Self-Archiving Mandates

SUMMARY: Imre Simon asks:
Why are Institutional Repositories (IRs) near empty unless mandated, whereas Central Repositories (CRs) like ArXiv and  CiteSeerX appear to be full without a mandate? 
    Here is the answer:
    (1) Authors deposit papers directly in Arxiv, whereas CiteseerX (like Google Scholar) is harvested from authors' websites.
    (2) The crucial factor is central vs. institutional locus-of-deposit. Search is always at the CR level.
    (3) These CRs (Arxiv for physics, Citeseerx for computer science) are fuller than IRs because: (3a) An entire discipline is bigger than an institution. (3b) The global unmandated deposit rate is about 15% of OA's total target: all annual journal articles, across all disciplines and institutions. (3c) But deposit rate is the ratio of deposits to total output, which is much bigger for an entire discipline than a single institution. Physics and Computer Science have been depositing, one centrally, one institutionally, unmandated, for years, but OA's problem is all the disciplines that are not.
    (4) Locus-of-deposit and mandates are closely related issues.
    (5) Deposit mandates can be either funder or institutional mandates.
    (6) Funder mandates only cover funded research, and not all research is funded. 
    (7) But all research output is institutional.
    (8) So if all institutions mandated OA, that would generate universal OA.
    (9) So what is most needed is universal institutional OA mandates.
    (10) Funder mandates would help far more if they could facilitate the deposit not only of the research they fund, but all research.
    (11) To do this, funder mandates need only change one small detail. This would lose none of their funded content, but could help gain the rest of the output of each of its fundees' institutions.
    (12) Funders need to stipulate the fundee's own IR as the preferred locus-of-deposit for complying with the funder's deposit mandate.
    (13) The fundees' deposits can be harvested to CRs from IRs.
    (14) The issue of search and functionality at the harvester level is a red herring. 
    (15) The special features of the few disciplines that began spontaneously self-archiving long ago, unmandated, have nothing to do with the IR vs CR deposit-locus issue; hence unmandated CRs do not offer a viable alternative to universal IR mandates.

---

Imre Simon wrote (in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

"It is an unquestionable reality that unmandated IR's [Institutional Repositories] remain all but empty.

"[In contrast] ArXiv, CiteSeerX, Repec and SSRN are the four examples of large thematic repositories [Central Repositories, CRs] I know of which are populated without a mandate.

"One wonders why?"

The answer is highly instructive. Let me try to map it out as 15 simple points, one following from the other:

(1) There is a profound difference between (1a) Arxiv (and perhaps also SSRN), which are Central Repositories [CRs] in which authors deposit papers directly, and (1b) CiteseerX (and partly also Repec), which are harvested CRs, their papers and metadata being harvested from local repositories, usually at the author's host institution, where they have been directly deposited. Harvested CRs are like OAIster -- or, for that matter, Google Scholar!

(2) The difference is crucial, because central vs. institutional locus-of-deposit is what is really under discussion here; no one is disputing that navigation and search are done, and should be done, at the central level, irrespective of whether CR deposit is direct or CR contents are harvested.

(3) There are several reasons why these particular CRs (Arxiv, Repec, SSRN, and the biggest of all, Citeseerx) are fuller than IRs:

    (3a) An entire discipline is bigger than a single (multidisciplinary but local) institution

    (3b) These CRs contain only the deposits of those individual authors and disciplines that do deposit spontaneously, unmandated; these amount to about 15% of OA's total target output, and that is well known. The problem is the remaining 85% -- which will be pretty homogeneously represented in each individual multidisciplinary institution's IR (each one 85%-empty if unmandated).

    (3c) But there is a systematic denominator bias here, for the success of an IR in capturing its institutional research output needs to be reckoned as the ratio of its annual deposited papers to the total annual paper output for that institution, whereas for the success of a CR must be reckoned as the ratio of its annual deposited papers to the total annual output for the discipline or disciplines the CR covers (worldwide)! For certain disciplines and subdisciplines -- such as High Energy Physics, Astrophysics, Economics and Computer Science -- this ratio will be quite high. But those are not OA's problem disciplines, because they are depositing already, whether centrally or locally, unmandated, and have been doing so for years. OA's problem is all the disciplines that are not doing so, for those are the main basis of the 85% emptiness of IRs.

(4) The reason all this matters -- and the reason it is so important not to conflate direct-deposit CRs with harvested CRs, nor to conflate deposit locus with search locus -- is that the locus-of-deposit issue is very deeply interrelated with the issue of mandates.

(5) Deposit mandates can be funder mandates or institutional mandates.

(6) Funder mandates only cover funded research, and not all (perhaps not even most) research output is funded; moreover, this would be true even if all funders already mandated OA.

(7) In contrast, (virtually) all research output (and hence all of OA's target content) is institutional. Institutions are the universal research providers.

(8) So if all institutions mandated OA, that would generate universal OA.

(9) Hence if all of OA's target content is institutional output, it follows that, inasmuch as the 85% of research that is not being deposited spontaneously will be deposited once it is mandated, what is most needed is universal institutional OA mandates.

(10) Funder mandates already help, for their subset of OA's total target content, but they would help far more if they could facilitate the deposit not only of the research they fund, but all research: in other words, if funder mandates could help induce institutions, too, to mandate OA, for all of their own research output, not just the subset mandated by the funder.

(11) In order to be able to do this, funder mandates need only standardize one implementational detail, one that does not lose any of their own target content, but has the potential to extend the reach of the funder mandate to touch the rest of the research output of each one of its fundees' institutions.

(12) Funders need to stipulate the fundee's own IR as the preferred locus-of-deposit for complying with the funder's deposit mandate (with an interim backup repository like DEPOT -- which was created to host deposits until the depositor's institution sets up an IR of its own, to which the DEPOT deposits can then be automatically exported: currently, DEPOT has had only 66 deposits in its nearly 2 years of existence, and that is because most UK funders are either requiring CR deposit or leaving it open which repository their choose fundees deposit in).

(13) The contents can be harvested to CRs from IRs.

(14) The issue of search and functionality at the harvester level is a red herring. (Citeseerx is a perfect example of the functionality of a CR that harvests from distributed IRs.)

(15) Nor do the special features of the few disciplines -- such as computer science, the first, and physics and economics, which took spontaneously to self-archiving long ago, without waiting for a mandate -- have anything to do with either (a) the IR/CR issue, or (b) viable alternatives to mandates, because no one has so far demonstrated any alternatives (apart from waiting and waiting) that can generate the 85% of content missing from IRs, and from OA as a whole.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: In “Authors: I don’t care where you deposit, just do it”, Gavin Baker suggests that it does not matter where authors deposit their papers to make them Open Access (OA): in an Institutional Repository (IR) or a Central Repository (CR). Nor, more importantly, does it matter where authors' funders mandate that they should deposit them, because IR deposits can be harvested to CRs and vice versa. I point out that this apparent symmetry between IRs and CRs with respect to the harvestability from one to the other (in either direction) is irrelevant today because most of the target content for OA is not yet even being deposited at all, anywhere: In other words, authors are decidedly not "just doing it." Nor are institutions -- the universal providers of OA's target output, both funded and unfunded, across all fields -- "just mandating that authors do it." Apart from the tiny number (about 30) that have already mandated deposit, institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, until they wake up and mandate the deposit of their own research output in their own IRs. Not all research output is funded, but all research output is institutional: Hence institutions are the universal providers of all OA's target content. Although not many funders mandate deposit either, the few that already do (about 30) can help wake the slumbering giant, because one funder mandate impinges on the research output of fundees at many different institutions. But there is a fundamental underlying asymmetry governing where funders should mandate deposit: As Prof. Bernard Rentier (founder of EuropenScholar and Rector of U. Liège, one of the first universities to adopt an institutional deposit mandate) has recently stressed, convergent funder mandates that require deposit in the fundee's own IR will facilitate the adoption of deposit mandates by institutions (the slumbering giant), whereas divergent funder mandates that require CR deposit (or are indifferent between CR and IR deposit) will only capture the research they fund, while needlessly handicapping (or missing the opportunity to facilitate) efforts to get institutional deposit mandates adopted and complied with too. The optimal solution for both institutions and funders is therefore: "Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally".

---

The well-meaning recommendations of Gavin Baker (GB) in “Authors: I don’t care where you deposit, just do it” are based on some implicit misunderstandings and unrealistic assumptions about the status quo today (OA < 15%) and what is practically required to get us from that status quo to 100% OA, at long last.

Locus-of-Deposit Matters for OA Mandates. Getting us to 100% OA at long last is precisely what OA deposit mandates are all about. And that in turn is what makes locus-of-deposit the crucial matter that Prof. Rentier has fully recognized it to be: The lesson for GB is that if you care about getting authors to deposit, you need to care about where you mandate deposit!

Symmetry of IR/CR InterHarvestability Is Irrelevant Without Deposits, and Deposit Mandates. GB makes the simple, indeed simplistic assumption of symmetry, insofar as harvestability is concerned: There are Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Central Repositories (CRs) and they are all interoperable, hence inter-harvestable: “What difference does it make where the OA content is deposited? It can be harvested in either direction!” The difference is very simple: Most of it is not deposited anywhere, and what we are talking about is choosing the fastest and surest policy to get it all deposited (and hence OA).

Next to No Deposits Without Deposit Mandates. Everyone (including GB) is at last coming to realize that the way to get OA's target content to be deposited and thereby made OA is by adopting deposit mandates, because most researchers (85%) are simply not depositing, whereas most researchers say they will deposit, willingly, if mandated; and it turns out that when it is indeed mandated, most researchers actually do deposit.

Who Should Mandate Deposit, Where? The apparent symmetry of cross-harvestability to/from IRs and CRs (once everything is indeed deposited) certainly does not answer these two questions. A closer examination of the question of who is to mandate deposit, and where discloses profound and interrelated asymmetries. The two candidates for mandating deposit are authors' employers (i.e., their institutions) and authors' funders. And the two candidate loci for deposit are the authors' own institutions (IRs) or various thematic or geographic collections (CRs).

Not All Research Is Funded, But All Research Is Institutional. There are tens of thousands of research-active universities, research institutions, and major R&D organizations worldwide. These are the "institutions" and they generate virtually all of OA's primary target content: refereed journal articles. There are also a few thousand major research funders, public and private, that fund some (but by no means all) research output.

Asymmetry I: Funder Mandates Only Cover Part of OA’s Target Content. And here we have the first profound asymmetry that GB overlooks: All of OA's target output is produced by institutions (unaffiliated researchers represent such a minute fraction of the total that it would be absurd to base overall OA policy on this tiny special case). But not all -- in fact perhaps not even most -- of OA's target output is funded. So if CRs are to be filled by funder mandates, they will not be filled with all and perhaps not even most of OA's target content even if all funders were to mandate it -- and, crucially, most funders still don't mandate deposit at all.

The “slumbering Giant”: Most Institutions Do Not Yet Mandate Deposit. The fact that most institutions don’t mandate is the practical gist of the entire locus-of-deposit issue: How does locus-of-deposit affect probability-of-mandate adoption (and compliance)? Without the mandates (and mandate compliance), we do not have the OA.

Funder Mandates Can Wake the slumbering Giant – If They Stipulate Institutional IRs As Locus-of-Deposit. Now the coverage-asymmetry we have already pointed out -- that all research originates from institutions but not all research is funded -- already suggests that there may not be parity between IRs and CRs: If funders were the only ones to mandate deposit, and they either stipulated that papers had to be deposited in a CR, or they left it open-ended whether they were deposited in a CR or an IR, then that would leave all unfunded (institutional!) content undeposited, and no form of CR-to-IR harvesting could fill the IRs with their missing content. This would remain true even if (mirabile dictu) all funders were to mandate deposit. It is the institution/funder, IR/CR coverage asymmetry, which is irremediable by harvesting.

Institutions Are the Universal OA Providers. Now note that the reverse is not true, and this is another aspect of the coverage-asymmetry: If (mirabile dictu) all institutions were to mandate deposit, then that would indeed generate 100% OA, and funders and CRs would indeed be able to harvest all their target content from the CRs. The trouble is, and remains, that all institutions do not yet mandate deposit; only a tiny number of them (about 30) do today.

Funder Mandates Reach and Bind Multiple Distributed Institutions. It is likewise true that only a tiny number of funders (also about 30) as yet mandate deposit. (Perfect symmetry so far.) But because the number of funders is far smaller than the number of institutions, and because some of the mandating funders are rather big ones, the actual proportion of mandating funders (as well as the amount and proportion of OA content that they cover) is substantially higher than the current proportion of mandating institutions (and the amount and proportion of OA content that they cover).

Asymmetry II: Funder Mandates Can Jump-Start Institutional Mandates – If Locus-of-Deposit Is Convergent Rather than Divergent. This is the second IR/CR asymmetry, and the most important one, for with a simple change in the stipulated locus-of-deposit of these few funder mandates (and future ones) -- from CR or IR/CR deposit to IR deposit -- funder mandates can, at no loss to themselves, help to jump-start a burst of IRs and IR mandates from the “slumbering giant,” the distributed worldwide set of institutions: the universal providers of all OA content. Every single funder mandate in fact touches on many institutions: the institutions of each one of its fundees. If funders mandate CR deposit only, or even if they leave it open whether deposit is in a CR or an IR, they miss the opportunity to systematically motivate and facilitate IR-creation and mandate-adoption by institutions. Suppose funders instead stipulate the fundee's own IR as the designated locus of deposit (allowing, where needed, the option of depositing in interim back-up repositories like DEPOT, [currently languishing with only 66 deposits!], explicitly designed to host deposits temporarily for institutions that have not yet set up IRs of their own, ready to be exported to the depositor's institution automatically as soon as they have set up their own IR):

Funders Motivate Institutions to Mandate and Authors to Comply. The result of funder mandates designation the fundee's IR as locus of deposit is that funders greatly increase the potential scope and power of their deposit mandates, far beyond only their own funded output: With institutional authors depositing funder-mandated papers in their own IRs, not only are authors thereby motivated to deposit the rest of their output in their IRs too, but their institution is motivated to capture the rest of its institutional output by mandating deposit too. (The slumbering giant awakes!)

Collaboration and Convergence Versus Competition and Divergence Between Institutional and Funder Mandates. If funder mandates thus collaborate and converge on locus-of-deposit with institutional mandates, by stipulating IR deposit (at the unitary local source: the universal provider), instead of competing and diverging needlessly on locus of deposit, nothing whatsoever is lost and everything is gained. Automatic harvesting is indeed there, ready to collect funder-mandated IR deposits into the funder's preferred CRs where desired, because the deposits themselves have been done: Institutions are well placed and only too willing to cooperate in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the grant fulfillment conditions of the funders of their researchers. And the more that institutions are involved in seeing to it that their researchers do their depositing in compliance with funder requirements, the sooner the token will fall for them, so they realize that the very same solution can and should be applied to all their institutional research output, funded and unfunded, in all areas, by adopting an institutional mandate too.

Institution/Funder Complementarity and Synergy in Reaching Universal OA. It is from the fundamental asymmetry underlying the question of locus-of-deposit and direction of harvesting that the institution/funder complementarity and synergy emerges: It has next to nothing to do with the symmetry of harvestability, given the deposits, and everything to do with ensuring that the deposits actually get done! (And this is without even mentioning the third asymmetry underlying the absurdity of institutions having to back-harvest their own institutional output because it has been deposited willy-nilly institution-externally instead of being deposited institutionally in the first place, and then automatically exported wherever else desired.)

I will reply to the rest of GB's posting via quote/commentary:

If requiring deposit is left to universities, their repositories will only contain publications by their researchers.

(1) But the total of all institutional research output is the total of all research output, hence 100% of OA’s target content. (“Institutions” includes all universities, research institutes, and major R&D organizations.)

(2) Not so for the total of all funded output.

(3) And the fundamental problem for OA today is that the institutions – the slumbering giant, the universal providers – do not yet require deposit. Only a tiny number of them do.

(4) If (as is simply assumed here) all institutions did mandate deposit for all of their research article output, we would have 100% OA.

(5) The issue, therefore, is: How can locus-of-deposit be used to help induce all institutions to mandate deposit?

Since some researchers have multiple institutional affiliations, and since any given publication may be authored by researchers across multiple institutions, it is easy to see that researchers will ultimately have to deposit their publications in as many repositories as there are institutions involved in their research.

We are talking about one, single locus of direct deposit, particularly for funder-mandated deposits, and whether that one deposit should be in the author’s own IR or a non-institutional CR, if the purpose is not just to deposit that one paper to make it OA, but to wake the slumbering giant to mandate depositing all institutional output to make it OA.

For an author affiliated with multiple institutions, that still only means a one-time IR deposit, in the IR of one of his institutions, followed by export to the IRs of the rest of his institutions. That has nothing to do with the question of symmetry for the locus of deposit of funder mandates that cover multiple institutions.

This trend seems to rest on the naive notion that, in the Internet era, it is somehow still necessary for researchers to conduct their work solely through the channels of a university.

It is not clear what futuristic scenario GB may have in mind, but the reality today is that researchers are employed and paid by their institutions to conduct and report their (funded and unfunded) research.

It is understandable that universities may wish to host a complete collection of the research published by their faculty, but nowadays that can easily be accomplished by importing it automatically from the more complete collections of the distributed Web.

Yes, just as manna from heaven could be harvested to feed the hungry! The trouble is, most research (85%) is not yet deposited anywhere on the distributed Web today, hence nowhere to be harvested to or from, because deposit has not yet been mandated. We are talking here about how locus-of-deposit, particularly for funder mandates, can increase the probability of waking the slumbering giant (institutions) to mandate deposit of all of their output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, institutions, languages and nations. That way we might one day indeed have a “complete collection” of OA research output globally.

Recall also that universities are not the universal providers of all research output. There will always be independent scholars, as well as publications by authors in government, non-profits and think tanks, and corporations.

Government, non-profits, think-tanks and corporations are all “institutions,” can all create their own (individual or consortial) IRs, and can mandate deposit in them. And funders can mandate deposit in those IRs by those of their fundees working at those institutions.

The OA philosophy is global. It cannot be reduced to a single university.

No one is reducing OA to a single university. OA content is distributed across a global network of institutions, the universal providers. And the idea is not reduction but expansion – of the practice and policy of depositing the research output of all those institutions in their own IRs, through collaborative, convergent rather than competing and divergent deposit mandates from both institutions and funders.

Institutions: Require that researchers ensure their publication ends up in your IR, wherever they initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to depositing in a funder or thematic repository, they’re responsible for working with the IR manager to ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the IR allows users to set up automatic harvesting themselves, either for a single publication or for all the author’s future publications, if they don’t want to talk to the IR manager.

All splendid alternatives for institutions that already mandate deposit! But the trouble is that the giant is still slumbering, and we are talking about how to wake him. If he were already awake -- i.e., if all or most or even many institutions were already mandating deposit for all of their research output -- then locus-of-deposit would be far less crucial, and GB’s symmetry assumptions and alternatives would be perfectly fine.

The trouble is that that is not at all where we are today. The giant is fast asleep; indeed he has grotesquely overslept! And this panorama of alternative ways to do what he is not doing, nor thinking of doing, is not going to wake him up and induce him to do it.

Whereas convergent IR mandates from funders have a good chance of serving as the wake-up call...

Funders: Require that grantees ensure their publication ends up in your repository, wherever they initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to depositing in an institutional repository, they’re responsible for working with your repository manager to ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the repository allows users to set up automatic harvesting themselves, either for a single publication or for all the author’s future publications, if they don’t want to talk to the repository manager.

In the current status quo, when only a tiny proportion of funders is mandating deposit at all, and an even tinier proportion of institutions is doing so, this advice is perhaps a tad premature... for existing IR content.

But it would certainly be a good idea to couple IR deposit mandates from funders with clear instructions on how the deposits may be automatically exported to the funder’s preferred CR (if any), as well as how compliance with the deposit mandate is to be verified as a fulfillment condition of the grant, with the collaboration of the fundee’s institution, IR software (for a funder-name metadata tag) and IR management.

This seems more flexible and accommodating to all preferences. In particular, it’s superior to the suggestion that funders should require authors to deposit in their institution’s repository, because [1] not every institution has an IR. Indeed, [2] not every funded researcher may even have an institution. The ultimate goal is opening all research, regardless of where the authors work or who funded the research.

[1] Every institution is just (a) a piece of free software, (b) a $1000 linux server plus (c) a few days of sysad set-up time from having its own IR. In the meanwhile, there are interim alternatives like the DEPOT or multi-institution consortial IR solutions like the Whiterose Consortium.

[2] Unaffiliated researchers are a red herring, when we are talking about a collaborative policy that will greatly enhance the probability of mandating deposit for the overwhelming majority of OA’s target output that is produced by researchers affiliated with an institution. Moreover, universities have a long and admirable tradition of hosting the work of unaffiliated scholars (and some IRs already do).

In summary: The symmetry between Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Central Repositories (CRs) with respect to harvestability the harvestability from one to the other (in either direction) is irrelevant today because most of the target content for Open Access (OA) is not yet being deposited at all. Convergent funder mandates that require IR deposit will facilitate the adoption of deposit mandates by institutions (the universal research providers), whereas divergent funder mandates that require CR deposit (or are indifferent between CR and IR deposit) will needlessly handicap (or fail to facilitate) efforts to get institutional deposit mandates adopted and complied with. The universal, synergistic solution for both institutions and funders is: Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally.

Gavin Baker comments:

"Every research funder should mandate OA to the research it funds.
Every institution that produces research (college, universities, research institutions) should mandate OA to the research it produces.
Every researcher should ensure her research is OA."

Noble wishes. But alas not being fulfilled -- and it's been a long wait. That's why specifying institutional locus-of-deposit for existing funder-mandates matters: to help make these wishes come true instead of just continuing to hope they will come true of their own accord.

"[P]ractice has shown that policy is significantly more effective than unenforceable exhortations to authors in general. So our question is not whether to mandate OA, but how"

Indeed. But exhortations to mandate are not effective either! So this is an exhortation to make a specific modification in existing (funder) mandates to make them more effective in generating further (institutional) mandates.

"Where he’s wrong: Dr. Harnad repeats...“Not All Research Is Funded, But All Research Is Institutional”... he weakens this statement to 'virtually all'..."

Not all researchers have fingers -- only "virtually all" do: That does not mean it cannot be mandated that the deposit keystrokes need to be done.

"[N]ot all academic journal literature is written by authors at colleges, universities, or research institutions"

Fine. This changes nothing regarding the potential benefits of funder mandates stipulating IRs as the default locus of deposit. As noted, where the fundee has no IR, they can and should deposit in a back-up CR such as DEPOT.

"Institutional mandates won’t touch these [unaffiliated] authors (by definition). Funder mandates may touch some, though I’d suspect that most such research is unfunded"

That makes this case even more irrelevant. This is about funder-mandates inducing fundees' institutions to adopt institution-mandates. No IR? Or no Instiutution? Deposit in the DEPOT -- and let's not let this minuscule number of exceptions obscure the potential benefits of funder mandates stipulating institutional deposit as a rule!

"(Harnad notes that some funders do offer “back-up” repositories for grantees without IRs, but without endorsing this flexibility.)"

I did indeed endorse it, many, many times: And, in case of doubt, I endorse it here too.

"Harnad also deftly re-defines the traditional meaning of “institution” in “IR”, to mean “any organization whose employees might ever produce research”... As a result, he reduces further the number of “unaffiliated” researchers"

Yes. And your point is...?

("Every institution is just (a) a piece of free software, (b) a $1000 linux server plus (c) a few days of sysad set-up time away from having its own IR. In the meanwhile, there are interim alternatives like the DEPOT...")

"Doesn’t it make more sense to tell your employees to deposit in a higher-visibility thematic repository?"

Most definitely not. It makes immeasurably more sense to mandate that both fundees and institutional employees deposit in their own IR (or DEPOT) and let high-visibility CRs harvest the deposits thereafter, because that will generate more institutional mandates. That is in fact the very essence of the point I am making.

"My point about authors with multiple institutional affiliations also goes unheeded. Harnad suggests that this situation “only” requires one deposit, “followed by export to the IRs of the rest of his institutions”. Well, now we’re talking about export, which is exactly what I call for between IRs, thematic, and funder repositories. There’s no difference between exporting from one IR to another and between exporting from a thematic repository to an IR."

That's the symmetry-fallacy again, which is exactly what I was refuting: There's no point "calling for" ("exhorting") the export of nonexistent (because undeposited) content. The point here is about funder-mandates designating institutional deposit in order to generate institutional-mandates (waking the "slumbering giant", "more bang for the research buck," or whatever you want to call it) so as to generate all that missing content!.

"Harnad also understates the resource requirements for adequately maintaining an IR. I’ll let Dorothea Salo answer this point."

Umm -- I'd rather this point was answered by the managers of the few successful, well-stocked IRs that are actually doing what OA IRs are for -- rather than doing anything but (and at high cost)...

"Where I was wrong: Since more research comes out of institutions (as a whole) than is funded (as a whole), institutional mandates offer broader coverage."

No, institutional mandates would offer broader coverage (indeed, universal coverage, if universally adopted). But only 30 have been adopted so far; and so what we are talking about here is how funder-mandates stipulating institutional deposit could induce more institutions to mandate deposit for the rest of their total output, funded and unfunded.

"(But a given funder may sponsor significantly more research than a given institution produces, and there are fewer funders than institutions, so they give more “bang for the buck” as initial targets.)"

Again, the point is not that a funder generates more research than a single institution (though most do), but that a funder generates research at many institutions. That's what will give them "more bang for the buck" if they mandate IR rather than CR deposit. (And we are talking about making this small but important change in existing funder-mandates, not about just wishing for more funder-mandates.)

"[D]o funders have any leverage to encourage institutions to deploy IRs and mandate deposit? I am less sanguine about this than Harnad, but flooding IRs with deposits certainly could have the effect of building institutional constituencies for IRs and thus for institutional mandates."

Sounds like you are and are not sanguine, Gavin!

And funders do have enormous "leverage" with their fundee institutions. But we are not talking about direct leverage to require fundee institututions to create IRs or adopt deposit mandates -- just the indirect leverage that would result from specifying IRs instead of CRs as the funder-mandate's default locus of deposit.

"Therefore: Is there some promise in using funder mandates to prod universities toward institutional mandates? Yes, there’s some. Is it a sure thing? No. Do funders still need to provide a “repository of last resort” to deal with exceptions? Yes."

Agreed! So what are we arguing about?

(Yes, "repositories of last resort" do need to provided -- though it's not clear why they have to be provided by the funder; nor how many of them are really needed. There's plenty of room, for example, in DEPOT, which currently has only 66 deposits after almost two years of existence, simply because funders are mandating direct deposit in their own CRs instead of the fundee's IR -- for which DEPOT was specifically created to serve as the back-up.)

"Is it still easier for funders to monitor compliance and ensure adequate levels of service (including preservation) by requiring grantees to get their work into the funder’s repository, one way or another? Yes."

Here's the way: import/export/harvest them from the IRs (and DEPOTs). And the fundee institutions will be more than happy to collaborate in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the funder's grant fulfillment conditions.

"Require grantees to deposit in their IR, if they have one. Require also that grantees ensure their publication ends up in your repository, wherever they initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to depositing in an institutional repository, they’re responsible for working with your repository manager to ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the repository allows users to set up automatic harvesting themselves, either for a single publication or for all the author’s future publications, if they don’t want to talk to the repository manager."

Yup, that's it! So what are we arguing about, Gavin?

"[Or] Encourage grantees to deposit in their IR, if they have one."

Now that, in contrast, would be useless, just as encouraging ("exhorting," "calling for," "wishing") authors to deposit -- or funders or institutions to mandate -- is useless. What we are talking about is a tiny but concrete and specific change in the implementational details of actual, adopted funder mandates, so as to require institutional (or, as last resort, DEPOT) deposit, in order to generate more institutional mandates. Merely "encouraging" it will generate nothing.

"[T]he risk of backlash if IRs are poorly managed, a factor over which the funder can have little control..."

Why are we speculating about the possibility of full, ill-managed IRs when what we are actually faced with is virtually all IRs (whether well-managed or ill) empty! Necessity is the mother of invention: Fill those IRs with their valuable intended content, and institutions will nurture them as the invaluable assets they will prove to be. Keep fussing instead about the current or future management of idle or nonexistent IRs and you will have years more of idle or nonexistent IRs.

"Funder repositories come with their own cost: the increased potential for government interference in science that comes with greater centralization"

Let's not get carried away! We're talking about published journal articles, made openly accessible, free for all. If they are deposited in each researcher's distributed IRs, they can thence be harvested into multiple CRs. If there is government "interference" (whatever that means) in governmental CRs, there will be plenty of other harvested CRs (e.g. google scholar!) where those came from.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

      

Funder mandates from Canada (FRSQ), Norway (NRC) and Spain (Asturias) now bring the planetary total of Green OA Mandates to 65! (Three new ones in one day; thanks to Peter Suber for news of two of them.)

UK's 21st Green OA Mandate, Planet's 62nd
(Via Peter Suber's OA News)

Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) (UK funder-mandate)
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
http://roar.eprints.org/ http://roar.eprints.org/

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/AboutEPSRC/AccessInfo/ROAccess.htm

The independent study commissioned by Research Councils UK was completed in late 2008. The findings from the study are now being taken forward by the Cross-Council Research Outputs Group and will be used to inform future policy on open access. EPSRC Council agreed at its December meeting to mandate open access publication, but that academics should be able to choose whether they use the green option (ie, self-archiving in an on-line repository) or gold option (ie, pay-to-publish in an open access journal). Further details will be published in spring 2009.

SUMMARY: An Indiana University study (on the Institutional Repository of the University of Southampton) by Xia (2008) has tested the hypothesis that physicists who already habitually self-archive in an Open Access (OA) Central Repository (Arxiv) would be more likely to self-archive in their own institution's OA Institutional Repository (IR). The outcome of the study was that the hypothesis is incorrect: If anything, veteran Arxiv self-archivers are more resistant to IR deposit than ordinary nonarchivers, because they neither wish to change their longstanding locus of deposit, nor do they wish to double-deposit.
   This outcome is quite natural and to be expected. The solution for this relatively small population of seasoned self-archivers is for their institution-external deposits to be automatically imported back into their IRs using the SWORD protocol (which can also be used to export automatically from IRs to central repositories). There is no need for veteran self-archivers to change their practices or to double-deposit.
   It is not the 15% of authors who already self-archive (whether institution-externally or on their own institutional websites) that are the problem for OA: The problem is the 85% who do not yet self-archive. It is in order to set the keystrokes of those nonarchivers in motion at long last -- for their own benefit and that of their employing institutions as well as the tax-paying public that funds their research -- that Green OA self-archiving mandates are now being adopted by their institutions and funders.
   When researchers have been polled (by Alma Swan & Sheridan Brown), the vast majority (95%), across all fields, have responded that they would comply with self-archiving mandates by their institutions and/or their funders (over 80% of them reporting that they would comply willingly). And actual outcome studies (by Arthur Sale) have confirmed that this is indeed what happens, with near-100% self-archiving rates reached within about two years once mandated -- but continuing to languish at the baseline 15% self-archiving rate (30% with incentives ad assistance) if left unmandated.

---

Xia, J. (2008) A Comparison of Subject and Institutional Repositories in Self-archiving Practices. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34 (6):489-495.

(1) The Xia (2008) study's finding is quite correct that many more Southampton physicists self-archive centrally in Arxiv rather than institutionally in Southamtpon University's Institutional Repository (IR). If the same study had been conducted at any other university, the outcome would almost certainly have been identical. The reason is that physicists have been self-archiving centrally in Arxiv since 1991, and today, quite understandably, they have no desire either to switch to local IR self-archiving or to do double-depositing.

(2) This was already known at Southampton, and other institutions know it about their own physicists.

(3) Consequently, it is not at clear why anyone would have expected the opposite result, namely, that longstanding Arxiv self-archivers would be quite happy to switch to local IR self-archiving, or to do double-depositing!

(4) In reality, the problem -- for both OA and for IRs -- is not the physicists who are already self-archiving, regardless of where they are self-archiving. If all researchers were doing what the physicists have been doing since 1991 (and computer scientists have been doing since even earlier), 100% OA would be long behind us, and IRs could all be filled, if we wished, trivially, by simply importing back all their own institution-external deposits, automatically, using something like the SWORD protocol.

(5) The real problem is hence not the minority of spontaneous self-archivers of long standing (globally, spontaneous self-archiving overall hovers at about 15% overall); the problem is the vast majority, which consists of nonarchivers: Of OA's target content -- the annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines and institutions -- 85% is not yet being self-archived. It is for that reason that self-archiving mandates have proved to be necessary.

(6) In choosing to analyze the data on Southampton -- which is indeed a hotbed of OA, OA IRs, OA self-archiving, and OA self-archiving mandates -- this study has unfortunately chosen to analyze the wrong IR and the wrong mandate! It is Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) that has the planet's first and longest standing self-archiving mandate (since 2002-2003), and it is the ECS IR that has a full-text deposit rate near 100%. 

(7) The 2008 study analyzed the self-archiving rate for physicists, in the university-wide IR. But the University as a whole only has a university-wide mandate (and a rather vague one) since April 2008, and even that has not yet been publicized or implemented yet. (The university did have a longer standing requirement to enter metadata in the IR for the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), mostly by library proxy deposit, which is why the study found so many abstracts without full texts therein, for there was no requirement to deposit the full text.)

(8) As a consequence, the study's findings -- although quite accurate regarding the general resistance of veteran Arxiv self-archivers to self-archiving alternatively or additionally in their own institution's IR -- do not really have any bearing on mandates and mandated IR behavior in general.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

[The following is a posting to the American Scientist Open Access Forum by Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège.]

---

Yesterday, Klaus Graf reacted rather strongly to the announcement of the Liège University repository mandate, stating [in the American Scientist Open Access Forum] that its "practice and legal framework is nonsense."

It seems to me that perhaps he may have missed a few essential aspects of this mandate, essentially the way it is handled in practice, the legal wherewithal and the reasons for imposing it.

Below is the English translation of the message I sent to the whole University Community on November 26, 2008. I believe that, rather than a lengthy explanation of how the Liège mandate works, this message tells it all much better.

It may perhaps be useful as well for those who wish to find a way to obtain compliance within their own universities. It demonstrates also that the Liège Mandate is indeed IDOA/DDR (Immediate-Deposit/Optional- Access -- Dual Deposit/Release), to use the latest definitions coined in this forum.

Happy New Year to all !

Bernard Rentier

---

Madame, Monsieur, Cher(e) Collègue,

The increase in international visibility of the ULg [Université de Liège] and its researchers, mainly through their publications, as well as the support for the worldwide development of an open and free access to scientific works (Open Access) are two essential objectives at the heart of my action, as you probably know.

At my request, the Institutional Repository "ORBi" (Open Repository & Bibliography) has been set up at the ULg by the Libraries Network to meet these objectives.

[1] The experimental encoding phase based on volunteerism being now successfully completed, we can step forward and enter the "production phase" this Wednesday November 26th, 2008. I take this opportunity to thank all the professors and researchers who have already filed in ORBi hundreds of their references, 70% of them with the full text. Thanks to their patience, ORBi's fine tuning could be achieved.

From today onward, it is incumbent upon each ULg member to feed ORBi with his/her own references. In this respect, the Administrative Board of the University has decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members:

- to deposit the bibliographic references of ALL their publications since 2002;

- to deposit the full text of ALL their articles published in periodicals since 2002.

Access to these full texts will only be granted with the author's consent and according to the rules applicable to author's rights and copyrights. The University is indeed very keen on respecting the rights of all stakeholders.

[2] For future publications, deposit in ORBi will be mandatory as soon as the article is accepted by the editor.

[3] I wish to remind you that, as announced a year ago in March 2007, starting October 1st, 2009, only those references introduced in ORBi will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vitæ in all evaluation procedures 'in house' (designations, promotions, grant applications, etc.).

Information seminars have been planned during the next months to allow every one of you to make the tool your own thing. Help is also accessible online, such as the simplified user's guide (also available as a leaflet) and the Depositor's Guide.

The development of ORBi offers multiple advantages not only to the Institution, but also to the researchers and their teams, such as:

- a considerable speeding up of the dissemination and visibility of the scientific works (as soon as publication approval is granted;

- a considerable increase in visibility for the published works through referencing in the main search engines (Googlescholar, OAI metaengines, etc.);

- centralised and perennial conservation of publications allowing multiple exploitation possibilities (integration in personal web pages, in institutional web pages, export of reference lists towards other applications and to funding organisations such as the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research); - etc.

I hope that, despite the time you are going to devote to this somewhat tedious task, you will soon realise the benefits of this institutional policy.

With many thanks,

Bernard Rentier
Rector
University of Liege
7, place du 20 Aout
4000 Liege, Belgium
Tel: +32-4-366 9700

ORBi, répertoire institutionnel de l'Université de Liège Vu sur la liste Biblio.fr

"Six mois après son démarrage, ORBi «Open Repository and Bibliography» dépasse déjà les 1200 références archivées dont près de 1000 avec texte intégral. Ces chiffres encourageants sont les résultats d'une politique ambitieuse mise en place à l'ULg (Université de Liège) en matière de dépôt en Open Access."

Le Conseil d'Administration de l'Université a en effet décidé de rendre obligatoire :

- l'introduction des références de toutes les publications des membres de l'ULg depuis 2002 ;

- le dépôt de la version électronique intégrale de tous les articles de périodiques publiés par les membres de l'ULg depuis 2002.

"Six months after its launch, ORBi «Open Repository and Bibliography» already has more than 1200 deposits, nearly 1000 of them full-text. These encouraging figures are the result of an ambitious Open Access Self-Archiving policy at ULg (Université of Liège)."

The University Administrative Council has made it mandatory:

- to deposit the references for all publications of all ULg faculty as of 2002

- to deposit the digital full-text of all journal articles published by ULg faculty as of 2002

ORBi
Annonce sur le blog du Recteur
BICTEL/e-ULg - Répertoire des thèses électroniques

Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (NORWAY* institutional-mandate)

Institution's OA Eprint Archives

Institution's OA Self-Archiving Mandate

Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (Nasjonalt kunnskapssenter for helsetjenesten, NoKC) adopted an Institutional Policy for Open Access to Scientific Publications, November 25, 2008.

All scientific publications by NoKC research staff "must" be deposited at the time of acceptance in Helsebiblioteket's Research Archive (HeRA), the new institutional repository launched by the NoKC health library (Helsebiblioteket). For each deposit, HeRA will release as much as it can as soon as it can. For example, HeRA will respect publisher embargoes, but will release OA metadata during the period when the full-text may be embargoed.

[From Peter Suber's Open Access News]

Napier University (UK* institutional-mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives

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

"The mandate will be enforced from Jan2009...

"Material which represents the total publicly available research and scholarly output of the University is to be located and deposited as fulltext in the digital “Repository@Napier”. It is University policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of its research output by enabling central online access to that corpus of work for all potential users and for researchers throughout the world...

"All research output is to be self-deposited, so that the repository forms the official record of the University’s research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source...

"The comprehensive, online, University repository will be used in future to respond to bibliometric research assessments with reduced input and effort from staff...

"Journal articles or conference papers may be submitted as accepted drafts not yet refereed (preprints) but it is mandatory that the refereed, final, submitted, accepted, version (postprint) is later entered into the repository as the last university owned version of the document...

"Staff are not required to deposit the full text of books or research monographs, but are required to supply references along with abstracts and metadata to identify the works...

"Uploading of items in the Repository@Napier is the responsibility of authors and researchers, as advised and supported by Learning Information Services (LIS)....

"It is University policy that each depositor should be required to make the minimum effort in order to provide open online access to their research output, so the “Repository@Napier” is designed to enable uploading of documents and entry of minimal extra data...

"Initially, the repository manager or a designated assistant will upload files sent to a designated email address, but depositors will be encouraged to make their own deposits and information on the process will be made available by LIS....

---

SUMMARY: Which Green OA Mandate should an institution adopt?
    ID/OA: The Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting (ID/OA) mandate immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author's choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher (with no guarantee of a successful outcome). The other alternative candidate mandates are:
    ID/IA: The Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate is stronger than ID/OA. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out or waiver for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all -- i.e., it is weaker than ID/OA. Hence not one of the existing mandates to date is ID/IA.)
    ID/DA: The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow access embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But an Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access (ID/DA) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simply identical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that's just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consensus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)
    DD/DA: Next there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself may be delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, DD/DA is in fact needlessly weaker than ID/OA, because it arbitrarily loses the 37% Almost-OA that authors can provide semi-automatically via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses. (DD/DA further risks needlessly losing a lot of the 63% OA as well, by not requiring immediate deposit in any case.)
    Author Licensing Mandate ("author addendum", "rights reservation"): Last, and almost as strong as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate is a negotiated author-licensing mandate ("author addendum"). But how can such a mandate reach consensus on adoption and compliance with authors who are concerned that it would put their papers at risk of not being accepted by their journal of choice whenever the licensing negotiation fails? As a consequence, there exist no ID/IA mandates either, only ID/IA with an optional author-opt-out (waiver) (as in Princeton's mandate) -- which again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or opt-out, and is hence needlessly weaker than ID/OA (if a mandate with waiver/opt-out is indeed a mandate at all! This has been remedied in Harvard's mandate, which adds copyright reservation [with a waiver option] with ID/OA [with no waiver option]).
    It is because of this logic and these pragmatics that ID/OA is the default baseline mandate: Anything weaker than ID/OA is gratuitously weaker than necessary (and generates less OA than ID/OA). Anything stronger (such as ID/IA without opt-out, or mandatory licensing without opt-out) is more than welcome, if an institution can successfully reach consensus on adoption and compliance. But no institution (or funder) has yet managed that, hence holding out for an over-strong mandate leads to the adoption of no mandate at all. (And designate deposit as the sole means of submitting refereed publications for performance evaluation.)

---

The following are replies to some queries I received about Elsevier's Authors' Rights Policy on Green OA Self-Archiving:

Q: "The Elsevier Authors' Rights policy states that authors may...

'Post a personal manuscript version of the article on the author's personal or institutional website or server... This means an author can update a personal manuscript version (e.g., in Word or TeX format) of the article to reflect changes made during the peer-review process. Note [that] such posting may not be for commercial purposes... and may not be to any external, third-party website.'

"Does this not exclude posting to a repository? And if so, can Elsevier still qualify for Green status given such a restriction?"

The Green OA author-rights policy of Elsevier (and of many other Green publishers) explicitly excludes posting to a 3rd-party repository (in order to avoid sanctioning free-riding from rival publishers). The author's own institutional repository, in contrast, is of course simply an institutional website/server.

And that is just fine for OA -- in fact, better than fine, for the following reasons:

All Open Access repositories -- whether institutional or institution-external -- are interoperable, because they comply with the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. So if you deposit your full-text in any one of them, it is functionally as if you had deposited it in any or all of them, because central harvesters (such as OAIster and Elsevier's own Scirus) can and do harvest the metadata from all those repositories, and then provide a search interface that collects the links to all the distributed repository contents into one searchable global OA repository (or several, by subject, or nation, or funder, or what-have-you) -- just as Google and Google Scholar likewise do.

So not only does Elsevier's Green author-self-archiving policy acknowledge the right of every single Elsevier author to make (the author's refereed final draft of) every single one of his Elsevier articles OA, but it helps correct an extremely counterproductive and ill-thought-out -- though well-intentioned -- bug in many of the current OA self-archiving funder-mandates, in which direct central deposit (in PubMed Central) is mandated, needlesly, instead of direct institutional deposit (which can be followed by central metadata-harvesting or automatic SWORD-based export to PubMed Central).

It is quite natural to ask: "If all repositories are interoperable, what difference does it make whether mandates specify central self-archiving or institutional self-archiving?"

To understand the reply, one must first clearly apprehend that:

-- not all research is in one field
-- not all research is funded by any given funder
-- not all research is funded at all
-- all research originates from institutions
-- yet most institutions have not yet mandated self-archiving

As all research originates from a university or other research institution, institutions are the universal providers of all refereed research output. Hence, to systematically ensure that all refereed research -- from all institutions, in all fields, whether funded or unfunded -- is self-archived, it is essential that all self-archiving mandates -- whether from institutions of funders -- be convergent and mutually reinforcing, rather than divergent and competitive. 

In other words, both funders and institutions need to mandate self-archiving in the author's own institutional repository. That way funder and institutional mandates reinforce one another: For example, NIH's mandate, which technically applies only to NIH-funded biomedical research, would vastly increase its scope if it stipulated institutional deposit; that would immediately extend the reach of the NIH mandate to all institutions receiving NIH funding, thereby encouraging each of them to adopt institutional mandates of their own to cover all their research output, and not just the NIH-funded subset. And it would of course also encourage universities to create institutional repositories, if they have not done so already. (Institutions -- already quite obsessively involved in preparing and vetting their research grant proposals, are also the natural ones to monitor and ensure compliance with the funder's deposit mandate as part of the grant's fulfillment conditions, and especially if they have a institutional deposit mandate of their own. And again, one convergent deposit and locus -- institutional -- is enough for an author; the rest can be handled by automatic harvesting or exportation.)

Nothing whatsoever is lost with convergent mandates: NIH can still harvest all of its funded research into PubMed Central; so can any other harvesters, into their own collections. (And import/export can also be done automatically, via the SWORD protocol.) There is absolutely no need for -- and many reasons against -- authors depositing directly in PubMed Central or any other central collection: Not only does that fail to encourage and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates for all the rest of each institution's (non-NIH) research output, but, apart from creating needless confusion and ambiguity about locus of deposit, it even puts authors at (perceived) risk of having to do multiple deposits in order to fulfill both funder and institutional mandates. (Here too, the risk is perceived rather than real, because the SWORD protocol can of course transfer contents in both directions, whereas the real problem is inducing the adoption of mandates from both funders and institutions, and particularly from the universal providers, the institutions: It is precisely there that collaborative, convergent mandates from funders are a great help whereas divergent, competitive mandates are a gratuitous hindrance.)

So some of the funder mandates to date, welcome though they were and are, have failed to think things through (and failed to fully understand IRs, and OAI-interoperability and OA itself) in needlessly mandating direct central deposit. (That's rather like requiring providers to deposit directly in google, instead of depositing on their own distributed websites, from which google can then harvest.)

This inadvertent error can and will still be corrected, of course, but the correction needs to happen sooner rather than later, because meanwhile divergent funder mandates are slowing the growth of the potential institutional mandates that represent the real lion's share of global research output across all disciplines (and research access and impact continues to be needlessly lost).

NIH has so far been unresponsive about reconsidering its unnecessary and counterproductive requirement to deposit directly in PubMed Central (and a number of CopyCat funders elsewhere have been simply aping NIH, equally unreflectively). The work of those who are trying to create a systematic synergy that will result in the rapid global growth of OA mandates by the sleeping giant (the world's universities and research institutions), is thereby made more difficult than necessary -- but here, Green publishers' restrictions on depositing in 3rd-party central repositories may prove to be a serendipitous aid in converging on convergent deposit mandates and practices.

Q: "Having made the case for Immediate Deposit/Optional Access-setting (ID/OA), it's not clear how you can be so complacent about the Optional Access-setting part. Surely in order to achieve the goal of genuine open access, articles must not only be deposited immediately, but also made freely available. Now clearly, the weaker the mandate, the more likely is its adoption; this is a matter of tactics. But what if all institutions adopt ID/OA, but then do not Open Access on the deposits? Has anything been gained? (Perhaps you’d reply yes, because one has to win the first battle before being free to fight the second?)"

    (1) I am not at all worried about the (37% of) articles that might, under the ID/OA mandate, be deposited as Closed Access (hence not OA but only "Almost-OA," thanks to the repositories' semi-automatic, almost-instantaneous, "email eprint request" button). I have been at this for over a decade and a half now, and for that decade and a half, we have not had the at-least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA that we could have had, if we had adopted ID/OA mandates. Instead, all we had is what we have now: the <15% of all articles that are being self-archived spontaneously (unmandated), plus the even smaller percentage of all articles that are being published in Gold OA journals.

    (2) So I am unworried about universal ID/OA mandates, but definitely not unworried about continuing to do without them, just waiting instead in the hope that (a) either spontaneous self-archiving will somehow increase to 100% on its own, without the need of any mandate at all, (b) or that agreement on even stronger OA mandates will somehow be reached, or (c) that all publishers will somehow agree to convert to Gold OA publishing!

    (3) Just continuing to advocate and wait for (a) or (c) is, I hope all will agree, not a sensible strategy after all these years.

    (4) As for stronger mandates, consider the options: In place of the ID/OA (Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting) mandate -- which immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author's choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher -- we have the following alternative candidates:

(4a) There is the stronger Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all -- hence weaker than ID/OA. Not one of the existing 58 mandates is ID/IA.)

(4b) The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But such an ID/DA (Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simply identical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that's just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consenus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)

(4c) Then there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself is delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, that is in fact weaker than ID/OA, because it loses the 37% Almost-OA accessible via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses.

(4d) Last, and almost as strong as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate (4a) is a negotiated author licensing mandate ("author addendum"). But how can such a mandate (for authors to use the author addendum) reach consensus on adoption with authors who are concerned that it would put their papers at risk of not being accepted by their journal of choice whenever the licensing negotiation fails (because the publisher declines)? As a consequence, there exist no ID/IA mandates either, only ID/IA with an optional author-opt-out (as in Princeton's mandate) -- which again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or opt-out, and is hence weaker than ID/OA (if a mandate with an opt-out is indeed a mandate at all! This has been remedied in Harvard's mandate, which adds copyright reservation (with a waiver option) with ID/OA (with no waiver option)).

It is because of this logic and these pragmatics that ID/OA is the default baseline mandate: Anything weaker than ID/OA is gratuitously weaker than necessary (and generates less OA than ID/OA). Anything stronger (such as ID/IA without opt-out, or mandatory licensing without opt-out) is more than welcome, if an institution can successfully reach consensus and compliance -- but no institution (or funder) has yet managed that, hence holding out for an over-strong mandate leads to the adoption of no mandate at all.

The most common mandates are DD/DA, with and without embargo caps, but those are all weaker than ID/OA, and hence should be upgraded to at least ID/DA, whether with or without an embargo cap.

Licensing mandates are rarer, but as they have opt-outs, they too are weaker than ID/OA. Again, however, they can easily be upgraded to add ID/OA (without opt-out) alongside the "mandatory" licensing (with opt-out), and then they are fine.

So the reason we can all be relaxed and satisfied with ID/OA is that it is the default baseline for all OA mandates. Where a stronger one can be agreed, it should of course be adopted. And it makes no sense to arbitrarily adopt a still weaker mandate -- DD/DA or author-licensing with opt-out -- since upgrading either of those to ID/OA is free of objections, either in institutional copyright worries or in author worries about journal choice. But on no account should no mandate at all be adopted, in favor of an unending quest for a mandate stronger than ID/OA: Adopt ID/OA now, and then try to agree on a stronger upgrade thereafter (and meanwhile, designate deposit as the sole means of submitting refereed publications for performance evaluation).

(Note that I did not list a universal conversion to Gold OA publishing on the part of publishers as being among the mandate options, because, on the one hand, institutions and funders can only impose mandates on their own employees and fundees; not on publishers. And, on the other hand, continuing to sit around trying to persuade publishers to convert to Gold OA of their own accord is likely to extend our waiting time even closer to the time of the heat death of the universe than continuing to sit around trying to reach agreement on stronger mandates, instead of just going ahead and adopting ID/OA right now.)

Q: "How do you know that the university servers/websites in which Elsevier allow authors will be OAI compliant?"

Because just about all Institutional Repositories today are OAI-compliant! OAI-interoperability was part of the rationale for the institutional repository movement -- a movement that was itself set in motion by the OA movement (in 2000) but has alas since moved off in other directions of its own (often vague and aimless ones, not carefully thought through in advance).

Q: "Why do you think Elsevier has adopted a Green policy on self-archiving?"

I cannot second-guess the motivation. Elsevier is a commercial company. Unlike (some) Learned Society and University publishers, its primary allegiance is not to science but to the bottom line.

My guess is that Elsevier realized that OA is inevitable, and unstoppable. So they have settled on just trying to slow it down, if possible. At first, I think Elsevier's Green policy on author self-archiving was based on three calculations: (1) that a Green policy on author self-archiving might quiet the growing clamour for OA, perhaps even (2) reducing the widespread hostility against Elsevier for their aggressive pricing policies, while (3) not many individual authors would be likely to actually go ahead and self-archive. If this was indeed Elsevier's reasoning, then they were right on all three counts.

But what Elsevier did not reckon on was the emergence and growth of the movement for institutional and funder self-archiving mandates. (While it was adopting a Green Policy on author self-archiving, in order to satisfy the author demand for OA, Elsevier was also lobbying -- vigorously, but in the end unsuccessfully -- against Green OA self-archiving mandates. (Elsevier, along with the American Chemical Society [the non-Green publisher giving Learned Societies such a bad name] had been among the prime supporters of the notorious "prism"/pitbull anti-OA coalition that backfired so badly when exposed in Nature.] So I am quite ready to forgive and forget Elsevier's failed attempt to lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates; their Green policy on author self-archiving (though it too was not necessary for Green OA to prevail in the end) has nevertheless been more helpful than the lobbying has been harmful, and historians will make due note of that.

Finally, before anyone asks (again), my own view of the way things will go in the future for publishing (about which I no longer speculate publicly, because speculation and counterspeculation on this question has been for far too long yet another distraction from practical action toward providing immediate Green OA) is described here, here, and here. Speculations aside, all empirical evidence to date has been that conventional subscription-based publishing and Green OA self-archiving can co-exist peacefully, even in fields where Green OA self-archiving has already reached 100% years ago.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum