Open Access Archivangelism

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On Tue, 5 Oct 2010, [identity deleted] wrote:

Hi Stevan,
We are happy to inform you that [university identity deleted] senate passed a campus open access resolution...

[Here] is the text of our open access resolution. We are not sure if we should register it to ROARMAP since it is not a policy or a mandate. Do you have any guidance for us?

Thanks, [Identity deleted]

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Hi,

Congratulations to your university for taking a stance on OA, but I'm afraid there is nothing yet to register in ROARMAP on the basis of this kind of resolution (encouraging OA), for the following reasons:

(1) Ten years of evidence on which kinds of policies succeed and which fail have shown that encouraging deposit simply does not work. Baseline deposit rates remain about 15% of university research output, even with encouragement, recommendations, invitations, and requests.

(2) If the encouragement is accompanied by relentless activism, contacts, incentives and assistance from library staff, the deposit rate can be raised somewhat higher (c. 30%).

(3) But only a deposit requirement (mandate) can raise the deposit rate to 60%, from which it approaches 100% within a few years (especially quickly if deposit is officially designated as the sole procedure for submitting publications for performance assessment). Neither encouragement nor activism will accomplish deposit rates of that order, no matter how long the policy remains in place.

So I am afraid that your university is now destined to have to discover for itself -- by losing several more years of research uptake and impact while other institutions (over 100 now) adopt a deposit mandate -- that encouragement alone simply does not work.

I also think it is a mistake to foreground the recommendation to publish in open access journals ("Gold OA"): Unlike "Green OA" -- i.e. depositing (in the institutional repository) articles that have been published in subscription journals (which still constitute about 90% of journals today, and still include virtually all the top journals) -- publishing in Gold OA journals cannot be required; it can only be encouraged. So as a means of providing OA to all the university's annual research output, publishing in Gold OA journals should clearly be portrayed as merely a supplement to a deposit mandate. Your faculty resolution puts the encouragement to publish in OA journals first, followed by an encouragement to deposit. Not only is the crucial requirement to deposit missing altogether, but the priorities are counterproductively reversed.

Last, I have to point out that your resolution's statement regarding deposit is so hedged by apparent legal worries that it is virtually just a statement to the effect that "We encourage you to deposit if and when your publisher says you may deposit"!

Not only is that legalistic hedging not helpful, but it is unnecessary and misleading. Your university can and should require deposit of the author's final, refereed, revised draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exception. Over 60% of journals (including virtually all the top journals in all fields) already endorse immediate OA self-archiving (see the ROMEO registry). If there is a desire to abide by the remaining journals' OA embargoes, then your university should simply recommend setting access to the (immediate, mandatory) deposit as Closed Access rather than Open Access during the embargo. But the immediate deposit itself should be mandatory, without exception, regardless of publisher policy on the timing of OA. That way even during any OA embargo users can request and authors can provide "Almost OA" on a case by case basis, for research or educational purposes, via the repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button.

All I can do is hope that as you see the growing evidence of the feasibility and success of immediate-deposit mandates registered in ROARMAP, your university will be emboldened to upgrade its policy to an immediate-deposit mandate (as NIH did, after 2 years lost pursuing the vain hope that encouragement would be enough) before your university needlessly loses many more years of uptake and impact for its annual research output.

Invaluable OA policy-making guidance is now available to universities from EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship) Convenor, Alma Swan, Key Perspectives and University of Southampton; Chairman, Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege.

We hope many new deposit mandates will be announced during international OA week (beginning October 18):

Best wishes,
Stevan

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S; Carr, L; Swan, A; Sale, A & Bosc H. (2009) Maximizing and Measuring Research Impact Through University and Research-Funder Open-Access Self Archiving Mandates. Wissenschaftsmanagement 15(4) 36-41

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. Technical Report. School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton.

Holly Mercer reports that the self-archiving rate in library and information science is nearly 50% among librarians (and double the 20% global baseline even among nonlibrarians). Nevertheless, not even all articles for which immediate OA self-archiving has been endorsed by their publishers (c. 58-68%) are yet being self-archived even in library and information science, let alone the over 90% after embargo (or the 100% that can be deposited immediately in Closed Access allowing the semi-automatic eprint-request Button to provide Almost-OA during any embargo).

Among the potential solutions, the most important and effective one is for institutions and funders to mandate self-archiving. (Several library faculties have already taken the intiaitive of doing this.)  It is also important to make institutional repository deposit the official mechanism for submitting publications for institutional and national performance review (see Liège model).

One slight correction: Alma Swan's reported rate of 49% self-archiving was not for total articles; it was just the percentage of authors who said they had self-archived at least once. (And both Alma's studies and those of others have found that authors are often not sure what they mean when they say they have self-archived!) This too will be self-corrected as self-archiving mandates, with their links to research assessment, grow.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Frankel & Nestor's helpful advice to authors about rights retention is very well-informed and valuable, except for this:

"Finally, we must be careful to distinguish between a license mandate and a deposit mandate. Whereas a licensewhether exclusive or nonexclusivetransfers some amount of rights in the article, a deposit mandate merely allows for (or requires) a physical copy of the article to be given to the institution. Simply handing over a physical copy of an article, or draft of that article, is not sufficient under copyright law to constitute a grant of any rights, as physical possession of an article does not give the owner of that copy any copyright rights in work embodied in the copy.

"Deposit mandates certainly are useful for institutions to retain the knowledge and scholarship of its faculty members. Indeed, some journals already permit institutional depositories. But such permissions do not address the increasing loss of knowledge in the academic community caused by the ever- increasing costs of journal subscriptions and the inability for academic institutions to keep up with shouldering the burden of those costs. The open access policy goes beyond a simple university depositorylimited in size, scope, and, most universal scope and accessibility. By combining the nonexclusive license discussed in this paper with a deposit policy, an institution can create open access."

Simon J. Frankel and Shannon M. Nestor (2010) Opening the Door: How Faculty Authors Can Implement an Open Access Policy at Their Institutions.

(1) Most authors are not providing Open Access (OA) to their refereed research output at all today. (Only 20% are providing it.)

(2) OA Mandates are coming, but still extremely slowly.

(3) It is much harder to mandate more than less.

(4) A license mandate is much more than a deposit mandate.

(5) The majority of journals (60%+) already endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft.

(6) A deposit mandate will immediately provide OA to 60%+ instead of just 20% of refereed research.

(7) The repository's eprint-request button can provide almost-OA to all the rest for the time being.

(8) So what is urgently needed is at least a deposit mandate, today.

(9) Re-use rights are not urgent, and will be much easier to get once we already have universally mandated OA.

The Gratis Green OA self-archiving door is open already: All institutions and funders need do is mandate entry. Rights retention and Libre OA can come later.

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2008) Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal? Open Access Archivangelism December 7 2008.

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Suber, Peter (2008) Green/gold OA and gratis/libre OA. Open Access News August 2, 2008

Chris Armbruster [CA] wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

CA: "'Institution' is indeed not a very precise concept, but the repository ranking will not be improved if one were to spend much time trying to decide which repository is institutional and which is not"

If there is any rationale for separately ranking and comparing -- as the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR) does -- both the top 800 repositories and the top 800 institutional repositories (and there is indeed an important rationale for doing so), then that rationale is that the institutions are indeed institutional and not multi-institutional. The purpose is to rank their relative size (and hence their success in capturing their target content), and there is no point in comparing the size of the category "apple" with the size of the category "fruit." This is the "denominator fallacy."

The pro's and con's of Chris Armbruster's advocacy of central (multi-institutional) repositories over institutional repositories have already been multiply discussed over the years in this Forum and elsewhere.

The argument for institutional repositories is that (1) institutions are the providers of all of OA's target content, (2) they have a stake in managing their own output, and (most important of all) (3) they are in a position to mandate the deposit of their own output.

The argument for multi-institutional (central) repositories is that they look (superficially) as if they were bigger, hence more "successful" in attracting OA's target content. (Hence Chris's preference for keeping the two kinds of repositories and their sizes conflated in the RWWR rankings.) They also look (superficially) more manageable and sustainable.

The argument against multi-institutional (central) repositories is (a) that multi-institutional entities (notably, funders) cannot mandate the deposit of all institutional research output (because not all research is funded), (b) that central deposit mandates compete with instead of reinforcing institutional mandates (eliciting resistance from authors facing the prospect of having to do double-deposits), and (most relevantly here) (c) that the size and success of a repository can only be evaluated and compared in relation to the size of that repository's total target output: And although there are differences among institutions in the size of their own total output (which can and should be weighted to normalize it and make it comparable), the differences in size between institutions and multi-institutions is the difference in size between the number of apples and the number of fruit. (The denominator fallacy.)

Multi-institutional (central) repositories' content would have to be weighted by the output of all their actual and potential target institutions and the total target content of each, in order to make multi-institutional rankings comparable to those of individual institutions. RWWR is not doing that kind of weighting -- nor would it be easy to determine those weightings for each kind of multi-institutional repository, though it may eventually be possible to estimate in principle. If it were done, however, there would hardly be any need for two rankings (for repositories vs. institutional repositories).

What would be clear from a proper denominator-weighted ranking of institutional and multi-institutional repositories is that, contrary to what Chris has argued, it is not at all true that the multi-institutional repositories are bigger or more successful in collecting their respective total target contents. Rather, it makes much more sense for both institutions and funders to mandate that researchers deposit in their own institutional repository -- from which multi-institutional collections could then be automatically harvested. (It would then be redundant to try to compare their relative success, as one would clearly be a derivative of the other.)

For management and sustainability, local institutional deposit and central harvesting is the complementary -- and optimal -- solution. But first the primary content-provision problem has to be solved, otherwise there is next to nothing to manage and sustain!

CA: "how about also deleting No 10 because it is only a departmental repository?"

A departmental repository, in contrast, is sub-institutional rather than multi-institutional. Hence, unless there is to be a separate RWWR ranking of the top 800 departmental mandates, there is no harm in listing the departmental repositories among the institutional repositories -- except if the university has both an institutional and a departmental repository, and the contents of the departmental repository are also a proper subset of the contents of the institutional repository, hence double-counted.

This is not the case in the instance of ["institutional"] repository #10, University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, whose contents are not part of institutional repository #27, University of Southampton. Rather than resulting in an inflated ranking for Southampton, this actually results in a lower ranking. The joint RWWR ranking of the integrated institutional repository would be higher for Southampton. (That said, with a properly weighted denominator, separately tagged departmental repositories would be useful at this time, to compare the relative success of institution-wide mandates vs. departmental/school/faculty mandates -- i.e., Arthur's Sale's "patchwork mandate" strategy.)

CA: "Also, it is a bad idea to define repositories as institutional only if they restrict themselves to the output of a single institution. We already have too many repository managers who succumb to this kind of institutionalist logic - and reject OA content only because it is not from their own institution."

If only the problem were that of an overflowing cup, with so much OA target content that it needs to be rejected!

Chris has the OA content problem completely upside-down! The problem is that not enough of each institution's own OA target content is being deposited, anywhere -- not that institutions are declining to host the output of other institutions. (It is only Chris's central-repository preoccupation that makes him imagine that the latter is the problem.)

What's missing is not repositories to deposit in, but mandates to deposit. The solution is for institutions and funders to mandate institutional deposit of all content, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines -- and then, if desired, to harvest that content into various central collections, by discipline, funder, language or nation, as desired. Institutions are the universal providers of all that content; they are also the natural locus for deposit mandates.

CA: "The CSIC has a sound methodology for ranking repositories, and it not their job to define exclusively what is an IR and what not. And in cyberspace it is much more interesting to compare repositories according to domains and services they offer…"

I take it that by the CSIC Chris means the RWWR.

And as far as I can tell, the only reason Chris finds the methodology sound is that it conflates institutional and multi-institutional repositories, which favors Chris's preference for multi-institutional repositories.

What is much more interesting and important in cyberspace than the locus of the distributed content is the presence of the content. Most (80%) of OA's target content is still missing from anywhere on the (free) web, and long overdue. Locus matters strategically for the concrete, practical goal of capturing that target content (and making it OA). Chris keeps systematically missing this point. If the content were all there already, none of this would matter in the slightest.

(And a good intuition pump to bear in mind is that the key to the success of Google and the like was not to try to get everyone to deposit their content directly in Google: What happened, and worked, was distributed, local deposit and hosting, followed by central harvesting. Not a bad principle to generalize to OA...)

CA: "Moreover, it would help if we could move beyond the often narrow understanding of what an institutional repository is and what not & acknowledge more clearly that a strategy of privileging institutional repositories as such has not helped."

Chris does not seem to have noticed the growing institutional/departmental repository mandate movement (initiated in 2002 by Southampton ECS, but greatly accelerated since the 16th mandate in 2008 by Harvard FAS, and now running well over 100 institutional/departmental mandates, including UCL, MIT and Stanford, as well as over 40 funder mandates).

It is not (and never has been) a matter of merely "privileging" institutional deposit, but mandating it.

CA: "The value & sustainability of IRs (individually, as isolated instances, & if not embedded in a national system) is rather limited for both scholarship and open access."

(1) Repository value is nil without content.

(2) With content, locus is irrelevant, as search is not local but global, via central harvesters.

(3) Sustainability is a red herring (especially with today's sparse OA content); institutional deposit loci and central harvesters are complementary, insofar as preservation is concerned.

(4) Nations can and should mandate OA deposit. Nations can and should harvest OA deposits centrally. But there is no earthly need (or prospect) of nations directly hosting all their institutional OA output centrally, any more than there is any earthly need for nations to host all their institutions centrally.

(5) If Chris is worried about limitations on OA scholarship, he should set his mind to thinking of how to induce the OA target content providers (institutional researchers) to deposit their content, to make it OA.

(6) IRs will take care of themselves.

CA: "Hence, it is very welcome that more determined efforts are underway at building viable networks of research repositories and integrate IRs in national systems (e.g. Ireland as latest instance)."

All true, but a non sequitur, insofar was the fundamental problem of filling those repositories with their target contents is concerned.

CA: "For a sustained argument, please see": Armbruster & Romary (2010) Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication (accepted for publication in IJDLS)
and Romary & Armbruster (2010) Beyond Institutional Repositories. IJDLS 1(1)44-61

For a sustained critique and response, see:

Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and Central-Service Issues

Institutional vs. Central Repositories: 2 (of 2)

Institutional vs. Central Repositories: 1 (of 2)

Beyond Romary & Armbruster On Institutional Repositories

When Will the Research Community Take OA Matters Into Its Own Hands?

First Things First: OA Self-Archiving, Then Maybe OA Publishing

Well-Meaning Supporters of "OA + X" Inadvertently Opposing OA

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18 (1). pp. 25-40.

I have quickly skimmed (but not read verbatim) the new A & R paper, and I see that all of my prior objections (to A & R's earlier paper) remain unanswered, indeed not even noted.

(1) The 4-way classification system -- subject, nation, "research" and institution -- continues to be arbitrary and rather incoherent.

(2) The three far more important and salient distinctions -- direct deposit repositories vs harvested collections, OA target content vs other kinds of content, mandated repositories vs. unmandated repositories -- are not treated (or not treated in enough depth to understand their salience)

(3) The all-important question of how best to capture OA's target content -- the most central question, before we even talk about repository types, services or sustainability -- is not given any serious consideration.

(4) The very specific question of locus of deposit, and its specific importance for deposit mandates (and hence for capturing the target content) is likewise not given any serious consideration.

(5) The "denominator fallacy" continues to pervade throughout, in the continued reference to absolute repository size, without taking into account the size or proportion of the repository's target contents that the repository is actually capturing. (For an institutional repository, the denominator is its total refereed journal article output; for HAL -- which A & R stunningly misclassify as the most successful of all repositories! -- it is the totality of France's refereed journal article output.)

In short, A & R's approach -- which takes so much of the current sparse and inchoate landscape for granted, and follows after it, instead of facing the real problem, which is to remedy that sparseness, and lead the way toward capturing the vast proportion of OA's target content (at least 80% of it) that is still not being captured (by any repository) -- is not, I believe, a realistic or productive one.

The reality is that most repositories -- of all the kinds A & R consider and don't consider -- are near-empty of their target content. Consequently, search, services and sustainability are not the problem: Content is.

Mandates generate the content, but A & R's treatment imagines that mandates, and their promise, amount mostly to funder mandates (and funder -- i.e. "research" repositories).

This is (in my view) an enormous error: Not all scholarly and scientific research (perhaps not even the majority of it) is funded, but virtually all of it comes from institutions -- universities and research institutes.

In and of itself, that is strong reason to give institutional repositories and institutional mandates far more serious thought than A & R give them. Another reason is that once institutional deposit is mandated and OA contents are being systematically deposited in their institutional repositories, they can be harvested to any other collections we may desire -- subject-based, national, "research" or what-have-you. Nor are the various search and other services that are built atop this OA content meant to be provided at the institutional level (where A & R note their absence as if it were a defect): services are a harvester-level function, whereas content-provision is an institution-level function.

A & R's article is also missing the point of depositing the author's rather than the publisher's version (the author's version has far fewer restrictions and can be provided much earlier); nor does it take into account the power of institutional repositories to provide immediate "Almost OA" even in the case of publisher-embargoed content, via the semi-automatic "eprint request" button. A & R also make some incorrect assumptions about the difficult and effort of deposit and the need for library assistance and proxy deposit.


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Keynote Address to be presented at UNT Open Access Symposium, University of North Texas, 18 May, 2010.

OVERVIEW: As the number of Open Access (OA) mandates adopted by universities worldwide grows it is important to ensure that the most effective mandate model is selected for adoption, and that a very clear distinction is made between what is required and what is recommended:

By far the most effective and widely applicable OA policy is to require that the author's final, revised peer-reviewed draft must be deposited in the institutional repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication, without exception, but only to recommend, not require, that access to the deposit should be set immediately as Open Access (at least 63% of journals already endorse immediate, unembargoed OA); access to deposits for which the author wishes to honor a publisher access embargo can be set as Closed Access.

The IR's "fair use" button allows users to request and authors to authorize semi-automated emailing of individual eprints to individual requesters, on a case by case basis, for research uses during the embargo.

The adoption of an “author’s addendum” reserving rights should be recommended but not required (opt-out/waiver permitted).

It is also extremely useful and productive to make IR deposit the official mechanism for submitting publications for annual performance review.

IRs can also monitor compliance with complementary OA mandates from research funding agencies and can provide valuable metrics on usage and impact.

(Mandate compliance should be compulsory, but there need be no sanctions or penalties for noncompliance; the benefits of compliance will be their own reward.)

On no account should a university adopt a costly policy of funding Gold OA publishing by its authors until/unless it has first adopted a cost-free policy of mandatory Green OA self-archiving.

Stevan Harnad

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68 

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) 

Harnad, S; Carr, L; Swan, A; Sale, A  & Bosc H. (2009)  Maximizing and Measuring Research Impact Through University and Research-Funder Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates. Wissenschaftsmanagement 15(4) 36-41

• "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?" 

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

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

• "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates" 

• "Upgrading Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause" 

• "On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

ABSTRACT: We describe the "Fair Dealing Button," a feature designed for authors who have deposited their papers in an Open Access Institutional Repository but have deposited them as "Closed Access" (meaning only the metadata are visible and retrievable, not the full eprint) rather than Open Access. The Button allows individual users to request and authors to provide a single eprint via semi-automated email. The purpose of the Button is to tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo on Open Access and, more importantly, to make it possible for institutions to adopt the "Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access" Mandate, without exceptions or opt-outs, instead of a mandate that allows delayed deposit or deposit waivers, depending on publisher permissions or embargoes (or no mandate at all). This is only "Almost-Open Access," but in facilitating exception-free immediate-deposit mandates it will accelerate the advent of universal Open Access.

Professor Henk Schmidt, Rector of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, in an interview about Open Access conducted by Leo Waaijers, has announced that he proposes to adopt a Green Open Access self-archiving mandate for Erasmus University's Institutional Repository, RePub:

HS: "I intend obliging our researchers to circulate their articles publicly, for example no more than six months after publication... if possible in collaboration with publishers via the 'Golden Road' and otherwise without the publishers via the 'Green Road'... [We] can’t just oblige researchers to publish in Open Access journals. It has not yet been established that there are enough prestigious Open Access journals, but – until there are – prescribing the 'Green Road' seems to me an excellent idea... even though it’s a bit of a problem that this will lead to two versions of the article being circulated."

This is excellent news, but let me dispel the misapprehension that it will entail even a "bit of a problem":

Professor Schmidt states, quite rightly, that since most journals are not Gold OA (and especially few of the top journals are Gold OA), universities (and funders) cannot achieve OA by obliging their authors to publish in Gold OA journals. 

However, as Professor Schmidt notes, universities (and funders) can require (mandate) that their authors make their articles Green OA by depositing them in their institutional OA repositories (of which every Dutch university now has one) immediately upon publication -- allowing an embargo on setting access to the deposit for a maximal permissible interval (say, 6 months) for those journals that do not yet already endorse immediate OA. (63% of journals already do endorse immediate OA, and that includes virtually all the top journals. And 79 institutions, 18 departments and 42 research funders worldwide already mandate Green OA).

All of this is extremely welcome, and spot-on. I would add only that the difference between the author's peer-reviewed, revised, and accepted final draft (the postprint) and the publisher's version-of-record (PDF) is negligible for active researchers (especially those for whom OA is really intended, namely, the many would-be users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the journal in which an article happens to be published); moreover, most researchers are already quite accustomed to receiving and using prepublication hard copies (and, lately, email versions) of final drafts rather than waiting for the journal to appear.

Professor Schmidt adds:

HS: "It may well take a year before your article appears in a journal. But I do expect the time pressure to increase. In that case, circulating your work by uploading it to a repository could speed things up." 

As noted, OA is not merely for the sake of earlier access during the publication lag (most journals now offer access to the online version immediately, and even to the author's final draft -- but to subscribers only). The primary motivation for OA is the need for access to journals to which the would-be user's institution cannot afford to subscribe.

HS: "I don’t... upload [my articles to] the university’s repository... I had never even consulted the repository. I did try it once a few weeks ago and realised that none of my publications are in there. It was just too awkward, and I’ll now probably wait quite a long time before I try it again. I’m just too busy for this kind of experimentation. It really does need to be made a lot simpler... it would make a difference if it were... easy to deposit your PDF... Either that or somebody has to do it for you. [Our researchers] are of course used to registering the metadata in Metis. But it would make a difference if it were then easy to deposit your PDF..."

This passage is a bit ambiguous as to whether Professor Schmidt is referring here to (1) consulting the repository, in search of an article, as a user, or to (2) depositing one's own articles in the repository, as an author.

(1) Consultation: Institutional repositories (IRs) can be consulted directly (for institution-internal record-keeping, monitoring or showcasing purposes) but that is certainly not the primary purpose of either IRs or OA. The way most OA IR deposits are consulted by potential users is not by going to each individual IR to search! The IRs are OAI-compliant, hence interoperable, and hence they are harvested by central search services (such as OAIster, Base, Scirus, Scopus, PubMed, Citeseer, Celestial, and even Google Scholar) so they become jointly searchable by users as if they were all in one and the same global repository.

(2) Deposit: To find out how quick and easy deposit really is, one must actually have deposited an article in an IR. It is certainly as simple as depositing the metadata in Metis -- moreover, software can easily import/export directly from one to the other (Metis to IR or IR to Metis), automatically. So the (few) keystrokes only ever need to be done once. 

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) "Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving." 

(It's fine to have the keystrokes done by proxy -- by an assistant, a student, a librarian -- if an institution wishes, but it is not clear that there is even the need to do so: Do researchers need proxies to deposit in Metis? It's virtually the same thing.)

Nor is the publisher's PDF needed. The author's final draft is what needs to be deposited, and the author has that at his fingertips as soon as a final draft is accepted for publication (i.e., when no more revisions are required).

Metadata are metadata, and the same metadata are needed for OA IR deposit as for Metis (author, title, date, journal, etc.) registration. The publisher's PDF is both unnecessary and undesirable (because it has more access restrictions than the author's refereed. accepted final draft.)

Moreover, the most successful university deposit mandates (such as the mandate at University of Liège) have combined the functions of the OA IR and (their equivalent of) Metis: The form that the deposit mandate takes is that it is in the IR that the researcher must deposit for performance review!

Here is how the Rector of U Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier, worded the Liège mandate:

-- deposit in ORBi will be mandatory as soon as the article is accepted by the journal

-- starting October 1st, 2009, only those references introduced in ORBi will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vitae for all evaluation procedures 'in house' (designations, promotions, grant applications, etc.) 

-- Wherever publisher agreement conditions are fulfilled, the author will authorize setting access to the deposit as open access 

-- For closed access deposits, the institutional repository will have an EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST BUTTON which allows the author to fulfill individual eprint requests. 

In response to the question "If uploading material to a repository were actually made a lot simpler, would they all do it, or would something else have to happen?" Professor Schmidt replied:

HS: "I think it will be necessary to impose an obligation so as to get them used to it. But if it were really simple and it took only a single action to upload the publication to the repository and register it in Metis for the annual report, then they’d come on board."

This reply is spot-on, on all counts: Researchers will not deposit unless it is mandated, but if it is mandated, they will indeed deposit (95%), and the vast majority will do so willingly (81%).

What Professor Schmidt may not have realized is that deposit is already easy, just a few minutes worth of keystrokes, and virtually identical to the keystrokes for registering in Metis. So all that needs to be done is to mandate deposit in the Erasmus IR, as the prerequisite for performance evaluation, and automatically export the metadata from the IR to Metis!

All universities considering the adoption of a Green Open Access mandate are urged to join EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship). The chairman of the EOS Board is Professor Bernard Rentier (Rector of the University of Liège), and the Coordinator is Dr. Alma Swan (of Southampton and Key Perspectives Inc). These are the two most far-sighted and dynamic leaders in the international OA mandate movement, and with their help university IRs and mandates will be the most effective they can be: 

EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is an organisation for universities and research institutions worldwide. The organisation is both an information service and a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities and research institutions, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings
 
The aim of EOS is to further the opening up of scholarship and research that we are now seeing through the growing open access, open education, open science and open innovation movements.

 
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Leo Waaijers suggests in Ariadne that funder OA mandates impose "unfair conditions" on authors because there are not enough Gold OA journals to publish in. So instead, funders should fund research on alternative "non-proprietary peer review" services. This is based on a misunderstanding of OA mandates (which are for author self-archiving of the final peer-reviewed drafts of articles published in peer-reviewed non-OA journals, i.e., Green OA, not Gold OA) as well as a misunderstanding of peer review, which needs to be neither reformed, replaced nor redirected: existing peer-reviewed articles need merely to be self-archived.

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Leo Waaijers wrote in Ariadne, "Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems":

LW: "More and more research funders require open access to the publications that result from research they have financed... Although there is a steadily growing number of peer-reviewed Open Access journals... the supply fails to keep pace with the demand... [A]s authors cannot all publish in Open Access journals... Open Access-mandating funders impose unfair conditions on authors."

There is a profound misunderstanding here. Funders who mandate Open Access (OA) impose no "unfair conditions." What they mandate is the self-archiving of all published articles ("Green OA"), not the publishing of all articles in Open Access (OA) journals ("Gold OA").

It cannot be pointed out often enough that Gold OA is not the sole or primary way to provide OA: The incomparably faster, easier, cheaper and surer way to provide OA is for authors to self-archive articles published in non-OA journals by depositing them in the author's Institutional Repository (IR) (Green OA). And that is exactly what funders and institutions are mandating. No need to wait for all publishers to convert to Gold OA. Hence no "unfairness."

Most of the top institutions already have IRs. All the rest can create them with free (and extremely powerful) software; moreover, the DEPOT repository is available (now internationally) for self-archiving by author's whose institutions do not yet have an IR or for authors who do not have an institution.

Hence Leo's point about "unfair conditions" by funder mandates is either misinformed or misinforming.

LW: "[A] conversion... from proprietary to non-proprietary systems of peer review... can be speeded up if disciplinary communities, universities, and research funders actively enter the market of the peer review organisers by calling for tenders and inviting publishers to submit proposals for a non-proprietary design of the peer review process"

This is a non sequitur. What is needed is Open Access to peer-reviewed articles (2.5 million articles per year, published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals). Most of those articles are available today only via toll-access (institutional subscriptions). The solution is neither to keep waiting for those journals to convert to Gold OA, nor to try to invent alternative forms of peer review. That would be like thinking that the way to solve the problem of public smoking is not to mandate no-smoke zones but to invent an alternative form of cigarette, or instead of mandating medicare to invent alternative forms of medicine, or instead of mandating recycling to invent an alternative form of garbage.

Not only is there no need to try to replace existing journals and their peer review system, but the problem with peer review is not that it is a proprietary service (for which the service-provider -- the journal -- needs to be paid) but that the byproducts of the service -- the peer-reviewed articles -- are not openly accessible to all would-be users.

And the solution is for authors to self-archive (the final, peer-reviewed drafts of) their peer-reviewed articles (Green OA) -- and for authors' institutions and funders to mandate it (submit submit tenders soliciting research proposals for alternatives to peer review!).

There is no need (and certainly no time) to wait to re-invent peer review in new hands and try to persuade (mandate?) authors to publish in these new "non-proprietary systems of peer review" instead of their existing peer-reviewed journals; nor is there the need or time to persuade publishers (already sluggish about converting to Gold OA) or others to turn to "tenders" inviting them to design a new system of peer review.

What is needed is for authors' institutions and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving, a non-hypothetical solution that has already been tested, works, and can scale to all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals as quickly and surely as it can be mandated.

LW: "The [funder]... requires that... published research appears as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles."

The way for the funder to require that published research should appear as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles is to mandate that the author's final peer-reviewed draft (not the publisher's proprietary PDF) must be self-archived in the author's OA IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. That's all. No need for "tenders" for "non-proprietary peer review."

And this is exactly what most of the existing and proposed OA mandates (by funders as well as institutions) require -- not the "unfair condition" of having to find and publish in a suitable Gold OA journal. Hence there is no need at all to create new Gold OA journals, let alone new forms of peer review, in order to provide universal OA, today. All that is needed is Green OA mandates.

But Leo instead recommends a highly speculative alternative for reforming peer review that is not only untested and unnecessary, but contains within the proposal itself the signs that it misunderstands how peer review itself works, and why it is needed for research and researchers:

LW: "In order to have appropriate review procedures in place to process these articles... The reviewing process must be independent, rigorous and swift..."

So far, so good (except Leo does not say how peer review should be speeded up, given the number of papers submitted daily for peer review, the number of qualified peer reviewers available, and the number of their waking hours that researchers can devote to peer reviewing. Let us agree, however, that there are indeed ways to make this process faster and more efficient in the online era.)

But now, the proposed system (for which, Leo recommends, funders should solicit proposals, instead of mandating Green OA):

LW: "As a result of the reviewing process, articles will be marked 1 [low] to 5 [high]... In review procedures the [funder] will weigh articles with marks 3, 4 and 5 as if they were published in journals with impact factors 1-3, 4-8 and 9-15 respectively... For articles marked 3 to 5 adequate Open Access publication platforms must be available (e.g. new Open Access journals). Alternatively, authors may publish their articles in any existing OA journal. Upon publication all articles will be deposited in a certified (institutional) repository."

This speculative notion of peer review imagines that peer review consists of giving papers marks.

(It does not. It involves assessing their contents and making concrete recommendations as to what needs to be done by way of revision -- if they are potentially acceptable -- and reasons for rejection if not. What users expect and need from journals is an all-or-none indication of whether an article has met that journal's established quality-standards for acceptance. Any internal ratings the referees might have used in the process of coming to a recommendation on acceptance or rejection are not for the user but the editor. The real ranking for the user -- and author -- is in the quality hierarchy among journals. Their quality standards -- meaning what percentage of articles meet their acceptance criteria -- are reflected in their track-records and known to users. They are also (sometimes) reflected in the journals' impact factor. But that impact factor -- which is objectively determined by journals' average citation counts -- is certainly not the same thing as referees' internal ratings.)

Leo suggests that these "marks" should be given (by someone), with marks 3-5 standing in for having been published in peer-reviewed journals with corresponding "impact factors," for which there must be a corresponding Gold OA journal (either new or existing) for them to appear in (created to ensure that "unfair conditions" are not imposed by the deposit requirement).

Then the paper can be deposited in a "certified" IR. (One wonders why? Since all articles, in Leo's hypothetical scenario, would be published in Gold OA journals that this peer-review reform proposal had miraculously generated, why do they need to be deposited in IRs at all -- "certified" or otherwise -- since they are all already OA?)

In other words, Leo has invented an imaginary problem with deposit mandates (viz, "there aren't enough Gold OA journals") -- whereas the mandates are not to publish in Gold OA journals but to deposit in Green OA IRs. And then he has invented an imaginary solution to the problem (viz, create new "non-proprietary peer-review services" and then publish the outcome in new Gold OA journals that no longer need to bother to implement peer review). All in order to be able to "fairly" deposit them in "certified" IRs?

My guess is that this rather complicated conjectural solution ("non-proprietary peer-review services") to an imagined problem ("unfair Gold OA mandates") was inspired by Leo's incorrect six assumptions:

(1) that what needs to be deposited in an IR in order to provide OA is the publisher's proprietary PDF, i.e., the canonical version of record (whereas what needs to be deposited for OA is just the peer-reviewed final draft ("postprint" which is merely a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- the canonical version of record);

(2) that depositing in Closed Access during any publisher embargo on OA would not fulfill the deposit mandate (whereas in fact it would, and especially with the help of the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button to tide over research usage needs during any embargo on OA);

(3) that peer review is largely just a rank-assignment (whereas in reality peer review is a dynamic, interactive, answerable system of detecting and correcting errors so as to meet a given journal's established quality standards);

(4) that OA means just Gold OA publishing (whereas Green OA self-archiving too is OA);

(5) that what research and researchers really need is not just Green OA, but Gold OA (whereas what they need is OA) and hence that

(6) IRs are just for digital preservation (whereas OA IRs are for OA-provision today, and digital preservation of the canonical version of record is an entirely different matter, unrelated to OA until and unless subscriptions become unsustainable, thus making the author's peer-reviewed final draft the canonical version of record!).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Chris Armbruster wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

CA: "I have some doubts that the juxtaposition of institutional versus central repository is helpful (any longer)"

No longer helpful for what?

It is not only helpful but essential if what one is interested in is filling repositories with the target content of the OA movement (refereed journal articles). For in order to fill repositories, you have to get their target contents deposited. And to get their target contents deposited you have to mandate deposit. And to mandate deposit you have to specify the locus of the deposit. And the only two locus options are institutional and central. And for the probability of achieving consensus and compliance with mandates it makes a huge difference where the mandates propose to require the author to deposit: institutionally or centrally, because that in turn determines whether the author will have to deposit once, in one place, institution-internally, or more than once, in more than one place, institution-externally. The prospect of having to do multiple deposit is a deterrent to the depositor. And the prospect of having to compete with institution-external deposit mandates is a deterrent to achieving consensus and compliance with institutional deposit mandates.

So those for whom the distinction between institutional and central repositories is not "helpful" are perhaps those for whom it is immaterial or secondary whether repositories get filled or remain near-empty, because their primary concerns are instead at some other, more abstract or idealized level:

CA: "that is why the proposition is to henceforth distinguish between four ideal types of repositories on an abstract level, so as to be able to examine each specific repository in more detail."

Alas, while we are theorizing at an abstract level about ideal repository types, real, concrete repositories remain mostly empty, in no small part because of some funders' failing to adopt practical, realistic mandates on locus of deposit, mandates that converge rather than compete with institutional mandates.

The abstract distinctions among the four "ideal types of repositories" (apart from three of them being of doubtful substance) have nothing to do with this crucial concrete distinction, three of the four being "subtypes" of central repository.

To repeat: Only a portion of OA's target content is funded, but all of it originates from institutions.

CA: "For example PMC was a subject-based repository, but it languished before it became a research repository (capturing publication outputs) due to a national mandate, which is compatible with also having a UK PMC and PMC Canada."

The only thing that changed with PMC was that it went from being an empty repository to being a less-empty repository when full-text deposit was mandated for NIH-funded articles.

That had nothing to do with its changing from being a "subject" repository to a "research" repository. Its target contents were always the same: biomedical research articles. The only difference is that the mandates increased somewhat the proportion of PMC's total target content that actually got deposited.

But the cost of that welcome increase was also a greater opportunity lost and a bad example set -- because NIH (and now its emulators) insisted on direct deposit in a central repository (PMC, and now its emulators) instead of allowing -- indeed preferring -- institutional deposit, and then harvesting, importing or exporting (one or many) central collections and services therefrom.

That would have facilitated institutional mandates for all the rest of OA's target content, not just research funded by NIH (and its emulators), by spurring institutions -- the universal providers of all research output -- to mandate institutional deposit for all the rest of their research output too, funded and unfunded.

Not all funders copied NIH, however, and there is still hope that NIH will rethink its arbitrary and counterproductive locus-of-deposit policy, in the interest of all of OA's target content: "NIH Open to Closer Collaboration With Institutional Repositories"

CA: "The point here is to examine (here: for the life sciences) past and (possible) future repository development and help stakeholders make informed decisions."

Help which stake-holders make which decisions about what, and why?

While repositories remain near empty -- and that includes PMC (or its emulators) whose target contents comprise all of US (or other nations' or funders') biomedical research -- the only substantive thing at stake is content; and the "stake-holders" are mostly institutions and their researchers, who also happen to be the providers of all that content, funded and unfunded, across all nations and funders.

CA: "Another example: the Dutch system looks like a network of institutional repositories, but is now part of a national gateway (NARCIS)."

But what does this example show? The only relevant question is: what proportion of their own annual research output are those Dutch institutional repositories actually capturing?

The last time I asked Leo Waaijers, he admitted quite frankly that no one has checked. But unless there is something different about the air breathed in the Netherlands, all indications are that their institutional repositories, like repositories everywhere, are only capturing about 15% of their target output. That is the approximate deposit rate for spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving, worldwide. Only deposit mandates can raise that deposit rate appreciably -- and so far the Netherlands has no OA mandates.

It matters how you do the arithmetic. An institutional repository can calculate its annual deposit rate by dividing its annual full-text article deposits for that year by the institution's annual article publication total for that year.

But for a central repository -- or for a "network of institutional repositories" -- you have to make sure to divide by their respective annual total target output. For the Netherlands, that's the total annual article output from all the institutions in the NARCIS network. And for PMC it's all of US biomedical research article output.

Otherwise one gets carried away in one's idealized abstractions by the spurious fact that central repositories often have much more content, in absolute terms, than individual institutional repositories. But remedying this "denominator fallacy" by dividing annual deposit counts by their total annual target content count quickly puts things back into practical perspective.

(And this is without even mentioning the question of time-of-deposit, which is almost as important as locus-of-deposit: Many of the central repositories -- e.g. PMC -- have access embargoes because funder mandates have allowed them (and have even left it in the hands of publishers rather than fundees to do the deposits, even though it is fundees, not their publishers, who are subject to funder mandates). Institutional repositories have a powerful solution for providing "Almost OA" to closed access deposits during any embargo period -- the "email eprint request" Button. This Button is naturally and easily implemented by the repository software at the local institutional level, but would be devilishly difficult -- though not impossible -- to implement at the central level (especially where there is proxy deposit by publishers) because it requires immediate email approval by the author of eprint requests from the would-be user, mediated automatically by the repository software.)

[Leo Waaijers has since responded on jisc-repositories as follows: "Currently 25% of the Dutch national research output published in 2008 is available in Open Access... For the moment we have no mandates. The Netherlands Research Organisation NWO has announced one. Six or seven universities have a mandate for doctoral theses."]

25-30% is the level to which Arthur Sale showed that deposit rates can be laboriously raised if one provided incentives (of which the Dutch "Cream of Science" is an example), but only mandates can propel deposits toward 100%.

CA: "Moreover, the major institutions in the network are research universities. Thus the question arises, if Dutch repository development could be improved if stakeholders used the notion of research repository and national repository system to consider their options (rather than thinking that the institutions must do the job)."

What on earth does this "arising question" mean at this late stage of the game? We have researchers, the ones who do the research and write the articles. They are (mostly, 85%) not depositing until and unless it is mandated by their institutions and/or funders. This is now unchangingly true for decades.

Now what -- in specific, concrete, practical terms -- is it that using "the notion of research repository and national repository system to consider their options (rather than thinking that the institutions must do the job)" is supposed to do to fill those empty repositories? Is there any evidence that theorists' abstract contemplations about ideal repository subtypes translate into concrete, practical action on the part of researchers 85% of whom consistently fail to deposit unmandated into any-which repository across the years?

CA: "In two decades of immersion in digital worlds, we have witnessed the development of various repository solutions and accumulated a better understanding of what works and what doesn't. The main repository solutions may be distinguished as follows:"

Before we go on: The only thing we have learned in two decades -- apart from the fact that computer scientists, physicists and economists deposit spontaneously, unmandated (two of them institutionally, one of them centrally) at far higher than the global baseline 15% rate -- is that the only thing that will raise the spontaneous deposit rate is deposit mandates (from institutions or funders).

That lesson has nothing whatsoever to do with "various repository solutions" (central or institutional, abstract or concrete, real or ideal, actual or notional).

CA: "Subject-based repositories (commercial and non-commercial, single and federated) usually have been set up by community members and are adopted by the wider community. Spontaneous self-archiving is prevalent as the repository is of intrinsic value to scholars."

Spontaneous self-archiving is "prevalent" at the steadfast rate of about 15%, and that is the problem.

The nature of the repository has absolutely nothing to do with this, one way or the other. It is a matter of "community" practice.

And, as noted, the few scholarly "communities" that have adopted spontaneous self-archiving practices unmandated (computer scientists, physicists and economists) did so very early on in these two decades, continuing their pre-Web pratices, two of them institutionally and one of them centrally; and they did so mainly to share preprints of unrefereed drafts early in their research cycle. The value they found in that practice predated the Web and had absolutely nothing to do with repository type (since two communities did it institutionally and one did it centrally).

(And if it's hard to get authors to make their final drafts of refereed, published articles publicly accessible unless the practice is mandated, it would be incomparably harder to get authors from the "communities" that have their own reasons for not wanting to make their unrefereed drafts public to do so, against their wills: their institutions and funders certainly cannot mandate it!)

"Commercial" vs. "non-commercial" also sounds like a can of worms: In speaking of "repositories," are we mixing up the Free-Access (OA) ones with the Fee-Access ones? And those that contain full-texts with those that contain only metadata? And those that contain articles with those that contain other kinds of content? If so, we are not even talking about the same thing when we speak of repositories, for all I mean is OA repositories of the full-texts of refereed research journal articles.

CA: "Much of the intrinsic value for authors comes from the opportunity to communicate ideas and results early in the form of working papers and preprints, from which a variety of benefits may result, such as being able to claim priority, testing the value of an idea or result, improving a publication prior to submission, gaining recognition and attention internationally and so on."

We are comparing apples and oranges. OA's primary target is not and has never been unpublished, unrefereed drafts.

Distinguish the self-archiving of OA's target content -- refereed articles -- from the self-archiving of unrefereed preprint drafts. The latter practice has been found very useful by some disciplines (computer science, physics, economics) for a long time -- indeed before the Web. But this practice has not caught on with other disciplines, for an equally long time, in all likelihood because most disciplines are not interested in making their unrefereed drafts public. (Some may find this practice unscholarly; others might find it potentially embarrassing professionally; in some disciplines it might even be dangerous to public health.)

And the overall global self-archiving rate remains the baseline 15% unless self-archiving is mandated.

CA: "As such, subject-based repositories are thematically well defined, and alert services and usage statistics are meaningful for community users"

This not only conflates unrefereed draft-sharing with OA and repositories with services over repositories, but it also mixes up cause and effect. There is no central repository functionality that cannot just as well be provided over distributed or harvested repositories. And there is no repository that cannot succeed if it manages to capture its target content. Otherwise, the rest of the functional details are merely decorative, for empty repositories.

And neither OA's nor OA mandates' target is unrefereed drafts (though they are of course welcome if the author wants to deposit them too).

CA: "Research repositories are usually sponsored by research funding or performing organisations to capture results. This capturing typically requires a deposit mandate."

It makes no difference whether one calls a repository of, say, biomedical research a "subject" repository or a "research" repository. That's just words. And both institutions and funders "sponsor" them. All that matters is whether or not deposit is mandated, because that is what determines whether the repository is full or near-empty.

Armbruster & Romary are conflating "mandated repository" with "central research repository." All OA repositories are "research repositories" because all have the same target content: refereed research articles. And both central and institutional deposit can be mandated.

Armbruster & Romary seem to keep missing the sole substantive point at issue, which is that institutions are the universal providers of all of OA's target content, funded and unfunded, across all research subjects and all nations -- and funder mandates requiring direct central deposit compete with and discourage institutional mandates for all the rest of OA's target content, by requiring (from already-sluggish authors) divergent, multiple institution-external deposit instead of convergent one-stop institution-internal deposit (which can then be imported, exported or harvested by central collections and services).

CA: "Publications are results, including books, but data may also be considered a result worth capturing, leading to a collection with a variety of items."

It's nice to get more ambitious in speculating about what one would ideally like to see deposited, but let us not lose sight of practical reality today: Authors (85%) are not even depositing their refereed research articles until it is mandated. These are articles that -- without a single exception -- authors want to be accessible to any would-be user, for they have already published them.

In contrast, it is certainly not true that all, most or even many authors today want to make their unpublished research data (perhaps still being data-mined by them) or their published books (perhaps still earning royalty revenue, or hoping to) or their unrefereed drafts (perhaps embarrassing or even dangerous until validated by peer review) publicly accessible to all users today.

Now, does it not make more sense to try to encourage authors to provide OA to content that they would already wish to see freely accessible to any would-be user today -- by mandating the practice -- rather than imagining (contrary to fact) that authors are already providing OA to content that many of them may not yet even wish to see freely accessible to any would-be user today?

CA: "Because these items constitute a record of science, standards for deposit and preservation must be stringent."

Stringent standards for deposit? When most authors are not even bothering to deposit at all? That seems an odd way to try to generate more deposits! Rather like raising the price of a product that no one is bothering to buy at current prices.

(No, it's not raising the quality of the product either: Users are the ones who benefit from repository functionality; but it is authors that we are trying to induce to provide the content to which this user-functionality is applied.)

And is the scientific record not already in our journals and libraries, on paper and online? And is peer review not a already stringent enough standard?

Yes, peer-reviewed articles need to be preserved, but what has that to do with authors depositing it in an OA repository? and usually deposited in the form of a refereed final draft which is not the canonical "version of record," but merely a supplementary version, to provide OA for those would-be users who do not have subscription access to the journal in which the canonical version -- the one that really needs the preservation -- was published).

This is the old canard, again -- conflating digital preservation with Open Access provision -- and perhaps also conflating unpublished preprints with published postprints.

And as to record-keeping: Yes, both institutions and funders need to keep records -- indeed archives -- of the research output that they employ and fund researchers to produce. Again, the natural locus for that record is the institutional repository, which the institution can manage, monitor and show-case, and from which the funder can import, export or harvest its funded subset if it wishes. Direct institution-external deposit, willy-nilly, would be like institutions relying on their banks to do their record-keeping instead of themselves.

CA: "The sponsor of the repository is likely to tie reporting functions to the deposit mandate, this being, for example, the reporting of grantees to the funder or the presentation of research results in an annual report."

Yes, both grant fulfillment and annual research output recording and evaluation can and should be implemented through repository deposit mandates, by both funders and institutions. But the question remains: What should be the locus of deposit? and should there be one convergent locus of deposit, for a researcher and/or article, or multiple divergent ones?

The obvious answer, again, is one-time, one-place institution-internal deposit, mandated by both institutions and funders, and the rest by institution-external import/export/harvesting therefrom.

CA: "Research repositories are likely to contain high-quality output. This is because its content is peer-reviewed multiple times (e.g. grant application, journal submission, research evaluation) and the production of the results is well funded."

This is extremely blurred and vague.

Inasmuch as refereed journal articles report funded research, they have been both grant-reviewed and peer-reviewed, so that's double-counting.

Accepted grant proposals are not part of OA's target content, and are just a book-keeping matter for institutions and funders.

Research evaluation is done on the basis of research performance and impact, including refereed publications as their primary input. We are again double-counting if we dub as triply peer-reviewed content that is simply standardly peer-reviewed articles, deposited for research evaluation in a repository.

This sounds mostly like massaging the obvious without stating the obvious: None of it happens if the content in question is not deposited. Deposit needs to be mandated, and the locus of the deposit needs to be institutional, not central, to avoid needlesly placing divergent multiple-deposit burdens on the (already sluggish) author.

CA: "Users who are collaborators, competitors or instigating a new research project are most likely to find the collections of relevance"

Yes indeed -- if they are deposited. And they will only be deposited if deposit is mandated. And mandates need to be convergent rather than competitive in order to reach consensus on adoption and compliance. And hence the sole stipulated locus of deposit needs to be institutional. The rest is all just a matter of harvesting and services over distributed institutional repositories.

CA: "National repository systems require coordination - more for a federated system, less for a unified system. National systems are designed to capture scholarly output more generally and not just with a view to preserving a record of scholarship, but also to support, for example, teaching and learning in higher education. Indeed, only a national purpose will justify the national investment. Such systems are likely to display scholarly outputs in the national language, highlight the publications of prominent scholars and develop a system for recording dissertations. One could conceive of such a national system as part of a national research library that serves scholarly communication in the national language, is an international showcase of national output and supports public policy, e.g. higher education and public access to knowledge"

You are talking about a harvesting service. No need for it to be a direct locus of deposit.

Which brings us back to the sole real priority, which is concerted, convergent mandates from institutions and funders (and national governments) to deposit (once only) in institutional repositories, minimizing the burden on authors.

CA: "Institutional repositories contain the various outputs of the institution."

And all other repositories -- subject-based, funder-based, or national -- likewise contain "the various outputs of the institution," institutions being the sole universal providers of all research output.

CA: "While research results are important among these outputs, so are works of qualification or teaching and learning materials. If the repository captures the whole output, it is both a library and a showcase. It is a library holding a collection, and it is a showcase because the online open access display and availability of the collection may serve to impress and connect, for example, with alumni of the institution or the colleagues of researchers."

It is highly desirable for universities to make their courseware freely accessible online. But it is a different agenda from OA's. And it has an even lower deposit rate today than OA: MIT is the only institution that has a policy of making its courseware openly accessible.

If people are not yet recycling their waste, what needs to be done is to mandate waste recycling, not to find other worthy things it would be a good idea to do, but that people are likewise not doing, such as giving up cigarettes -- or other worthy things that a (near-empty) waste-recycling depository could host, aside from its target contents, such as charity-donation booths.

Besides, some courseware -- especially material prepared in the hope of writing a best-selling textbook -- is more like data, books, unrefereed preprints (and software, and music and movies): discretionary give-aways, depending on the author, rather than universal give-ways, written solely for uptake and impact, like refereed research articles.

So let's not remain oblivious to the vast shortfall in OA's target content by blurring it with fantasies about other kinds of content (much of it absent too!).

As for theses: The natural solution for them is to treat them the same way as journal articles: mandate deposit in the institutional repository (as more and more universities are now beginning to do).

CA: "A repository may also be an instrument of the institution by supporting, for example, internal and external assessment as well as strategic planning."

Yes, and this is yet another rationale for mandating deposit of OA's target content: refereed research publications. Australia and the UK are beginning to link their institutional repositories to submissions for research assessment nationally, and universities like Liège are doing so for internal performance assessment.

CA: "Moreover, an institutional repository could have an important function in regional development. It allows firms, public bodies and civil society organisations to immediately understand what kind of expertise is available locally."

Yes, all true. These are further rationales for institutions mandating institutional deposit -- and for funder mandates to reinforce institutional deposit mandates rather than compete with them.

CA: "These four ideal types have been derived partly from the history of repositories, partly through logical reasoning. This includes an appreciation of the relevant literature on scholarly communication, open access and repositories, though the [paper] is not a literature review but an argument that moves back and forth between abstract ideal types and specific cases. Ideal types should not be misunderstood as a classification, in which each and every repository may be identified as belonging unambiguously to a category. Rather, the purpose of creating ideal types is to aid our understanding of repositories and provide a tool for analysing repository development."

The "argument" does not seem to be grounded in a grasp either of what (OA) repositories are for, or of the practical problem of filling them. The distinctions among central repositories are largely arbitrary and spurious; they are more about services and functionality than about locus of deposit or repository type. The fundamental and sole substantive point is completely missed: Deposit needs to be mandated (by the universal providers of the target OA content -- institutions -- reinforced by funders) and the locus of deposit needs to be institutional.

The rest is just counting abstract chickens before their concrete eggs are fertilized, let alone laid or hatched.

CA: "Some publication repositories may be identified easily as resembling very much one ideal type rather than another. Some of the classic repositories conventionally identified as subject-based, such as arXiv and RePEc, exhibit few features of another type. Yet, one of the more interesting questions to ask is in how far other elements are present and what this means. ArXiv, for example, is also a research repository, with institutions sponsoring research in high-energy physics being important to its development and success. RePEc, by comparison, has a strong institutional component because the repository is a federated system that relies on input and service from a variety of departments and institutes."

Arxiv is based on direct central deposit of preprints (and postprints) in physics; Repec amalgamates distributed institutional deposits of preprints in economics; Citeseer harvests distributed institutional deposits of preprints and postprints in computer science. There is nothing to be learned here except that the spontaneous preprint (and postprint) deposit practices in these three research subject communities have failed to generalise to other research subject communities and therefore postprint deposit mandates from institutions and funders are needed, with one convergent locus of deposit: the repositories of the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all subjects and nations: the world's universities and research institutes.

CA: "To continue with another example, PubMed Central (PMC), at first glance, is a subject-based repository. Acquisition of content, however, only took off once it was declared a research repository capturing the output of publicly funded research (by the NIH). Notably, US Congress passed the deposit mandate, transforming PMC into a national repository. That a parallel, though integrated, repository should emerge in the UK (UK PMC) and Canada (PMC Canada) is thus not surprising. Utilisation of the ideal types outlined above would thus be fruitful in analysing the development of PMC and, presumably, be equally valuable in discussing the future potential of PMC, for example the possible creation of a Europe PMC."

This just repeats the very same incorrect analysis made earlier: PMC is and always was a US central research subject repository for refereed biomedical research publications (so are its emulators, for their own "national" output). What changed was not that NIH rebaptized PMC by "declaring" it a "research repository." What changed was that NIH mandated deposit (after two years wasted in the hope that a mere "invitation" would do).

The rest is just monkey-see, monkey-do. What those aping the US missed, however, was all the rest of OA's target content, funded and unfunded -- across all nations, subjects and institutions -- and how not only mandating deposit, but mandating convergent institutional deposit is essential in order to have universal OA to refereed research in all subjects, worldwide.

(The various national PMCs are a joke, and will be quietly rebaptized as harvested archival national collections -- if those are desired at all -- once worldwide OA content picks up, as institutional deposit mandates become universal. The global search functionality will not be at the level of all these absurd and superfluous national PMC clones, but at the level of global harvesting/search services. Why would any user -- peer or public -- want to search the world's biomedical literature by country (or institution, for that matter) -- other than for parochial actuarial purposes?)

CA: "National solutions are increasingly common (and principally may also be regional in form), but vary especially with regard to privileging either research outputs or the institutions. The French HAL system is powered by the CNRS, the most prestigious national research organisation, and thus is strong on making available research results."

Strong on making them available if/when deposited, but no stronger than the default 15% on getting them deposited at all. (The denominator fallacy again...)

CA: "In Japan, the National Institute of Informatics has supported the Digital Repository Federation, which covers eighty-seven institutions, with mainly librarians working to make the system operational."

Unless librarians in Japan have executive privileges over authors' writings that librarians elsewhere in the world lack, they will not be able to raise the deposit rate without mandating deposit either...

CA: "In Spain, an aggregator and search portal, Recolecta, sits atop a multitude of institutional repositories, with a large variety of items."

A large variety of "items": But what percentage of Spanish annual refereed article output is being deposited? My guess is that -- apart from Spain's 4 institutional mandates and 1 funder mandate -- that percentage will be the usual baseline 15% (looking spuriously bigger because aggregated centrally across multiple institutions: the denominator fallacy yet again...).

CA: "In Australia, institutional repositories are prominently tied to the national research assessment exercise, with due emphasis on peer reviewed publications."

That's promising, because being required to submit for research assessment via institutional repositories is effectively a deposit mandate. Moreover, with 1 funder mandate and 5 institutional mandates -- including the world's first institution-wide mandate at QUT -- Australia is neck-and-neck, proportionately, with the UK, in the worldwide national OA sweepstakes: The UK has 13 funder mandates, 11 institutional mandates, and 3 departmental mandates, including the world's very first OA mandate (U Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science); the UK too is moving toward linking deposit to the new national research assessment scheme.

CA: "Any Internet 101 course will include plenty of examples where deposit, content and service are assembled within a single site (by one provider, company etc.) - the list is really very long, from ArXiv to Amazon, SSRN to Flickr, RePEc to Facebook and so on. Internet 101 theory will then elucidate why this is so an (e.g. network effects, economies of scale and so on). Creating thousands of little repositories was probably never a good idea..."

Umm, I guess Internet 101 will also tell us that creating billions of little sites was never a good idea and we should all be depositing directly in Google...

CA: "More here:"
Armbruster, Chris and Romary, Laurent, Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication (November 23, 2009). Available at SSRN

Let the reader be prepared for a rather confused and practically unproductive mashup of OA repository-content, deposit-locus, and central-service issues in the Armbruster & Romary paper.

Yet the resolution is a simple one-liner: All research institutions and funders worldwide need to mandate institutional deposit, and then reap the harvest centrally, with search services, subject collections, national collections, language collections, and any other "ideal" on which hearts are set.

(But don't let the function-tail wag the content-dog now, when it's only at 15% body weight and needs to settle down and eat.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 [identity deleted] wrote:

"Re: PubMedCentral (PMC) [is] (relatively) well populated."

PMC is only better populated than any other repository to the degree that some funders have mandated deposit. But there is a "denominator fallacy" here:

Mandates only cover content mandated by the funders in question. As a percentage of the world's (or, if you like, the US's) total annual biological and medical research output, PMC still covers only a small fraction of that total annual target.

The global baseline for spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving is about 15%. The degree to which PMC is doing better than that -- and it is, but the question is by how much? -- can only be properly determined if we divide the deposits of biomedical articles published in each year by the total published biomedical output for that year (worldwide, or by US authors, if you prefer).

If you do that calculation, you will almost certainly find that PMC is doing no better nor worse for its mandated content than any mandated institutional repository; and for its unmandated content it is likewise doing no better nor worse than any unmandated institutional repository (c. 15%).

We cannot go a single step further on the underlying question -- how to populate repositories, and how well various approaches and repositories are doing -- until the denominator fallacy is corrected.

"It's my understanding that not only is there a funder mandate, but the Wellcome Trust also publicly favour the author-pays model, through which the publisher will deposit the article to PubMedCentral on behalf of the author."

Yes, and that's bad news, and unfortunately that's a bad policy on the part of the Wellcome Trust (WT), ideologically rather than functionally driven, and ill thought-through, but one from which WT seems to be unwilling to consider budging. So the problem is that whereas WT are rightly to be admired for having been the first funder to mandate OA, they have also set a very bad example for other mandates.

(1) Note that squandering research money on funding Gold OA publication for WT-funded research does not increase by a single article the number of articles that are made OA as a result of the WT mandate. (They could all have been simply self-archived instead, setting an incomparably better, and more scaleable example for other funders, who have better things to do with their scarce research funds than to pay for Gold OA when they can mandate Green OA without having to redirect any money from research: Publication is already being paid for, in full, by institutional subscriptions) The prospect of having to pay for Gold just discourages potential emulators who could mandate Green, but cannot afford to pay for Gold.

(2) In addition, WT mandates central deposit instead of institutional, which is, as I've said, counterproductive for facilitating and reinforcing the really crucial mandates, which are the ones by the universal providers of all research: the world's universities and research institutes. Central deposit mandates compete with institutional deposit mandates, for no good reason whatsoever.

(3) And third, allowing a deposit mandate to be fulfilled by a publisher instead of by the fundee (hence the mandatee) is doubly foolish. It lets the publisher decide (and enforce) the embargo period (as well as allowing them to drag their feet, since they are beholden to no one in their timing or compliance); and it reinforces the paid Gold option (self-fulfillingly) by making it the only one likely to generate timely deposit (but at a price).

Three unnecessary, dysfunctional features, adopted completely arbitrarily, simply because WT did not think things through carefully (and would not -- and alas still will not -- listen to advice even today).

But now, because WT were the first mandators (and they still do deserve eternal blessing for that!), their somnambulistic "view" is taken to be oracular by others. So it does damage beyond the ambit of WT's own funding.

"The rights negotiation over what can be done with the full text deposit in that situation is clear and the Wellcome trust openly prefer this route to OA [over] the post-print deposit, although they do support both models if the post-print is deposited to PubMedCentral directly. They also are prepared to pay for such a model of author-pays and publisher deposits."

As I've just said, it's bad news that WT "prefers" the funded Gold OA route because it makes Green appear less adequate for providing OA (though it is in fact more adequate tha Gold), it wastes money, it discourages mandates from those who cannot follow WT's example with paying for Gold, and it is totally unnecessary:

There are no re-uses at all that the access-deprived potential users (for whom OA is intended) require that they do not have with Green OA: All that is needed is immediate, free online access to the full texts of the articles. There are no further uses or re-uses that need sanctioning or licensing. Researchers, students and teachers don't do "mashups" of journal articles, as teenagers do for music, video and text youtube. They just need to be able to access the texts online, download them to read and data-crunch and perhaps print off for themselves. That's it. The published text's content (as opposed to its verbatim text) was always free to be used, applied, built-upon (and cited), if only the user could manage to access the verbatim text. And that's what Green OA provides, 24/7, webwide: access. Teachers can put the URLs in their course-packs (no need to worry about supplying multiple hard copies, or any associated permissions issues: just URLs are enough if the texts themselves are OA). No need to "re-publish" either. So what are these re-use rights that all that extra Gold money is needed to pay for?

And as to timing: WT allows a one-year embargo. If they mandated institutional deposit, the institutional repositories' "email eprint request" Button could do a good deal better than that. 63% of journals endorse immediate OA (no embargo) already. For the remaining 37% the IRs can provide "Almost OA" -- for just a few extra user and author keystrokes and slight delay (but not remotely comparable to a year's delay!) for the semi-automatic eprint request fulfillment.

Instead, WT "prefers" to pay for immediate OA at a high price. The price is higher than they think, because of the emulation (and non-emulation) that their bad example inspires, in place of good, sensible practice that would generate far more (Green) OA and Green OA mandates, far faster, with no loss, only gain, over the dysfunctional WT policy.

"Apparently the route to post-print deposit in PubMedCentral is not particularly easy, although I can't speak from personal experience."

My guess is that it's no harder or easier to deposit in PMC than in any other repository, central or institutional (and the fact is that it's easy and fast to deposit: you just have to be mandated to try it and then you find out). But with WT "preferring" to offer what looks to the author like the even easier option of proxy deposit (some day) by the publisher (if embargoed) and immediate proxy deposit if paid-Gold, the author never even gets to learn from personal experience how easy and fast it really is.

Another bad example to set.

"Such complexities at the deposit stage will also force authors into paying for publication, just to give themselves an easier life!"

I doubt that profoundly. If the choice really were to do a few minutes worth of keystrokes or pay out of their pockets, authors would quickly discover how easy it really was to deposit, and would save their money. But with WT offering to pay for Gold OA in their stead, I don't doubt that a number of years more will be wasted going down that dysfunctional route before it is discovered that it is both unnecessary and wasteful.

"Personally, I'd much rather see the author depositing in institutional repositories, and PubMedCentral harvesting from us."

Yes, that is indeed the optimal way, not just for PMC and WT but for the institution, which, if all funders mandated institutional deposit, would soon realize that it made sense for the institution itself to go on to mandate (institutional) deposit for all of its research output, whether funded or not.

"There have been a couple of lonely requests on discussion lists from repository managers asking whether others have deposited works to PubMedCentral on behalf of authors but no replies so far."

Why on earth should proxy deposit be offered to authors to spare them a few minutes' worth of keystrokes? If it comes to that, that's what secretaries are paid for, or student assistants. Let authors decide for themselves whether it's worth paying money to spare themselves those few extra keystrokes per paper. (I suppose some authors still pay secretaries to do the keystrokes to type their drafts in the first place, so this would just be a few more keystrokes...)

"Why might we do this on authors' behalf? Because authors recognise the importance of subject repositories far more than they do that of institutional repositories and if we can do this for them then we gain their support and understanding. Because, whether there is an institutional mandate or not, it's not right that authors should have to deposit the same article twice."

Unfortunately the above passage has conflated so many unfounded assumptions, I hardly know where to begin!

(i) The reason it's better not to do deposits on authors' behalf is that in reality deposits are fast and easy and it is absurd to fear or avoid them.

(ii) In addition, if everything continues to be done to insulate authors' groundless phobias about a few keystrokes from the simple reality of deposit, that simply makes the path to universal OA longer and more arduous (real arduousness being substituted for the notional arduousness that keeps authors at arms' length).

(iii) The only repositories that authors "recognise the importance of" are mandated repositories, regardless of whether the mandate is from their funder or their institutions (but preferably both!), and regardless of whether the repository is central or institutional -- but it had *#&% well better be just one-time, one-place deposit, otherwise the authors can and will and should revolt: and that's really what this is all about: A few minimal keystrokes, yes, but no unnecessary, redundant or profligate ones. WT did not think this through, otherwise it would have been realized at once that convergent institutional locus of deposit should be specified by both institutional and funder mandates, with automated central harvesting to whatever further loci hearts desire thereafter; the authors' fingers are not involved in that.

(iv) Doing proxy deposit on behalf of authors in order to "gain their support
and understanding"? Their support and understanding for what? So that the next time they want to deposit, they can again appeal to your free keystroke services? Where's the support and understanding in that? What's needed is mandates; that moots the need for "support and understanding."

(v) It's certainly true that "it's not right that authors should have to deposit the same article twice." That's the whole point here. We have WT and NIH to thank for the fact that we need to face this prospect at all. And it discourages the adoption of institutional mandates (and of course diminishes the probability of spontaneous institutional deposit to even below the 15% baseline).

(vi) But an institutional mandate would still remedy this, for then the author could deposit once, institutionally, and the proxy redeposit phase would be much lightened: Instead of having to do each deposit for the author, software (like SWORD) could be used to port the deposits' metadata from their IR to their secondary (central) loci. And then maybe the central deposit stipulation of WT, NIH and other such funders -- not all funders have been silly enough to emulate this dysfunctional stricture -- would die a natural death of its own accord, , eventually short-circuited by increasingly efficient software.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum