Self-Archiving Mandates

Comment on:
Setting Prices for Open Access, Paul Jump, Times Higher Education

The urgent issue today is not publisher profits but research access -- access for all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research was published.

The way to provide more research access is to provide more research access, not to pay publishers more.

Providing more access is entirely in the hands of researchers, their institutions and their funders. Free online access (Open Access, OA) to the authors' final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles ("Green OA") can be provided by self-archiving them in the author's institutional repository.

Green OA can be -- and is being -- mandated (required) worldwide by over 50 research funders (including all the UK Research Councils, the EU, and NIH in the US) and nearly 200 universities (including UCL, Harvard and MIT). The US has a congressional bill (the Federal Research Public Access Act, FRPAA) that would extend Green OA mandates to all the major US research funders. A US public petition supporting this has just reached its target threshold of 25,000 signatures within 2 weeks.

Institutional subscriptions are paying, in full, for research publication today. If universal Green OA ever makes the subscription model unsustainable, institutional subscription cancellations will release the money for a transition to "Gold OA" publishing, in which the cost of publication is paid per outgoing paper rather than per incoming journal.

But what is missing and urgently needed now, for research impact and progress, is more research access, not new sources of revenue for publishers while subscriptions are paying for publication.

The UK has been the leader in the worldwide OA movement. It would be a great pity if Mr. Willetts and Dame Janet Finch were to allow the UK to become an insurer of publishers' revenue streams instead of an insurer of access to the research funded by the UK tax-payer.

That would not only be a waste of scarce funds in exchange for precious little OA, but it would be to allow the publishing tail to wag the research dog at the expense of the UK tax-payer.

Stevan Harnad

Dear Falk,

First, I apologize for my school-masterish tone!

On a planet which still has far too few OA mandates and much too little OA, it cannot be repeated often enough that every single mandate is a step forward, and welcomed by all (in the research community!)

But I hope you will agree that optimizing these first pioneering mandates is very important too, to provide a tested, successful model for others to follow.

This is the reason for focusing here -- in this side-discussion that has arisen from the underlying discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the US's NIH mandate -- on the detailed breakdown of Austria's FWF mandate's compliance rate and the formal and implementational details that have been generating it.

You have kindly provided some very important benchmark data on the compliance rate for the FWF mandate in your previous postings:

The compliance rate for the FWF mandate in its current form is 65%.

Of this, half (32.5%) is Green OA self-archiving and half (32.5%) is from publishing in fee-based Gold OA journals, one third of them exclusively Gold OA (11%) and two thirds (22%) hybrid Gold (meaning the journal is still charging institutions for subscriptions, but authors can pay an additional fee to make their own individual article OA -- and FWF pays that extra fee for fundees).

The global baseline for the annual un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate worldwide is about 20% (although Yassine Gargouri will soon be reporting some new results suggesting that this worldwide un-mandated rate may have increased in the last few years).

So it has to be admitted that the FWF mandate's net gain from raising the baseline un-mandated rate of 20% to 32.5% for Green OA self-archiving is not very great (and much smaller than the Green OA rate generated by other current mandates -- such as Belgium's FNRS mandate -- that may be formulated and implemented in ways that could help Austria's FWF mandate increase its Green OA compliance rate too).

The bulk of the OA generated by the FWF mandate (32.5%) comes from articles published in Gold OA journals or in subscription journals offering optional ("hybrid") Gold OA publishing for an extra fee; FWF hence increases by 22.5% the global Gold OA baseline rate, which is under 10%.

But this Gold OA increase, as you will agree, has been bought at a price -- up to 3000 euros per paper. I ask you to keep that figure in mind in some of the replies I make, below, to the points you have raised.

It is also very important to know the discipline breakdown for Green and Gold compliance rates, because, as Andrew Adams has noted, PMC/UKPMC are just for biomedical research, and, as we all know, physicists have been self-archiving in Arxiv for over two decades at very high rates, un-mandated. Hence their contribution is not a result of the FWF mandate.

On 2012-05-21, Falk Reckling [FR] of Austria's FWF wrote on GOAL:

FR:
In 2006 no Austrian institution had a mandate or an IR. Today only some Austrian institutions have an IR [Institutional Repository] but no one has an OA mandate.

Austria's IR tally in 2006 and today, as well as Austria's mandate tally in 2006 and today are roughly comparable with those of other countries: Increase in the number of institutions with IRs (but with those IRs remaining near-empty) and still extremely few mandates (either from funders or from institutions) -- although Austria does seem to be unusually low in its number of IRs relative to its number of universities.

So the question is: What can be done to generate more IRs and more mandates in Austria?

This is precisely where the FWF can help, in three ways:

1. Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, whether or not it is published as Gold OA.

2. Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR).

3. Only offer to pay for Gold OA if conditions 1 and 2 have been fulfilled.

This will ensure that FWF fundees self-archive. 

It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. 

It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with the FWF OA mandate.

It will motivate and facilitate the adoption by fundees' institution of a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just FWF-funded research.

It will ensure that most of the compliance with the FWF mandate is not just Gold OA paid for by FWF at 3000 euros per paper.

FR:
By organizing a nationwide network we now try to tackle these problems.

Before organizing a nationwide network in place of upgrading the FWF mandate with conditions that induce institutions to create their own IRs, it would be well to look at the experience of France's HAL, which is a nation-wide repository just as empty as individual IRs that have not mandated deposit.

Years more can be lost travelling down that garden path...

FR:
At the same time, we noted that a lot of Austrian scholars were/are voluntarily willing to deposit their articles in central disciplinary repositories like arxiv, Repec, SSRN, Citeseer or PMC.

I have already replied about the profound denominator error that you are making here. The un-mandated deposit rate for central disciplinary repositories is just as low as the un-mandated deposit rate for institutional repositories. The crucial factor is not the repository but the mandate. 

And convergent, collaborative mandates (from both institutions and funders) designating the author's IR as the locus of deposit will generate far more institutional mandates than divergent, conflicting ones, for the many reasons I've already described.

One also has to be careful how one counts one's central repositories: Arxiv, as noted, is one of the prominent exceptions to the global un-mandated Green OA self-archiving rate. Physicists self-archive in Arxiv, un-mandated, at a much higher rate than other disciplines self-archive (anywhere) un-mandated. 

In over two decades, however, the only other discipline that seems to have followed the example of physicists un-mandated self-archiving) is mathematics. It would seem to be a strategic mistake to wait yet another two decades hoping that un-mandated self-archiving will generalize to other disciplines, rather than just to go ahead and mandate it.

Moreover, there is a third prominent exception to the global un-mandated self-archiving rate (20% overall, but much closer to 100% for physics and maths, in Arxiv) and that is computer science, which has been doing high rates of Green OA self-archiving without needing to be mandated to do so -- but they have not been depositing" in Citeseer (which is not a repository at all, but a harvester):

Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own institutional websites (since long before IRs were invented). But their admirable un-mandated practice has not generalized in over two decades either.

Citeseer does provide a good case in point, though, for the power and efficacy of central harvesting, navigation and search across distributed local deposits.

Google and Google Scholar are further examples of the power and functionality of central harvesting across webwide distributed contents: one does not deposit centrally in google. 

There are more examples of central harvesting and navigation/search over distributed content.

But there is no point in further developing the potential of metadata harvesting and functionality while OA content is still so sparce.

That, again, is what OA mandates are for -- and why it is so important to optimize them, so they maximize compliance and OA.

FR:
With BMC, PLoS and others the need for covering APC arose. And we found it useful to support an alternative business model, as other renown institutions did [see COPE] :

[On COPE, see these critiques of paying pre-emptively for Gold before or instead of [effectively] mandating Green OA.]

Paying the additional costs of Gold OA article processing charges (APCs) is fine, if one has already done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by one's OA mandate (and one has the spare cash). 

But (it seems to me), it is very far from fine to spend all that extra money without first having done what is needed to maximize all OA generated by the mandate.

FR:
I do not agree with your position that Gold OA is costly and Green OA is nearly for free. In practice, Green OA costs a lot of time and money for creating repositories, establishing mandates, having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers, e.g.

I would be very grateful to see what actual Green OA costs you have in mind, Falk. Like the denominator fallacy, it is crucial here to compare like with like. Gold OA costs are from 500-3000 euros per paper.

IR software casts nothing, server space costs next to nothing, IR one-time set-up time is a few days of sysad work, and annual IR maintenance is a few more days of sysad work, per year. IRs are set up for a variety of reasons, not just OA, but let us pretend as if the IR costs are just OA costs: How much do you think that adds up to, per paper deposited? (And bear in mind that adopting a mandate costs nothing, and greatly increases the number of papers deposited, hence decreases the cost per paper.)

Yes, extra money can be spent, and is being spent, on "having well-informed supporting staff, interpreting publishers policies, advising researchers, depositing papers [in place of authors]".

But the very same thing can be said about these additional expenditures as what was just said about expenditures on Gold OA fees: It's fine to spend this extra money if you have the extra cash -- but not if you have not adopted a mandate that will maximize self-archiving. Most IRs are spending all this money without a mandate (since most IRs don't have a mandate, let alone an optimized one).

So we are again speaking apples and oranges, if we try to rationalize spending scarce cash on Gold OA instead of optimizing our OA mandate in the direction of institutional Green OA self-archiving on the grounds that IRs are costly:

If the costs of Green OA and Gold OA are compared on a per-paper basis (as they need to be, to make sense), there is no contest: Green OA is incomparably cheaper, and Green OA mandates generate incomparably more OA.

FR:
That might give you some reasons why we find, for example, that UKPMC offers a very good option to solve some these problems 

UKPMC, a central repository for UK biomedical research, populated mostly by funder mandates, does not even address the matter at hand here, which is about ways to optimize those funder mandates so that they will generate more OA.

The UK too, like Austria (and the US) would benefit from much greater funder mandate compliance and would also generate many more complementary institutional mandates were it to:

1. Require Green OA self-archiving of every FWF-funded article, whether or not it is published as Gold OA.

2. Designate the author's IR as the locus of the deposit (with OpenDepot as the interim alternative locus, for fundees whose institution has not yet created an IR.

3. Only offer to pay for Gold OA if those two conditions have been fulfilled.

This will ensure that fundees self-archive. 

It will encourage fundees' institutions to create an IR. 

It will engage fundees' institutions in monitoring and ensuring compliance with funder OA mandate.

It will motivate and facilitate fundees' institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just funded research.

It will ensure that most of the compliance with the funder mandate is not just Gold OA paid for at 3000 euros per paper.

FR:
Finally, we see no contradiction to support both Green and Gold the same time, but we think in the end a change of the business model should be envisaged.

It is question of priorities, contingencies and timing.

Green OA self-archiving has to be made universal first, by both funder and institutional mandates, both designating institutions as the locus of deposit. That will generate 100% (Green) OA. That, in turn, will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable, reduce costs, and induce a conversion to Gold OA, while also freeing institutional subscription funds to pay for it.

All the best,

Stevan Harnad

"FWF requires all project leaders and workers to make their publications freely available through open access media on the Internet."

Message to Falk Reckling (FWF):

Dear Falk,

I fervently hope that you are communicating with us on GOAL open-mindedly, with a view to gaining information you perhaps did not have, and with a readiness to revise policy if a valid case can be made for the fact that it would help.

Because all too often, I have alas found, those who come to OA policy-making tend to make some initial judgments and decisions, implement them, and then when either practical evidence itself, or those who have more and longer experience in OA and OA policy, call into question those initial judgments and decisions, the response is: "My mind's made up, don't bother me with facts!" and the initial policy simply becomes more and more firmly entrenched, regardless of the consequences.

It is too early for such rigidity, Falk. And Andrew Adams and I (and many others) are trying to explain to you what is amiss with both the FWF policy and the rationales that you are voicing here.

On Sun, May 20, 2012 Falk Reckling wrote on the Global Open Access List (GOAL):

FR:
[1] an [Insitutional Repository] has to exist and that is often not the case.
[2] And if an IR exists it is often not used,
[3] mandate or not.
[4] Here some central disciplinary respositories are much more successfull as PMC/UKPMC.

1. Many, many institutions have repositories, and those that do not yet have one are merely a free piece of software and a server sector away form having one.

2. Yes, almost all existing repositories are unused (at least 80% of annual institutional refereed research output is not deposited). But that is the point! That's precisely why deposit mandates are needed.

3. It is an enormous factual error, however, to say that institutional repositories are unused whether or not they have a mandate. Again, that is the whole point. There is abundant evidence that institutions that mandate deposit are not near 80% empty but near 80% full! (And especially when they have adopted the optimal ID/OA mandate of U. Liege.)

4. It is also an enormous factual error to state that central repositories like PMC/UKPMC are exceptions to the 20/80 rule (i.e., that only 20% of total research output is deposited un-mandated). The total research output of an institution is all the refereed journal articles, in all disciplines, that its authors publish each year. The total research output of a central discipline-based repository is all the refereed journal articles published each year by all authors in that discipline, in all institutions worldwide. To imagine otherwise is to fall into the denominator fallacy:

The annual percentage use of a repository is the annual ratio of deposited articles to all target articles within its ambit. For an institution, the denominator is obvious, and easily estimated. For an entire discipline, it is far from obvious, but it too can be estimated. And I can assure you that the un-mandated Bio-Medical Research content of PMC/UKPMC is no higher than the global 20% baseline for all other disciplines. What gives the illusion that it is otherwise is two things, one trivial, one nontrivial:

The trivial reason for this profound error and misconception is the simple fact that disciplines are much bigger than institutions. So the absolute number of articles in a disciplinary repository is much bigger than those in any institutional repository, even though their un-mandated content is just 20% in both cases.

The nontrivial reason for this profound error is the fact that much of PMC/UKPMC content is mandated (by NIH, MRC, Wellcome Trust), and for that subset the percentage deposit is of course much higher -- exactly as it is with institutional mandated content.

So the overall error is to conflate central repository content and mandated content, and incorrectly (and misleadingly) deduce that central repositories are doing better than institutional repositories because they are bigger and have more deposits.

Reflection will show that it is mandates that generate deposits, not centrality or disciplinarity (irrespective of whether the mandates are institutional mandates or funder mandates). 

(The Physics Arxiv is the sole exception, where un-mandated deposits are close to 100%, and have been for two decades: But two decades is far too long to keep waiting in the hope that the physicists' spontaneous, un-mandated self-archiving practices would generalize to other disciplines: they have not. That's why the OA movement has moved toward supporting mandates.)

And as several of us have now stated, the functionality of a central repository for navigation and search (which is certainly incomparably better than the functionality of any single institutional repository, where no one would ever dream of doing navigation and search) is fully preserved if the central repository harvests the metadata and links to the full-text from institutional repositories. 

The point being made here about the importance of ensuring that both institutional and funder mandates collaborate and converge on institutional deposit instead of diverging and competing is that it makes a huge practical difference -- both to the burden on authors and to the probability of persuading institutions (who are the universal providers of all refereed research, funded and funded, in all disciplines) to adopt deposit mandates of their own -- whether funders mandate institutional deposit or institution-external deposit.

But Falk, you do not seem to be hearing this in these exchanges so far: you seem instead to return over and over to the funding of Gold OA fees rather than the mandating of Green OA. Is there any hope of drawing your attention to this much more fundamental and urgent question, on which the prospects of OA growth in upcoming years hinges?

FR:
b) We believe that OA is better supported by the Gold road and therefore a change of the business model is needed. That means costs should be covered by APCs or institutions or mixed models.

It is a great pity if you are rigidly committed to this belief, which is not only erroneous (for the many reasons we have been describing) but costly, because of the premature, pre-emptive focus on getting OA by paying Gold OA fees instead of by mandating Green OA -- and designating institutional repositories as the locus for direct deposit.

If funders mandate institutional deposit, institutions (the universal providers) will mandate Green OA too, and we will have 100% OA (Green). That will already solve the research accessibility problem, completely.

Moreover, that is also the fastest and surest way to eventually convert journals to Gold OA (and liberate the subscription money to pay for it.)

Solving the research access problem does not immediately solve the journal affordability problem too -- but does make it into a far less urgent, life/death matter (since with 100% Green OA, all users have access, whether or not journals are afforded or cancelled.)

I profoundly hope you will set a good example for other policy-makers, by showing some open-mindedness, flexibility and reflection on these crucial questions.

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

This is a comment on
"Horizon 2020:
A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access"
an article in AAAS's ScienceInsider which notes that:

"Elsevier's embargoes for green open access currently range from 12 to 48 months"

First, it has to be clearly understood that the existing EU mandate (i.e., requirement) that the EU is now proposing to extend to all of the EU's €80 Billion's worth of funded research -- while something similar is being proposed for adoption in the US by the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) as well as by the currently ongoing petition to the White House (rapidly nearing the threshold of 25,000 signatories) -- is a mandate for the Green OA self-archiving, by researchers, of the final drafts of articles published in any journal. (What is to be mandated is not Gold OA publishing: You cannot require researchers to publish other than in their journals of choice, nor require them to pay to publish.)

And although some publishers do over-charge, and do lobby against Green OA mandates, the majority of journals (including almost all the top journals) have already formally confirmed that their authors retain the right to self-archive their final drafts immediately upon publication -- not just after an embargo period has elapsed.

Moreover, that majority of journals that have formally endorsed immediate, un-embargoed Green OA include all the journals published by the two biggest journal publishers, Springer and Elsevier! The only difference is that unlike Springer, Elsevier has just recently tried to hedge its author rights-retention policy with a clause to the effect that authors retain the right to self-archive if they wish but not if they must (i.e., not if it is mandated!). (See Elsevier's "Authors' Rights & Responsibilities")

(Curious "right," that one may exercise if one wishes, but not if one must! Imagine if citizens had the right to free speech but not if it is required (e.g., in a court of law). But strange things can be said in contracts...)

Elsevier is having an increasingly severe public image problem: It is already widely resented for its extortionately high prices, hedged with "Big Deals" that sweeten the price package by adding journals you don't want, at no extra charge. Elsevier is also itself the subject of an ongoing boycott petition (with over 10,000 signatories) because of its pricing policy.

So Elsevier cannot afford more mud on its face. Elsevier has accordingly taken a public, formal stance alongside Springer, on the side of the angels regarding Elsevier authors' retained right to do un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving of their final drafts on their institutional websites -- but Elsevier alone has tried to hedge its progressive-looking stance with the clause defining the authors' right to exercise their retained right only if they are not required to exercise it..

Elsevier's cynical attempt to hedge its green rights-retention policy against OA mandates will no doubt be quietly jettisoned once it is publicly exposed for the cynical double-talk it is. Meanwhile, Elsevier authors can continue to exercise their immediate, un-embargoed self-archiving rights, enshrined in Elsevier's current rights agreement, with hand on heart, declaring that they are self-archiving because they wish, not because they must, even if it is mandated. A mandate, after all, can either be complied with or not complied with; both choices are exercises of free will, yet another basic right…

Richard Poynder has raised some interesting questions in "Open Access Mandates: Ensuring Compliance". Here are some suggestions as to why neither NIH nor the Wellcome Trust (WT) has a compliance rate of 100% -- and what could be done to remedy that:

1. How To Comply. Both the NIH and WT mandates designate Gold OA publishing as one of the means of fulfilling the mandate, instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving as the sole means of compliance (whether or not the fundee publishes in a Gold OA journal.

2. Who Complies. Funder mandates only apply to fundees: only fundees are bound by them. Yet fulfillment can be done by either fundees or non-fundees (publishers, especially in the case of WT), instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving as the sole means of compliance.

3. When To Comply. The designated timing for compliance with both mandates is not immediately upon publication -- instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving immediately upon publication as the sole means of compliance (even if the self-archived draft is not made immediately OA). As noted, it is in publishers' interests to make compliance as delayed as possible, and to leave it in their hands rather than the fundees' hands.

4. What Version To Deposit. It contributes to the delay in compliance and the ambiguity as to who is fulfilling the mandate (the fundee or the publisher) if compliance can wait for the publisher's PDF instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving of the refereed final draft immediately upon publication as the sole means of compliance (even if the self-archived draft is not made immediately OA and the publisher's PDF is optionally deposited later).

5. Where To Deposit. Both NIH and WT mandates stress direct deposit in PubMed Central (PMC), instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving of the refereed final draft in the fundee's own institutional reposiitory immediately upon publication as the sole means of compliance (even if the self-archived draft is not made immediately OA and the publisher's PDF is optionally deposited later), thereby recruiting fundees' institutions to monitor and ensure compliance with the fulfillment conditions of the grant (as institutions are always very eager to do!).

Institututional ID/OA Mandates Work. None of these delays, ambiguities or uncertainties applies to (effective) institutional mandates such as U. Liege's model ID/OA (immediate-deposit/optional-access) mandate. Not only can author self-archiving in the institutional repository be designated by institutions as the sole means of submitting research for institutional reporting and performance assessment (as Cameron Neylon correctly points out), but institutions are in a position to monitor deposits continuously, not just when a research project grant (which may last for years) has elapsed.

Mutual Potentiation Between Institutional and Funder Mandates. In addition, designating institutional repository self-archiving as the means of compliance for both funder and institutional mandates motivates institutions to adopt self-archiving mandates of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just NIH- or WT-funded research. (Institutions are the universal providers of all published research, funded and unfunded.) Funder mandates designating institutional deposit make institutional and funder mandates convergent and mutually reinforcing -- rather than divergent and competitive, as funder mandates requiring direct institution-external deposit in PMC (instead of just automated harvesting or export from institutional repositories) do.

Effective Institutional Mandates Can Generate 100% OA Globally. The Liege model institutional ID/OA mandate really works. If funders and institutions worldwide collaborate, 100% OA can be reached not just for NIH and WT funded research but for all research.

In my opinion, it is not helpful to the cause of OA or the needs of the research community to use this opportunity to advise Elsevier to make the following extremely counterproductive recommendation -- a recommendation that, like Elsevier's own ambivalent self-archiving policy, starts positively, but then switches to the extreme negative, taking away with one hand what it had seemed to be giving with the other:

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Jan Velterop wrote on the Global Open Access List (GOAL):

"One step [for Elsevier] could be to promote self-archiving instead of reluctantly allowing it and then only under certain circumstances. But given that immediacy is obviously not considered the most important feature of OA by many of its advocates (vide many mandates), and immediacy is perhaps the most understandable of the publishers' fears, there is an opportunity for Elsevier to make all the journal material it publishes available with full open access, CC-BY, after a reasonable embargo of a year, maybe two years in less fast-moving disciplines."

First, Jan Velterop (JV) asks Elsevier to drop its ambivalence about Green OA self-archiving. So far, so good.

But second, Jan makes a factually incorrect claim: that immediate OA is so unimportant to researchers and OA advocates that this is an opportunity for Elsevier to change its current policy (which has been Green since 2004 -- meaning immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving) -- back-pedalling instead to a "reasonable" embargo of a year or two (meaning no longer being Green, as now, on immediate, unembargoed Green Gratis OA self-archiving).

Third, as justification for this startling recommendation to Elsevier to back-pedal on its longstanding immediate-Green policy, Jan cites the fact that many mandates allow an embargo -- forgetting the fact that the reason OA embargoes have been allowed by those OA mandates is precisely because the 40% of publishers that are not yet Green (as 60% of publishers, including Elsevier since 2004, already are) still insist on an embargo as a condition for allowing self-archiving at all. In other words, the reason some mandates allow embargoes is not at all because all researchers and all mandates don't consider immediate, unembargoed OA to be important, but because of the non-Green publishers that don't yet allow immediate, unembargoed OA. Jan is here suggesting to Elsevier that it should re-join their ranks.

Fourth, Jan refers throughout this recommendation only to the Libre OA [Gratis OA plus CC-BY] from which he has been urging the OA community not to "lower the bar" to the Gratis OA [free online access to the author final draft] on which Elsevier has been Green since 2004, and about which OA advocates are here urging Elsevier to remove its recent self-serving and self-contradictory hedging clause about mandates.

Immediate, unembargoed OA may be less important for Libre OA than for Gratis OA, but what is at issue here is Gratis OA.

For the sake of both research progress and OA progress, I urge Jan to drop his conterproductive opposition to Green Gratis OA, just as I urge Elsevier to drop the self-contradictory hedging clause about Green Gratis OA in its author rights retention agreement.

Stevan Harnad

Elsevier Authors' Rights & Responsibilities

What rights do I retain as a journal author?
"…the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes… (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specificagreement with the publisher)..."

---

I am grateful to Elsevier's Director for Universal Access, Alicia Wise, for replying about Elsevier's author open access posting policy.

This makes it possible to focus very quickly and directly on the one specific point of contention, because as it stands, the current Elsevier policy is quite explicitly self-contradictory:

ALICIA WISE (AW): "Stevan Harnad has helpfully summarized Elsevier’s posting policy for accepted author manuscripts, but has left out a couple of really important elements.

"He is correct that all our authors can post voluntarily to their websites and institutional repositories.  Posting is also fine where there is a requirement/mandate AND we have an agreement in place.  We have a growing number of these agreements."

 I am afraid this is not at all clear.

What does it mean to say that Elsevier has a different policy depending on whether an author is posting voluntarily or mandatorily?

An author who wishes to comply with an institutional posting mandate is posting voluntarily. An author who does not wish to comply with an institutional posting mandate refrains from posting, likewise voluntarily.

The Elsevier policy in question concerns the rights that reside with authors. Is Elsevier proposing that some author rights are based on mental criteria? But if an authors says, hand on heart, "I posted voluntarily" (even where posting is mandatory) is the author not to be believed?

(It is true that in criminal court a distinction is made between the voluntary and involuntary -- but the involuntary there refers to the unintended or accidental: Even in mandated posting, the posting is no accident!)

So it is quite transparent that the factor that Elsevier really has in mind here is not the author's voluntariness at all, but whether or not the author's institution has a mandatory posting policy - and whether that institutional mandate has or has not been "agreed" with Elsevier.

But then what sort of an author right is it, to post if your institution doesn't require you to post, but not to post if your institution requires you to post (except if some sort of "agreement" has been reached with Elsevier that allows the institution to require its researchers to exercise their rights)?

That does not sound like an author right at all. Rather, it sounds like an attempt by Elsevier to redefine the author right so as to prevent each author's institution from requiring the author to exercise it without Elsevier's agreement. By that token, it looks as if the author requires Elsevier's agreement to exercise the right that Elsevier has formally recognized to rest with the author.

(What sort of right would the right to free speech be if one lost that right whenever one was required -- say, by a court of law, or even just an institutional committee meeting -- to exercise it? -- And what does it mean that an author's institution is required by a publisher to seek an agreement from the publisher for its authors to exercise a right that the publisher has formally stated rests with the author?)

AW:
"An overview of our funding body agreements can be read here.  These agreements, for example, mean that we post to UKPMC for authors who receive funding from a number of funding agencies including the Wellcome Trust.  We deposit manuscripts into PMC for NIH-funded authors."

We are talking here very specifically about authors posting in their own institutional repositories, not about institution-external deposit or proxy deposit by publishers.

AW:
"Posting in the arXiv is fine too."

Is it? So if institutions mandate depositing in Arxiv rather than institutionally, that would be fine too? (Some mandates already specify that as an option.) Or would Elsevier authors lose their right to exercise their right to post in Arxiv if their institutions mandated it...?

AW:
"We are also piloting open access agreements with a growing number of institutions, including posting in institutional repositories."

The point under discussion is Elsevier authors' right to exercise the right that Elsevier has formally stated rests with the author -- to post their accepted author manuscripts institutionally. What kind of further agreement is needed from the author's institution with Elsevier in order that the author should have the right to exercise a right that Elsevier has formally stated rests with the author?

Again, Elsevier's target here is very obviously not author rights at all. Rather, the clause in question is an attempt to influence institutions' own policies, with their own research output, by trying to redefine the author's right to post an article online free for all as being somehow contingent on institutional research posting policy, and hence requiring Elsevier's agreement.

It would seem to me that institutions would do well to refrain from making any agreement with Elsevier (or even entering into discussion with Elsevier) about institutional policy -- other than what price they are willing to pay for what journals (even if Elsevier reps attempt to make a quid-pro-quo deal).

And it would seem to me that Elsevier authors should go ahead and post their accepted author manuscripts in their institutional repositories, voluntarily, exercising the right that Elsevier has formally recognized as resting with the author alone since 2004, and ignore any new clause that contains double-talk trying to make a link between the author's right to exercise that author right and the policy of the author's institution on whether or not the author should exercise that right.

AW:
"It is already clear that one size does not fit all institutions, and we are keen to continue learning, listening, and partnering."

I am not sure what this means. Accepted author manuscripts (of journal articles, from all institutions, in all disciplines) fit into all institutional repositories. That's all that's at issue here. No institution differences; no discipline differences.

AW:
"Our access policies can be read in full [here] (health warning: they are written for those who really enjoy detail) and we’ve been working on a more friendly and succinct summary too (but this is still a work in "

Fortunately, only two details matter (and they can be made explicit without any danger to one's health!):

1. Does Elsevier formally recognize that "all [Elsevier] authors can post [their accepted author manuscripts] voluntarily to their websites and institutional repositories" (quoting from Alicia Wise here)?

According to Elsevier formal policy since 2004, the answer is yes.

2. What about the "not if it is mandatory" clause?

That clause seems to be pure FUD and I strongly urge Elsevier -- for the sake of its public image, which is right now at an all-time low -- to drop that clause rather than digging itself deeper by trying to justify it.

The goal of the strategy is transparent:

"We wish to appear to be supportive of open access, formally encoding in our author agreements our authors' right to post their accepted author manuscripts to their institution's open access repository -- but [to ensure that publication remains sustainable,' we wish to prevent institutions from requiring their authors to exercise that right unless they make a side-deal with us."

Not a commendable publisher strategy, at a time when the worldwide pressure for open access is mounting ever higher, and subscriptions are still paying the cost of publication, in full, and handsomely.

If there is eventually to be a transition to hybrid or Gold OA publishing, let that transition occur without trying to hold hostage the authors' right to provide Green OA to their author accepted manuscripts by posting them free for all in their institutional repositories, exercising the right that Elsevier has formally agreed rests with the author.

Stevan Harnad

Elsevier Authors' Rights & Responsibilities

What rights do I retain as a journal author?
"…the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes… (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher)..."

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Alice Wise (Elsevier, Director of Universal Access, Elsevier) asked, on the Global Open Access List (GOAL):

"[W]hat positive things are established scholarly publishers doing to facilitate the various visions for open access and future scholarly communications that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized?"

Remedios Melero replied, on GOAL:

RM: I would recommend the following change in one clause of the What rights do I retain as a journal author? stated in Elsevier's portal, which says:

"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher. Click here for further information)"

RM: By this one:

"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal, institutional website, subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article"

RM: I think this could be something to be encouraged, celebrated and recognized.

That would be fine. Or even this simpler one would be fine:

"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal, institutional website or institutional repositories or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article"

The metadata and link can be harvested from the institutional repositories by institution-external repositories or search services, and the shameful, cynical, self-serving and incoherent clause about "mandates for systematic postings" ("you may post if you wish but not if you must"), which attempts to take it all back, is dropped.

That clause -- added when Elsevier realized that Green Gratis OA mandates were catching on -- is a paradigmatic example of the publisher FUD and double-talk that has no legal sense or force, but scares authors (and their management).

Dropping it would be a great cause for encouragement, celebration and recognition, and would put Elsevier irreversibly on the side of the angels (regarding OA).

Stevan Harnad

I would like to answer some questions and clarify some points in Richard Van Noorden's Nature newsblog posting (NN):

"[T]he [RCUK] agencies which fund UK scientists [have] required [researchers]… to make their research papers free [online] since 2006; but now they’re going to enforce it…"

The UK has indeed led the world in mandating Open Access (OA). The UK is the first country in which all the national research funding agencies have formally required OA. (Before its funder mandates, the UK was also where the world's first OA mandate was adopted within a University, in 2002.)

But adopting an OA mandate is not enough. The real challenge is in formulating and implementing the mandate in a way that ensures compliance. That is where attention is focused right now.

"[W]ill research papers be instantly open, or will publishers get to impose a delay?…[S]ome [publishers] let authors put up a free copy of the published manuscript after an embargo period. This is known as ‘green’ open access… RCUK open-access policies currently permit this embargo, with a six-month delay."

There are two ways to provide OA:

Green OA is provided by publishing in any suitable peer-reviewed journal, and then making the paper OA by self-archiving it in the author's institutional OA repository (or an institutional-external repository).

Gold OA is provided by publishing in an OA journal that makes the paper OA.

The majority of journals (over 60%, including the top journals in most fields) endorse the author providing immediate (unembargoed) Green OA.

A minority of journals (less than 40%) embargo Green OA. To accommodate this, some mandates have allowed an OA embargo of 6 months (or longer). To fulfill would-be users' immediate research needs during the embargo, however, institutional repositories have a semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button: The user can request an eprint with a click and the author can comply with a click.

"[T]he recommendation will be for a mixed green-gold model… ultimately we will see a transition to gold – so the real question is how long this will take."

Among the implementation problems of some of the OA mandates today is precisely this mixture of Green and Gold. Only Green OA can be mandated. (Authors cannot be forced to choose a journal based on the journal's cost-recovery model rather than its quality and suitability.) Funds (if available) can be offered to pay the Gold OA publishing fee, if there is a suitable Gold OA journal in which the author wishes to publish; but Green OA self-archiving needs to be mandated first, cost-free.

My own view is that it is a mistake to press too hard for Gold OA now, while subscriptions are still paying the costs of publication, the top journals are not Gold OA, the price of Gold OA is still high, and Green OA mandates (cost-free) are still too few. Once Green OA mandates by funders and institutions have made OA universal, the resulting availability of Green OA to everything will drive the transition to Gold OA publishing, at a much lower price, as well as releasing the subscription funds to pay for it.

"British universities could end up paying twice – once to make their research open access, and again for subscriptions to the journals that they will still need to buy, because those journals will contain 94% non-British, non-open-access, research."

This is precisely why the mixed Green/Gold model is not a good idea. The press should be for Green OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and institutions worldwide. The transition to Gold OA will then take place naturally of its own accord -- and meanwhile the world will already have 100% OA.

"[T]he UK could challenge the US for global leadership on open access."

It's the other way 'round! The UK is in the lead, but if the US passes the FRPAA, then the US will have taken over the UK's lead.

"Just being able to read a free PDF isn’t actually open access."

Yes it is. Gratis OA means free online access and Libre OA means free online access plus certain re-use rights. Just as Green OA has to come before Gold OA, Gratis OA has to come before Libre OA. The barriers are much lower. (All the OA mandates are for Gratis OA.)

"[R]esearchers and institutions would be forced to comply with open access…. mak[ing] open access a requirement for future grants… asking institutions to sign a statement that papers published under its grants are compliant with its open access policy; and if not… hold back a final instalment… of the grant funding."

And the most important implementation detail of all: All mandates (funder and institutional) should be convergent and collaborative rather than divergent and competitive:

(1) Both funders and institutions should require author self-archiving in the author's institutional repository (not in an institutional-external central repository). Central repositories can then harvest from the institutional repository, authors only have to deposit once, institutions can monitor and ensure compliance with funder OA mandates and they will also be motivated to adopt OA mandates of their own, for all of their research output, funded and unfunded, in all discipline.

(2) Both funders and institutions should require immediate deposit (not just after an allowable embargo period).

(3) The deposit mandate should be fulfilled by the mandatee (the author), not by publishers (3rd parties who have an interest in delaying OA and are not bound by the mandate). This will also make the monitoring of compliance much easier and more effective.

"What Wales will add here is not clear… Some celebrity involvement is to be welcomed."

OA means Open Access to peer-reviewed research. Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed research and indeed it is rather negative on expertise and answerability. So Wales has a lot to learn. But if he does learn what needs to be done to make Green OA mandates effective, he may be able to see to the adoption of the implementation details that are needed, if he has David Willetts' confidence…

The UK government has engaged Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to help make UK tax-payer-funded research available online for all.

Open Access to peer-reviewed research (OA) is an important, timely and even urgent goal, and the UK's commitment to providing OA is extremely welcome and commendable. But turning to Jimmy Wales to help make it happen makes almost as little sense as turning to Rupert Murdoch.

Wikipedia is based on the antithesis of peer review. Asking JW to help make sure peer-reviewed research is available to all is like asking McDonalds to help the UK Food Standards Agency make sure that wholesome food is available to all.

The way to make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to all is already known: Make it a mandatory condition of funding that the fundees make it available online to all (OA).

Britain (RCUK) has already gone a long way toward trying to mandate just that -- a much longer way than any other country so far. But there are still some crucial implementational details that need tweaking in order to make those mandates work:

1. The requirement has to be to deposit in the fundee's institutional repository (rather than an institution-external repository).

2. The deposit itself must be made immediately upon acceptance for publication (rather than only after a publisher embargo period).

That way the fundee's institution will be empowered to monitor and ensure compliance with the funder mandate. In addition, when there is an allowable publisher embargo on making the immediate-deposit OA immediately, the institution's email-eprint-request Button can tide over immediate research usage needs during the embargo on an automated, accelerated individual-request basis. Institutional deposit will also motivate institutions to mandate OA for all of their research output, not just the RCUK-funded portion.

But these are all implementational details that could be fixed by just updating the language of the RCUK mandates -- making it explicit that research that is not institutionally deposited immediately loses its funding. Each institution's research grant support office, already so solicitous about complying with all conditions on applying for, receiving and retaining grants will equally assiduously see to it that institutional fundees understand and comply.

But JW does not know any of this. And if he did, he would be no better able to implement it than anyone else. It's the implementation that's needed, to make the broth edible and available to all -- not more cooks (and especially not from McDonalds' kitchens)!