Self-Archiving Mandates

Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California

The UC Faculty Survey results are summarized in a somewhat misleading way:

"There is limited but significant use of alternative forms of scholarship, with 21% of faculty having published in open-access journals, and 14% having posted peer-reviewed articles in institutional repositories or disciplinary repositories."

(1) The practise in question is making published articles open access (not "alternative forms of scholarship").

(2) 21% of UC Faculty published articles in OA journals and 14% posted their published postprints in repositories.

(3) But 31% posted their published postprints on personal or departmental websites (and 29% posted their preprints).

So the comparison between the proportion of OA publishing (Gold OA) and OA self-archiving (Green OA) is not 21% vs. 14%. It's 21% vs. either 31% or anything up to 74% (if the 3 forms of self-archiving were additive).

UC should correct these summary figures. Otherwise it is giving a very misleading picture of the actual proportions at UC between the two ways of providing OA. This is important, because it is OA self-archiving that has the greatest scope for growth and acceleration, as Gold OA cannot be mandated, but Green OA can (and should be).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has just announced the official adoption of the Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate it had proposed last year.

This is the 31st Green OA Mandate adopted worldwide, but the 1st in North America. (Indeed, only one North American University -- l'Universite du Québec à Montréal -- has signed the Berlin Declaration.)

In all, 14 departmental and university self-archiving mandates plus 17 funder mandates have so far been adopted worldwide. In addition, 2 large multi-university mandates (Brazil and Europe) are in the proposal stage, as are 4 proposed funder mandates (two of them in the US and very big).

The UK is still substantially in the lead for OA mandates adopted, but if the pending US and European mandate proposals are adopted, OA will have prevailed unstoppably worldwide.

The next big growth area will be the sleeping giant of university Green OA mandates, fueled by both the OA movement and the Institutional Repository movement. The UK universities and the European ones are moving in concerted directions here. Time for US university provosts (who signed in support of the FRPAA Green OA mandate proposal) to go into action too!

Stay tuned...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Universities are adopting Open Access Self-Archiving Policies (which is a very good thing) but the policies are often not the optimal ones, and are sometimes even inadvertently reducing instead of enhancing the access potential of university research output. In this exchange with Prof. Andrew Colman of the University Leicester, and Prof. Diane Kornbrot of University of the University of Hertfordshire, the simple parametric tweaks are pointed out that can change an ineffective OA Policy into an effective one. They are:
    (1) requiring rather than requesting deposit
    (2) requiring deposit in the university's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than in a central or discipline-based repository elsewhere
    (3) requiring deposit of the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft, rather than the publisher's PDF (unless the publisher endorses PDF deposit)
    (4) requiring deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication rather than after a publisher-imposed delay or embargo period
    (5) during any embargo, deposits can instead simply be made Closed Access rather than Open Access (and the IR's "Fair Use" Button can send and receive eprint requests and eprints semi-automatically)

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Professor Andrew Colman, University of Leicester, wrote:

I am keen to have my publications archived where they are likely to be found by interested readers. After your encouraging reply [suggesting that I deposit, by default, peer-reviewed final manuscript drafts rather than the publisher's PDF], I spent a whole day retrieving 63 manuscript drafts of articles and tidying them up for deposit in the Leicester Research Archive. Because PDFs of the published versions are already in my own web space, I inserted a hyperlink on each manuscript version, directing readers to the PDF version.

I would advise you to to forward this exchange to the IP policy-makers at U Leicester, because the logic of the current UL policy has to be more carefully thought through. I am sure UL's motivation is to help, not hinder UL's research impact while ensuring everything is in conformity with the law. A few minor but critical changes in the current policy will accomplish both goals: maximal impact, and full legality:

A month later, less than half of my manuscripts are in the Leicester Research Archive. The archive has been seeking permission from the publishers [as a precondition] for archiving each manuscript draft, and, for those for which permission has been granted, have also carefully deleted the hyperlinks that I inserted at the top of each manuscript draft.

This is the policy that urgently needs to be carefully thought through again, as it has a few major, unnecessary flaws that are easily remediable, but do need to be remedied:

(1) All manuscripts should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Deposit itself is entirely the prerogative of UL, an internal matter, not requiring permission from anyone. It is only access-setting to that deposited document -- i.e. Open Access vs. Closed Access -- that can depend in part on publisher policy.

(2) If the UL archivists wish to query the publishers about access-setting, that's fine: in the meanwhile, access to the full texts of the deposits can be set as Closed Access.

(3) If the response to the query is affirmative (or the policy indexed in Romeo endorses immediate OA self-archiving), set access as Open Access; otherwise, rely on the "Request Copy" "Fair Use" Button the Archive provides for those would-be users who need access to the Closed Access deposits during any embargo period:

See: "How the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate + the 'Fair Use' Button Work"

(Deleting hyperlinks to the PDFs on your website makes no sense at all!)

I am not convinced of the value of manuscript drafts on their own. Researchers cannot rely on them, even if they are in fact faithful versions of the published articles, which is seldom the case because of copy-editing alterations that are often not even discussed with authors.

You are judging this against the wrong baseline:

(a) If a potential user has access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, they can and will use that. Those are not the users for whom the self-archived version is being provided.

(b) If a potential user does not have access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, then their problem is not that they don't have access to a "faithful" copy-edited version, but that they have no access at all! Those are the target users for whom OA is needed, and being provided, and they are the ones who double research impact if they are at last given access.

Please do not think of OA self-archiving as a substitute subscription access (for now). The self-archived draft is a supplement to the subscription draft, provided for those who are denied subscription access. You can make your final draft as faithful as you judge necessary. But it would be a profound error in judgment and priorities to deprive would-be users of access altogether, when they can't afford subscription access at all, mistakenly thinking you are thereby protecting them from being deprived of the copy-editing!

Even if one had confidence in the accuracy of a manuscript version, it would be impossible to quote from it, because the pagination would be missing. I don't find other researchers' manuscript drafts nearly as useful as final PDFs.

Again, you are weighing this entirely from the wrong viewpoint: Those who can't access it, cannot read or use your research at all.

(And of course one can quote from a manuscript version. One quotes it, specifying the section and paragraph number instead of the page! That is in fact more accurate and scholarly than a page reference. And if the copy-editor (of the article one is writing, in which one is quoting from an article for which one only has access to the final draft, not the PDF) requests page-spans, that's the time to tell the copy-editor that one does not have subscription access, so let them look up the page numbers -- or use the even better scholarly indicator of section name and paragraph number.)

You said that "Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well". Worse than that, the person handling my submissions believes that publishers need to be contacted for each item, and that "unfortunately I do have to wait for permission to archive them, even if they are drafts. Generally publishers do not allow the 'as published versions' to be archived by anyone apart from themselves on their own sites and so for us to archive them, or provide links to sites, other than the publisher's official site, may breach copyright law... Unfortunately we are not allowed to even archive the drafts from the following publications which you have articles in [followed by a list]".

This UL provisional policy has not been thought through and needs only a few simple parametric changes to make it sensible and effective:

(i) The manuscript can and should be deposited immediately. No one's permission is needed for that, and the metadata are then immediately visible webwide, and the "Fair Use" Button can start doing its job.

(ii) The journal policy can already be looked up in Romeo for most journals, and that means 62% of the immediate deposits can definitely be set to Open Access immediately. The archivist can write to the publisher to double-check the policy if they wish, but meanwhile the deposit should be set as OA for that 62%:

(iii) For the remaining 38% of immediate-deposits, set access initially as Closed Access, and let the archivist inquire, if they wish. Meanwhile the Fair Use button will be doing its job.

See: "Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the Decision Loop"

Is this [i.e., UL's current policy] right, and if not, is there perhaps a different archive in which I and my colleagues could place our articles? I have several colleagues who are keen on this idea but are not attracted by the very partial solution available locally.

The Leicester Archive policy is very wrong on this score. I urge you to take it up with the administration, because currently they are shooting themselves in the foot, gratuitously, with this flawed policy, so easily corrected.

Yes, there are other Archives (e.g. Depot or CogPrints) you could deposit it in, but it would be a great pity if Leicester did not sort out its own deposit policy, as it is so simple to do: I. All manuscripts should be deposited immediately.

II. Not only the archivists but the authors should be able to deposit, as they can in virtually all of the other IRs worldwide. Almost no IR restricts depositing to proxy archivists (and those few that do are making a big mistake in imposing this needless and counterproductive restriction).

III. If there are worries about rights, check Romeo, and, if the archivist wishes, also write to the publisher. But meanwhile, deposit immediately and set Access as Closed Access if in doubt.

IV. Implement the "Fair Use" Button.

V. Adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) policy.

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Professor Diana Kornbrot of the University of Hertfordshire added:

I am having similar problems at University of Hertfordshire.
Is there somewhere a draft code of practice or policy (e.g. How is it done at Southampton) that we could all show to our Univ admin people?

Yes there is a draft code of practice!

1. The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Universities are invited to use this document to help encourage the adoption of an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at their institution. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions; but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months).
    This IDOA policy is greatly preferable to, and far more effective than a policy that allows delayed deposit (embargo) or opt-out as determined by publisher policy or copyright restrictions. The restrictions apply only to the access-setting, not to the deposit, which must be immediate. Closed Access deposit is purely an institution-internal book-keeping matter, with the institution's own assets, and no publisher policy or copyright restriction applies to it.
    [In the meanwhile, if there needs to be an embargo period, the IR software has a semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button that allows any would-be user to request (by entering their email address and clicking) and then allows any author to provide (by simply clicking on a URL that appears in the eprint request received by email) a single copy of the deposited draft, by email, on an individual basis (a practice that falls fully under Fair Use). This provides almost-immediate, almost-Open Access to tide over research usage needs during any Closed Access period.]

2. Professor Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, which has an OA self-archiving mandate (designed by Prof. Sale) has also provided a "Generic Risk Analysis of Open Access For Your Institution".

3. Model policies for research funders have also been drafted (collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad, by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement).

4. And here is the OA Self-Archiving Policy of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (the first OA self-archiving mandate - from 2001):

1. It is our policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide.
1a. It is also our policy to minimise the effort that each of us has to expend in order to provide open online access to our research output: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
1b. With all our research output accessible online we will be able to respond to the research assessment and other administrative initiatives with minimal input and effort from individual staff.
2. We have accordingly adopted the policy that all research output is to be self-archived in the departmental EPrint Archive before and after peer-reviewed publication. This archive forms the official record of the Department's research publications; all publication lists required for administration or promotion will be generated from this source.
3. Our policy is compatible with publishers' copyright agreements as follows:
3a. The copyright for the unrefereed preprint resides entirely with the author before it is submitted for peer-reviewed publication, hence it can be self-archived irrespective of the copyright policy of the journal to which it is eventually submitted.
3b. The copyright for the peer-reviewed postprint will depend on the wording of the copyright agreement which the author signs with the publisher.
3c. Many publishers will allow the peer-reviewed postprint to be self-archived. The copyright transfer agreement will either specify this right explicitly or the author can inquire about it directly. If you are uncertain about the terms of your agreement, a directory of journal self-archiving policies -- http://romeo.eprints.org -- is available to guide you. Wherever possible, you are advised to modify your copyright agreement so that it does not disallow self-archiving.
3d. In the rare case where you have signed a very restrictive copyright transfer form in which you have agreed explicitly not to self-archive the peer-reviewed postprint, you are encouraged to self-archive, alongside your already-archived preprint, a "corrigenda" file, listing the substantive changes the user would need to make in order to turn the unrefereed preprint into the refereed postprint.
3e. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department's infrastructure for your personal homepage.
4. We do not require you to archive the full text of books or research monographs. It is sufficient to archive the references along with the usual metadata.
5. Some journals still maintain submission policies which state that a preprint will not be considered for publication if it has been previously 'publicised' by making it accessible online. Unlike copyright transfer agreements, such policies are not a matter of law. If you have concerns about submitting an archived paper to a journal which still maintains such a restrictive submission policy, please discuss it with the Department's IPR and Copyright Advisor.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

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The only thing standing between the research community and 100% Open Access (OA) is:    K  E  Y  S  T  R  O  K  E  S

Universities and Research Funders need to mandate those keystrokes with the

Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate:

EITHER

Immediate Deposit + Immediate Open Access (62%)

OR (optionally, in case of a publisher embargo)

Immediate Deposit + Closed Access + “Fair Use Button” (38%)

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1. In the case of an embargoed (Closed Access) deposit the would-be user sees this:

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2. Clicking on the Request button allows eprint requester to insert email address (and, optionally, to specify reason for requesting eprint):

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3. Author of eprint receives email request and can click either to email eprint (automatically) or reject request:

From Peter Suber's Open Access News:

"The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, on the appropriations bill establishing an OA mandate at the NIH.

Sec. 217: The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication...

"The section creating the OA mandate (ß217) was read. The amendment window opened briefly and then closed. No amendments were offered.
   "This victory reflects the groundswell of public support for OA at the NIH. House members definitely heard the message.
  "The House vote is in a few days, and then the Senate vote, which is still unscheduled. Then a Presidential signature."
        Peter Suber, Open Access News

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But let us not forget that the proposed NIH policy, though much better than the previous one -- because it is at last the mandate that it ought to have been, rather than just a request -- is still flawed in that it requires deposit in a central repository (PubMed Central) instead of an Institutional Repository. Let us hope this will still be remedied in the implementation, and that the deposit will be required to be immediate (with the embargo, if any, applicable only to the date at which access to the deposit is set as Open Access.)

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) did not "sell out" to Elsevier in agreeing to pay for Open Access publication charges in exchange for compliance with their (very welcome and timely) Open Access mandate. They (and the Wellcome Trust) simply made a strategic mistake -- but a mistake that no one at HHMI (or Wellcome) as yet seems ready to re-think and remedy:

What HHMI should have done was to mandate that all HHMI fundees must deposit the final, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints") of all their published articles in their own institution's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Instead, they uncritically followed the (somewhat incoherent) "e-biomed" model, and mandated that it must be deposited directly in PubMed Central, a central, 3rd-party repository, within 6 months of publication.

The reason this was a mistake (and the reason it is silly to keep harping on HHMI's "selling out") is that all Elsevier journals, including Cell Press, are already "Green" on immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR: It is only 3rd-party archiving that they object to (as rival publication).

But there is no reason whatsoever to hold out (or pay) for direct deposit in a central repository: All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Hence any central repository can harvest their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.) and simply link it to the full-text in the author's own IR. (Oaister, Scirus, Scopus, Google, Google Scholar, etc. can of course also harvest and link for search and retrieval).

So in exchange for their unnecessary and arbitrary insistence on having the full-text deposited directly in PubMed Central within six months of publication, HHMI (and Wellcome, and other followers of this flawed model) have agreed instead to pay arbitrary, inflated, and unnecessary "Gold" OA publication charges. That would in itself be fine, and simply a waste of money, if it did not set an extremely bad example for other research funders and institutions, who are also looking to mandate OA self-archiving, but do not have the spare change to pay for such extravagant and gratuitous expenses.

Below is Cell Press's Self-Archiving policy:

Authors' rights (Cell Press):

"As an author you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:

"...Post a revised personal version of the final text (including illustrations and tables) of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or your institutional website or server, with a link (through the relevant DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not for commercial purposes..."

See also:

Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access

Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The following re-posting from Peter Suber's OA News reconfirms that Elsevier is squarely on the side of the angels insofar as OA is concerned: Elsevier is and remains solidly Green on author self-archiving. So if there is any finger of blame to be pointed, it is to be pointed straight at the research community itself, not at Elsevier. If researchers desire Open Access, and fail to provide it by self-archiving their own articles, it is entirely their own fault, certainly not Elsevier's.
   And if researchers' institutions and funders are aggrieved that their researchers are not providing OA, yet they have failed to mandate that they do so, there is again no one else to fault but themselves.
  Read on. And then if you are a researcher and minded to complain about the absence of OA, please don't waste keystrokes demonizing publishers like Elsevier, or signing pious declarations, statements, manifestos, or boycott-threats: Direct your keystrokes instead toward the self-archiving of your own articles in your own Institutional Repository!

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Elsevier restates its self-archiving policy

Ways to Use Journal Articles Published by Elsevier: A Practical Guide, Elsevier, Version 1.0, June 2007. (Thanks to Rea Devakos.)

Elsevier compiled this guide for its journal editors, but it may also be useful for authors and readers.

Excerpt:

Elsevier believes it is important to communicate clearly about our policies regarding the use of articles we publish....However, this guide does not amend, replace or cancel any part of an existing license with Elsevier....

Authors publishing in Elsevier journals retain wide rights to continue to use their works to support scientific advancement, teaching and scholarly communication. An author can, without asking permission, do the following after publication of the author's article in an Elsevier-published journal:

Make copies (print or electronic) of the author's article for personal use or the author's own classroom teaching.

Make copies of the article and distribute them (including via email) to known research colleagues for their personal use but not for commercial purposes as described below [PS: omitted here].

Present the article at a meeting or conference and distribute copies of the article to attendees.

Allow the author's employer to use the article in full or in part for other intracompany use (e.g., training).

Retain patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or procedure described in the article.

Include the article in full or in part in a thesis or dissertation.

Use the article in full or in part in a printed compilation of the author's, such as collected writings and lecture notes.

Use the article in full or in part to prepare other derivative works, including expanding the article to book-length form, with each such work to include full acknowledgment of the article's original publication in the Elsevier journal.

Post, as described below, the article to certain websites or servers.... Web posting of articles

Elsevier understands researchers want widespread distribution of their work and supports authors by enabling such distribution within the context of orderly peer review and publication.

Most journals published by Elsevier will consider (for peer review and publication) papers already posted in pre-publication versions to the Web. Pre-publication posting is common practice in, for example, physics and mathematics. However, some Elsevier clinical and biomedical journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals, follow the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and do not consider for publication papers that have already been posted publicly. Anyone with a question regarding pre-publication posting and subsequent submission of a paper to an Elsevier journal should consult that journal's instructions to authors or contact the editor.

An author can, without asking permission, do the following with the author's article that has been or will be published in an Elsevier journal:

Post a pre-print version of the article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and retain indefinitely this version on such servers or sites (unless prohibited in a specific Elsevier journal's instructions to authors).

Post a personal manuscript version of the article on the author's personal or institutional website or server, provided each such posting includes a link to the article's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and includes a complete citation for the article. 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 and editing process. Note such posting may not be for commercial purposes and may not be to any external, third-party website.

Elsevier-published authors employed by corporations may post their revised personal manuscript versions of their final articles to their corporate intranets if they are secure and do not allow public access.

This policy permitting open posting of revised personal manuscript versions applies to authors publishing articles in any Elsevier journals, including The Lancet and Cell Press journals.

If an article has multiple authors, each author has the same posting rights.

To preserve the integrity of the official record of publication, the final published version of an article as it appears (in PDF or HTML) in an Elsevier journal will continue to be available only on an Elsevier site....

Peter Suber, OA News

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Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
"Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving"

Cf: "Poisoned Apple"

"A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]

SUMMARY: Peter Murray-Rust is anxious to ensure that all research data should be harvestable and data-mineable, by man and machine alike. He worries that authors might instead agree to transfer copyright to their publishers for their data (as many already transfer it for their article texts) in exchange for the publisher's green light to self-archive. Not to worry. If authors don't self-archive their data at all today, when they hold all the rights, nor do 85% of them self-archive their articles (not even the 62% for which they already have their publisher's green light), then why on earth would they transfer copyright for their data in exchange for a green light to self-archive both? So first things first: Focus on ensuring OA for all article texts (postprints) by first mandating immediate deposit (in the author's Institutional Repository) of all postprints as soon as they are accepted for publication (without necessarily insisting that access to those deposits be immediately set to OA). All else will follow from that simple step, as surely as day follows night. OA is just a matter of keystrokes.

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Peter Murray-Rust (P-MR) writes: "I don’t disagree... [with] Stevan’s analysis of how we should deposit papers... I’m just more interested in data at present...

"Imagine, for example, that a publisher says 'I will make all our journals green as long as we retain copyright. And we’ll extend the paper to cover the whole of the scientific record'. That would be wonderful for Stevan and a complete disaster for paper-crunchers."

Make no mistake about it: Peter Murray-Rust (and Peter Suber) and I are all in total agreement about the goals, and in near-total agreement about the means.

PMR is especially concerned about research data harvesting and mining, which is not, strictly speaking, an OA matter, for two reasons:

(1) OA's primary target is research article texts. (That doesn't matter: free online access to data is extremely important too, and is part of OA's wider target.)

(2) More important, access to article texts is actually -- or, as I suspect, perceptually -- constrained by publishers' copyright-based restrictions. That is not true of data.

So, to a first approximation, authors are perfectly free to make their data OA today if they wish; all they need do is adopt the right Creative Commons License for it and then self-archive it in their Institutional repository (IR). If they don't make their data OA, it's their own fault, not the fault of publisher restrictions, actual or perceived.

PMR is worried that authors, instead of self-archiving their data, will instead transfer copyright for their data to their publishers, in exchange for their publishers adopting a Green policy. But I think PMR is misunderstanding a Green publisher policy here! Green publishers don't make their published matter OA; they merely bless the author's making it OA, if he wishes, by self-archiving it. The only publishers that make their own published matter OA are Gold OA publishers.

So what is the motivation for the copyright scenario PMR is worried about? Authors, who today cannot be bothered to self-archive their own data at all, and cannot be bothered to self-archive their articles either (and/or are too bothered by actual or perceived publisher's restrictions to do so) will henceforth, according to this scenario, adopt the brand-new practice of transferring copyright for their data (along with their articles) -- in exchange for their publishers going Green!

But why on earth would authors do that? What is the motivation? They can't be bothered self-archiving their data today, when they don't need their publisher's blessing (or greenery) to do it, just as most of them can't be bothered to self-archive their articles, even when they have their Green publishers' (62%) blessing to do so. Yet, for some unknown reason, these passive authors are to be imagined (in PMR's scenario) as being ready to transfer copyright for their undeposited data to their publishers, in exchange for their publishers' agreeing to give them the green light to self-archive their data (and articles)!

I think this fantasized scenario misses the point completely, and that point is precisely the one that PMR confesses he is less interested in, namely, that what is needed to get these passive authors to do the right thing -- in their own interests, but also in the interests of their institutions, their funders, the public that funds their funders and in whose interests the research is done, and in the interests of research progress and productivity itself -- is a Green OA self-archiving mandate, adopted by their institutions and funders! A mandate that requires them to self-archive, as a condition of employment and funding.

I would be quite happy if that self-archiving mandate applied to their data as well as to their articles. But first things first. A mandate first needs to be successfully adopted. And authors are already publishing their articles, but not yet publishing their data. Some may not wish to publish their data (preferring to keep it under wraps so that they, and not their competitors, can mine it); I make no judgment about this, except that co-bundling an article-archiving mandate with a data-archiving mandate would put the successful adoption of any mandate at all at risk, because of these potential exceptions and oppositions. (It is for similar reasons that a mandate to self-archive the refereed, accespted, published postprint is unproblematic, whereas a mandate to also self-archive the unrefereed preprint would be: Not all authors are willing to make their preprints public, nor should they be required to be. But all authors publish their postprints, by definition.)

So the prospects for the successful adoption of a postprint mandate are far better than the prospects for the successful adoption of a either postprint+preprint mandate or a postprint+data mandate. The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate in particular, as repeatedly noted, is the one with the best chance of successful adoption: It moots publisher restrictions, because it only requires deposit, not immediate OA-setting; yet it has the "Fair Use Button" to tide over usage needs during any embargo period. And ID/OA is not weighed down by requiring either preprint-deposit or data-deposit (or copyright-retention): It merely recommends them, just as it merely recommends setting access to the deposit as OA rather than Closed Access.

But -- if we agree that the only thing standing between us and 100% OA (not only for articles, but for data too) is those deposit keystrokes that sluggish, passive authors simply are not doing, unmandated -- then it should also be apparent why ID/OA is exactly what is needed now to get those keystrokes done. ID/OA does not go the whole way: It does not require the Nth (OA) keystroke. But unless we are all deeply deluded about the benefits of OA, OA's own rewards will see to it that those Nth keys get stroked, once the ID/OA mandate has propagated across all of research space, and human nature takes its course. The OA usage/impact advantage, which today can only be demonstrated by painstaking, post-hoc analyses (invariably discounted by the publishing lobby's "Dream Team," committed to arguing that there is no real advantage to OA!), will instead be obvious from the download and citation statistics for Open Access versus Closed Access articles in every Institutional Repository (IR); and the difference will be reinforced by the deluge of email eprint requests generated by the IR software's "Fair Use Button."

But once those Nth keystrokes fall, the token will (by the same token!) also fall for those same authors (i.e., all authors!), realizing the potential benefits of depositing their data too. OA will naturally propagate from postprints to (many) preprints and (most) underlying data too.

That is why I urge patience, and making common cause with Green OA mandates, for those whose goal is OA data-archiving: that too will come with the territory.

And there is no way in the world that authors will instead opt, for no reason at all, to transfer copyright to their publishers for their data too, along with copyright for their texts, in exchange for their publishers giving them the green light to do the self-archiving that they are not bothering to do anyway, with or without a green light!

They might agree to transfer data rights to a Gold OA publisher. But that would be no problem, because Gold OA publishers really do make their articles (and hence also their data) accessible online in every way, including for robot harvesting and data-mining. With ID/OA mandates, the next step after 100% postprint deposits (62% OA and 38% Closed Access + semi-automatic Fair-Use eprints) will be the transition to 100% Green OA for all postprints (the Nth keystroke), and then to the depositing of the accompanying data, with rights specified by the CC license the author adopts.

That's the natural scenario, and all it needs right now is worldwide propagation of the ID/OA mandate. To achieve that, we must not chafe, for the time being, at the absence of a guarantee of robotic harvesting and mining (for either text or data), because insisting on that now can only blunt the motivation and slow the momentum for the universal adoption of the ID/OA mandate.

Let us be patient, get the mandates adopted, and let them do their inexorable work; then the era of 100% OA -- for both text and data -- will not be far behind. You can (data-)bank on that!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Nowhere is the gap between precept and practice more apparent than in the disparity between the number of institutions that have signed the vague and pious Berlin Declaration in support of the abstract principle of Open Access, and the number of institutions that have actually registered a concrete Open Access policy in ROARMAP.

But that gap is closing...

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SUMMARY: Many Institutional Repositories (IRs) are not run by researchers but by "permissions professionals," accustomed to being mired in institutional author IP protection issues and institutional library 3rd-party usage rights rather than institutional author research give-aways. The solution is to adopt a sensible institutional (or departmental) deposit mandate and then to automatize the deposit procedure so as to take Repository Managers out of the decision loop, completely.
   The optimal deposit mandate is to require Open Access deposit of the refereed final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, but there is a compromise for the faint-hearted, and that is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate:
   The only thing standing between us and 100% OA today is keystrokes. It is in order to get those keystrokes done, at long last, that we need OA mandates, and ID/OA is a viable interim compromise: It gets all N keystrokes done for 62% of current research, and N-1 of the keystrokes done for the remaining 38%. For that 38%, the "Fair Use Button" will take care of all immediate researcher usage needs for the time being. The robots will have their day once 100% deposit mandates prevail and the research community tastes what it is like to have 62% OA and 38% almost-OA world, at long last. For then those Nth keys will inevitably get stroked, setting everything to Open Access, as it should (and could) have been all along.

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Peter Murray-Rust [PM-R] replied:

"Stevan Harnad... has been consistent in arguing the logic [of what comes with the OA territory]... and I agree with the logic... [but]... several repository managers at the JISC meeting [said] I could not have permission to do [such things] with their current content. I asked 'can my robots download and mine the content in your current open access repository of theses?' - No. 'Can you let me have some chemistry theses from your open access collection so I can data-mine them?' - No - you will have to ask the permission of each author individually.

"The MIT repository deliberately adds technical restrictions [on] printing their theses and this also technically prevents data and text mining...

"In data-rich subjects, linking to repositories is often little use. I need thousands of texts on specialist machines accessed with high frequency and bandwidth.

"My problem is not with Stevan’s views but that few... support... them, particularly not the repository managers. Maybe I’m too cautious…

The trouble with many Institutional Repositories (IRs) (besides the fact that they don't have a deposit mandate) is that they are not run by researchers but by "permissions professionals," accustomed to being mired in institutional author IP protection issues and institutional library 3rd-party usage rights rather than institutional author research give-aways.

The solution is to adopt a sensible institutional (or departmental) deposit mandate and then to automatize the deposit procedure so as to take Repository Managers out of the decision loop, completely. That is what we have done in the Southampton ECS Departmental Repository, and the result is an IR that researchers fill daily, as they complete their papers, without any mediation or meddling by permissions professionals. The author (or the author's designee) does the deposit and sets the access (Open Access or Closed Access) and the EPrints software takes care of the rest.

Institutions that have no deposit mandate have simply ceded the whole procedure to IP people who are not qualified even to understand the research access/impact problem, let alone solve it. All they are accustomed to thinking about is restrictions on incoming content, whereas the purpose of an OA IR is to allow researchers to make their own findings -- outgoing content -- accessible to other researchers webwide.

The optimal deposit mandate is of course to require Open Access deposit of the refereed final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication. But there is a compromise for the faint-hearted, and that is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate:

This is the policy that will remove IP-obsessives from the loop: The full-text and metadata of all articles must be deposited immediately, but access to the full-text is set as Open Access if the publisher is Green (i.e., endorses postprint self-archiving: 62%) and to Closed Access if the publisher is not Green (38%).

For the articles published in the non-Green journals, the IR has the semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (or "Fair Use Button"), which allows any user who has been led by the metadata to a Closed Access article to cut/paste his email address in a box and click to send an automatic email to the author to request a single eprint for research use; the author then need merely click on a URL to authorize the semi-automatic emailing of the eprint.

Now, Peter, I counsel patience! You will immediately reply: "But my robots cannot crunch Closed Access texts: I need to intervene manually!" True, but that problem will only be temporary, and you must not forget the far larger problem that precedes it, which is that 85% of papers are not yet being deposited at all, either as Open Access or Closed Access. That is the inertial practice that needs to be changed, globally, once and for all.

The only thing standing between us and 100% OA is keystrokes. It is in order to get those keystrokes done, at long last, that we need OA mandates, and ID/OA is a viable interim compromise: It gets all N keystrokes done for 62% of current research, and N-1 of the keystrokes done for the remaining 38%. For that 38%, the "Fair Use Button" will take care of all immediate researcher usage needs for the time being. The robots will have their day once 100% deposit mandates prevail and the research community tastes what it is like to have 62% OA and 38% almost-OA world, at long last. For then those Nth keys will inevitably get stroked, setting everything to Open Access, as it should (and could) have been all along.

It is in that keystoke endgame that all publisher resistance will disintegrate (and they know it, which is why they are lobbying so aggressively against keystroke mandates!). But right now, publishers have unwitting accomplices in institutional IP specialists, reflexively locking in the status quo, blithely ignorant or insouciant about what OA is actually about, and for. That is why ID/OA must be allowed to take them out of the loop.

Just as I have urged that Gold OA (publishing) advocates should not over-reach ("Gold Fever") -- by pushing directly for the conversion of all publishers and authors to Gold OA, and criticizing and even opposing Green OA and Green OA mandates as "not enough" -- I urge the advocates of automatized robotic data-mining to be patient and help rather than hinder Green OA and Green OA (and ID/OA) mandates.

In both cases, it is Green OA that is the most powerful and promising means to the end they seek: 100% ID/OA will eventually drive a transition to 100% Green OA and 100% Green OA will eventually drive a transition to Gold OA. Short-sightedly opposing the Green OA measures now in the name of holding out for "greater functionality" is tantamount to joining forces with IP specialists who have no sense of researchers' daily access needs and impact losses, and are simply holding out for what they think is the perfect formal solution, which is all authors successfully negotiating a copyright agreement that retains their right to make their article OA.

First things first. We are HERE now (85% deprived of research content even for non-robotic use). In order to get THERE (100% of research content OA to researchers and robots alike) we first have to get those keystrokes done. Please help, rather than just hope!

PM-R: "Some publishers allow posting on green open access on web sites but debar it from repositories."

This is the sort abject and arbitrary nonsense that takes one's breath away! Can these publishers define the difference between a website and a repository? They are just ways that disk sectors are labelled. To block such incoherent stipulations Southampton ECS has formally baptized its researchers' repository disk sector as their "personal website." (This is also why I object so vigorously to SHERPA-Romeo's slavish and solemn canonizing of every announced publisher "condition" on deposit, no matter how absurd. I stand ready to hear that there is a new SHERPA-Romeo permissions category, colour-coded "chestnut" for those publishers who do not allow deposit of articles by authors who have maternal uncles with chestnut-coloured irises... Here too we detect the familiar mark of the IP gurus...)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum