Self-Archiving Mandates

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Ivy Anderson, California Digital Library, UCOP, wrote:

Stevan,

I wanted to post this comment to your OA blog, but the blog’s comment function doesn’t display properly in my browser (whether Firefox or IE).

Ivy, Apologies. Now fixed, and comments enabled. 

Here is a response via email which you’re welcome to post to your blog if you wish.  I’m also responding on the SPARC OA Forum list.

You appear to have inferred from reading an article published on The Scientist blog that UC has bundled extra payment into its licensing deal with Springer in order to procure open access for UC authors.  Nowhere in that article, or elsewhere, has a statement been published to that effect. 

My inference was based on this passage from the Scientist article:

"University of California Libraries... minted an agreement with the publishing giant Springer so that all articles written by UC-affiliated authors would be published with full and immediate open access in any of Springer's 2,000-odd journals, even if the rest of the articles in the journals are subscription-only. Under the arrangement, UC authors retain the copyright to their work and don't have to pay additional fees on a per-article basis. In exchange, the publisher receives an undisclosed sum of money that is 'part and parcel of our standard licensing arrangement with Springer'..."

I hope you'll agree that the description is ambiguous, to say the least, and not least because "Big Deal" negotiations with publishers are always a quid-pro-quo bargaining matter, so that whether or not it was monetized in the form of an explicit surcharge, the upshot is the same: UC subscribes to the Springer fleet as a package, and part of the package deal is that OA fees for UC authors publishing in those journals are waived.

I call that a good deal for the publisher and a very bad deal for UC -- until and unless UC mandates Green OA self-archiving for all of its research article output (as 67 other institutions and funders have already done). UC having thereby ensured OA for all UC research output, it becomes a far less important matter what journals UC elects to subscribe to, how much it elects to pay, what deals it makes with any particular publisher, and whatever else it does with any spare cash.

UC does not at all conflate journal affordability and research accessibility;  rather, we have an institutional responsibility to address both issues, and believe we can do so in a principled and sustainable manner, by redirecting our support for research publication from the ‘readership’ side of the transaction to the publication side. 

I will try to translate this into more explicit and transparent terms in order to clarify the underlying dynamics and to show that it all leads in an unscalable and unsustainable direction:

(1) Yes, UC needs both to (1a) provide access to the research output of other institutions for UC researchers and to (1b) provide access to UC research output for researchers at other institutions.

(2) Responsibility 1a is fulfilled by negotiating the best possible deal with publishers for journal subscriptions/licenses and responsibility 1b is fulfilled by adopting a Green OA self-archiving mandate for all UC research output, as Harvard, Stanford, NIH, and over 60 other universities and funders worldwide have done (for the research output of their own faculty and fundees).

(3)  UC's journal affordability problem is addressed directly by 1a; and 1b is UC's local contribution to solving the global research accessibility problem.

(4) It should already be transparent that if other universities follow Harvard's, Stanford's and UC's example with 1b, then the research accessibility problem is solved: 1b is a solution that scales.

(5) It does not require much more analysis to see that once universal Green OA mandates by institutions and funders have solved the research accessibility problem, (5a) the journal affordability problem becomes a far less pressing one; and that (5b) universal Green OA is likely (though not certain) to lead eventually to subscription cancellations and a transition to Gold OA publishing, with each institution redirecting some of its own subscription cancellation savings to pay for its own authors' Gold OA publishing fees.

(6) What requires a bit more reflection is to see that for all this to happen, Green OA (1b) must come first: Until all research is OA, UC researchers do not have access to whatever journals UC cannot afford to subscribe to. And until all research is OA, UC cannot cancel journals to which its researchers need access.

(7) Now it is true that if, mirabile dictu, the publisher of every journal that UC can afford were to offer UC the same sort of "Big Deal" Springer has offered -- "subscribe to our journal(s) at our asking price and your institution's authors can have Gold OA for free" -- and if every research-active institution bought into that deal for every journal it could afford, then that too would (probably) be enough to provide universal OA: But consider the probability -- and the price!

(8) Universal "Big Deal" Gold would buy universal OA at the price of (8a) locking in current journal prices and (8b) locking in all their currently co-bundled products and services (print edition, online edition, peer review); and (8c) what institutions would be negotiating with each publisher annually thereafter would no longer be journal subscriptions and journal subscription prices, but the institution's own researchers' continuing right to publish in each of those journals.

(9) This is of course an absurd and dysfunctional outcome, because journal-level subscriptions and article-level publication charges have fundamentally different units. (One is an entire, annually renewable, incoming journal or fleet of journals from a single publisher, the other is single, one-at-a-time, outgoing articles, destined for different journals and publishers, and depending in each individual case on the outcome of peer review for their acceptance, rather than on just the annual payment for the service of peer review.)

(10) Hence negotiating Gold OA on the "Big Deal" license model is incoherent and is neither scaleable nor sustainable: It means locking in everything that is co-bundled with a subscription today, at today's prices, and treating that as the unit of the transaction even when the unit of transaction must clearly cease to be the journal or the publisher, as the practice spreads across all institutions as well as all journals and publishers competing for their annual "membership" dues. Consortial collective bargaining for all this would just make this oligopoly even more absurd.

That is why I have called such short-sighted reckonings "sleep-walking." But if they are coupled with Green OA Mandates, the incoherence of "memberships" no longer matters, because the real solution -- universal (mandated) Green OA -- is on the way.

Our Springer arrangement is one such initiative; our support for SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, is another. 

SCOAP3 is likewise a co-bundled, price-lock-in "membership" scheme, but it matters much less, because it is being pushed through in the only field that already has near 100% Green OA self-archiving without its having to be mandated. Ensure 100% Green OA in all other fields and the silliness of lock-in Gold OA membership schemes will likewise matter far less. They matter now precisely because they are distracting sleepy institutions from the urgent need to mandate Green OA (or giving them the golden illusion that it will not be necessary).

In these and other efforts, UC seeks to redirect library funds toward open access publishing in order to both foster more unfettered access to research and provide financial support to the scholarly publishing system at the point in the publication chain where a truer market relationship exists – between authors and the journals in which they publish – in the hope that the cost of research publication can be brought down thereby over the long term. 

This may sound as if it makes sense in these abstract terms, but once it is looked at more closely, as I have just done above, in (1) - (10), it proves to be incoherent.

(a) Redirecting library funds from subscriptions to OA publication charges before all research is OA is paying for what other subscribing institutions are already paying for (the publication of your own institution's outgoing articles) and for what can already be had without having to pay even more (the mandated self-archiving of your own institution's outgoing articles).

(b) Redirecting library funds from subscriptions to OA publication charges before all research is OA is locking in publishers' current asking-prices and co-bundled products and services.

(c)  As to "provid[ing] financial support to the scholarly publishing system at the point in the publication chain where a truer market relationship exists – between authors and the journals in which they publish" -- that's precisely what this sort of "membership Big Deal" is not doing, as you will quickly see if you just try to scale it up in your mind, across journals, publishers and time: The "market relationship" is at the level of an individual outgoing article, on a particular occasion, and is dependent on the outcome of peer review; it is not an annual incoming journal quota, the way subscriptions are. Hence it makes no sense to treat it as an annual individual institutional "membership" fee, let alone a global consortial one.

(d) As to the hope of bringing journal costs down: again, this is conflating the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem. -- Indeed, unless UC mandates Green OA, it is letting affordability get in the way of accessibility, even though the latter is fully within reach.

(e) And if you have any doubts about my contention that this local solution is incoherent and is neither scalable nor sustainable, please spell out for me how you envision a university -- formerly an annual subscriber, now an annual "member" of countless Gold OA journals -- will negotiate its annual "membership" payments from year to year with each journal, while its researchers need to go on publishing? Will there be annual acquisitions and cancellations of the right to publish in each journal? (This is yet another symptom of conflating the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem.)

Articles will be deposited into UC’s eScholarship Repository through our Springer arrangement, also supporting the institutional deposit that you favor. 

It is not the deposit of articles whose Gold OA status has been paid for with hard cash that I favor! Those articles are already OA (and at quite a price). What I favor is the mandatory deposit of all institutional research output, irrespective of whether it is published in an OA or a non-OA journal. 

If UC does go ahead and mandates Green OA, then all my objections are immediately mooted, because although these additional publisher deals are still incoherent, premature, unscalable and unsustainable, they no longer matter. However, if these local subscription/membership deals are being pursued instead of mandating Green OA, then they matter very much, because they are needlessly and thoughtlessly retarding the universal OA that is already within reach. (And that is why I call them "somnambulism.)

The deposited articles will be the final published versions, avoiding the concerns about version control that can arise through deposit of final author manuscripts.  We think this is a very good arrangement indeed, and we negotiated it while wide awake. 

I wish I could agree, but in fact everything you have said by way of reply unfortunately confirms the opposite: "version control" is not the OA problem: version absence is. The ones who are fussing about the importance of having the publisher's PDF are not all those would-be users worldwide who cannot access 85% of annual published articles at all today, in any version. The latter is the problem that Green OA mandates are designed to solve. The "version control" problem is trivial, and will be taken care of by the institutional repository software: Please take care of the far more urgent and consequential version-provision problem first.

I write this all in the fervent hope that UC -- the biggest single player in the US OA arena -- will take the long-awaited step that will help awaken the slumbering giant, and make the dominoes fall worldwide at long last: Mandate Green OA.

Best wishes,

Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Excellent news from Harvard! It looks as if the Harvard Green OA Mandate has added an ID/OA Immediate Deposit Clause with no opt-out. 

This would make Harvard's mandate the optimal Green OA Mandate model, now ready for all universities worldwide to emulate: rights-retention (with optional opt-out) plus Immediate-Deposit (without opt-out).

And please remember that the three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving spontaneously are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to self-archive, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

The Harvard mandate now has all the requisite ingredients for performing this facilitating function: Deposit itself is required, but negotiating rights-retention and making the deposit OA can be waived if there are reasons to do so. One cannot ask for a better policy than this: Its worldwide adoption will bring us OA as surely as nightfall is followed by day. -- Stevan Harnad

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From Peter Suber's Open Access News

At Harvard, waivers apply to OA, not to deposits

The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication has updated two of the FAQs on the university's OA mandates.  I'm not posting all the new language, just the new answers to two existing questions:

From the Policy FAQ:

What do I have to do to comply with this policy? 

Here is the one-line answer: ADDENDUM or WAIVER but in any case DEPOSIT....

Whether or not you included the addendum or the publisher accepted it, you should always deposit the author's final version of your article in the DASH repository....

From the Procedural FAQ:

Should I include my article in the Harvard repository even if I have gotten a waiver for it?  [PS:  Formerly:  May I be able to include...?]

Yes. The repository accepts not only articles covered by the license granted to Harvard under the FAS policy, but also articles not covered by the license but for which the publisher grants, or the author has otherwise secured, sufficient rights. Even if you take a waiver, the publisher's agreement may provide, or you may be able to negotiate, sufficient rights to allow copies of your article to be made publicly available in the Harvard repository. The publisher may ask that certain conditions be met, some of which the repository can accommodate (for example, an embargo period during which the article will not be made publicly available)....

Comment.  The new language makes clear that the Harvard policies expect deposit even when faculty members obtain waivers and do not or cannot authorize OA.  This is an excellent policy and welcome clarification.

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.)

Note that Edinburgh's is the optimal ID/OA Mandate. (Let us hope Edinburgh will also implement the automatized Request a Copy Button for Embargoed or Closed Access Deposits!)

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University of Edinburgh (UK* institutional-mandate)
http://www.ed.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives:
[growth data] http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.publications.lib.ed.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy:
http://www.acaffairs.ed.ac.uk/Committees/Senate/Meetings/200809/20090127/C4-OpenAccess.pdf

The University of Edinburgh has adopted an OA mandate. Here's an excerpt from the Open Access Publications Policy (January 27 - February 4, 2009), the proposal which the university's Electronic Senate approved on February 18, 2009:

This... Publications Policy... requires researchers to deposit their research outputs in the Publications Repository, and where appropriate in the Open Access Edinburgh Research Archive in order to maximise the visibility of the University’s research....

This policy will be implemented [i.e. become mandatory] from January 2010, and in the meantime, researchers are encouraged to deposit outputs....

The Publications Repository (PR) is a closed repository for use only within the University of Edinburgh and is an internal University tool for research output management, while Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) is a public open access repository, making content available through global searching mechanisms such as Google.

This policy requires each researcher to provide the peer reviewed final accepted version of a research output to deposit. The policy encourages the deposit of an electronic copy of nonpeer reviewed research, particularly where this may be used for national assessments. Researchers (or their proxies, eg research administrators) will deposit these research outputs in the PR, and at the same time provide information about whether the research output can be made publicly available in ERA. It will then be automatically passed into ERA, where this is allowable, with no further input from the researcher or their agent....

There are several strong reasons for pursuing the requirement for the deposits of such research outputs at the moment:

1.  The impact of research is maximized because there is growing evidence that research deposited in Open Access repositories is more heavily used and cited

2. The deposit of outputs in ERA will support compliance with Research Council and other funding agency requirements that research outputs are available openly.

3. This will ensure that each research output has consistent metadata and ensures longevity which, for example, a researcher’s own website does not.

4. Items which are already in Edinburgh Research Archive are well used. The average number of times each item was downloaded during 2008 was 228, with the top countries downloading Edinburgh research being: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, China, Iran and India.

5. Researchers, research groups or Schools can use the PR to provide automatically generated output for their own websites, or for their curriculum vitae.

6. Future possible metrics based research assessment will require us to ensure that Edinburgh’s research be cited as much as possible, and this means that it must be as visible as possible....

9. This will become a competitive tool for Edinburgh’s research by enhancing its reputation and branding as a good place to carry out research....

11. The world of scholarly communication is changing—adopting this policy in Edinburgh will help us move forward within this changing environment. Other universities require their researchers to deposit research outputs. Harvard University, Stirling University—the first in the UK to do so, and very recently the University of Glasgow, have adopted institutional requirements for such deposit.

12. Such a deposit requirement is in line with other UoE policies on knowledge exchange, public accountability and serving the public good....

Since this initiative requires changed patterns of work from researchers, there will be many questions some of which are addressed in this section....

-- What happens if I don’t want to make the research output public? There will always be a variety of circumstances where it is not possible to deposit, for example where a researcher does not wish to go public with their research immediately, because they wish to publish further, or where commercial reasons exist or where there are copyright 
issues (considered below). In these cases the research output should be deposited but only the metadata will be exposed in the PR the item will not be passed into ERA until permission is given.

-- What happens if the publisher does not agree? You should try to avoid assigning the copyright to the publisher or granting them an exclusive license. Rather, you should aim to grant a nonexclusive licence which leaves you with the ability to deposit the work in the University Repositories and possibly make it available in other digital forms.

-- How should I communicate this with the publisher? There will be advice and guidance on how to achieve this and template forms to show how you can amend Publisher copyright forms.

-- What about research outputs which are not journal articles? The PR and ERA can accept most research output types including books, book chapters, conference proceedings, performances, video, audio etc. In some cases – for example books not available electronically – the PR/ERA will hold only metadata, with the possibility of links to catalogues so that users can find locations....

-- What about my research data? Data supporting research outputs is also required by RCs to be made available? and this can be included where requested. IS is establishing a working group to consider research data issues....

-- I would like to publish in an author-pays Open Access journal. Does this mean that I also have to deposit?  Yes, please deposit the research output in the normal manner....

Unfortunately, far too much of what is stated in "coglanglab's" well-meaning blog posting about Conyers' Bill H.R. 801 is simply incorrect, starting with its title:

"Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals"

No, the Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is not considering killing open-access journals; it is considering killing NIH's right to mandate that its fundees must deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that have been published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. The Bill has nothing to do with open-access journals.

"A recent movement has led to the creation of open-access journals, which do not charge access fees. This movement has gained traction at universities (e.g., Harvard) and also at government agencies."

The "open-access journal movement" has indeed been gaining some traction, but this has next to nothing to do with either the Conyers Bill or the Harvard and NIH mandates, which have nothing to do with open-acesss journal publishing: Harvard and NIH mandate that faculty and fundees deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that are published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals.

"NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication."

No, the NIH did no such thing. It required the researchers they fund to deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals -- and to make those deposits openly accessible within a year of publication."

Fortunately for the for-profit journal system, Congress is considering H.R. 801, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies."

The issue has nothing to do with for-profit vs. nonprofit journal publication. The publishers lobbying against the NIH policy include not only for-profit publishers but nonprofit publishers such as the American Chemical Society and the American Physiological Society.

"The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works. Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication."

The "conceit" of Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is that the government should not be allowed to require researchers to make their research open access even when the research has been supported by public funds because that could interfere with the publishers' right to make a return on their investment.

(The Conyers Bill will fail because the public investment in research is incomparably greater than the publisher's, because the government's contractual conditions on that funding predate any agreement the fundee makes with the publisher, and because repository deposit can be mandated even without requiring that access to the deposit be immediately made open access: The repositories' semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can tide over would-be users access needs during any embargo.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.) Note that the Harvard proposal is to deposit institutionally and export centrally. Bravo!

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Harvard Medical School (US* proposed-institutional-mandate)
http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/home.asp

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data]
http://repository.countway.harvard.edu/xmlui/handle/cr1782/137

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

http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/2009/030609/publishing.shtml

...Many [NIH-funded] scientists are still learning what it takes to comply with the NIH public access policy... Some researchers also wonder how they can make their work publicly accessible even if it is not funded by the NIH.

These issues could be solved by a new open-access policy under discussion in the Harvard medical community. A team at the Countway Library [at Harvard Medical School] has developed a two-pronged strategy to help scientists smoothly manage the latest changes in scholarly publishing and further expand the open-access model at Harvard.

A longer-term solution is an HMS-wide open-access policy and repository to streamline NIH-funded article deposits and to showcase the range of scholarly contributions by medical, public health and dental faculties...

A voluntary online repository called HMScholar already exists at the Countway website....

Under an open-access policy, the system would automatically make the NIH-required submissions to PubMed Central and enable the University to track NIH compliance better.

The policy would be similar to those adopted last February by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and in June by the Harvard Law School. The online collection would be integrated with the new University-wide open-access institutional repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) in Cambridge, said Amy Brand at the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. Plans call for DASH to use the Countway mechanism for deposits to PubMed Central....

Lawrence Lessig (LL) has just written "John Conyers and Open Access," a trenchant and useful critique of the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn the NIH OA mandate. But there is one crucial error in LL's critique: It conflates (1) (Gold) OA publishing (in OA journals) with (2) (Green) OA self-archiving (of articles published in conventional non-OA journals).

What the NIH is mandating is Green OA, not Gold OA. So what the Conyers Bill is trying to overturn is Green OA self-archiving mandates (of which there are 65 others, besides NIH's), not Gold OA publishing mandates (of which there are none).

It is hence somewhat misleading to write in this context, as LL does, that

"Open access journals... have adopted a different publishing model... [and] NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge."

What both NIH and FRPAA are and were exploring is mandating Green OA as the better way to spread knowledge. Once Green OA becomes universal, we already have OA. Whether or not -- and if so when -- this will in turn lead to a transition to the Gold OA publishing model is another question, and a hypothetical one. And it is certainly not what NIH is mandating and the Conyers Bill is attempting to unmandate.

It is true, of course, as LL states, that "[p]roprietary publishers, however, didn't like it" [i.e., the NIH OA Mandate], but not because Gold OA was being mandated: Publishers would be perfectly happy if NIH were foolish enough to take some of the scarce funds it uses to support research itself and redirect them instead to paying publishers for Gold OA publishing fees (especially at today's going rates). (In fact, I believe publishers even did some lobbying in that direction, trying to persuade NIH to mandate Gold OA instead of Green OA).

But what it was that publishers were actually unhappy with was mandatory Green OA self-archiving. The majority of journals have already formally endorsed elective Green OA self-archiving by their authors, because of the growing pressure from the worldwide research community for OA. But only about 10-15% of authors actually bother to take them up on it, by self-archiving of their own accord, whereas Green OA mandates by funders and institutions will eventually raise that percentage to 100%.

And that's the real reason publishers are lobbying against Green OA mandates: They feel it might one day make the subscription/license model unsustainable, and may hence eventually induce downsizing and transition to the Gold OA model for the recovery of the (much reduced) costs of publication.

And it might. But that is all just hypothetical. Treating the actual NIH mandate (and the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it) as if it were a mandate to convert to Gold OA publishing (rather than just a mandate to self-archive papers published in non-OA journals, so as to make them [Green] OA) not only mischaracterizes what it is that NIH is actually mandating, but it upgrades a mere hypothetical conjecture into what then looks as if it were an actual, current, direct effect!

Talking about Green OA as if it were tantamount to making subscription/license publishing unsustainable is actually playing into the hands of the anti-OA lobby. This doomsday scenario has often been used as a scare-tactic by anti-OA publishers themselves (sometimes with temporary success) to blur the difference between Green and Gold OA as well as the difference between hypothesis and reality. But in most cases this only succeeds as a temporary delaying tactic. Eventually the illogic is reversed, and the optimal and inevitable prevails.

I think it is both a factual and a strategic mistake for the pro-OA lobby to (inadvertently) reinforce this doomsday tactic on the part of the anti-OA lobby by conflating Green and Gold OA along much the same lines, especially with respect to what the NIH mandate is actually mandating (and even if one's heart is really with Gold OA!).

Yes, universal Green OA might eventually lead to a transition to Gold OA. Or it might not. But that is not what the NIH mandate is about, or for. And it certainly is not what the NIH is mandating.

The NIH is mandating that its fundees provide (Green) OA, now, not in some hypothetical golden future, so that all research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the R&D industry, teachers, students, the developing world, and the tax-paying public for whose benefit most research is being funded and conducted -- rather than, as now, just those who can afford subscription/license access to the publisher's proprietary version -- may access, read, use, apply and build upon the research that research funders fund, research institutions conduct, and tax-payers' money pays for.

Research is not funded or conducted to provide revenues to the publishing industry. Publishers are service-providers for the research community and they are currently being paid in full through subscriptions. Perhaps one day they will instead be paid through publication fees, perhaps not. That is not what is at issue with the NIH mandate: OA is.

The publishing tail is trying to wag the research dog with the Conyers Bill, by treating research as if it were no different from Disney cartoons. The tax-paying public needs to reassert mastership.

[See also James Boyle's brilliant spoof on the Conyers Bill in the Financial Times: "Misunderestimating open science."]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)

OA Self-Archiving Policy: University of St. Gallen

Full list of institutions

University of St. Gallen (SWITZERLAND* institutional-mandate)
http://www.unisg.ch

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data from ROAR] http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch

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

The new 'Reglement zur Open Access Policy' (signed December 15th, 2008 by the Senate, the academic governing body of the university) contains rules for the researchers at the University of St. Gallen. These rules go beyond the former 'Open Access Policy' (signed November 12th, 2007 also by the Senate). The new regulations are mandatory.

There are three parts in the new regulations: General provisions, Obligations and Rights of researchers.

General statement: The results of the research at the University of St. Gallen should be open to public access.

Obligations : The researchers are obliged to retain the necessary rights for self-archiving under OA (Open Access) prior to publication. If this is only possible with a temporally limited embargo, they have to fix this period in the contract. If there is a possibility to publish the post-print version under OA instead of the pre-print one the researchers have to choose the former.

There is, however, a phrase in the regulations "soweit möglich", meaning "where possible", because the university is aware of the situation that there are publishers who do not allow self-archiving under OA.

The full text (post-print or pre-print) has to be published in the institutional repository of the research platform of the University of St. Gallen (http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch) at the moment of acceptance by a publisher. Further, the university encourages the researchers to publish in OA-journals.

Rights: The university supports the researchers concerning all matters of OA.

Added to ROARMAP by: Ruedi Lindegger (Coordinator Research-Platform) alexandria AT unisg.ch on 03 Mar 2009

SUMMARY: NIH's Acting Director, Raynard Kington, writes that "NIH [is] open to closer collaboration with institutional [repositories]... [D]irect feeds from [institutional repositories (IRs) are] worthwhile [but] raise important technical and logistical challenges..."
    All technical and logistical challenges to designating Institutional Repositories (IRs) as NIH's preferred locus of direct deposit (followed by "direct feed" to PubMed Central (PMC)) can be successfully met (most already have been):
(1) The SWORD transfer protocol has already solved the problem of automatically exporting IR deposits to other repositories.
(2) "Author approval": Authors are mandated by NIH to deposit, and NIH specifies the locus of deposit.
(3) "Copyright permissions": If copyright is not an issue with PMC deposit, it is even less of an issue with direct institutional deposit in the fundee's own IR.
(4) "Quality control": The IR deposit can be exported by "direct feed" (via SWORD) to PMC, where exactly the same quality controls can be performed as are now being performed by PMC.
(5) "Formats for electronic transfer": The SWORD protocol does the electronic transfer, and the format for deposit of the author's final, refereed, revised draft is exactly the same.
    The benefits of NIH/institutional collaboration on direct feeds will be enormous, and will far exceed the current reach of the NIH mandate. This should also be cited in the defense of NIH's historically invaluable public access policy against the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it.

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In his "Analysis of Comments and Implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy," Dr. Raynard Kington, Acting Director, National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes that

"direct feeds from [institutional repositories (IRs) are]... worthwhile... but... raise important technical and logistical challenges regarding author approval, copyright permissions, quality control, and formats for electronic transfer. The NIH remains open to closer collaboration with institutional [repositories] and will consider this issue as the Policy matures."

It is virtually certain that all technical and logistical challenges to designating Institutional Repositories (IRs) as NIH's preferred locus of direct deposit (followed by "direct feed" to PubMed Central (PMC)) can be successfully met (and most already have been: see below). The benefits of NIH/institutional collaboration on direct feeds will be enormous, and will far exceed the current reach of the NIH mandate (which is now restricted to the 80,000 articles a year resulting from NIH funding, no more, no less).

The NIH mandate touches the institutions of every one of NIH's fundees. If the NIH mandate preferentially encourages its fundees to deposit their NIH-funded output in their own respective IRs (with direct feed to to PMC therefrom, instead of direct deposit in PMC, as now), it will also motivate their fundees to deposit -- and motivate their fundees' institutions to mandate the deposit of -- the rest of their institutional output in their IR too, not just the NIH-funded fraction of it. Not so if the 80,000 NIH articles must be directly deposited institution-externally (in PMC): That has the exact opposite effect, competing with and complicating, hence demotivating institutional deposits and mandates. (And we must not forget that the institutions are the universal providers of all research output: funded and unfunded, across all disciplines.)

The "technical and logistical challenges" for "direct feeds" from IRs to PMC have already been largely met:

(1) The SWORD transfer protocol has already solved the problem of automatically exporting IR deposits to other respoitories.

(2) "Author approval" is not a problem at all: Authors are mandated by NIH to deposit, and NIH specifies the locus of deposit. Currently that designated locus is PMC. The recommendation here is that the preferred locus of deposit should instead be the author's IR, with the deposit then automatically ported by "direct feed" (via SWORD) to PMC. (Institutional deposit will in fact simplify deposit for authors, increasing their motivation to comply with the NIH mandate.)

(3) "Copyright permissions" are not a problem either: Authors are mandated by NIH to deposit and NIH specifies the locus of deposit. If copyright is not an issue with PMC deposit, it is even less of an issue with direct institutional deposit in the fundee's own IR. (Publisher embargoes can be -- and are -- implemented by IRs just as they are by PMC.)

(4) "Quality control" is not a problem either. Authors are mandated by NIH to deposit their final, refereed, revised draft, and NIH specifies the locus of deposit. The IR deposit can be exported by "direct feed" (via SWORD) to PMC, where exactly the same quality controls can be performed as are now being performed by PMC. (The IR direct-deposit protocol can easily be made to conform to the PMC direct-deposit protocol: they are almost identical already.)

(5) "Formats for electronic transfer" is not a problem either. The SWORD protocol does the electronic transfer, and the format for deposit of the author's final, refereed, revised draft is exactly the same.

It is very welcome and timely news that NIH's Acting Director is "open to closer collaboration with institutional archives." The sooner a collaborative deposit policy, with IR deposit and direct feed to PMC can be adopted and announced, the sooner its potentially enormous knock-on effects will begin to make themselves felt in helping to wake the "slumbering giant" -- the US and global network of universities and research institutes, not only the NIH-funded ones, but all of them: the universal providers of research, worldwide -- to create their own IRs (if they don't have them already) and to mandate the deposit of all of their own research output into them, not just NIH-funded research.

This global enabling effect of the NIH mandate for accelerating and facilitating universal OA should also be cited in the defense of NIH's historically invaluable public access policy against the Conyers Bill's attempt to overturn it.

(And the other research funding councils worldwide, too, should be encouraged to consider the enormous potential OA gains -- at no loss -- from stipulating IR deposit rather than institution-external deposit in their own OA policies as well.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) (funder-mandate):
http://www.sfi.ie

Repository Portal:
http://www.irel-open.ie/

Self-Archiving Policy:

1. All researchers are required to lodge their publications resulting in whole or in part from SFI-funded research in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication.

2. The publication to be so deposited relates to accepted peer-reviewed publications, conference proceedings and technical reports.

3. Publisher’s copyright, licensing and embargo policies must be respected.

4. The protection of intellectual property, in any form, arising from the publication takes precedence over open access depositing and indeed over any form of publication.

5. The time by which open access depositing is to take place ranges from immediately on publication, if possible, up to six months from the date of publication.

6. Institutional and disciplinary repositories should be used in preference to an author’s own website. In the Life Sciences, PubMed Central and/or a future European PubMed Central should be used. Information on the Irish universities’ institutional repositories is available through IREL-Open

7. The publication to be deposited is to be the publisher’s version, if permitted, or the author’s final version. It is required that there be a link from the deposited version to the publication site, and also that the DOI (Document Object Identifier) be used.

8. On publication, whether in print or online with a DOI, metadata must be deposited in an open access (institutional, disciplinary, other) repository. Metadata comprises at a minimum the full bibliographic data.

9. Suitable open access repositories should make provision for long-term preservation of, and continuing free public access to, their contents.

10. Research monographs are within the scope of peer-reviewed publications. They must be deposited in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication, subject to the copyright which has been assigned to the publisher.

11. Wherever possible supporting research data should be made available in an open access repository at the time of publication of the research publication. Research data includes associated metadata and supporting documentation.

12. In the interest of reproducibility of scientific results, wherever possible, software should be made available in an open access repository at the time of publication of the research publication. Software is understood to include documentation on usage, and on methods and algorithms employed.

[As the Conyers Bill in the US seeks to undo the good done by the NIH Public Access Policy, here is some sunnier news from Spain. It is no exaggeration that open access to health research advances research progress and saves lives, whereas the Conyers Bill seeks to protect publisher access to profits at public expense. Iberia has different priorities. Many thanks to Eloy Rodrigues and Alicia Lopez Medina for posting this information about Spain's Draft Open Access Law on the American Scientist Open Access Forum.]

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Draft of the National Law of Science in Spain includes Open Access.

A draft of the National Law of Science in Spain has been released and includes a chapter dedicated to Open Access.

Article 33 of the draft states (translated from Spanish):

1. The agents of the Spanish System of Science and Technology will promote the development of institutional or aggregated repositories to allow open access to the publications of their researchers

2. The researchers, whose research had been granted with public funds shall make publicly available a digital version of their own final draft (peer-reviewed and accepted for publication) as soon as possible, but not later than 6 months after the official date of the publication of this final draft.

3. This final version will be made publicly available in open access repositories, disciplinary or institutional.

4. The public digital version deposited in the repositories can be used in the evaluation processes by Public Administrations.

The inclusion of Open Access in this document represents an important and significant commitment in support of Open Access and repositories in Spain.

The draft document is available online from https://lcyt.fecyt.es/