Self-Archiving Mandates

Another brilliant (and timely) OA whodunnit by Richard Poynder!

Yet the plot thickens, with the mystery of the outcome of the 2004 UK Select Committee deliberations still not altogether dispelled.

Ian Gibson is clearly brilliant, and his heart is clearly in the right place. But although his 2004 Gibson Committee Report clearly had (and continues to have) enormous (positive) ramifications for OA worldwide, Ian himself just as clearly does not fully grasp those ramifications!

Journal and Author Selectivity. Ian still thinks that OA is about somehow weaning authors from their preferred highly selective journals (such as Nature), even though the cost-free Green OA that his own Report recommended mandating does not require authors to give up their preferred journals, thereby mooting this issue (and even though the ominous new prospect of double-paying publishers for hybrid Gold OA out of shrinking research funds favoured by the Finch Committee Report does not require authors to give up their preferred journals either).

Research access, assessment and affordability are being conflated here. Green OA does not solve the affordability problem directly, but it sure makes it much less of a life/death matter (since everyone has Green access, whether or not they can afford subscription access). And of course that in turn makes subscription cancelations, publisher cost-cutting, downsizing and conversion to Gold much more likely -- while also releasing the institutional subscription cancelation windfall savings to pay the much lower post-Green Gold OA cost many times over. This leaves journals' peer-review standards and selectivity up to the peers -- and journal choice up to the authors -- where both belong.

Giving up authors' preferred journals in favour of pure Gold OA journals was what (I think) BMC's Vitek Tracz and Jan Velterop had been lobbying for at the time (and that is not what the Gibson Report ended up recommending)!

Emily Commander. So I think if you really want to get to the heart of the mystery of how the Gibson Report crystallized into the epochal recommendation for all UK universities and funders to mandate Green OA you will have to dig deeper, Richard, and interview its author, Emily Commander, who -- as Ian indicates -- was the one who crafted the text out of the cacophony of conflicting testimonials.

Don't ask Emily about the bulk of the report, which is largely just ballast, but about how she arrived at its revolutionary core recommendation (highlighted in boldface below). That's what this is all about...

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Select Committee on Science and Technology
Tenth Report
(2004)

Summary
[boldface added]

Academic libraries are struggling to purchase subscriptions to all the journal titles needed by their users. This is due both to the high and increasing journal prices imposed by commercial publishers and the inadequacy of library budgets to meet the demands placed upon them by a system supporting an ever increasing volume of research. Whilst there are a number of measures that can be taken by publishers, libraries and academics to improve the provision of scientific publications, a Government strategy is urgently needed.

This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way. The Government will need to appoint a central body to oversee the implementation of the repositories; to help with networking; and to ensure compliance with the technical standards needed to provide maximum functionality. Set-up and running costs are relatively low, making institutional repositories a cost-effective way of improving access to scientific publications.

Institutional repositories will help to improve access to journals but a more radical solution may be required in the long term. Early indications suggest that the author-pays publishing model could be viable. We remain unconvinced by many of the arguments mounted against it. Nonetheless, this Report concludes that further experimentation is necessary, particularly to establish the impact that a change of publishing models would have on learned societies and in respect of the "free rider" problem. In order to encourage such experimentation the Report recommends that the Research Councils each establish a fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish. The UK Government has failed to respond to issues surrounding scientific publications in a coherent manner and we are not convinced that it would be ready to deal with any changes to the publishing process. The Report recommends that Government formulate a strategy for future action as a matter of urgency.

The preservation of digital material is an expensive process that poses a significant technical challenge. This Report recommends that the British Library receives sufficient funding to enable it to carry out this work. It also recommends that work on new regulations for the legal deposit of non-print publications begins immediately. Failure to take these steps would result in a substantial breach in the intellectual record of the UK.

The market for scientific publications is international. The UK cannot act alone. For this reason we recommended that the UK Government act as a proponent for change on the international stage and lead by example. This will ultimately benefit researchers across the globe.

We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.

Gargouri Y, Lariviere V, Gingras Y, Brody T, Carr L & Harnad S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness Open Access Week 2012

OA Week has already generated several important OA mandates and mandate recommendations (from Hungary, Japan, Ireland, France, Brazil, Science Europe, ).

If your institution, funder or nation has adopted or proposed an Open Access Mandate, please register it in

ROARMAP
Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies
http://roarmap.eprints.org
This will inform the world about OA progress and motivate others to adopt and announce their OA policies.

Mark Thorley has posted "RCUK Open Access Policy – When to go Green and When to go Gold" on the RCUK site.

Here are four further questions about the policy:

1. Policy Wording. As repeatedly pointed out and acknowledged at the Imperial College Forum, the wording of the present RCUK policy is confusing and leads to the widespread misunderstanding that fundees may not choose (free) Green (6-12) unless the journal does not offer (paid) Gold (CC-BY). If the intended meaning is that fundees may freely choose Green or Gold, isn't the right place to say that -- and to prevent this confusion and misunderstanding -- in the wording of the policy itself? rather than just in accompanying guidance to the interpretation of the wording of the policy?

2. Perverse Effects. Is RCUK not concerned that only allowing fundees to publish in journals that offer either (paid) CC-BY Gold or (free) 6-12 Green (or both) will simply induce subscription journals (60% of which currently allow immediate, unembargoed Green) to now offer hybrid (paid) CC-BY Gold while increasing their Green embargo to 13+ to make sure that UK authors must pay for Gold?

3. Benefits of 6% CC-BY. The UK produces 6% of worldwide research output. What benefit is it to UK industry, or to UK wealth creation, or to UK research, for the UK to pay (hybrid) subscription publishers worldwide 6% extra, over and above what they are already being paid for subscriptions, in order to make (only) the UK's own 6% of worldwide research output CC-BY Gold? Is it worth the extra UK research money, diverted from research? or the loss (to both the UK and the rest of the world) of Green OA from the rest of the world (94%), because RCUK gives subscription publishers worldwide the irresistible incentive to offer a hybrid Gold option and increase their Green embargo lengths (while the rest of the world, unlike the UK, cannot afford -- or does not wish -- to subsidize hybrid publishers over and above what they are already paying them in subscriptions)?

4. Green Compliance Mechanisms. There seem to be plans in the making for verifying compliance with RCUK's paid Gold option. What are RCUK's plans for verifying compliance with the Green OA option? A requirement to deposit is not even mentioned in the current RCUK Policy's wording: just a requirement to choose an RCUK-compliant journal.

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Mark Thorley's Reply (since September 28):
"Your comment is awaiting moderation"

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Rick Rylance (CEO, AHRC) in Independent on RCUK policy:

"because we recognise that… the… pay-to-publish "gold" model of Open Access.. is not always available, we've retained a mixed model for the time being. This means that if there is not a to pay-to-publish option, researchers can opt for the "green" model of open access where the paper would be available via a repository after an embargo period… [emphasis added]

Why "for the time being"?

Why (cost-free) Green only if (paid) Gold unavailable?

Why is Green described as embargoed when over 60% of journals (including the top journals in most fields) already endorse immediate, unembargoed Green (and "Almost OA" is available for the remaining 40%)?

Is RCUK trying to encourage publishers to increase their Green OA embargoes?

Stevan Harnad

Keynote at Digital Research 2012, St. Catherine's College, Oxford, 11 September 2012.

These questions are for the
Imperial College Science Communication Forum
"Open access: Going for Gold?"
Thursday, 27 September 2012
18:30 to 21:00 (BST)
London, United Kingdom

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QUESTION 1: For hybrid subscription journals that offer both Gold OA (CC-BY) for a fee and Green OA (6-12) for free, why does RCUK require authors to pick and pay for Gold? Why not leave the choice to the author?

RCUK Policy:

"…papers must be published in journals which are [RCUK]-compliant… journal [is RCUK-]compliant… if…(1)… journal offers [Gold OA, CC-BY].. Or (2) where a publisher does not offer option 1… journal must allow… [Green OA, 6-12]"

QUESTION 2: If the RCUK official policy really means "RCUK authors may choose Green or Gold" rather than "RCUK authors may choose Green where Gold is not offered", then why does it not say "RCUK authors may choose Green or Gold" rather than "RCUK authors may choose Green where Gold is not offered"? All that's needed to make this perfectly clear is is to drop the words "where a publisher does not offer option 1".

(It is not clear why the clause  "Where a publisher does not offer option 1" was ever inserted in the first place, as the logic of what is intended is perfectly clear without it, and is only obscured by inserting it. The only two conceivable reasons I can think of for that gratuitous and misleading clause's having been inserted in the first place are that either (a) the drafters half-forgot about the hybrid GREEN+GOLD possibility, or (b) they were indeed trying to push authors (and publishers!) toward the GOLD option in both choices: the between-journal choice of GOLD versus GREEN journal and the within-journal choice of the GOLD versus GREEN option -- possibly because of Gold Fever induced by BIS's Finch Folly.)

QUESTION 3: Are Finch/RCUK not bothered by the fact that the new policy that "RCUK authors may choose Green [only] where Gold is not offered" (if that's what it means) would be in direct contradiction with the recommendations of BOAI-10 to institutions (see excerpt at end of this posting)?
 
QUESTION 4: How many UK research fields urgently need CC-BY today? Have Finch/RCUK not confused the re-use needs of research data (Open Data) with the need for free online access to articles? What percentage of all research fields needs and wants CC-BY (machine data-mining and re-publication rights) for its articles today, compared to the percentage that needs and wants free online access to its articles? What is the relative urgency of these two needs today (and the price worth paying to fulfill them)?

QUESTION 5: What good does it do UK industry to have BIS subsidize Gold OA for the UK's 6% of worldwide research output (out of the UK's scarce research funds) when the rest of the world is not doing the same (and unlikely to afford or want to) for the remaining 94% of worldwide research output? Does UK industry need Open Access to the UK's own research output only, in order to "create wealth"?

QUESTION 6: Is RCUK not concerned that a policy requiring UK authors to choose Gold over Green would simply induce subscription publishers to offer a pricey hybrid Gold option and to increase their Green embargoes (for all authors worldwide) so as to ensure that all UK researchers must pay for Gold? Won't that make it tougher for other others (94%) to provide and mandate Green OA worldwide?

QUESTION 7: Has anyone troubled to do the arithmetic on the UK subsidy for Gold? The UK publishes 6% of worldwide research output. The UK presumably also pays 6% of publishers' worldwide subscription revenue. Most publishers today are subscription publishers. So, in response to the current policy that "RCUK authors may choose Green where Gold is not offered", would it not make sense for all subscription publishers worldwide simply to add a hybrid Gold option, so that their total subscription income can be increased by 6% for hybrid Gold, subsidized by the UK tax-payer and UK research funds? Has it not been noticed by Finch/RCUK that even if publishers made good on the promise to lower their subscription fees in proportion to any increase in their Gold OA revenue from the UK, the UK would only get back 6% of the 6% it double-pays for hybrid Gold?

QUESTION 8: The Finch Report (cited also by RCUK) claimed that Green OA had failed, and suggested it should be downgraded to just preservation archiving. But is it not rather the prior RCUK Green OA mandate that failed, because it adopted no compliance verification mechanisms? Green OA mandates with effective compliance mechanisms (integrated with institutional mandates) are succeeding very well elsewhere in the world. Why does the new RCUK policy again focus only on confirming compliance with Gold, rather than with Green?

ANSWER: RCUK already has a Green OA mandate. If the UK wants 100% UK OA within two years, it need only add the following simple, cost-effective compliance verification mechanism: (1) Deposit must be in the fundee's institutional repository. (This makes each UK institution responsible for monitoring and verifying timely compliance.) (2) All articles must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Publisher embargoes apply only to the date on which the deposit is made OA.) (3) Repository deposit must be designated the sole mechanism for submitting publications for UK research assessment (REF).

BOAI-10 RECOMMENDATIONS

-- 1.1. Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository...

-- Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication.

-- University policies should respect faculty freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. [emphasis added]

-- University policies should encourage but not require publication in OA journals [emphasis added] ...

-- 1.3. Every research funding agency, public or private, should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as soon as practicable.

-- Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication...

Stevan Harnad

Time for the call to fix RCUK OA policy's fatal flaw to go viral

If you want to help, please re-tweet and re-post

The Two Tweaks Needed
to Disambiguate RCUK OA Policy
The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

1. [GOLD] The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

2. [GREEN] *REMOVE* Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above,*REMOVE* the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. In this option no ‘Article Processing Charge’ will be payable to the publisher. Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.

ADD: "Where a journal offers both suitable green (2.) and suitable gold (1.) options the PI may choose the option he or she thinks most appropriate" .

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For those with patience for logic, here is how the ambiguity crept into the RCUK Open Access Policy, where it resides, and why it is all the more important to set it right promptly, before it takes root:

The RCUK fundee is actually faced with not one but two semi-independent choices to make in order to comply with the RCUK OA mandate: the between-journals choice of a suitable journal, and the within-journal choice of a suitable option.

These two semi-independent choices have been (inadvertently) conflated in the current RCUK policy draft, treating them, ambiguously, as if they were one choice.

Both choices are nominally GREEN versus GOLD choices.

Let's quickly define "GREEN" and "GOLD," because they mean the same in both cases. I will use a definition based on the current RCUK policy draft:

GOLD means the journal makes the article OA with CC-BY ("Libre OA"), usually for a fee.

GREEN means the author makes the article OA ("Gratis OA") by depositing it in a repository, and making it OA within 0-12 months of publication.

These two definitions are not what is in dispute here.

But now the GREEN versus GOLD choice applies to two different things: 

(1) the author's choice of which journal is an RCUK-suitable journal to publish in (this is the between-journals choice) 

and then, if the journal offers both the GREEN and GOLD option: 

(2) the author's choice of which option to pick (this is the within-journal choice).

A perfectly clear and unambiguous way to state the intended policy would be:

An RCUK-suitable journal is one that offers
(i) GREEN only or (ii) GOLD only or (iii) BOTH (i.e., hybrid GREEN+GOLD).

An RCUK author may choose (i), (ii) or (iii).

If the choice is (iii), the RCUK author may choose GREEN or GOLD.

That would dispel all ambiguity.

But what the current RCUK policy actually states instead is:

An RCUK-suitable journal is one that offers (i) GOLD, or, if it does not offer GOLD, then an RCUK-suitable journal is one that offers (ii) GREEN OA.

The possibility that the journal offers (iii) both (i.e., hybrid GREEN+GOLD) is not mentioned, and the between-journals choice of journal is hence left completely conflated with the within-journal choice of option.

So the conclusion the RCUK fundee draws is that GREEN can only be chosen if GOLD is not offered: "GREEN IF AND ONLY IF NOT GOLD."

When a policy so fully conflates two distinct, independent choice factors, it is extremely important to disambiguate it so as to undo the conflation.

Dropping the 9-word -- and completely unnecessary -- clause 

"Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above" [i.e., does not offer GOLD]

would remove the conflation and the ambiguity.

To make this even more transparent, the statement from Mark Thorley, interviewed by Peter Suber, could also be added:

"Where a journal offers both suitable green (2.) and suitable gold (1.) options" [i.e., hybrid GREEN+GOLD] , "the PI may choose the option he or she thinks most appropriate" 

This would make it perfectly clear that if a hybrid GREEN+GOLD journal is chosen, the author is free to choose either its GREEN or GOLD option.

It is not clear why the clause  "Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above" was ever inserted in the first place, as the logic of what is intended is perfectly clear without it, and is only obscured by inserting it. 

(The only two conceivable reasons I can think of for that gratuitous and misleading clause's having been inserted in the first place are that either (a) the drafters half-forgot about the hybrid GREEN+GOLD possibility, or (b) they were indeed trying to push authors (and publishers!) toward the GOLD option in both choices: the between-journal choice of GOLD versus GREEN journal and the within-journal choice of the GOLD versus GREEN option -- possibly because of Gold Fever induced by BIS's Finch Folly.)

The RCUK OA Policy can be fixed very easily (and without any fanfare) by doing the two tweaks highlighted at the beginning of this posting -- the first for disambiguation, the second for clarification.

Once that is done, we can all unite in support of the RCUK policy and do everything we can to make it succeed. (There is still a lot of work to do in the implementation details, to provide a reliable fundee-compliance-assurance mechanism.)

If these two essential tweaks were not made, however, then the RCUK OA policy would not only fail (because of author resistance to constraints on journal choice, resentment at the diversion of scarce research funds to double-pay publishers, and outrage at the prospect of having to use their own funds when the RCUK subsidy is insufficient): It would also handicap OA policies by funders and institutions all over the world, by giving publishers worldwide the strong incentive to offer hybrid Gold OA (which, for publishers, is merely a license change, for each individual double-paid article) and -- to maximize the chances of increasing their total revenues by a potential 6% (the UK share) at the expense of UK tax-payers and research funds -- lengthen their Green OA embargoes beyond RCUK limits to make sure UK authors must choose paid Gold.

The failed RCUK policy would not only mean that the UK fails to provide OA to its own research output, but it would make it harder for the rest of the world to mandate and provide (Green) OA to the remaining 94% of worldwide research output. The perverse effects of the UK's colossal false start would hence be both local and global.

Unless 9 words are removed from the new RCUK OA policy, it is in direct contradiction with the very first item of the new BOAI-10-Recommendations for institutions.

RCUK Draft OA Policy:

3. Research Council Expectations of Researchers

...Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

1. must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access (see section 4)....

4. Compliance of Journals

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access. The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

1. The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

2. Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. In this option no ‘Article Processing Charge’ will be payable to the publisher. Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.

BOAI-10 OA Policy Recommendations for Institutions and Funders:

1. On policy

1.1. Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository...

Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication.

University policies should respect faculty freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. [emphasis added]

University policies should encourage but not require publication in OA journals [emphasis added] ...

1.3. Every research funding agency, public or private, should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as soon as practicable.

Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication...