Institutional Repositories

A new open-access repository for preprints on biomedical research findings prior to peer review -- "PLoS Currents: Influenza" -- is a welcome development, as are all services that provide free online access to research findings, before and after refereeing, in all fields. As long as the unrefereed/refereed distinction is prominently tagged, as it will be, it is always good to encourage researchers in all fields to make their drafts available for peer and public scrutiny as soon as they feel ready to do so.

It would, however, make more sense for central repositories like PLoS Currents to harvest their contents from the researchers' own institutional repositories, rather than to try to serve only as yet another locus for direct central deposit. Researchers' institutions are the universal providers of all research output, in all fields, and central repositories should be facilitating universal self-archiving and self-archiving mandates, rather than competing with them. That said, self-archiving mandates [i.e., institutional and funder policies requiring OA deposit] can and should be applied only to refereed postprints, not to unrefereed preprints, whose self-archiving must be left a matter of author choice.

I'm not sure, though, that is it quite accurate to describe me, in 1999, as having been "[o]ne of the fiercest critics of the proposal"!

I greeted the e-biomed proposal as an "extremely welcome and important initiative... deserving of the strongest support" and went on [as is my wont] to make some "recommendations... in the interests of strengthening the proposal by clarifying some crucial central aspects and modifying or eliminating some minor, weaker aspects."

Among those recommendations was that of making and retaining a clear distinction between between (1) peer-reviewed journal publishing (now called "Gold OA") and author self-archiving (now called "Green OA"), as well as a distinction between (2) unrefereed drafts ("preprints") and refereed, published articles ("postprints"). Each of these crucial distinctions was conflated in the original 1999 e-biomed proposal, and it is good to see them de-conflated 10 years later.

The fundamental dichotomy between unrefereed drafts and refereed articles predates Open Access, PLoS, e-biomed, Arxiv, the Web and the Net.

What has changed is that it can now all be done at a global scale, far more rapidly, far more interactively, and by a means that is freely accessible to everyone.

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). ABSTRACT: Scientific publication is a continuum, from unrefereed preprints to refereed reprints, to revisions, commentaries, and replies. All this is optimally done electronically, as "Scholarly Skywriting."

___ (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.

___ (1995) Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting. In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414.

___ (1996) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Pp 103-118.

___ (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292.

___ (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

___ (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines. Retour a la tradition orale: écrire dans le ciel a la vitesse de la pensée. Dans: Salaün, Jean-Michel & Vendendorpe, Christian (dir). Le défis de la publication sur le web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et méta-éditions. Presses de l'enssib.

___ (2002) BBS Valedictory Editorial.

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

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SUMMARY: Evidence confirming that OA increases impact will not be sufficient to induce enough researchers to provide OA; only mandates from their institutions and funders can ensure that. HEP researchers continue to submit their papers to peer-reviewed journals, as they always did, depositing both their unrefereed preprints and their refereed postprints. None of that has changed. In fields like HEP and astrophysics, the journal affordability/accessibility problem is not as great as in many other fields, where it the HEP Early Access impact advantage translates into the OA impact advantage itself. Almost no one has ever argued that Gold OA provides a greater OA advantage than Green OA.The OA advantage is the OA advantage, whether Green or Gold.

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Gentil-Beccot, Anne; Salvatore Mele, Travis Brooks (2009) Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics: How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories

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This is an important study, and most of its conclusions are valid:

(1) Making research papers open access (OA) dramatically increases their impact.

(2) The earlier that papers are made OA, the greater their impact.

(3) High Energy Physics (HEP) researchers were among the first to make their papers OA (since 1991, and they did it without needing to be mandated to do it!)

(4) Gold OA provides no further impact advantage over and above Green OA.

However, the following caveats need to be borne in mind, in interpreting this paper:

(a) HEP researchers have indeed been providing OA since 1991, unmandated (and computer scientists have been doing so since even earlier). But in the ensuing years, the only other discipline that has followed suit, unmandated, has been economics, despite the repeated demonstration of the Green OA impact advantage across all disciplines. So whereas still further evidence (as in this paper by Gentil-Beccot et al) confirming that OA increases impact is always very welcome, that evidence will not be sufficient to induce enough researchers to provide OA; only mandates from their institutions and funders can ensure that they do so.

(b) From the fact that when there is a Green OA version available, users prefer to consult that Green OA version rather than the journal version, it definitely does not follow that journals are no longer necessary. Journals are (and always were) essentially peer-review service-providers and cerifiers, and they still are. That essential function is indispensable. HEP researchers continue to submit their papers to peer-reviewed journals, as they always did; and they deposit both their unrefereed preprints and then their refereed postprints in arxiv (along with the journal reference). None of that has changed one bit.

(c) Although it has not been systematically demonstrated, it is likely that in fields like HEP and astrophysics, the journal affordability/accessibility problem is not as great as in many other fields. OA's most important function is to provide immediate access to those who cannot afford access to the journal version. Hence the Early Access impact advantage in HEP -- arising from making preprints OA well before the published version is available -- translates, in the case of most other fields, into the OA impact advantage itself, because without OA many potential users simply do not have access even after publication, hence cannot make any contribution to the article's impact.

(d) Almost no one has ever argued (let alone adduced evidence) that Gold OA provides a greater OA advantage than Green OA. The OA advantage is the OA advantage, whether Green or Gold. (It just happens to be easier and more rigorous to test and demonstrate the OA advantage through within-journal comparisons [i.e Green vs. non-Green articles] than between-journal comparisons [Gold vs. non-Gold journals].)

Stevan Harnad

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EXCERPTS: from Gentil-Beccot et al:

ABSTRACT: Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead....

...

...arXiv was first based on e-mail and then on the web, becoming the first repository and the first “green” Open Access5 platform... With the term “green” Open Access we denote the free online availability of scholarly publications in a repository. In the case of HEP, the submission to these repositories, typically arXiv, is not mandated by universities or funding agencies, but is a free choice of authors seeking peer recognition and visibility... The results of an analysis of SPIRES data on the citation behaviour of HEP scientists is presented... demonstrat[e] the “green” Open Access advantage in HEP... With the term “gold” Open Access we denote the free online availability of a scholarly publication on the web site of a scientific journals.... There is no discernable citation advantage added by publishing articles in “gold” Open Access journals...

Figure (Gentil-Beccot et al. 2009): Cumulative citation count as a function of the age of the paper relative to its publication date. 4839 articles from 5 major HEP journals published in 2005 are considered.

...

7. Conclusions

Scholarly communication is at a cross road of new technologies and publishing models. The analysis of almost two decades of use of preprints and repositories in the HEP community provides unique evidence to inform the Open Access debate, through four main findings:

1. Submission of articles to an Open Access subject repository, arXiv, yields a citation advantage of a factor five.

2. The citation advantage of articles appearing in a repository is connected to their dissemination prior to publication, 20% of citations of HEP articles over a two-year period occur before publication.

3. There is no discernable citation advantage added by publishing articles in “gold” Open Access journals.

4. HEP scientists are between four and eight times more likely to download an article in its preprint form from arXiv rather than its final published version on a journal web site.

Taken together these findings lead to three general conclusions about scholarly communication in HEP, as a discipline that has long embraced green Open Access:

1. There is an immense advantage for individual authors, and for the discipline as a whole, in free and immediate circulation of ideas, resulting in a faster scientific discourse.

2. The advantages of Open Access in HEP come without mandates and without debates. Universal adoption of Open Access follows from the immediate benefits for authors.

3. Peer-reviewed journals have lost their role as a means of scientific discourse, which has effectively moved to the discipline repository.

HEP has charted the way for a possible future in scholarly communication to the full benefit of scientists, away from over three centuries of tradition centred on scientific journals. However, HEP peer-reviewed journals play an indispensable role, providing independent accreditation, which is necessary in this field as in the entire, global, academic community. The next challenge for scholarly communication in HEP, and for other disciplines embracing Open Access, will be to address this novel conundrum. Efforts in this direction have already started, with initiatives such as SCOAP3...

Critique of: Romary, L & Armbruster, C. (2009) Beyond Institutional Repositories.

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R&A: "The current system of so-called institutional repositories, even if it has been a sensible response at an earlier stage, may not answer the needs of the scholarly community, scientific communication and accompanied stakeholders in a sustainable way."

Almost all institutional repositories today are near-empty. Until and unless they are successfully filled with their target content, talk about their "answering needs" or being made "sustainable" is moot.

The primary target content of both the Open Access movement and the Institutional (and Central) Repository movement is refereed research: the 2.5 million articles per year published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals. (That is why R&C speak, rather ambiguously, about "Publication Repositories.")

Institutions are the universal providers of all that refereed research output, funded and unfunded, in all scholarly and scientific disciplines, worldwide.

Institutions have a fundamental interest in hosting, inventorying, monitoring, managing, assessing, and showcasing their own research output, as well as in maximizing its uptake, usage and impact.

Yet not only is most of the research output of most institutions failing to be deposited in the institution's own repository: most of it is not being deposited in any other repository either. (Please keep this crucial fact in mind as you reflect on the critique below.)

R&A: "[H]aving a robust repository infrastructure is essential to academic work."

A repository, be its "infrastructure" as "robust" as you like, is of no use for academic work as long as it is near-empty.

R&A: "[C]urrent institutional solutions, even when networked in a country or across Europe, have largely failed to deliver."

Largely empty repositories, "networked" to largely empty repositories remain doomed to deliver next to nothing.

R&A: "Consequently, a new path for a more robust infrastructure and larger repositories is explored to create superior services that support the academy."

Making largely empty repositories "larger" (by "networking" them) is as futile as "making their infrastructure more robust": What repositories lack and need is their target content.

The reason most repositories are near-empty is that most researchers are not depositing in them.

And the reasons most researchers are not depositing are multiple (there are at least 34 of them), but they boil down to one basic reason, and researchers have already indicated, clearly, in international surveys, what that one basic reason is: Deposit has not been mandated (by their institutions or their funders).

Ninety-five percent of researchers surveyed across all disciplines, worldwide, most of whom do not deposit, respond that they would deposit if deposit were mandated, 14% of them reluctantly, and 81% of them willingly. (Swan)

And outcome studies have shown that researchers do what they said they would do: When deposit is mandated, they do indeed deposit, in high proportions, within two years of adoption of the deposit mandate. (Sale)

Hence what institutions need in order to induce their researchers to deposit is not larger or more robust repositories, but deposit mandates.

The number of mandates is growing, but there are still as yet only 90 of them worldwide.

Hence what is urgently needed to fill repositories so they can begin providing "superior services" for the academy is more mandates, not larger repositories or "more robust infrastructure."

R&A: "[F]uture organisation of publication repositories is advocated that is based upon macroscopic academic settings providing a critical mass of interest as well as organisational coherence."

The only "critical mass" that repositories need is their missing target OA content.

Researchers have an intrinsic interest in making their research output OA. Institutions have an interest in making their research OA. Funders have an interest in making their research output OA. And the tax-paying public has an interest in making the research they fund OA.

In contrast, subscription/license publishers do not have an intrinsic interest in making the research they publish OA except if they are paid for it (via Gold OA publication fees). Publishers view Green OA (via repository deposit) as putting their subscription and license revenues at risk. They haven't much choice but to endorse deposit by their authors, given the research benefits of OA, and particularly when it is mandated by their authors' institutions and funders; but publishers themselves certainly have no need or desire to do the depositing on their authors' behalf, for free.

The way to see this clearly is to realize that Green OA amounts to repository deposit by authors, for free, whereas Gold OA amounts to "repository deposit" by publishers, for a fee.

Most publishers are not depositing today because they are not being paid to do it.

Most authors are not depositing today because they are not being mandated to do it.

There is no solution in "amalgamating" these respective empty repositories (unmandated Green and unpaid Gold). The solution is either more mandates or more money.

As subscriptions/licenses are covering the costs of publication today, there is neither the need to pay for Gold OA, pre-emptively, today nor the extra money to pay for it: The potential money is tied up in paying the subscription/license fees that are already covering the costs of publication.

Mandates do not depend on publishers but on institutions and funders; nor do mandates bind publishers: they bind only authors. It is hence incoherent to imagine macro-repositories fed by both authors and publishers. Nor is it necessary, since institutional (and funder) deposit mandates, along with institutional repositories are jointly necessary and sufficient to achieve 100% OA.

R&A: "Such a macro-unit may be geographical (a coherent national scheme), institutional (a large research organisation or a consortium thereof) or thematic (a specific research field organising itself in the domain of publication repositories)."

"Macro" organisations -- whether institutional consortia, national consortia or disciplinary consortia -- do not resolve this fundamental contradiction between free access and any scheme to pay for access.

(In principle, McDonalds and Burger King could give free access to hamburgers if a global consortium of some sort were to agree to bankroll it all up-front; however, that would hardly be free access: it would simply be global acquiescence to a global oligopoly on the sale of a product.)

So forget about counting on publishers to deposit articles in OA repositories -- whether institutional or central -- unless they are paid up-front to do so. And paying them to do so via licenses is not "organisational coherence" but what biologists would call an "evolutionarily unstable strategy," doomed to collapse because of its own intrinsic instability.

It is the articles' authors who need to deposit, and it is that deposit that their institutions and funders need to mandate.

R&A: "The argument proceeds as follows: firstly, while institutional open access mandates have brought some content into open access, the important mandates are those of the funders"

This "argument" is demonstrably incorrect.

Not all or even most of research is funded, whereas all research originates from institutions. Hence institutional mandates cover all research, whereas funder mandates cover only funded research.

The NIH, RCUK and ERC funder mandates were indeed important because they set an example for other funders to follow (and many are indeed following); but that still only covers funded research. Funder mandates do not scale up to cover all research.

The Harvard, Stanford and MIT institutional mandates were hence far more important, because they set an example for other institutions to follow (and many are indeed following); and this does cover all research output, because institutions are the universal providers of all research output, whether funded or unfunded, across all disciplines.

R&A: "[Funder mandates] are best supported by a single infrastructure and large repositories, which incidentally enhances the value of the collection (while a transfer to institutional repositories would diminish the value)."

This is again profoundly incorrect. The only "value enhancement" that empty collections need is their missing content. (Nor are we talking about "transfer" yet, since the target contents are not being deposited. We are talking about mandating deposit.)

Funder mandates can be fulfilled just as readily by depositing in institutional repositories or central ones. Repository size and locus of deposit are completely irrelevant. All OAI-compliant repositories are interoperable. The OAI-PMH allows central harvesting from distributed repositories. In addition, transfer protocols like SWORD allow direct, automatic repository-to-repository transfer of contents.

Hence there is no functional advantage whatsoever to direct central deposit, since central harvesting from institutional repositories achieves exactly the same functional result. Instead, direct central deposit mandates have the great disadvantage that they compete with institutional mandates instead of facilitating them.

Both the natural and the optimal locus of deposit is the institutional repository, for both institutions and funders. That way funder mandates and institutional mandates collaborate and converge, covering all research output.

Summary:
(1) Repository size and "infrastructure" do not generate content.
(2) Empty repositories are useless.
(3) The only way to fill them is to mandate deposit.
(4) Not all or most research is funded.
(5) But all research originates from institutions.
(6) Institutions' interests are served by hosting and managing their own research assets.
(7) Hence both institutional and funder mandates should converge on institutional deposit.
(8) Any central collections can then be harvested from the global distributed of institutional repositories.

And now an important correction of a widespread misinterpretation of the relative success of institutional and central repositories in capturing their target content:

The Denominator Fallacy. With one prominent exception -- which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the exceptional repository in question, the physics Arxiv, happens to be central rather than institutional -- unmandated central repositories (and there are many) are no more successful in getting themselves filled with their target content than unmandated institutional repositories. The critical causal variable is the mandate, not the repository's centrality or size.

The way to arrive at a clear understanding of this fundamental fact is to note that the denominator -- i.e., the total target content relative to which we are trying to reckon, for a given repository, what proportion of it is being deposited -- is far bigger for a central disciplinary repository than for an institutional repository.

For an institutional repository, its denominator is the total number of refereed journal articles, across all disciplines, produced by that institution annually.

For a central disciplinary repository, its denominator is the total number of refereed journal articles, across all institutions worldwide, published in that discipline annually. (For a national repository, like HAL, its denominator is the total research output of all the nation's institutions, across all disciplines.)

So it is no wonder that central repositories are "larger" than institutional ones: Their total target content is much larger. But this difference in absolute size is not only irrelevant but deeply misleading. For the proportion of their total annual target content that unmandated central repositories are actually capturing is every bit as minuscule as the proportion that unmandated institutional repositories are capturing. And whereas the total size of a mandated institutional repository remains much smaller than an unmandated central repository, the reality is that the mandated institutional repositories are capturing (or near capturing) their total target outputs, whereas the unmandated central repositories are far from capturing theirs.

The reason Arxiv is a special case is not at all because it is a central repository but because the physicists that immediately began depositing in Arxiv way back in 1991, with no need whatsoever of a mandate to impel them to do so, had already long been doing much the same thing in paper (at the CERN and SLAC paper depositories), and necessarily centrally, because in the paper medium there is no way one can send one's paper to "everyone," nor to get everyone to access or "harvest" each new paper from each author's own institutional depository (if there had been such a thing).

All of that is over now. And if physicists had made the transition from paper preprint deposit to online preprint deposit directly today rather than in 1991, in the OAI-MPH era of repository interoperability and harvesting, there is no doubt that they would have deposited in their own respective institutional repositories and CERN and SLAC and Arxiv would simply have harvested the metadata automatically from there (with the obvious computational alerting mechanisms set up for harvesting, export and import).

But that longstanding cultural practice of preprint deposit among physicists would be just as anomalous if physicists had begun it all by depositing institutionally rather than centrally, for no other (unmandated) central repository (or discipline) is capturing the high portion of its annual total target content that the physics Arxiv is capturing (in certain preprint-sharing subfields of physics) and has been capturing ever since since 1991, in the absence of any deposit mandate.

So the centrality, size and success of Arxiv is completely irrelevant to the problem of how to fill all other unmandated repositories, whether central or institutional, large or small, in any other discipline, and regardless of the "robustness" of the repository's "infrastructure." Only the mandated repositories are successfully capturing their target content, and there is no longer any need to deposit directly in central repositories: In the OAI-compliant OA era, central "repositories" need only be collections, harvested from the distributed local repositories of the universal research providers: the institutions.

R&A: "Secondly, we compare and contrast a system based on central research publication repositories with the notion of a network of institutional repositories to illustrate that across central dimensions of any repository solution the institutional model is more cumbersome and less likely to achieve a high level of service."

The assumption is made here -- with absolutely no supporting evidence, and with all existing evidence (other than the single special case of Arxiv, discussed above) flatly contradicting it -- that researchers are more likely to deposit their refereed journal articles in big central repositories than in their own institutional repositories.

All evidence is that researchers are equally unlikely to deposit in either kind of repository unless deposit is mandated, in which case it makes no difference whether the repository is institutional or central -- except that if both funders and institutions mandate institutional deposit then their mandates converge and reinforce one another, whereas if funders mandate central deposit and institutions mandate institutional deposit then their mandates diverge and compete with one another.

(And of course the natural direction for harvesting is from local to central, not vice versa: We all deposit on our institutional websites and google harvests from there; it would be absurd for everyone to deposit in google and then back-harvest to their own institutional website. The same is true for any central OAI harvesting service.)

R&A: "Next, three key functions of publication repositories are reconsidered, namely a) the fast and wide dissemination of results; b) the preservation of the record; and c) digital curation for dissemination and preservation."

Again, these functions in no way distinguish central and institutional repositories (both can and do provide them) and have no bearing whatsoever on the real problem, which is the absence of the target content -- for which the remedy is to mandate deposit. Otherwise there's nothing to curate, preserve and disseminate.

R&A: "Fourth, repositories and their ecologies are explored with the overriding aim of enhancing content and enhancing usage."

You cannot enhance content if the content is not there. And you cannot enhance the usage of absent content. Hence it is it not enhancements that are needed but deposit mandates to generate the nonexistent content for which all these enhancements are being contemplated...

R&A: "Fifth, a target scheme is sketched, including some examples."

The target scheme includes a suggestion that publishers should do the depositing, of their own proprietary version of the refereed article. This is perhaps the worst suggestion of all. Just when institutions are at last realizing that after decades of outsourcing it to publishers, they can now host and manage their own research output by mandating that their researchers deposit their final refereed drafts in their own institutional repositories, Romary & Armbruster instead suggest "consolidated" central "publication repositories" in which publishers do the depositing. (The question to contemplate is: If it requires a mandate to induce researchers to deposit, what will it require to induce publishers to deposit -- other than paying them to do it? And if so, who will pay how much for what, out of what money -- and why?)

Most of the rest of R&C's suggestions are superfluous, and fail completely to address the real problem: the absence of OA's target content. You can't go "beyond" institutional repositories until you first succeed in filling them.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of a publisher's policy on author self-archiving, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

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On 22-May-09, at 5:10 AM, C.J.Smith wrote (regarding my "Definitive Answer: I"):

Stevan,

The John Wiley & Sons entry on SHERPA RoMEO describes the policy of John Wiley & Sons before they merged with Blackwell. Even so, one of the conditions of their ‘green’ status is ‘not allowed on institutional repository’. They only permit the use of the ‘post-print’ on the author’s own website.

Dear Colin, and all:

In the blogged version of the conclusions I drew from all of this, and the advice I gave on its basis, I added a fifth point that I should have added to my posting too. See (5) below:

(1) Under all circumstances,  deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft of your journal article (postprint) in your Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is no need whatsoever to make a single exception. 

(2) Unless you are certain that you have reason not to, set access to that deposited draft as Open Access (OA) immediately upon deposit. (Otherwise, you can set access as Closed Access, for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.) 

(3) The only thing even remotely at issue is whether or not, if you deposit a document in your IR and make it OA, you ever receive a take-down notice from the publisher. 

(4) If and when you ever receive a take-down notice and you wish to honor it, set access as Closed Access for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.

(5) Meanwhile, if there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive on and don't give it another thought until and unless you ever receive a take-down notice.

I also added:

And above all, reflect that if the millions of articles that have been made OA (by computer scientists, physicists, economists, and all other disciplines) since the 1980's had waited (or asked) for a clear, unambiguous green light in advance from each publisher, we would have virtually none of those millions of articles accessed, used and built-upon across those decades by the many users worldwide whose institutions could not afford access to the publisher's subscription edition. 

In other words, I think it is both unnecessary and counterproductive for individual authors (or Institutional Repository managers) to assume the pre-emptive burden of trying to sort out the double-talk that the publisher posts, or that their individual permissions grunts pronounce in response to individual permissions queries.

For the specific question of the distinction between the "institutional repository" and the "author's own website": that distinction is such utter, unmitigated nonsense that I find it difficult to believe that anyone (other than a wishful-thinking publisher's permissions grunt or permissions double-talk text-drafter) would give it a nanosecond of thought. There is no difference between an "institutional repository" and an "author's own website"! They are just names for disk sectors on the author's institutional webserver:

If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

That includes contradictory statements from the same publisher, posted at different URLs, and under slightly different names! (A number of IRs have since explicitly, and wearily, declared that their authors' sector on the IR server is now officially baptized their "website".)

Your quote from the Wiley-Blackwell Author Services page is interesting. It does indeed say the following:

“Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways, including in publications of their own work and course packs in their institution. An electronic copy of the article (with a link to the online version) can be posted on their own website, employer's website/repository and on free public servers in the subject area. For full details see authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp.”

However, when you click through to the ‘full details’ link, there is no further mention of what authors can do with their accepted manuscripts.

My advice: don't click through to the 'full details' link! This is all just double-talk and FUD. Pick the most favorable version, screen-grab it for your records, and then go ahead and post your accepted article on your employer's website/repository and forget about it.

By the way, I am fully aware of what illusion this self-serving double-talk is striving to create in this instance: to make the publisher appear to be Green on immediate OA self-archiving -- but, if you click-through, you realize that it is only at the price of paying them for hybrid Gold OA! This is shameful, misleading nonsense -- but you need not "click through": just take

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

at face value and do not give it another thought until and unless someone from "Wiley-Blackwell" ever ventures to send you a take-down notice.

And let the "you" be the author, to whom this message about how "Wiley-Blackkwell journal authors can use their accepted article" is addressed. Please don't get any 3rd-party intermediaries involved in it -- except in the form of a blanket institutional Green OA self-archiving mandate for its employees.

I asked the Wiley-Blackwell person with whom I have been in touch to update their policy on SHERPA RoMEO. Part of his response to me was as follows:“

We have no connection with the SHERPA/RoMEO site and we do not sanction the service or verify the information held there. The SHERPA/RoMEO site should therefore not be taken as an accurate reflection of our policies.”

I made no particular mention of the SHERPA/ROMEO site in my posting and advice. I simply quoted three published online excerpts of each "Wiley's" public words to their authors. Consider the Romeos to just be short-cuts to publishers' own expressed policies, and summaries of them.

(And I can only repeat, yet again, that it is an enormous strategic error to ask when there already exists a suitable public green light from the publisher -- and even worse to have a 3rd party ask: The only thing the author's institution should do is require immediate deposit, without exception, in all cases, and also to strongly recommend immediately setting access to that deposit as Open Access. But no chasing after permissions on the author's behalf, and especially not in advance, and in the absence of any take-down notice.)

I will now challenge him based on the quote you found above, but his answer to me in writing still seems very clear:

“The submission version is the only version we allow to be placed into institutional repositories. We do not allow the post-peer review article, the author’s final draft, or any other version to be deposited.”

Based on this, and on your “sensible practical advice to authors and Repository Managers alike”, I can see no other choice than to deposit Wiley-Blackwell post-prints under permanent closed access.

I see a very clear and far better choice, with publicly documented support for it from "Wiley-Blackwell":  

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

Let the author "post" his accepted draft to his IR immediately upon acceptance, set access immediately as OA, and then forget about it, as millions of authors have been doing since the 1980's, followed by virtually no take-down challenges from their publishers.

Most journals, on the contrary, have since officially given immediate OA self-archiving their green light. If and when the author ever does get a take-down notice, he can decide whether or not to honor it at that time. But pre-emptive obstacles should not be needlessly created, in advance, by having 3rd parties contact publishers' permission grunts -- even if their portfolio is "W/B Associate Permissions Manager."

(It is the author who is doing the depositing and the access-setting, not a 3rd party. Except where an exception has been negotiated by the author (as recommended, for example, by the Harvard policy), the copyright transfer agreement is between the author and the publisher, not a 3rd party.)

The Open University (OU) should adopt an ID/OA mandate. OU should not doom you, Colin, to having to contact a publisher's permissions grunt for every new OU article written, nor to have to do the hermeneutics to sort out incoherent versions of publishers' official policy. Let authors pick a grammatical English sentence, posted publicly by the publisher, to the effect that authors can post their final drafts on their websites, and take that to be a green light, regardless of whether the publisher goes on to contradict it elsewhere. It's publishers' copy-editors who are supposed to vet incoherent author prose, not authors (or Repository Managers) vetting incoherent publisher prose...

A second word to the wise,

Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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Please take the time to express your support for sustaining the Depot, a far-seeing and timely JISC Project that just happened to come slightly before its historical time! Please make sure the Depot is kept alive so that it can now come into its own, to perform the crucial role it was intended to perform, and set the example for the rest of the world. The reason the Depot has lain fallow (with only 66 deposits) to date is exactly the same reason virtually all of the world's Institutional Repositories (IRs) have been lying fallow: They are waiting for the "slumbering giant" (the world's universities and research institutions) to wake up and mandate deposit of their own research output. Meanwhile, funders have been providentially mandating deposit of the research they fund, but needlessly and counterproductively insisting upon institution-external, central deposit -- instead of mandating institutional deposit and central export (via SWORD) -- simply because not every institution has its own IR yet! Yet that is exactly the transitional role Depot was designed to fulfill: to provide an interim repository for any UK institution that has no IR yet, so its research output can be made OA until it sets up its own IR, to which its deposits can then be automatically exported. Well the token is at last beginning to drop for funders. So let's keep Depot alive to catch it, and help propel the UK (and by its example, the rest of world) to universal OA IR deposit mandates by funders and institutions alike.      -- S.H.

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Consultation on Role of the Depot

16 February 2009

The role of the Depot must change before the end of 2009.

We have come to the view that we should not decide upon the future of the Depot without first consulting wider among those who are working to promote and enable sharing of research through Open Access (OA) self-archiving, both in the UK and internationally. For the first part of that consultation process we approached a small number of individuals and we are grateful for their comments; those have helped frame the options we are considering. We now seek your input in a short period of consultation over the next four weeks.

The initial role of the Depot has been to provide the UK academic community with an online deposit facility for eprints during the interim period while Institutional Repositories (IRs) were being set up. Among other policy issues this was to put in place material support for the prospect of mandates for Open Access self-archiving. The initial purpose for the Depot has been judged to have been completed, and the project funding from JISC for the Depot as part of JISC RepositoryNet is coming to an end.

The Depot was never planned to be a central repository that would rival institutional repositories; rather it has complemented them by assisting both researchers-as-authors by providing two support functions. The first is that of re-direction, linking the potential depositor of an eprint with the appropriate UK institutional repository. This uses identity recognition and the OpenDOAR registry of IRs. The second is that of ingest, enabling deposit of that eprint, and thus exposure under terms of Open Access for those UK academic authors not having an appropriate IR. Both functions are computer-aided and without mediation by library or other support staff. We have also carried out some project work (EM-Loader project) to investigate how extraction of metadata from extant sources could improve the deposit process, both assisting the depositor but also helping to ensure good quality metadata.

Within EDINA and SHERPA, which developed and supports the Depot, we have been carrying out an appraisal of options for an exit strategy beyond its project funding. Could the Depot add value by continuing as support activity for the open access agenda, or else when and how to close the Depot? Please give us your views.

Preliminary discussion with advocates of OA self-archiving have indicated that there is value in continuing the Depot in order to assist OA sharing of research output internationally, especially where IR capacity is not yet comprehensive. There has also been discussion about how to develop the re-direction capabilities more generally, including support of OA deposit mandates by funding bodies - for example, by helping their funded researchers locate the appropriate IR.

The existing Depot service will be fully supported until at least 30 September 2009. Next month (March) or shortly thereafter we will decide what to do based upon feedback from yourselves, and any other developments, using the following six months to enact an agreed plan. This might include re-branding or change of mission and message, as well as arranging the transfer of the limited content that we have in the Depot to some other repository or even handing over the running of the Depot to another body.

Your comments are welcome, and should be sent to edina@ed.ac.uk, marked 'Role of the Depot'.

EDINA Services

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SUMMARY: There just might be some hope that UK's Research Funding Councils -- all seven of which now mandate Green OA self-archiving, as recommended by the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology in 2004 -- could go on and take the initiative to stipulate that each fundee's Institutional Repository (IR) is to be the default locus-of-deposit (with DEPOT as the interim back-up). If adopted by the UK Funding Councils, this small change in implementational detail has a good chance of motivating all UK universities and research institutions to adopt Green OA self-archiving mandates too, for the rest of their research output. This UK model will then undoubtedly propagate globally, to bring the planet universal OA at long last!

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Gerry Lawson [GL] (NERC Research Information Systems, RCUK Secretariat) wrote (in JISC-REPOSITORIES):

GL: Stevan, a very useful series of postings - thanks. UK Research Councils have a variety of OA mandates - including two which mandate deposition in CRs (MRC- UK PubMed and ESRC - Society Today).  WIth the exception of EPSRC (and this may well change) the others do mandate deposition, but are unspecific about where.  NERC, for example, says:

"From 1 October 2006 NERC requires that, for new funding awards, an electronic copy of any published peer-reviewed paper, supported in whole or in part by NERC-funding, is deposited at the earliest opportunity in an e-print repository.  NERC also encourages award-holders to deposit published peer-reviewed papers arising from awards made before October 2006. "

BUT its very difficult to check compliance to these mandates!  Councils have reduced their final reporting requirements on the expectation that it will be possible to collect outputs information (not just publications) electronically from grantholders.  RCUK is assessing options for doing this - either pushing/pulling from Institutional Repostories or from HEI CRIS systems, or both.  Whatever is decided its certain that that we'd be assisted by inclusion in IRs of metadata fields for a) "Funder" (perhaps using a dropdown list of funders URIs); and b) "GrantReference".  

Gerry, you are absolutely right. IRs need to have a metadata field that specifies the funder, for a variety of reasons, including verification of grant fulfillment conditions.

(As you note below, the EPrints IR software has already implemented this metadata tag.)

This is also yet another strong reason why funders should not require direct deposit in a CR, nor even simply require open-ended deposit in any repository at all (as NERC does), but should instead specify the author's own institutional IR as the designated locus of deposit (and DEPOT for those fundees whose institution has not yet set up its own IR).

Universities are already eager to do everything they can to help in ensuring compliance with funders' grant conditions. They can accordingly be invaluable aids to each funding council in verifying compliance with its deposit mandate. See: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates".

GL: The disadvantage of using IRs rather than Central Repositories is the absence of minimum standards and formats in the former.  Both the above fields exist in CRs (e.g. UK PubMed and Society Today)

But the standards and formats can all be implemented in IRs. EPrints is continuously upgrading its functionality to keep pace with the emerging needs of Open Access (including Open Access mandates by funders and institutions). 

Don't forget that two free IR softwares -- EPrints and DSpace -- are used to create the majority of IRs. IR software standards can be made widespread or even universal (as OAI-PMH, for example, was made) in the distributed worldwide IR community with a resultant power, scope and functionality that can not only match but exceed what can be done with CRs -- and without any of the disadvantages of CRs that Professor Rentier, author of the U. Liège mandate, and I have both described.

GL: So, three questions re IRs

1. Funder and GrantRef fields exist in EPrints (as free text) from version 3.0  - do they exist in DSpace and Fedora - and in what form?

I don't know. But EPrints -- which is the first of the IR softwares and invariably the leader in keeping upgrades lock-step with the emerging needs of OA -- will contact DSpace and Fedora developers, as it has in the past (most notably with the all-important  "request a copy" Button) to urge them to implement the GrantRef field too. (Meanwhile, institutions should just adopt EPrints!)

GL: 2. Can a standard be introduced where they allow multiple funders - like multiple authors? (its unlikely we'd want to be as sophisticated as adding a %DueToGrant field!)

I can't see any reason why not. I am branching this to Les Carr, who will be able to reply. (Perhaps it has been implemented already.)

GL: 3. If Councils were to add to their mandates a sentence like:  'By [date] such records should be tagged with Funder and Grant Reference information, and made available for harvesting', what would be an appropriate [date].  I guess this is depends on the harvisting tool.  I'm told that standard OAI-PMH doesnt handle these fields and that SWAP is not widely used?  What is the best approach?

For the technical answer, I defer to Les Carr and the EPrints development team.

But for timing, the question is slightly more complicated: The Councils should specify that the deposit must take place immediately upon the date of acceptance for publication. This date will vary from paper to paper, of course, so it cannot be specified in advance, but it is the most natural, reliable and universal reference point for authors and funders to use to time their deposit. See: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

With IRs (as long as we ensure that they provide the requisite functionality), harvesting need not be restricted to only metadata OAI fields. Again, I defer to Les, but the EPrints and DSpace metadata fields should surely be uniformly detectable and automatically harvestable regardless of whether they are part of the OAI protocol. (Les?)

GL: Additionally, some Councils mandate deposition only 'where a suitable repository exists'.  Should we change this to something like 'where a suitable Institutional Repository does not exist it is expected that the JISC-supported repository of last resort, 'The DEPOT' , will be used.'?

Yes, definitely! That will at last breathe some life into DEPOT so that it can at last begin to be used for its intended purpose, which was precisely that!

I am ever so grateful for your reply, Gerry, because it shows not only that the Funding Councils are listening, but it confirms how important and fruitful convergent mandates can and will be. Much gratitude also to Professor Rentier, Rector of University of Liège, whose timely and perspicacious essay on the relation between IRs, CRs, and between institutional and funder deposit mandates has triggered all this constructive discussion and coordination.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: What France -- exactly like every other country -- needs is both funder and institutional Open Access (OA) mandates, requiring the self-archiving of all refereed research output immediately upon acceptance for publication, and all converging on single-locus deposit in the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR). (It is completely irrelevant to this whether or not the IR happens to be hosted by HAL, France's national Central Repository [CR], which is designed so as to be able in principle to give every university or institution in France its own "virtual IR" if the institution so wishes.) But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, then OA's slumbering giant -- the universities and institutions that are the providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, in all fields, virtually none of which yet mandate the deposit of their institutional research output in their IRs -- will just keep hibernating: Institutional (and departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, most researchers (85%) will not self-archive anywhere (in either an IR or a CR), and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow. Apart from the funder-mandated research -- and the few fields (such as computer science, economics and physics) where researchers have already been self-archiving spontaneously for years worldwide -- the CRs will of course be in exactly the same state as the IRs.

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Thierry Chanier wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

TC: The question of tools for central repositories (CRs) is central. It is preferable to avoid opposing CRs and IRs.

They are not opposed. Both are welcome and useful. What is under discussion is locus of deposit. (The deposited document itself, once deposited, may be exported, imported, harvested to/from as many repositories as desired. The crucial question is where it is actually deposited, and especially where deposit mandates from funders stipulate that it should be deposited.)

The issues for locus-of-deposit are:

(1) Single or multiple deposit? 

I think everyone would agree that at a time when most authors (85% ) are not yet depositing at all, this is not the time to talk about depositing the same paper more than once.

(2) If single deposit: where, institution-internally or institution-externally? 

The author's institutional repository (IR) might be his university's IR, or his research institute's IR, or the IR of some subset of his institution, such as his department's IR or his laboratory's IR. The point is that the locus of production of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines and worldwide -- is the author's institution. The author's institution also has a shared stake and interest with its authors in hosting and showcasing their joint research output.

All other links to the author's research are fragmented: Some of it will be funded by some funders, some by others, and some will be unfunded. Some will be in some discipline or subdiscipline, some in another, some in several. There is much scope for collecting it together in various combinations into such institution-external collections, but it makes no sense at all to deposit directly in some or all of them: One deposit is enough, and the rest can be harvested automatically. The natural and optimal locus for that one deposit is at the universal source: the author's own institution.

(3) Import/Export/Harvest from where to where?

The natural and optimal procedure is: deposit institution-internally and then, where desired, import/export/harvest institution-externally. This one-to-many procedure makes sense from every standpoint: Single convergent deposit, convergent mandates, maximal flexibility and efficiency, minimal effort and complication (hence maximal willingness and compliance from authors). The alternative, of many-to-one importation, or many-to-many import/export means multiple, divergent deposit, divergent mandates, reduced flexibility and efficiency, increased effort and complications (and hence reduced willingness and compliance from authors).

TC: In some countries, CRs may be prominent (particularly because local institutions have a low status, so IRs may not mean much to researchers ... when they exist), because centralized procedures for evaluating research may offer opportunity to researchers to start depositing - see below about France.

Institutional status-level is irrelevant, because research is not searched at the individual IR level but at the harvester (CR) level. We are discussing here what is the optimal locus of deposit, so as to capture (and mandate the capture of) all of OA's target content, worldwide, and as quickly and efficiently as possible. What matters for this is to find a procedure for systematically capturing all research output, and the natural and exhaustive locus for that is at the source: the institution (university, research institute, department, laboratory) that hosts the researcher, pays his salary, and provides his institutional affiliation.

There is of course research evaluation at the institution-internal as well as the institution-external (funder and national) level. But even for national research assessment exercises, such as the RAE in the UK, the institution and department are the "unit of assessment"; they are local, and distributed. And the natural locus for their research output is their own IRs. And that is exactly how it is that many UK universities provided their submissions to RAE 2008. See the IRRA .

TC: Researchers should be free to choose where they deposit but with requirements to deposit. They may do it in different repositories (I mean one document is only in one place, but depending on the nature of the document/data, one may choose various repositories)

I am afraid that it is here that we reach the gist of the matter (and the height of the misunderstanding and equivocation):

First, the only kind of deposit under discussion here is OA's primary target content: refereed journal articles. That is also the only deposit requirement (mandate) under discussion here, because although there are many other things an author might choose to deposit too -- books, software, multimedia, courseware, research data -- those are optional contents insofar as OA deposit mandates are concerned. And it is specifically the locus of deposit of the required contents (refereed journal articles) that matters so much, particularly in funder mandate policies.

It might sound optimal for a funder to simply require deposit in some OA repository or other, leaving it up to the author to choose which (and such a funder mandate is certainly preferable to a mandate that specifies deposit in a CR, or to no mandate at all). But this is in fact far from being the optimal mandate, for the reasons discussed by Prof. Rentier: 

Most researchers (85%) do not deposit unless they are required to. Funders can only mandate the deposit of the research that they fund. If they require that it must be deposited in a specific CR, they are in direct competition with institutional mandates (necessitating double or divergent deposit). If funder mandates simply leave it open where authors deposit, then they are not in competition with IR mandates, but they are not helping them either. As noted, institutions are the producers of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines, worldwide. Only 30 institutions mandate deposit so far, worldwide (out of tens of thousands). If a funder mandates deposit, but is open-ended about locus of deposit, it leaves institutions in their current state of inertia. But if funders specifically stipulate IR deposit, they thereby immediately increase the probability and the motivation for creating an IR as well as adopting an institutional deposit mandate for the rest of the research output of every one of the institutions that have a researcher funded by that funder.

TC: It is a tactical decision for OA supporters, knowing the local habits, to advertise ways of deposit to colleagues

But we already know that advertisement, encouragement, exhortation, evidence of benefits, assistance -- none of these is sufficient to get most researchers to deposit. Only requirements (mandates) work (and you seem to agree).

Now institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, because they are the universal providers of all of OA's target content. So to induce the "slumbering giant" to wake up and mandate OA for all of his research output, there has to be something in it for him (or rather them, because the "slumbering giant" is in fact a global network of universities and research institutions). What is in it for each of them? A collection of its own institutional research output that it can host, manage, audit, assess and showcase. What use is it to each of them if their research output is scattered globally willy-nilly, in diverse CRs? It increases the research impact of the institution's research output, to be sure, but how to measure, credit, showcase and benefit from that, institutionally, when it is scattered willy-nilly? 

Now, as noted, importation/exportation/harvesting can in principle work both ways. But if a university that might wish to host its own research assets has to go out and find and harvest them back from all over the web, because they were deposited institution-externally, instead of being deposited institutionally in the first place, the time and effort involved is considerably greater than simply mandating direct institutional deposit would have been -- and that back-harvest does not even yield all of the university's output: only whatever institutional research output happened to be funded by funders that also mandate OA! Yet if those funders had mandated IR deposit, all that work would already be done, and the university would have a strong incentive to adopt a mandate requiring the rest of its research output to be deposited too.

Meanwhile, for a mandating funder, harvesting the distributed IR content of all of its fundees into a CR is far easier; part of the fulfillment conditions for the grant need only specify that the author should send the funder the URL for the IR deposit of all articles resulting from the grant. The rest can be done automatically by software.

TC:  We have to make sure that people in charge of funding research (EU, National) do not oblige researchers to deposit in one specific place (their CR or any other).

On the contrary, there is every reason that funders should specify the fundee's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, for the reasons just adduced. Open-ended mandates are better than competing CR mandates, but they are not nearly as good as convergent, synergistic IR mandates (to help awaken the slumbering giant).

(As I was writing this posting, two new funder mandates have been announced -- FRSQ in Canada and NRC in Norway: Both are welcome, but both are open-ended about deposit locus, and consequently both miss the opportunity to have a far greater positive effect on global OA growth, by stipulating IR deposit.)
 

TC:  But I understand funders, because when they ask researchers to provide access to their work and advertise the fact that they have been paid by them, there is currently no practical way of doing so (labels put on deposit with the name of the program which gave the money, and harvesters able to compute this information)

Yes, precisely. Funding metadata can easily be added as a field in the IR deposit software -- and institutions will be only too happy to help in monitoring grant fulfillment conditions in this way, in exchange for the jump-start it provides for the filling of their own IRs.

TC: I also understand funders because I feel that they want to add interesting tools (search, computation, meta-engine), tools which could be developed by central harvesters (CH). We are late on this issue and harvesters have not made much progress (see below).

To repeat: Locus of direct deposit has nothing whatever to do with harvester-level search. Search is not done at the IR level but at the harvester (e.g., CR)  level.

TC: 1. HAL and research evaluation: 3 years ago I tried to convince my former lab to open a sub-archive within HAL (same repository, but URL specific to the lab, with proper interface). I also tried to convince my university to have a general meeting with directors of local labs in order to invite them to do the same and, at another level, to manage the sub-archive in HAL for the university (a solution somewhere in between CR and IR). My lab colleague  agreed, started the work but gave up because of lack of time. My university never replied to my proposal.

HAL is a nationwide resource that can in principle be used (much the way the Web itself is used) to allow an institution to create and manage its own "virtual IR". As such, HAL is partly a platform for creating virtual IRs, rather than a CR.

So, essentially, what you and your colleague tried to do (and only partly succeeded) was to create and manage an IR. That's splendid, and welcome, but we already know that IRs alone are not enough. Without a mandate, they idle at the usual 15% baseline.

(Please note that a lab repository is an IR.)

TC:  Now, thanks to procedures for evaluating research in France, labs will have to choose the way they want to be evaluated (I mean the technical procedure to achieve it). Some software used by the national board will do the computation out of HAL. Consequently, my lab decided this week to urgently re-open and manage its sub-archive in HAL. Of course, the first thing they have to do is deposit metadata. The actual deposit of the corresponding full-text is not mandatory. But they will take the opportunity to suggest to researchers to deposit as well their full papers.

It won't work; it's been tried many times before. So this is a great opportunity lost. As you see, the IR clearly languishes neglected without a mandate. With a mandate -- particularly one in which evaluation is based on what is deposited, as in Prof. Rentier's mandate at Liège -- researchers perk up and deposit. But if all they have to deposit is metadata, that's all they will deposit (even though adding the full-text is just one more keystroke).

The reason is that the effect of mandates is mostly not coercive. Researchers don't jump to deposit just because they are required to deposit. They actually want to deposit, but they are held back by two main constraints, one small, the other big: 

(1) The small constraint is ergonomic. Researchers are overloaded, and they will not do something extra unless it really has a high priority. A deposit mandate, especially one tied to funding and/or evaluation, gives the few minutes-worth of keystrokes per paper (which is all that a deposit amounts to) the requisite priority that they otherwise lack.

(2) The big constraint is psychological: Researchers are (groundlessly) afraid to deposit their papers (even the 63% for which the journal already gives them its explicit blessing to do so) -- afraid until and unless their institutions and/or their funders tell them they must, because then they know it is officially okay to do so! The mandate unburdens their souls, and unlocks their fingers.

TC:  Last thing: I do not mean that in France, only HAL should be used. We should make sure we have the choice to deposit where we please.

What France needs, like every other country, is funder and institutional mandates converging on single-locus IR deposit (irrespective of whether the IR is hosted by HAL). But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, the giant will keep hibernating, institutional (departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow.

TC:  2. Harversters : advantages and current limits:  Just a personal experience. Till recently I used to advertise my list of publications by giving the URL of an open archive, Edutice (a thematic one, VERY USEFUL in our domain, a sub-part of HAL but with its local procedures, interface, etc.). Now I give colleagues the OAISTER URL (with the path to follow) to get all my publications (because some of them are in other archives). The problem is: deposits in Edutice appear twice in the OAISTER list (as deposits of Edutice and of HAL - but there is one only deposit). It is a concrete example of progress which should be made to avoid repetitions in harvesters (among many other new features).

If they had all been deposited in your own IR you would have had an automatic listing of all your works (without duplications) through a simple google IR site-search "chanier site:http-IR-etc." -- and your institutions would have it all too. And so would OAIster. And you could have exported to Edutice with SWORD if you wished.

De-duplication and version-comparator software is already being developed (though it's hardly worth it yet, when the problem is not the presence of duplicates but the absence of even a singleton for 85% global refereed research output) -- and that's what mandates in general -- and convergent IR mandates in particular, to awaken the slumbering giant -- are needed for.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

This is the timely and incisive analysis of what is at stake in the question of locus of deposit (institutional vs. central) for open access self-archiving mandates. It was written (in French, and then translated into English) by Prof. Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège and founder of EurOpenScholar. It is re-posted here from Prof. Rentier's blog.

For more background on the important current issues underlying the question of institutional vs. central deposit mandates by universities and research funders, click here.

Liège is one of the c. 30 institutions (plus 30 funders) worldwide that have already adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate .

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Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?

Posted by Bernard Rentier in Open Access

[Also recommended: a remarkable and very complete review of OA by Peter Suber.]

The “Green Open Access (OA)” solution, providing free access to research publications in Institutional Repositories (IRs) via the Web, is certainly the best one, but sooner or later it will face a new wave of centralised thematic or funder repositories (CRs).

The latest initiative comes from the very active EUROHORCs (European Association of Heads of Research Funding Organisations and Research Performing Organisations), well known for its EURYI prizes and its prominent influence on European thinking in the research area. EUROHORCs is working to convince the European Science Foundation (ESF) to set up, through a large subsidy from the EC, a centralised repository (CR) which would be both thematic (Biomedical) and geographic (European). The concept is inspired by PubMed Central, among others.

The EUROHORCs initiative is very well-intentioned. It is based on an awareness that many of us share: It is of the utmost importance that science funded by public money should be made freely and easily accessible to the public (OA). But the initiative also reveals a profound misunderstanding about what OA and researchers’ real needs are all about.

The vision underlying the EUROHORCs initiative is that research results should be deposited directly in a CR. However, if research results are not OA today, this is not because of the lack of a CR to deposit them in, but rather because most authors are simply not yet depositing their articles at all, not even in an IR.

Creating a new repository is hence not the solution for making research OA. The solution lies in universal deposit mandates, from both institutions and funding agencies. If this task is left to large funders such as the European Community, their central repositories will only contain publications of the research they have funded. From this it is easy to see that researchers will ultimately have to deposit their publications in as many repositories as there are funders supporting their research. Not only is this not practical, it is needlessly cumbersome.

The obvious solution is that both research institutions and funding agencies should jointly require IR deposit. Once that systematic coordination has been successfully implemented, if CRs are desired, they can easily be created and filled using compatible software for exporting or harvesting automatically from IRs to CRs.

What is worrisome is the needless double investment in creating two distinct kinds of repositories for direct deposit. This trend seems to rest on the naive notion that, in the Internet era, it is somehow still necessary to deposit things centrally. But in reality, the centralising tool is the harvester, and its search engine. Google Scholar, for example, is quite efficient in finding articles in any repository, institutional or central, yet no one deposits articles directly in Google Scholar. The perceived need for direct-deposit CRs is groundless, technically speaking. Such CRs even run the risk of serving as hosts for only the publications funded by a single funder. IRs guarantee OA webwide for all research output, in all disciplines, from all institutions, regardless of where (or whether) it has been funded.

It is understandable that funders may wish to host a complete collection of the research they have funded, but nowadays that can easily be accomplished by importing it automatically from the more complete collections of the distributed IRs -- since institutions are the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded -- as long as funders collaborate with institutions in first ensuring that all the IRs are filled with their own institutional research output.

Besides, the OA philosophy is global. It cannot be reduced to a single continent. Science is universal.

Giving priority to creating more CRs for direct deposit today is not only a waste of time: it is also counterproductive for the growth of convergent funder and institutional mandates. It would generate multiple competing loci of primary deposit for authors -- most of whom, we must not forget, are still not depositing at all.

In conclusion, it seems far more efficient to focus first on filling IRs at this time; once that is accomplished, if it is judged useful, CRs can be configured to collect their data from IRs rather than being used as divergent points of direct deposit themselves.

The potential success of OA, without conflicting head-on with publishers, rests on the deposit of authors' own final drafts of their published articles, through a one-time, simple action on the part of the author. All research is generated from research institutions: IRs are hence the natural locus for author deposit, providing optimal proximity, convenience and congruence with the mission of the author's own institution. The rest is merely technical: a matter of automated data transfer to external CRs.

The EUROHORCs proposal is only worthwhile if it contributes to the secondary harvesting of data from primary IRs. Otherwise, it is missing the point of OA.

ORBi wins its challenge

U. Liège's IR "ORBi" (Open Repository and Bibliography) is fulfilling its promise: over 4,000 references have already been filed since November 26th and, in a happy surprise, 79% of these articles turn out to be full text. This is thus ahead of schedule for our institutional Green OA Mandate (announced in March 2007 to take effect in October 2009): "Whenever the university reviews faculty publications for promotion, tenure, funding, or any other internal purpose, the review will be based exclusively on full texts deposited in the IR."

The graph below shows clearly how the IR contents are growing. And yet a quick calculation also reminds us that we are still far from capturing the actual number of papers published yearly by our university authors.

[Funder mandates can help accelerate and motivate both the adoption of institutional mandates like ours, and author compliance with them -- provided the funder mandates stipulate the author's IR as the single convergent locus for direct deposit (followed by automatized harvest to CRs). If funders instead insist upon direct central deposit in their external CRs, they simply create a needless retardant and disincentive for author compliance, and hence for universal OA, rather than reinforcing and facilitating them.]

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Dépôts institutionnels, thématiques ou centralisés ?

Posté par Bernard Rentier dans Open Access

A lire: une remarquable revue très complète de l’OA par Peter Suber.

La formule des dépôts institutionnels permettant la libre consultation de publications de recherche par l’Internet est certes la meilleure, mais elle est, tôt ou tard, menacée par une nouvelle tendance visant à créer des dépôts thématiques ou des dépôts gérés par des organismes finançant la recherche.

La dernière initiative provient de la très active association EUROHORCs (European association of the heads of research funding organisations and research performing organisations), bien connue pour ses prix EURYI et dont l’influence sur la réflexion européenne en matière de recherche est considérable. Elle tente de convaincre l’European Science Foundation (ESF) de mettre sur pied, grâce à une subvention considérable des Communautés européennes, un dépôt centralisé qui serait à la fois thématique (sciences biomédicales) et localisé (Europe) sur base du principe qui a conduit à la création de PubMed Central, par exemple.

L’idée part d’un bon sentiment. Elle est née d’une prise de conscience que nous partageons tous: il est impératif que la science financée par les deniers publics soit rendue publique gratuitement et commodément. Mais en même temps, elle est fondée sur une profonde méconnaissance de l’Open Access, de l’Open Access Initiative et des besoins réels des chercheurs et des pouvoirs subsidiants.

La notion qui sous-tend cette initiative est que les résultats de la recherche doivent être déposés directement dans un dépôt centralisé. Mais si les résultats de la recherche ne sont pas aujourd’hui en accès libre et ouvert, ce n’est pas parce qu’il manque des dépôts centralisés, c’est tout simplement parce que la plupart des auteurs ne déposent pas leurs articles du tout, même pas dans un dépôt institutionnel.

La solution n’est donc pas de créer un nouveau dépôt. Elle est dans l’obligation pour les chercheurs de déposer leur travail dans un dépôt électronique, cette obligation devant être exigée par les universités et institutions de recherche ainsi que par les organismes finançant la recherche. Si l’on se contente de laisser faire les grands pourvoyeurs de fonds tels que l’Union européenne, on ne disposera dans le dépôt central que des publications de la recherche qu’ils ont financée. On comprend donc qu’àterme, le chercheur sera amené à encoder ses publications dans autant de dépôts différents qu’il bénéficiera de fonds d’origine différente. Ce n’est pas pratique, c’est même inutilement lourd.

Comme les institutions de recherche la produisent (avec ou sans financement public, dans toutes les disciplines, dans tous les pays, dans toutes les langues), la solution qui saute aux yeux est qu’ensemble, les institutions de recherche et les organismes finançants doivent encourager la mise en place de dépôts institutionnels. Ensuite, si l’on tient à réaliser des dépôts centralisés, on pourra toujours le faire, en redondance, et ce sera facile si les logiciels sont compatibles.

Ce qui est inquiétant, c’est l’investissement, redondant à ce stade, qu’implique la création de dépôts centralisés. En fait, ceci correspond à une vision naïve qui laisse penser qu’à l’heure de l’Internet, il faille encore centraliser quoi que ce soit. L’élément centralisateur, c’est le moteur de recherche. Prenons Google Scholar: il est parfaitement efficace pour retrouver les articles dans l’ensemble des dépôts institutionnels, aussi bien que dans un dépôt central. L’utilité des dépôts centralisés n’est donc pas justifiable sur le plan technique. Le risque est même qu’ils ne solidifient uniquement que le dépôt des travaux faits avec les fonds d’un seul bailleur de fonds. Les dépôts institutionnels assurent la présence sur le web de tous les travaux scientifiques quels qu’ils soient, peu importe comment ils sont financés.

On peut comprendre que les bailleurs de fonds et organismes finançants aient envie de disposer d’un répertoire complet des travaux qu’ils subsidient, mais il est logique alors qu’ils collectent les données — c’est maintenant très aisé techniquement et cela nécessite juste un peu d’organisation pour être systématique — à partir des dépôts institutionnels plus complets ou que ces derniers leur communiquent automatiquement l’information.

Par ailleurs, la philosophie qui sous-tend l’Open Access est planétaire. Elle ne peut se confiner à une dimension européenne. La science est plus universelle que cela.

La création de dépôts centralisés n’est pas seulement une perte de temps, elle est aussi contre-productive pour la généralisation du dépôt obligatoire car elle multiplie, pour des chercheurs qui résistent déjà à déposer ne fût-ce qu’une fois leurs travaux, elle multiplie les endroits où ils doivent les déposer !

Nous sommes donc en présence d’une initiative de très bonne volonté, qui a du sens pour l’ESF, mais qui est un peu maladroite. Il eût été préférable de développer le principe que les dépôts centralisés soient des récoltants d’informations à partir des dépôts institutionnels et non des endroits de dépôt direct. Le principe même des dépôts thématiques (par sujet, par domaine de la science, par nationalité, par continent, par source de financement, etc.) ne peut qu’ajouter à la confusion dans un domaine qui n’est déjà pas facile à mettre en place et où le succès le plus complet est lié à la proximité du niveau de pouvoir et d’exigence. Les dépôts thématiques (ici, il serait doublement sectoriel: Europe & Biomédecine) ont beaucoup de sens, mais doivent rester secondaires par rapport à l’exigence fondamentale du “tout accessible”.

En d’autres termes, le succès de l’Open Access, sans se heurter de front aux éditeurs, repose sur les dépôts d’articles publiés par ailleurs et sur l’exigence d’un travail unique pour l’auteur. Le plus simple et le plus efficace pour cela est le dépôt institutionnel. Toute recherche provient d’institutions: le dépôt idéal le plus efficace et le plus complet ne peut donc être qu’institutionnel. Le reste est technique: ce n’est plus qu’une affaire de récolte d’informations.

La proposition de l’ESF n’est donc intéressante que si elle se situe au niveau de la récolte secondaire des données à partir des dépôts institutionnels primaires. Dans sa présentation actuelle, elle manque son but.

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Re-posting of announcement by Isidro Aguillo of Webometrics University Rankings to the American Scientist Open Access Forum.

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The January edition of the Ranking Web of Repositories has just been published

http://repositories.webometrics.info/

The number of repositories is growing fast worldwide but still many of them do not have their own domain or subdomain, and for this reason it is not possible to add them into our analysis. Some institutions maintain several databases with completely different URLs which penalize the global visibility they have.

We are still unable to add usage/download statics but there are many initiatives already working on standardization of the collecting methods, so we expect that global data should be available soon.

Following several requests we now show two global Rankings. One that covers all repositories as was shown in previous editions (Top 300), and a new one that focus only on Institutional Repositories (Top 300 Institutional).

There is a minor change regarding the calculation of the number of rich files as in this new edition we are again using formats other than pdf (doc, ppt, ps) to obtain the data. Contrary to the methodology we used to make the other Rankings, the figures for rich files are combined and not treated individually.

The French HAL central repository, and its subsets like INRIA, Social Sciences and Humanities (HAL-SHS) or IN2P3, are at the top of the institutional repository list.

Important repositories like PubMedCentral, CiteSeerX and Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System, do not use standard suffixes to design their contents (e.g. papers in acrobat format with file names which extension is not .pdf). This is a bad practice as it reduces the visibility of these documents to the search engines.

Our policy is not to include collectors or metarepositories, with one exception, which is DiVa, the interface that the Uppsala University provides to more than 20 Nordic repositories. Many of these institutions do not have their own systems but link their contents to the DiVa portal. Unfortunately, this means that many of the papers are under different domains and hence they do not contribute to the DiVa's rank.

Isidro F. Aguillo
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28, 3C1. 28037 Madrid. Spain
Ph. 91-602 2890. Fax: 91-602 2971
isidro.aguillo -- cchs.csic.es
http://www.webometrics.info