Self-Archiving Mandates

In the wake of the historic NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate in the US, here are two well-informed current articles on university repository policy (the next phase in the planet-wide propagation of Green OA). Highly recommended:

Swan, Alma & Carr, Les (2008) Institutions, their repositories and the Web. Serials Review (in press).
ABSTRACT: It will soon be rare for research-based institutions not to have a digital repository. The main reason for a repository is to maximise the visibility of the institution's research outputs (provide Open Access), yet few contain a representative proportion of the research produced by their institutions. Repositories form one part of the institution's web platform. An explicit, mandatory policy on the use of the repository for collecting outputs is needed in every institution so that the full research record is collected. Once full, a repository is a tool that enables senior management in research institutions to collate and assess research, to market their institution, to facilitate new forms of scholarship and to enable the tools that will produce new knowledge.

Bailey, Charles (2008) Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
SUMMARY: A very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories. Fosters further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites.

The January issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter is superb, and I recommend it highly as a historical record of the milestone reached by the OA movement at this pivotal moment. There is no question but that the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is the biggest OA development to date, and heralds much more.

There remains, however, an important point that does need to be brought out, because it's not over till we reach 100% OA, because mistakes have been made before, because those mistakes took longer than necessary to correct, and because a big mistake (concerning the locus of the deposit) still continues to be made.

First, a slight correction on the chronometric facts:

Peter Suber wrote:"If NIH had adopted an OA mandate in 2004 when Congress originally asked it to do so, it would have been the first anywhere. Now it will be the 21st."

Actually, if the NIH OA mandate had been adopted when the House Appropriations Committee originally recommended it in September 2004, it would have been the world's third Green OA self-archiving mandate, not the first. And Congress's recommendation in September 2004 was the second governmental recommendation to mandate Green OA self-archiving: The first had been the UK Parliamentary Select Committee's recommendation in July 2004.

(1) The Southampton ECS departmental mandate was (as far as I know) the very first Green OA self-archiving mandate of all; it was announced in January 2003 (but actually adopted even earlier). QUT's was the second OA mandate, but the first university-wide one, and was announced in February 2004. (See ROARMAP.)

(2) The UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee Recommendation to mandate Green OA self-archiving was made in session 2003-04 and published in July 2004 (i.e., before September 2004, when the US House Appropriations Committee made its recommendation).

Moreover, the recommendation to mandate self-archiving had not only been part of the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ from its inception in 2002, but the FAQ's contents had actually preceded the existence of the BOAI by several years, with the recommendation itself -- that departments, universities and funders should mandate self-archiving -- already in circulation since about 1999. (The FAQ was also already quite specific at that time about mandating the self-archiving of the author's final accepted draft, rather than the publisher's PDF. Its one glaring error was to advocate central self-archiving -- but that was corrected as soon as the OAI protocol was formulated, making it possible to create the first OAI-compliant Institutional Repository software in 2000, thereby returning to the original distributed, institutional model of self-archiving of 1994.)

In contrast, to see where the precursor to the NIH mandate stood in 1999, one must re-read the original e-biomed proposal of May 1999. There was still a bumpy and meandering road ahead (via the PLoS petition in 2001 and the Bethesda Statement in 2003), with several false starts and dead ends (among them the first NIH non-mandate itself!), before the realization that what had been needed all along was self-archiving and a Green OA self-archiving mandate.

"A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)

Now NIH's has indeed instantly become by far the most important of the Green OA self-archiving mandates to date in virtue of its size and scope alone, but it still hasn't got it right!

The upgrade from a mere request to an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate was indeed an enormous improvement, but there still remains the extremely counterproductive and unnecessary insistence on direct deposit in PubMed Central. This is still a big defect in the NIH mandate, effectively preventing it from strengthening, building upon and complementing direct deposit in Institutional Repositories, and thereby losing the golden (or rather green!) opportunity to scale up to cover all of research output, in all fields, from all institutions, worldwide, rather than just NIH-funded biomedical research in PubMed Central: an altogether unnecessary, dysfunctional, self-imposed constraint (in much the same spirit as having requested self-archiving instead of mandating it for the past three lost years).

Even the benefits of Congress's wise decision to mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication -- thereby transferring the allowable 12-month embargo to the date at which access to that deposit is set to Open Access, rather than allowing any delay in the date on which the deposit itself is done -- are lost if that deposit is required to be made directly in PubMed Central, rather than in each author's own Institutional Repository (and thence harvested to PubMed Central): With direct IR deposit, authors can use their own IR's "email eprint request" button to fulfill would-be users' access needs during any embargo. And, most important of all, with direct IR deposit mandated by NIH, each of the world's universities and research institutions can go on to complement the NIH self-archiving mandate for the NIH-funded fraction of its research output with an institutional mandate to deposit the rest of its research output, likewise to be deposited in its own IR. This will systematically scale up to 100% OA.

The hope is that -- recognizing that similar mistakes have been made in the past, and that that has cost dearly in years of lost OA, and recognizing that the remedy is ever so simple, with no loss, only gain ("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally") -- the NIH will still have the sound sense, in the euphoria over the successful passage of the mandate itself, to optimize its mandate now, so it can do the maximal good in the minimal time, across all fields and institutions, worldwide.

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

This is from your greedy, never-satisfied Archivangelist:

Now that the NIH Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate looks as if it will shortly be signed into Law:

(1) There is no need to wait to implement the NIH mandate

(2) There is no need to ape it: It can easily be optimised

(3) There is no need to reserve Green OA self-archiving for NIH-funded biomedical research

(4) All universities should mandate that all their research articles in all their disciplines are self-archived

(5) There is no need to self-archive all those articles in PubMed Central: They should be self-archived in each university's own Institutional Repository

(6) There is no need to allow deposit to be embargoed for 12 months: Deposit should be mandated immediately upon acceptance for publication

(7) Embargoed deposits can be set as Closed Access during the embargo

(8) Meanwhile the Institutional Repository will allow users webwide to email the author a semi-automatic request for an eprint for individual use immediately for any deposit that is not yet OA.

This will provide either immediate OA (62%) or almost-immediate, almost-OA (38%) for all research articles in all disciplines, worldwide. It will also ensure the natural and well-deserved death of research access embargoes soon thereafter.

Summary of how to optimize the Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate:

I. Universities mandate deposit in their own Institutional Repositories.

II. Deposit is mandated immediately upon acceptance for publication.

III. The permissible embargo applies to the date on which the deposit is set as OA, not to the day on which the deposit is made.

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Why was the WHO IGWG OA recommendation downgraded from "requiring" OA to just "strongly encouraging" it? As Manon Ress and Peter Suber point out, this is simply a replay of the failed NIH policy, likewise downgraded from a requirement, tried for 2 years, resoundingly unsuccessful, and now being upgraded again to a requirement by the US Congress (only to be vetoed by George Bush). As repeatedly shown by Alma Swan's surveys of what authors say they will do and Arthur Sale's studies of what authors actually do, only a requirement (mandate) works.

The following prior wording:

(b) promote public access to the results of government funded research, through requirements that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts.

has for some reason been changed in the November Geneva version to:

(b) promote public access to the results of government funded research, by strongly encouraging that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts.

George Santayana (on being condemned to repeat history) comes to mind.

---

Candour prompts the following shame-faced disclosure: In the very first mandate recommendation of them all, this feckless archivangelist also cravenly allowed himself to be persuaded once -- but only once! -- to equivocate on mandating vs. "strongly encouraging," despite having insisted on the need to mandate self-archiving from the outset. To mortify me, compare the original wording of the 2003 recommendation first submitted to the UK Parliamentary Select Committee with the subsequent (downgraded) version. Fortunately, only one mention of "mandate" was diluted to "strong encouragement." The rest of the mentions are all the m-word, and it was that, fortunately, that the wise members of the Select Committee hewed to in their actual recommendation...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Michael Smith [MS] (Anthropology, ASU, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

MS: "The practice of author payment for open access journals may work for the hard sciences, but it presents major difficulties for various categories of scholars..."

Paying to publish journal articles presents difficulties for any author who does not have the money to pay, regardless of field. But it is not an obstacle to providing Open Access (OA) itself:

Although only about 10% of journals are OA journals ("Gold OA Publishing"), over 62% of journals are "Green," meaning that they have already given their green light to all their authors to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts ("postprints") OA by depositing them in their own Institutional (or Central) Repositories (IRs) upon acceptance for publication -- and immediately making them OA ("Green OA Self-Archiving"). Another 29% of journals endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint, with embargoes of various lengths on making the postprint OA.

(The IR software also makes it possible for all users to request and for all authors to provide almost-instant almost-OA even for Closed or Embargoed Access postprints on an individual Fair-Use basis by means of a semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" button. That means 62% instant OA plus 38% almost-instant almost-OA.)

OA self-archiving (Green OA) costs nothing. But it should also be pointed out that the majority of Gold OA journals today do not charge for publication -- and those that do, waive the fee if the author cannot afford to pay. (The much larger number of hybrid-Gold publishers -- offering the author the option to pay for Gold OA -- do not waive the Gold OA fee, but most of them are also Green.)

MS: "(1) social sciences and humanities, where grants are smaller and fewer than in the natural and physical sciences."

All authors in the social sciences and humanities should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(2) graduate students and younger scholars."

All graduate students and younger scholars should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "(3) scholars in the third world."

Scholars in the third world should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication.

MS: "The author-pay model puts people in the above categories (and others) at a serious disadvantage. It would effectively leave out an entire sector of scholarship in the third world. Panglossian arguments about convincing funding agencies to pay for author charges, or transferring university library budgets from subscriptions to author charges, ignore the current financial plight of research in most of the world today."

No need of Pangloss for OA: All authors can provide Green OA to articles (62% immediate full OA, 38% almost-immediate almost-OA) by self-archiving their postprints in their IRs, today.

Green OA self-archiving mandates from researchers' own institutions and funders are now on the way worldwide. (The US congress has recently approved a particular big NIH Green OA Mandate, in a Health Bill which has just been vetoed by President Bush, but it may still be adopted if the veto is over-ridden, and could be implemented by NIH and US universities in light of congressional adoption in either case. Six of seven UK research funding councils have already mandated Green OA after it was recommended but not adopted by Parliament. There are already a total of 32 funder and university mandates adopted worldwide, and at least nine more proposed or pending.)

Once adopted globally, these Green OA mandates will immediately provide 62% OA and 38% almost-OA, and the Closed Access embargoes will soon recede under the growing pressure from the powerful and obvious benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the tax-paying public that funds them, and the vast R&D industry.

(Eventually, 100% Green OA may even lead to the cancellation of non-OA journals, thereby releasing those institutional subscription funds to pay the much lower costs of Gold OA publishing for an institution's researchers -- costs which reduce to just those of peer-review alone, with all access-provision and archiving now offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA IRs.)

But there is no need to keep waiting for Gold OA: Green OA can be provided right now.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Since almost the beginning, the inadvertent and intentional conflation of Green OA (Self-Archiving) with Gold OA (publishing) has been a great obstacle to OA itself. I used to call it "Drubbing Peter to Pox Paul" and Peter Suber has since 2006 been calling it "JAM" (Journal/Archive Mix-Up).

Please do whatever you can to dispel this error as it is really holding up progress. In most cases, it is merely the result of ignorance or misunderstanding. But in the case of those who are lobbying against the NIH Bill, it is deliberately being used as a way to impugn Green OA Self-Archiving mandates by pretending they are Gold-OA publishing mandates.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In "OA, OK?" Richard Gallagher (2007) is quite right to say "we're still waiting" for the "optimal and inevitable" [Open Access]. I was already in full agreement in the previous millennium (Harnad 1999):

"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it may chuckle at us. It is not the pace of our scholarly and scientific research that will look risible, nor the tempo of technological change. On the contrary, the astonishing speed and scale of both will make the real anomaly look all the more striking.

"For staring us in the face in this last decade has been an obvious new way to augment that already impressive speed and scale by perhaps an order of magnitude, yet we simply haven't twigged on it...

"I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library... and its [peer-review] expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the [subscription cancellation] savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!" -- (Harnad 1999)

But Gallagher is not quite right that "most scientists became indifferent about Open Access." The syndrome is not quite indifference but a combination of ignorance and indolence (Swan 2005) concerning what is already demonstrably in their own best interests and fully within their reach. I have dubbed the syndrome "Zeno's Paralysis" (Harnad 2006); the affliction is, fortunately, curable. The medicine is OA self-archiving mandates (Harnad 2001, Harnad et al. 2003; Harnad 2007) by researchers' institutions and funders.

And those mandates are on the way. The inertia is and always was merely a matter of keystrokes: getting those digits to deposit those digits. "Publish or perish" mandates managed to induce otherwise busy, curiosity-driven researchers to find the time to set their (peer-reviewed) findings to paper, and self-archiving mandates will now ensure the few additional minutes it takes to make all published papers immediately and permanently accessible free for all their potential users online, rather than just for those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which they happen to be published (Carr & Harnad 2005).

To close, a few loose ends:

(1) OA is not about journal affordability but about research accessibility.

(2) Harnad (1998) is available not because of "an online forum" but because it was self-archived in my institutional repository (without waiting for a mandate).

(3) The optimal/inevitable is not just overdue since 1998, but at least since 1994 (Harnad 1995, 2004; Poynder 2004), and actually at least a decade longer.

(4) OA self-archiving mandates have been mooted since at least 2001 (Harnad 2001, Harnad et al 2003).

(5) A more optimistic version of Esposito's (2007) "nautilus" was already mooted seventeen years ago, as "scholarly skywriting" (Harnad 1990).

References

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

Esposito, J. (2007) Open Access 2.0. The Scientist 21(11) 52

Gallagher, R. (2007) OA: OK? The Scientist 21(11) 13

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature 395 (6698): 127-128

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12).

Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French versions: Harnad, S. (2003) Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: Pp. 77-103. ]

Harnad, S. (2004) June 27 2004: The 1994 "Subversive Proposal" at 10.
American Scientist Open Access Forum. June 27 2004.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. and Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Poynder, R. (2004) Ten Years After. Information Today. October 2004

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

This is a response to a query from a Southampton colleague who received an unsolicited invitation from an unknown individual to contribute a chapter to an "Open Access" book (author pays) on the basis of a paper he had deposited in the ECS Southampton Institutional Repository (IR) -- and possibly on the basis of its download statistics:

The colleague asked:

(1) Is the book chapter that [identity deleted] is soliciting an example of Open Access?

(2) Are download counts legitimate metrics for (2a) CVs, (2b) website statistics, (2c) departmental/institutional repository (IR) statistics?

(3) Can download statistics be abused?

(4) Should institutional authors be able to "opt out" of (4a) depositing their paper in their IR and/or (4b) having their download statistics displayed?

(1) Yes, Open Access (OA) books are instances of OA just as OA articles are. The big difference is that all peer-reviewed journal/conference articles, without exception, are written exclusively for research usage and impact, not for royalty income, whereas this is not true of all or even most books. Articles are all author give-aways, but most books are not. So articles are OA's primary target; books are optional and many will no doubt follow suit after systematic OA-provision for research articles has taken firm root globally. (Also important: article deposit in the IR can be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as Southampton ECS and RCUK have done, but book deposit certainly cannot -- and should not -- be mandated.)

(2) Yes, download metrics, alongside citation metrics and other new metric performance indicators can and should be listed in CVs, website stats and IR stats. In and of themselves they do not mean much, as absolute numbers, but in an increasingly OA world, where they can be ranked and compared in a global context, they are potentially useful aids to navigation, evaluation, prediction and other forms of assesment and analysis. (We have published a study that shows there is a good-sized positive correlation between earlier download counts and later citation counts: Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. (2006) Earlier Web Usage Statistics as Predictors of Later Citation Impact. Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 57(8) pp. 1060-1072.)

(3) Yes, download statistics can be -- and will be -- abused, as many other online innovations (like email, discussion lists, blogs, search engines, etc.) can be abused by spammers and other motivated mischief-makers or self-promoters. But it is also true that those abuses can and will breed counter-abuse mechanisms. And in the case of academic download metrics inflation, there will be obvious, powerful ways to counteract and deter it if/when it begins to emerge: Anomalous download patterns (e.g., self-hits, co-author IP hits, robotic hits, lack of correlation with citations, etc.) can be detected, named and shamed. (It is easier for a commercial spammer to abuse metrics and get away with it than for an academic with a career that stands at risk once discovered!)

(4) No, researchers should definitely not be able to "opt out" of a deposit mandate: That would go against both the letter and spirit of a growing worldwide movement among researchers, their institutions and their funders to mandate OA self-archiving for the sake of its substantial benefits to research usage and impact. There is always the option of depositing a paper as Closed Access rather than Open Access, but I think a researcher would be shooting himself in the foot if he chose to do that on account of worries about the abuse of download statistics: It would indeed reduce the download counts, usage and citations of that researcher's work, but it would not accomplish much else. (On the question of opting out of the display of download (and other) metrics, I have nothing objective to add: It is technically possible to opt out of displaying metrics, and if there is enough of a demand for it, it should be made a feature of IRs; but it seems to me that it will only bring disadvantages and handicaps to those who choose to opt out of displaying their metrics, not only depriving them of data to guide potential users and evaluators of their work, but giving the impression that they have something to hide.)

I would also add that the invitation to contribute a book chapter by [identity deleted] might possibly be a scam along the lines of the bogus conference scams we have heard much about. The public availability of metadata, papers and metrics will of course breed such "invitations" too, but one must use one's judgment about which of them are eminently worth ignoring.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Max Planck Society would do incomparably more for Open Access (and its own research impact) if it mandated deposit in its own Institutional Repository (IR), Edoc, rather than just canceling journal subscriptions.

For some time now, the reply from the MP Institutes and German universities has been: "We cannot mandate!"

But of course they can! The policy need not be coercive; it need not have sanctions for noncompliance. It need merely be officially adopted. And there are obvious and simple administrative ways to make it worth researchers' while to comply (if the enhanced research impact that OA vouchsafes is not enough): Simply declare the IR as the official institutional submission format for all performance review for its employees!

So there are no administrative barriers. Nor are there any legal barriers: For performance review, it is sufficient to deposit the final, revised, refereed, accepted draft -- the postprint -- immediately upon acceptance for publication, and set access the postprint full-text as Closed Access (administrative access -- with only the bibliographic metadata, not the postprint, visible webwide) rather than immediate Open Access (if the journal in which the article is published is non-Green and demands an embargo).

(Since the only thing that has been standing between us and 100% OA for years now is keystrokes, an administrative keystroke mandate is all that is needed. The increasingly palpable benefits of OA itself will take care of the rest, as carrots, rather than sticks.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Wednesday, October 17, one day before EurOpenScholar was launched by the Rector of the University of Liège, the Rector of the University of Brasilia (UnB) launched a Brazilian Open Access Task Force at a meeting hosting the rectors of six major Brazilian universities and the head of IBICT (Brazilian Institute for Information on Science and Technology). By way of a practical follow-up to the many manifestos and declarations already signed by Brazil's research institutions, the Task Force will inform the Brazilian university community about how Brazil's universities and research institutions can provide open access by establishing institutional repositories and institutional deposit mandates. OASIS.Br will also provide a central portal to Brazilian repositories and Open Access e-journals.