Self-Archiving Mandates

The European Commission, the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) and the European Research Councils have each recently recommended adopting the policy of providing Open Access to research results.

(Very similar recommendations are also being made by governmental research organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia.)

There are powerful non-research interests lobbying vigorously against these policy recommendations, so a display of support by the research community is critically important at this time.

A petition in support of the European Commission recommendation is now being sponsored by a consortium of European organisations:

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK),
SURF (Netherlands),
SPARC Europe,
DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany),
DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

The petition is to be presented to the European Commission February 15th in Brussels at its conference on "Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age."

The petition's purpose is to demonstrate the broad-based support for the EC recommendations on the part of the European as well as the worldwide research community, particularly

Recommendation A1: "GUARANTEE PUBLIC ACCESS TO PUBLICLY-FUNDED RESEARCH RESULTS SHORTLY AFTER PUBLICATION"

Establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives

Signatures may be added by individual researchers or by universities and research institutions.

Institutional signatures, from Europe and worldwide, are fast approaching 1000, while individual signatures are nearing 20,000.

Researchers, lab directors, institutute directors, university research VPs and DVCs, learned society and scholarly/scientific academy presidents are all strongly urged to register your support.

Please sign the OA petition here.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

As OA self-archiving mandates by research funders grow, here is Arthur Sale's timely and useful strategy to help accelerate the complementary growth of self-archiving mandates by universities and research institutions (if the whole institution is not yet ready, start bottom-up with mandates at the laboratory or departmental level):

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February doi:10.1045/january2007-sale.

Excerpts [interpolations added]:

"This article is written mainly for repository managers who are at a loss as to what policies they (or their universities or research institutions) ought to deploy in order to ensure that most, if not all, of the institution's scholarly output is deposited in the institution's repository. In essence, there are only two pure policies:

requiring (mandating) researchers to deposit, and

relying on voluntary (spontaneous) participation, with or without
encouragement...

"A mandatory deposit policy will approach a capture rate of 100% of current research publications, though it will take a couple of years to achieve that goal. Figures of 60-90% can be expected in a short time. See... for some data on how mandates actually work...:

Sale, A. The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.

"Voluntary deposit policies are known to achieve no greater deposit rate of current research than 30% and more usually around 15%... The evidence for this can be produced and is absolutely clear...:

Sale, A. The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4)

Sale, A. Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

"This short article describes a third policy that provides a transitional path between the two.

"What is the patchwork mandate? Simply this:

"Knowing that you have been [as yet] unable to convince the senior executives, you nevertheless personally commit to having a mandate across your institution.

"You aim to pursue a strategy that will achieve an institutional mandate in the long term. (It is highly recommended that you register your intention to do this in ROARMAP so as to encourage other repository managers caught in the same dilemma.)

"Since you haven't been able to get an institutional mandate [yet], you work instead towards getting departmental (school/faculty) mandates one by one. Each departmental mandate will rapidly trend towards 100%, and little activism is needed to maintain this level....

"Conclusion

"I am convinced that the patchwork mandate strategy described in this article will work in most cases. It is being trialled in Australia, and although it won't achieve 100% deposit of content into the institutional repository instantly, it is a clear way to work towards that goal. You can even explain the patchwork mandate approach to your senior executives, and they probably won't stop you from trying it. They may even encourage you in your efforts.

"Just remember that voluntary persuasion of individuals is known not to work beyond a pitiful participation level. Self-archiving needs to be made part of the routine academic duty, and this requires a policy endorsement of mandatory deposit by someone."

Arthur Sale

The ROARMAP Registry of University and Funder Self-Archiving Mandates keeps growing: 56 policies, 20 adopted mandates, and 5 proposed mandates so far, worldwide. But the latest mandate proposal from EURAB is the best of them all: So good that I don't have a single recommendation for improving it! It has all the essential ingredients:

(1) Deposit of peer-reviewed postprint is required
(2) Deposit required immediately upon acceptance for publication (no exceptions, no delays)
(3) Deposit in Institutional or Central Repository
(4) Set access to deposit as Open Access as soon as possible, within 6 months at the latest.

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

That's it. It's not possible to design a better policy, or one that is surer to get the entire international research community to 100% OA more reliably, quickly or effectively. Here's the policy. Please emulate it at your university, research institution or funding agency and we'll reach the optimal and inevitable at long last.

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Recommendations of the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB)

The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) has recommended that the European Commission should promote open access publication policies for all their publicly funded research. EURAB was invited by the Commission to examine the issue of scientific publication with particular reference to policy recommendations regarding open access for Framework Program 7 (FP7). It has recommended that a clear policy at European level is required which sets out a number of key high level principles. The Commission can play a role in three respects: as a funding body, as a policy body, as a supporting body.

1. The publication policy should not compromise the freedom of scientists to publish wherever they feel is most appropriate.

2. The effect of the policy should be to increase the visibility of and improve access to the research funded by the Commission.

3. The policy should be based on recognized best practice

4. EURAB recommends that the Commission should consider mandating all researchers funded under FP7 to [deposit] their publications resulting from EC-funded research in an open access repository as soon as possible after publication, to be made openly accessible within 6 months at the latest.

a. The repository may be a local institutional and/or a subject repository.

b. Authors should deposit post-prints (or publisher's version if permitted) plus metadata of articles accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings.

c. Deposit should be made upon acceptance by the journal/conference. Repositories should release the metadata immediately, with access restrictions to full text article to be applied as required. Open access should be made available as soon as practicable after the author-requested embargo, or six months, whichever comes first.

d. Suitable repositories should make provision for long-term preservation of, and free public access to, published research findings.

5. Given the complexity of the issues involved, the Commission should consider implementation of this policy on a phased basis, starting with research funded by the European Research Council.

The Commission should strongly encourage all Member States to promote open access publication policies for all their publicly funded research.

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If your university, research institution, or research funding agency has adopted or proposes to adopt an OA self-archiving mandate, please register it in ROARMAP for others to emulate.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The Australian Research Council (ARC) has proposed to mandate OA self-archiving by its fundees. SPARC has advised ARC (1) to require retaining non-exclusive rights as well, (2) to require OA self-archiving within 6 months of publication, and (3) to earmark ARC funds for OA journal publication costs, so OA can be immediate. I suggest instead (1) that to mandate self-archiving it is neither necessary nor desirable to mandate retaining non-exclusive rights at this time, (2) that deposit should be mandated immediately upon publication, with any allowable 6-month delay applying not to the timing of the deposit itself but only to the timing of the setting of access to the deposit (as Open Access rather than Closed Access), and (3) that it is neither desirable nor necessary at this time to earmark ARC funds to pay to publish in OA journals for immediate OA: Institutional Repositories' EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button will be sufficient to tide over user needs during any 6-month embargo interval between deposit and OA. (Australia's OA specialist Arthur Sale concurs.)

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Across the years, SPARC has often been a great help to the Open Access movement. But SPARC could help so much more if it could take advice, in addition to giving it (sometimes with insufficient information and reflection):

- A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature (Jun 2000)
- SPARC reply
- Comments on the SPARC Position Paper on Institutional Repositories (Aug 2002)
- New SPARC/ARL/ACRL Brochure on Open Access (Jun 2004)
- Eprints, Dspace, or Espace? (Oct 2004)
- "Life After NIH" (Apr 2005)
- A Keystroke Koan For Our Open Access Times (May 2005)
- "Disaggregated Journals" (Jul 2005)

SPARC has given the Australian Research Council the following advice:

(SPARC's advice in boldface, followed in each case by my comment, indented, followed by Australian OA specialist Arthur Sale [AS] commenting on my comment, in italics, double-indented)

SPARC: "Research funders should include in all grants and contracts a provision reserving for the government relevant non-exclusive rights (as described below) to research papers and data."

Fine, but this is not a prerequisite for self-archiving, nor for mandating self-archiving. It is enough if ARC clearly mandates deposit; the rest will take care of itself.

AS: "A sensible fundee will take this action; how sensible they are will remain to be seen. The unsensible ones will have some explaining to do. ARC could have given advice like this, but didn't."

SPARC: "All peer-reviewed research papers and associated data stemming from public funding should be required to be maintained in stable digital repositories that permit free, timely public access, interoperability with other resources on the Internet, and long-term preservation. Exemptions should be strictly limited and justified."

That, presumably, is what the ARC self-archiving mandate amounts to.

AS: "Exactly. And every university in Australia will have access to such a repository by end 2007. 50% already do."

SPARC: "Users should be permitted to read, print, search, link to, or crawl these research outputs. In addition, policies that make possible the download and manipulation of text and data by software tools should be considered."

All unnecessary; all comes with the territory, if self-archiving is mandated. (The policy does not need extra complications: a clear self-archiving mandate simply needs adoption and implementation.)

AS: "Totally agree..."

SPARC: "Deposit of their works in qualified digital archives should be required of all funded investigators, extramural and intramural alike."

Yes, the self-archiving mandate should apply to all funded research.

AS: "It does."

SPARC: "While this responsibility might be delegated to a journal or other agent, to assure accountability the responsibility should ultimately be that of the funds recipient."

Not clear what this refers to, but, yes, it is the fundee who should be mandated to self-archive.

AS: "Yes the onus is on the fundee(s), and especially the principal investigator who has to submit the Final Report."

SPARC: "Public access to research outputs should be provided as early as possible after peer review and acceptance for publication. For research papers, this should be not later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This embargo period represents a reasonable, adequate, and fair compromise between the public interest and the needs of journals."

The self-archiving mandate that ARC should adopt is the ID/OA mandate whereby deposit is mandatory immediately upon acceptance for publication, and the embargo (if any, 6 months max.) is applicable only to the date at which access to the deposit is set as Open Access (rather than Closed Access), not to the date of deposit itself. During any Closed Access embargo interval, each repository's semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button will cover all research usage needs.

AS: "ARC is silent on timing, but I expect a quick transition to the ID/OA policy by fundees. Anything else is a pain - it is easier to do this than run around like a headless chook later. The Research Quality Framework (RQF) will encourage instant mandate because of its citation metrics. NOTE ESPECIALLY THAT THE ARC GUIDELINES DO NOT SIT IN A VACUUM BY THEMSELVES. The National Health and Medical Research Council and the RQF are equally important. "

SPARC: "We also recommend that, as a means of further accelerating innovation, a portion of each grant be earmarked to cover the cost of publishing papers in peer-reviewed open-access journals, if authors so choose. This would provide potential readers with immediate access to results, rather than after an embargo period."

The ID/OA mandate -- together with the EMAIL EPRINT button -- already cover all immediate-access needs without needlessly diverting any research money at this time. The time to pay for publication will be if and when self-archiving causes subscriptions to collapse, and if that time ever comes, it will be the saved institutional subscription funds themselves that will pay for the publication costs, with no need to divert already-scarce funds from research. Instead to divert money from research now would be needlessly to double-pay for OA; OA can already be provided by author self-archiving without any further cost.

AS: "This recommendation will certainly be disregarded, correctly in my opinion. ARC has never funded publication costs and does not intend to start now. Australian universities are already funded for publication and subscription costs through the normal block grants and research infrastructure funding. All they have to do is redirect some of their funding as they see fit. The recommendation might accelerate innovation, but it is not the ARC's job to fund innovation in the publishing industry."

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Many thanks to Dr. Helio Kuramoto for his excellent, accurate summary of the recent Open Access (OA) workshop at U. Minho, Portugal. I just wanted to add that I (and other OA activists worldwide, notably Eloy Rodriques of U. Minho, organizer of the workshop) admire and applaud the efforts of Dr. Kuramoto and IBICT. Brazil is already a leader on the "golden" road to Open Access (OA) in the Developing World, namely, OA publishing, with its admirable Scielo journals initiative; but this is definitely not enough. What is urgently needed at this time is a strong Brazilian initiative along the faster, surer "green" road to OA: OA self-archiving, and especially OA self-archiving mandates from Brazil's research institutions and funders, exactly as summarized by Dr. Kuramoto:

"O estabelecimento dessa política e desse mandato só pode ser conseguido por meio do convencimento dos dirigentes das agências de fomento, das instituições governamentais, em espeical as universidades e os institutos de pesquisas, além, obviamente, dos pesquisadores."

This was also the verdict of the recent OA congress in Bangalore, likewise attended by representatives from Brazil; its outcome, the "National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries" was precisely the one summarized above by Dr. Kuramoto.

(I regret that I could not write this comment in Portuguese, but, with the help of Ana Alice Baptista, I have tried to make up for that here.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In Open Access News, Peter Suber excerpted the following from the AIP Position On Open Access & Public Access:

"AIP is fearful of and against government mandates that provide rules in favor of one business model over another.
AIP is against funding agencies mandating free access to articles after they have undergone costly peer review or editing by publishers."

It is important not to confuse AIP (American Institute of Physics) with APS (American Physical Society). AIP is merely the publisher of the journals of APS, which is a Learned Society (and one of the most progressive on OA).

Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society) (began Dec 1999)
APS copyright policy (Mar 2002)

Don't take the grumbling of AIP too seriously. The APS/AIP division-of-labor is optimal, because it allows us to separate the scientific/scholarly interests from the publishing interests (which are so thoroughly conflated in most other Learned Societies, notably the American Chemical Society!).

ACS meeting comments on e-prints
Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

The AIP is basically saying that the interests of generating and protecting AIP's current revenue streams and cost-recovery model trump the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the interests of the tax-paying public that funds their funders.

In contrast, the international Open Access movement, five out of eight UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust, a growing number of Australian and Canadian Research Councils, CERN, the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), the provosts of most of the top US universities, the European Commission, the Developing World, and a growing number of individual universities and research institutions think otherwise.

(By the way, self-archiving mandates do not "favor of one business model over another": They are not about business models at all. They are about maximizing the access, usage and impact of publicly funded research.).

AIP is the publishing tail, yet again trying to wag the research dog. Soon we will see an end of this sort of nonsense.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. Technical Report, Department of Electronics and computer Science, University of Southampton.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On the good authority of Arthur Sale (and Peter Suber), the classification of the Australian Research Council (ARC) self-archiving policy in ROARMAP has been upgraded to a mandate.

There are now 17 self-archiving mandates worldwide, 5 of them in Australia: A departmental and university-wide one at U. Tasmania, a university-wide one at QUT, and a funder mandate at ARC, joined soon after by another funder mandate (NHMRC) and reinforced by the Research Quality Framework (RQF) (the Australian counterpart of the UK Research Assessment Exercise, RAE).

Congratulations to Australia, and especially to Tom Cochrane, Paul Callan, Colin Steele, Malcolm Gillies, and to the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale.

Brunel University's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics has just adopted the 9th departmental/institutional self-archiving mandate. (Together with the 6 research funder mandates, that now makes 15 mandates worldwide, and the 8th for the UK.)

Brunel University School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics (UNITED KINGDOM mandate)

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/
Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy:

BURA will make journal articles conference papers, doctoral theses, recordings and images freely available via the internet, allowing users to read, download and copy material for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Brunel's School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics is supporting the initiative to make it compulsory for researchers to deposit their journal articles and theses in BURA. "[F]or academics it will make readily available their research to the world. If it is successful, it could also lead onto the whole university adopting mandatory self-archiving."

This is an instance of Prof. Artur Sale's recommended "Patchwork Mandate" -- departments first, then the university as a whole. Other examples are Prof. Sale's own University of Tasmania's departmental and university-wide mandates and University of Southampton's ECS departmental mandate (soon to become a university-wide mandate).

If your own university or research institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Yet another brilliant and timely stroke from the Archivangelist of the Antipodes (who is rapidly gaining worldwide moral hegemony!):

Sale, Arthur (2006) The Patchwork Mandate. Working Paper. School of Computing, Australia

Arthur Sale is so right: Where the university's senior management are momentarily immovable, the right strategy is a promising individual department or two: The focussed outcome of a departmental mandate can be even faster and more dramatic than a university-wide one, serving as an irresistible stepping stone toward a university-wide mandate.

And there is supporting evidence: The outcome of the U. Tasmania SC and U. Southampton ECS departmental mandates, there to prove it works (and both of them leading to university-wide mandates thereafter).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In the Gutenberg Galaxy of print-on-paper, right up to the present day, researchers have had a quasi-universal "mandate" to make their findings known: "Publish or Perish".

The reason was that findings buried in a file drawer may as well not have been found at all. Publishing the findings makes it possible for other researchers to use, apply, and build upon them.

In today's PostGutenberg Galaxy of globalised bits-on-line, we need to generalize and universalise the old Gutenberg mandate in a simple and natural way:

Researchers need to maximise access and usage by making their research freely accessible to all users online: Instead of mailing paper reprints of their articles to would-be users who request them, an inexhaustible supply of online eprints needs to be provided by self-archiving all published articles, free for all, in each researcher's Open Access Institutional Repository.

Prompted by a proposal by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives to find a catchy French PostGutenberg gloss of "Publish or Perish," a number of candidates immediately come to mind, both in English and in French. So let's have an (informal, unofficial) contest. (No prize, but the winner is likely to become the OA movement's slogan for the PostGutenberg extension of the Publish or Perish mandate.)

Please email candidates to me (harnad AT soton dot ac dot uk), not to the American Scientist Open Access Forum. I will then post them collectively (with the names of proponents, or anonymously: please indicate your preference) for a vote.

Here are a few to get you started:

ENGLISH:
Publish or Perish --->
Disseminate or Decease
Broadcast or Bury
Air or Expire
OA or Decay
Archive to Survive
Post or Ghost ...

FRENCH:
Publier ou périr --->
Diffuser ou Décéder...

Multilingual entries are welcome! Alma Swan wrote:

"The challenge is - in all languages - to get the [new] wide meaning and the alliteration!" [fore or aft]

(There is already a Hungarian gloss "Kiadsz vagy Kimaradsz" (roughly "give out [= publish] or get left out"] by Tamas Somogyi of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and soon, I hope, in Portuguese...)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum