oregon’s land grant university the library faculty believes they have a responsibility to share their expertise and research with the public,” Boock said. “As librarians, they believe in the widest possible access to information and its long-term preservation. The policy they’ve adopted supports these goals.”

From the policy text:

...The policy will apply to all scholarly works authored or co-authored while a faculty member of the University Libraries, beginning with works created after March 2009....

When a publisher is involved who will not agree to the terms of this policy as stated in the Science Commons Access-Reuse Addendum, the University Librarian or the University Librarian’s designate will waive application of the policy upon written request from faculty. When a waiver is granted, faculty are encouraged to deposit whatever version of the article the publisher allows (e.g. pre or post-print)....

The Coordinator [who also grants waivers] may assist the author in getting terms from the publisher that are most agreeable to the author.

From the policy guidelines:

[The Library Faculty Association] recommends that authors select the Access/Reuse agreement type using the Science Commons Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine....

Comment [from Peter Suber].  Kudos to the OSU Library Faculty Association (LFA) for this strong policy.  I applaud the mandatory language, the dual deposit-release strategy (or what Stevan Harnad calls immediate deposit / optional access), and the clarity in making waivers apply only to OA, not to deposits.  I like the way the LFA will help faculty deposit their articles as well as obtain better terms from publishers.  You can classify this as a "faculty vote" policy, as opposed to an administrative policy, and as a departmental rather than university-wide policy.  Now that the library faculty have taken the lead, it's time for other departments and divisions of OSU, already operating under a policy to encourage self-archiving, to strengthen their policy as well.

Posted in OA News by Peter Suber at 3/13/2009 05:13:00 PM