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Sunday, March 8. 2009

U. Edinburgh: Scotland's 6th Green OA Mandate, UK's 22nd, Planet's 67th

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.)

Note that Edinburgh's is the optimal ID/OA Mandate. (Let us hope Edinburgh will also implement the automatized Request a Copy Button for Embargoed or Closed Access Deposits!)

University of Edinburgh (UK* institutional-mandate)
http://www.ed.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives:
[growth data] http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.publications.lib.ed.ac.uk/

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy:
http://www.acaffairs.ed.ac.uk/Committees/Senate/Meetings/200809/20090127/C4-OpenAccess.pdf

The University of Edinburgh has adopted an OA mandate. Here's an excerpt from the Open Access Publications Policy (January 27 - February 4, 2009), the proposal which the university's Electronic Senate approved on February 18, 2009:

This... Publications Policy... requires researchers to deposit their research outputs in the Publications Repository, and where appropriate in the Open Access Edinburgh Research Archive in order to maximise the visibility of the University’s research....

This policy will be implemented [i.e. become mandatory] from January 2010, and in the meantime, researchers are encouraged to deposit outputs....

The Publications Repository (PR) is a closed repository for use only within the University of Edinburgh and is an internal University tool for research output management, while Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) is a public open access repository, making content available through global searching mechanisms such as Google.

This policy requires each researcher to provide the peer reviewed final accepted version of a research output to deposit. The policy encourages the deposit of an electronic copy of nonpeer reviewed research, particularly where this may be used for national assessments. Researchers (or their proxies, eg research administrators) will deposit these research outputs in the PR, and at the same time provide information about whether the research output can be made publicly available in ERA. It will then be automatically passed into ERA, where this is allowable, with no further input from the researcher or their agent....

There are several strong reasons for pursuing the requirement for the deposits of such research outputs at the moment:

1. The impact of research is maximized because there is growing evidence that research deposited in Open Access repositories is more heavily used and cited

2. The deposit of outputs in ERA will support compliance with Research Council and other funding agency requirements that research outputs are available openly.

3. This will ensure that each research output has consistent metadata and ensures longevity which, for example, a researcher’s own website does not.

4. Items which are already in Edinburgh Research Archive are well used. The average number of times each item was downloaded during 2008 was 228, with the top countries downloading Edinburgh research being: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, China, Iran and India.

5. Researchers, research groups or Schools can use the PR to provide automatically generated output for their own websites, or for their curriculum vitae.

6. Future possible metrics based research assessment will require us to ensure that Edinburgh’s research be cited as much as possible, and this means that it must be as visible as possible....

9. This will become a competitive tool for Edinburgh’s research by enhancing its reputation and branding as a good place to carry out research....

11. The world of scholarly communication is changing—adopting this policy in Edinburgh will help us move forward within this changing environment. Other universities require their researchers to deposit research outputs. Harvard University, Stirling University—the first in the UK to do so, and very recently the University of Glasgow, have adopted institutional requirements for such deposit.

12. Such a deposit requirement is in line with other UoE policies on knowledge exchange, public accountability and serving the public good....

Since this initiative requires changed patterns of work from researchers, there will be many questions some of which are addressed in this section....

-- What happens if I don’t want to make the research output public? There will always be a variety of circumstances where it is not possible to deposit, for example where a researcher does not wish to go public with their research immediately, because they wish to publish further, or where commercial reasons exist or where there are copyright  issues (considered below). In these cases the research output should be deposited but only the metadata will be exposed in the PR the item will not be passed into ERA until permission is given.

-- What happens if the publisher does not agree? You should try to avoid assigning the copyright to the publisher or granting them an exclusive license. Rather, you should aim to grant a nonexclusive licence which leaves you with the ability to deposit the work in the University Repositories and possibly make it available in other digital forms.

-- How should I communicate this with the publisher? There will be advice and guidance on how to achieve this and template forms to show how you can amend Publisher copyright forms.

-- What about research outputs which are not journal articles? The PR and ERA can accept most research output types including books, book chapters, conference proceedings, performances, video, audio etc. In some cases – for example books not available electronically – the PR/ERA will hold only metadata, with the possibility of links to catalogues so that users can find locations....

-- What about my research data? Data supporting research outputs is also required by RCs to be made available? and this can be included where requested. IS is establishing a working group to consider research data issues....

-- I would like to publish in an author-pays Open Access journal. Does this mean that I also have to deposit? Yes, please deposit the research output in the normal manner....

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, March 7. 2009

Conyers Bill H.R. 801 Has Nothing to Do With Open-Access Journals

Unfortunately, far too much of what is stated in "coglanglab's" well-meaning blog posting about Conyers' Bill H.R. 801 is simply incorrect, starting with its title:

"Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals"

No, the Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is not considering killing open-access journals; it is considering killing NIH's right to mandate that its fundees must deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that have been published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. The Bill has nothing to do with open-access journals.

"A recent movement has led to the creation of open-access journals, which do not charge access fees. This movement has gained traction at universities (e.g., Harvard) and also at government agencies."

The "open-access journal movement" has indeed been gaining some traction, but this has next to nothing to do with either the Conyers Bill or the Harvard and NIH mandates, which have nothing to do with open-acesss journal publishing: Harvard and NIH mandate that faculty and fundees deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that are published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals.

"NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication."

No, the NIH did no such thing. It required the researchers they fund to deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals -- and to make those deposits openly accessible within a year of publication."

Fortunately for the for-profit journal system, Congress is considering H.R. 801, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies."

The issue has nothing to do with for-profit vs. nonprofit journal publication. The publishers lobbying against the NIH policy include not only for-profit publishers but nonprofit publishers such as the American Chemical Society and the American Physiological Society.

"The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works. Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication."

The "conceit" of Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is that the government should not be allowed to require researchers to make their research open access even when the research has been supported by public funds because that could interfere with the publishers' right to make a return on their investment.

(The Conyers Bill will fail because the public investment in research is incomparably greater than the publisher's, because the government's contractual conditions on that funding predate any agreement the fundee makes with the publisher, and because repository deposit can be mandated even without requiring that access to the deposit be immediately made open access: The repositories' semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can tide over would-be users access needs during any embargo.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 14:43 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, March 5. 2009

More OA Somnambulism: Conflating the Journal Affordability and Research Accessibility Problems, Again

SUMMARY: University of California and University of Calgary are both providing extra money to pay publishers to make their researchers' journal articles Gold OA. This makes no sense at all unless they also mandate that their researchers provide Green OA for all of their current and future published journal articles -- by depositing them in their university's Institutional Repository, as about 30 other universities and Departments worldwide, including Harvard's FAS and Law and Stanford's FE (plus 30 research funders), have already mandated (although Harvard's and Stanford's mandates should be upgraded to add a no opt-out immediate-deposit clause, whether of not the author opts out of making the deposit Open Access; deposits can be made Closed Access for the duration of embargoes or opt-outs, which meanwhile still makes it possible for "Almost-OA" to be provided through the repository's semi-automatized eprint requests, individually fulfilled at the author's discretion with one click from the requester and one click from the author). Such policies need to be mandates (i.e., requirements, not just requests, like Boston University's), otherwise, they will fail, as NIH's first deposit policy did, until it was upgraded to a mandate.

The universities just keep sleep-walking. It would be amusing if it weren't so appalling:

(1) U of C-1 (University of California), conflating completely the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (as so many others have done), triumphantly bundles extra payment for optional Gold OA publishing charges for its own researchers' article output into its "Big Deal" subscription contract with Springer, thereby throwing still more money at publishers -- instead of simply mandating (as 66 universities and research funders have already done) that their own researchers make their own (published) journal articles Green OA by self-archiving them in U of C-1's own Institutional Repository (and, entirely independently, subscribing to whatever journals U of C-1 needs and can afford). And they think this is somehow a "Good Deal" and a big step forward for OA! (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate.)

(2) U of C-2 (University of Calgary) does the same sort of thing (having first cancelled an earlier Badder Deal along much the same lines), triumphantly earmarking scarce funds -- which could have been far better spent (especially in today's financial crunch) on things that U of C-2 really needed and could not get otherwise -- to pay for Gold OA publishing charges for its own researchers's article output. This, again, instead of simply mandating that their own researchers make their own (published) journal articles Green OA by self-archiving them in U of C-2's own Institutional Repository. (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate.)

(3) Harvard (one of the 66) did the far more sensible thing, and mandated Green OA self-archiving instead (but only if the author is willing and able to negotiate rights-retention with his publisher -- otherwise the author can opt out of self-archiving). Over 90% of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving in some form, 63% for the refereed final draft. If Harvard adds to its current mandate a clause that requires the no-opt-out deposit of all articles, without exception, immediately upon acceptance for publication, whether or not the author elects to opt out of the rights-retention clause, then Harvard has the optimal policy.(Access to embargoed deposits and deposits whose authors have opted out can simply be stored in Closed Access instead of Open Access during the embargo, or indefinitely;

the Repository's semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can provide Almost-OA to Closed Access deposits almost immediately, with just one click from the requester plus one click from the author, until universal OA inevitably prevails.)

(4) It is not clear whether Boston University's "University-Wide" policy (Harvard's mandate is so far only for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Law) is indeed a mandate at all: If not, it will fail, as all other nonbinding request/encourage policies have failed -- beginning with NIH's policy, which was upgraded to a requirement after two years of abject failure as a mere request. (No damage here that could not be repaired by also adopting a Green OA Mandate. Ditto for Griffiths University and Nottingham...)

To make all the OA dominoes fall, all it takes is universal deposit mandates; the rest is just (to mix metaphors) treading water and somnambulism.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Rationale for OA at 20:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, February 17. 2009

John Wiley on RoMEO and John the Baptist on Supererogation

SUMMARY: Publishers are increasingly adapting to the growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates now being adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide. Some of the conditions they impose are reasonable (such as endorsing the self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft but not the publisher's proprietary PDF, or endorsing institutional repository deposit but not institution-external, 3rd-party repository deposit) and pose no problem for authors, their institutions or their funders. Some conditions are less reasonable (such as 6-12-month embargoes on making access to the deposit Open Access), but these can be adapted to by authors, institutions and funders for the time being, with the help of the Institutional Repositories' "email eprint request" Button. Some of the conditions, however, are technically arbitrary or even incoherent (such as the distinction between the author's institutional website and the author's institutional repository, or conditions based on metadata or metadata harvestability, rather than the full-text). Technically arbitrary or incoherent conditions should accordingly be ignored by authors, institutions and funders. They are merely leftovers of paper-based thinking that simply do not make sense in the digital medium.

[Excerpted from JISC-REPOSITORIES]

Les Carr:
[O]ne step away (literally) from the [Wiley-Blackwell] "Best Practice document" is the [Wiley-Blackwell] "Copyright FAQ" in which they elaborate that although the ELF [Exclusive Licence Form] is used for societies, the wholly owned journals still retain the practice of Copyright Assignment. The sample Copyright Assignment document (for the aptly chosen International Headache Society) contains the following text:
Such preprints may be posted as electronic files on the author's own website for personal or professional use, or on the author's internal university, college or corporate networks/intranet, or secure external website at the author's institution, but not for commercial sale or for any systematic external distribution by a third party (e.g. a listserve or database connected to a public access server).
I think that an institutional repository is OK by that definition. After all, it is a secure external website at the author's institution which is not offering the item for sale nor run by a third party.

Ian Stuart:
Where does this leave the Subject Repository (e.g., arXiv)?

It's not the authors own website, or an intranet at the authors local institution, or an external server at the authors institution... yet it also doesn't offer commercial sales or systematic [my emphasis] distribution to a third party

Where does this leave the Depot?

It's /effectively/ an Institutional Repository, but like arXiv it's not at the authors institution.

.... or is this one of those questions one shouldn't really ask?

Stevan Harnad:
Here's my tuppence worth on this one -- and it's never failed me (or anyone who has applied it, since the late 1980's. when the possibilities first presented themselves) as a practical guide for action: (A shorter version of this heuristic would be "If the physicists had been foolish enough to worry about it in 1991, or the computer scientists still earlier, would we have the half-million papers in Arxiv or three-quarter million in Citeseerx that we have, unchallenged, in 2009?"):

When a publisher starts to make distinctions that are more minute and arbitrary than can even be made sense of technologically, and are unenforceable, ignore them:

The distinction between making or not-making something freely available on the Web is coherent (if often wrong-headed).

The distinction between making something freely available on the web here but not there is beginning to sound silly (since if it's free on the web, it's effectively free everywhere), but we swallow it, if the "there" is a 3rd-party rival free-riding publisher, whereas the "here" is the website of the author's own institution. Avec les dieux il y a des accommodements: Just deposit in your IR and port metadata to CRs.

But when it comes to DEPOT -- which is an interim "holding space" provided (for free) to each author's institution, to hold deposits remotely until the institution creates its own IR, at which time they are ported home and removed from DEPOT -- it is now bordering on abject absurdity to try to construe DEPOT as a "3rd-party rival free-riding publisher".

We are, dear colleagues, in the grip of an orgy of pseudo-juridical and decidedly supererogatory hair-splitting on which nothing whatsoever hinges but the time, effort and brainware we perversely persist in dissipating on it.

This sort of futile obsessiveness is -- in my amateur's guess only -- perhaps the consequence of two contributing factors:

(1) The agonizingly (and equally absurdly) long time during which the research community persists in its inertial state of Zeno's Paralysis about self-archiving (a paralysis of which this very obsession with trivial and ineffectual formal contingencies is itself one of the symptoms and causes). It has driven many of us bonkers, in many ways, and this formalistic obsessive-compulsive tendency is simply one of the ways. (In me, it has simply fostered an increasingly curmudgeonly impatience.) The cure, of course, is deposit mandates.

and

(2) The substantial change in mind-set that is apparently required in order to realize that OA is not the sort of thing governed by the usual concerns of either library cataloguing/indexing or library rights-management: It's something profoundly different because of the very nature of OA.

Rest your souls. Universal OA is a foregone conclusion. It is optimal, and it is inevitable. The fact that it is also proving to be so excruciatingly -- and needlessly -- slow in coming is something we should work to remedy, rather than simply becoming complicit in and compounding it, by giving ourselves still more formalistic trivia with which to while away the time we are losing until the obvious happens at long last.

Bref: Yes, this is "one of those questions one shouldn't really ask"!

Yours curmudgeonly,

Your importunate Archivangelist

Talat Chaudhri:
...Clearly the copyright system is incoherent and difficult, but nonetheless these publishers have indisputable copyright and may licence it as they please, even incoherently...

Stevan Harnad:
Even incoherently? I think Talat underestimates the supra-legal power of the Law of the Excluded Middle.

Example:

"You may deposit this article on the web if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle AND you may not deposit this article on the web if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle."

Unverifiable, unenforcable, and incoherent. But Talat feels it would be "frankly inappropriate to tell others to break the law at their own risk" by ignoring something like this.

There's no accounting for feelings.

Be sensible (as the half-million physicists and three-quarter million computer scientists have been, for two decades now): Take the "risk."

Charles Oppenheim:
Let me make my position clear. Comments that I make have no legal authority. I take no responsibility for any actions a reader might take (or not take) as a result of reading my opinion, and that in any cases of doubt, readers should take formal legal advice. Anyone who advises third parties to do something that is potentially infringing without such a health warning could find themselves accused by rights owners of authorising infringement, which means they would be just as liable to pay damages as the person who took the advice.

I agree with Talat that 100% OA is not necessarily inevitable, despite my hope that it does come to pass. Just because something is technically possible and makes economic sense does not mean it is bound to occur.

Stevan Harnad:
Let me make my position clear.

Comments that I make have no legal authority.

Nor am I addressing 3rd parties.

(I am addressing only the authors of refereed journal articles.)

And all I am advising is that they not take leave of their common sense in favor of far-fetched flights of formal fancy -- especially incoherent ones.

Amen.

Johannes
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Whimsy at 14:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, February 9. 2009

Universities and their IRs Can Help Monitor Compliance With Funder Mandates

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

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

GL: Stevan, a very useful series of postings - thanks. UK Research Councils have a variety of OA mandates - including two which mandate deposition in CRs (MRC- UK PubMed and ESRC - Society Today). WIth the exception of EPSRC (and this may well change) the others do mandate deposition, but are unspecific about where. NERC, for example, says:
"From 1 October 2006 NERC requires that, for new funding awards, an electronic copy of any published peer-reviewed paper, supported in whole or in part by NERC-funding, is deposited at the earliest opportunity in an e-print repository. NERC also encourages award-holders to deposit published peer-reviewed papers arising from awards made before October 2006. "
BUT its very difficult to check compliance to these mandates! Councils have reduced their final reporting requirements on the expectation that it will be possible to collect outputs information (not just publications) electronically from grantholders. RCUK is assessing options for doing this - either pushing/pulling from Institutional Repostories or from HEI CRIS systems, or both. Whatever is decided its certain that that we'd be assisted by inclusion in IRs of metadata fields for a) "Funder" (perhaps using a dropdown list of funders URIs); and b) "GrantReference".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GL: So, three questions re IRs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Institutional Repositories at 14:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Protect the NIH Public Access Mandate From the Conyers Copyright Caricature

SUMMARY: The publisher lobby is trying to undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public that funded it. Tendentiously misnamed the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" the Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" publicly funded research in exactly the same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, sold for author royalty income.
It is time for OA advocates and the general public (US and worldwide, because US OA policy has vast global implications) to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright. Please consult the Alliance for Taxpayer Access on how you can help and also express your support for mandating more OA rather than less, to President Obama.
This is also a good time to shore up the NIH Mandate with a small change that will not only increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide, but strengthen it against attempts like the Conyers Bill to undermine it: Specify that the research is to be deposited in the fundee's own Institutional Repository. (From there it can be automatically harvested to central repositories like PubMed Central.) The majority of journals already formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR). Immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities in the world: This small change would also spread the adoption of institutional mandates to NIH's fundees' institutions, extending OA to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded, thus ushering in universal OA at long last.

The publisher anti-Open-Access lobby is trying to use a time when the economy is down and the head of NIH is out to slip through a Bill that would undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public that paid for it.

The Conyers Bill is now trying to overturn the Public Access Act on the basis of copyright double-talk that would be ludicrous if it were not so ominous:

The published reports of publicly funded research findings are given away by their researcher-authors free for all in order to maximize their usage and impact. The Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" their work in exactly the same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, produced and sold by their authors to maximize their royalty income: The tendentiously misnamed "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" would rescind NIH's requirement that the results of the research it funds with taxpayer money should be deposited, free for all, on the Web.

The Conyers Bill's copyright arguments -- almost transparently contrived and arbitrary -- have been decisively refuted point for point by Law Professor Michael Carroll and other experts, just as all the other far-fetched, self-serving arguments marshalled by the publisher anti-OA lobby have (despite the hiring of "pit-bull" Eric Dezenhall as public-relations consultant) been repeatedly rebutted each time they were unleashed.

It is time not only for OA advocates, but the general public -- both US and worldwide (because US OA policy has vast global implications) -- to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright.The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is hard at work to save the NIH Mandate; please consult them on how you can help. You can also express your support for mandating more OA rather than less, to President Obama.

This would also be an opportune time to shore up the NIH Mandate itself with a small but important change in implementational detail that will not only increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide, but it will also strengthen it against mischievous attempts like the Conyers Bill to undermine it:

(1) Open Access is Open Access regardless of where on the Web a paper is freely accessible.

(2) Currently, the NIH mandate specifically stipulates deposit in a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR), PubMed Central.

(3) The majority of journals already formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR). (This is because they fear that endorsing deposit in 3rd party CRs would open the door to free-riding on their content by rival publishers.)

(4) Apart from being immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities and research institutions in the world: That makes it a much more diffuse, hence difficult target for the publisher anti-OA publisher lobby than PubMed Central, NIH or Congress.

(5) IRs also make it possible to deposit papers as "Closed Access" rather than Open Access during any publisher embargo period. The Closed-Access paper's metadata (authors, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are freely accessible and searchable webwide, and link to an IR Button that allows individual users to email the author an automatic request for an individual copy for research use with just one click, which the author can in turn fulfill with just one click, almost instantaneously. Over 60% of journals already endorse immediate OA for IR deposits. The Button provides "Almost OA" for the rest, to tide over researcher needs during any embargo.

(6) Hence if the NIH deposit mandate specifically stipulated deposit in the author's IR, rather than deposit in PubMed Central, it could harvest the deposit's metadata to PubMed Central, harvest the full-text after the allowable embargo, and moot most of the copyright issues, while indirectly providing "Almost OA" even during the embargo (via the Request-a-Copy Buttons of the global network of IRs distributed across the planet).

(7) This small change in implementational detail in NIH's funder mandate would also motivate and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates at all NIH's fundees' institutions, which would in turn help reinforce and protect the NIH mandate (from Conyers-like attacks) as well as extending it to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded.

(8) Stipulating IR deposit rather than CR deposit will also make the NIH funder mandate a model that can be emulated worldwide, globalizing the adoption of both funder and institutional mandates and helping to usher in universal OA at long last.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in News at 11:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday, January 16. 2009

STM Publisher Briefing on Institutional Repository Deposit Mandates: Re-Posted

January 16, 2009 11:38:30

Dear Stevan

Yes, please use the quotes with our permission. If you want to refer to the whole document please link to it on our website at [this link]

If you are interested in posting the full document on your website you have permission to do this - with the proviso that any modifications/commentary must be prominently noted and distinguished from our document and that you link it to the original on the STM site.

Thanks for the chance to post “background context and objectives”. Perhaps you could note to your ePrints site the gist of my emails, namely:
(1) Our document was originally intended as briefing for a STM member-publishers to help them develop policies and a greater understanding of the current environment

(2) STM welcomes open discussion of these matters and will be interested to learn about any comments you receive

(3) That I’d like to reserve the opportunity to comment at a later date if it seems that would be helpful
Best, Michael

Michael A Mabe
Chief Executive Officer
International Association of STM Publishers
Prama House, 267 Banbury Road
OXFORD, OX2 7HT, UK
Web: www.stm-assoc.org

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again), there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of the PRISM/pitbull misadventure of 2007.

Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are unavoidably -- almost ritually -- repetitive, because the errors and misinformation themselves are so repetitive.

STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES

Issues that drive... [publisher] policies [on IR deposits] center around assessments of their impact on the integrity of the scientific record and their potential to undermine the funding that drives scholarly communication today. These assessments are especially crucial when public posting of final and authoritative versions of scholarly articles on IRs are concerned.

This is a fair statement: The issues for the research community are research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress. The issue for the publisher community is their financial bottom line.

Publishers become concerned when IRs involve themselves in publishing and distribution activities currently being done efficiently and effectively by the scholarly publishing community. When this happens, a parallel publishing system is created that lacks the quality controls and value-added processes publishers already employ.

(1) IRs do not publish: peer-reviewed journal publishers publish. IRs provide access to their own authors' (peer-reviewed, published) output -- for all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's toll-based proprietary version -- so as to maximize the access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress of their research output.

(2) The version of the published article that the authors deposit in their IRs is the final, revised, peer-reviewed draft (the "postprint"), accepted for publication, but not the publisher's proprietary PDF. Hence deposit does have the quality controls provided (for free) by the peer-reviewers. (If the copy-editing should happen to detect any substantive errors -- which is exceedingly rare! -- these too can be corrected in the deposited postprint.)

If IRs become primary publishing outlets, many are concerned that key elements of today’s scholarly communication system such as quality controls, preservation standards, and the discoverability of research, will suffer.

IRs are not substitutes for publishing but supplements to it, providing access to research for access-denied would-be users, for the sake of maximizing research progress. The deposited postprints have undergone the essential quality-control for researchers: peer review.

The discoverability of postprints in IRs (via search engines like google, google scholar, citeseerx, scirus and scopus) is excellent. No problems, and no complaints from all the would-be users webwide who would otherwise lack access to them.

(Preservation is a red herring: Preservation of what? As supplements, rather than substitutes, authors' self-archived postprints are not the versions with the primary preservation burden (although IR deposits are of course being preserved). The primary preservation burden is on the publisher's proprietary version, the official version of record, as it always has been.)

Publishers rely on copyright transfers or publishing licenses from authors for the rights they need to ensure that the funding sources for the scholarly communications process... are not undermined by the availability of alternative versions. In return, authors’ manuscripts are improved, enriched, promoted, and branded as part of a web-based peer-reviewed journal publishing system developed and maintained by publishers.

(a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, and impact, by maximizing access to them.

(b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

(c) But if and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

(d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) merely in order to insure publishers' current funding model against any possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

(e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them, for research purposes. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

Publishers are not alone in expressing concern about the potential misuse and dangers of IRs. Most recently, Dorothea Salo of the University of Wisconsin library has raised issues about the expense and utility of IRs in an article entitled “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel”

(Publishers might do better to pay serious attention to the substantive rationale and evidence concerning IR deposits and IR deposit mandates, rather than to the opining of roach motel keepers.)

As an executive in the publishing industry, you may be asked to comment on news and developments in the academic community about these IR policies, which are sometimes also less accurately described as “authors’ rights” or “open access” policies.

IR deposit mandates are accurately described as institutional open access policy. (But IR deposit mandates are certainly not "authors' rights" policies.)

The purpose of this document is to provide a summary of the situation as it currently exists; to enable you to review and monitor your own policies and approaches; and to respond to members of the media if desired.... Key points for internal review:

-- What publishing rights are necessary to support our business model(s)? E.g. subscription models will generally need at least exclusive publishing rights while author-pays models may not

This mixes up issues: The only relevant issue here for IRs and IR deposit policies is whether or not the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication. (This is called a "Green" publisher policy on OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with author-pays/Gold OA publishing models. And authors paying for the "right" to deposit would be absurd and out of the question.)

-- In our journal publishing agreement(s), do we offer rights to authors for IR postings? If not, under what terms and conditions might we?

If the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication, the publisher is Green. If there is no endorsement, or OA is embargoed, the publisher is Gray.

-- What distinctions do we draw between pre-print servers, voluntary IRs, and mandated IRs in terms of copyright policies and business model(s)?

The only potential distinction is between authors' own institutional IRs and institution-external 3rd-party central repositories. Although OA is OA (and means free online accessibility webwide, irrespective of the locus of deposit), some publishers only endorse deposit in the author's own IR, in order not to endorse 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers: This limitation is innocuous, and no problem for OA. (In fact, there are many reasons why it is preferable for both kinds of Deposit mandates -- those from funders as well as from institutions -- to converge on institutional IR deposit, from which the metadata can then be harvested centrally.)

What would be arbitrary (and absurd, and unenforceable) would be to attempt to endorse only voluntary IR deposit and not mandatory IR deposit by authors!

-- Intramural Policies: We allow posting of final or near-final versions of articles on an Intranet site with no public access permitted;

Let there be no ambiguity about this: Such a policy would be Gray, not Green, on OA IR self-archiving.

-- Extramural Policies: We allow posting of early versions of articles [e.g. pre-prints, revised author manuscripts prior to copy-editing and formatting'] on an Internet site with public access permitted and journal-specific embargo periods;

Without an embargo, this policy would be fully Green, and neither IRs nor OA ask for anything more. With an embargo, it would be Gray.

-- Linking Policies: We allow posting of final versions of articles on a publisher web site with links from institutional sites

If the posting on the publisher's website is done immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access to it is immediately open to all users webwide, that would be fully Green too. (For such cases, IRs could, for internal record-keeping purposes, mandate the deposit of the author's postprint in the IR, but in Closed Access, with the OA link going to the publisher's freely accessible version for the duration of the publisher's embargo on making the IR version OA too: no problem.)

-- Sponsorship Policies: We allow posting of final versions of articles on an institutional site and/or our own site and/or other repository site with direct financial support of agency, institution, author or sponsor

Paying to deposit in researchers' own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community.

Key points to consider in possible interactions with the media:

-- More scholarly journal literature is more visible and more accessible to more individuals now than at any time in history, principally because of the efforts and investments of publishers

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress by making all research accessible to all of its would-be users webwide (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe) that the OA movement was launched. And that is why Green OA self-archiving, generated by funder and institutional IR deposit mandates, is growing, to the great benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.)

-- Today’s system of web-based peer-reviewed journals is a vital component of the scholarly communication process and is used by funding agencies and the institutions alike to make critically important personal and professional decisions

Correct. And both the research itself, and the peer review, are provided by the research community, free of charge, to the publishing community, in exchange for the neutral 3rd-party management of the peer review, and the certification of the outcome with the journal's name and track-record. The publishing community is compensated for the value it has added by receiving the exclusive right to sell the resultant joint product (and no need to pay authors royalties from the sales of their texts).

But that does not mean that researchers cannot and will not continue to give away their own peer-reviewed research findings also to those would-be users who cannot afford to buy the resultant joint product. Nor does it mean that researchers' institutions and funders cannot and will not mandate that they do so, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress for the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

-- Posting on an institutional repository is not the same as publishing in a journal— journals have established editorial policies and perspectives, peer review systems, editing, tagging, and reference-linking services

Correct. And individual authors depositing the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their published articles in their IRs is not publication but supplementary access provision, for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version.

-- If not carefully conceived and managed, IRs can become nothing more than alternative, free-access parallel (but inferior) publishing and distribution systems which risk undermining the incentives and ability of publishers to invest in managing the peer-review of research and to provide and maintain the well-organized infrastructure necessary to publish, disseminate and archive journal articles

This is merely the repetition of the same point made earlier:

No, IR deposits of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles are not publishing, nor substitutes for publishing, they are author supplements, provided for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version:

    (a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, impact, by maximizing access to them.

    (b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

    (c) If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

    (d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    (e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

-- IRs require investment and management. They should be undertaken only if they have a clear mission and purpose other than merely offering an alternative parallel publishing and distribution system

IRs are undertaken by universities and research institutions -- i.e., the research community. It is not at all clear why the publishing community is providing this advice to the research community on its undertaking...

-- Researchers should be fully briefed about possible adverse and long-term effects on scholarly communication before granting broad and ill-defined rights to IRs

Researchers can and should be fully briefed about the already demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and the researcher's institutions -- the benefits generated by maximizing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress through Green OA self-archiving and IR deposit mandates.

Researchers need this full briefing on research benefits, because it is based on actual facts and experience.

But is the publishing community suggesting that -- in addition to these empirical and practical facts -- researchers should also be briefed on publishers' speculations about how Green OA self-archiving might conceivably induce an eventual change in publishers' funding model?

Why?

If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to protect publishers' current funding model from the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

-- Faculty authors should retain the freedom to choose how and where to publish

By all means. And they should continue to exercise their freedom to supplement access to their published research by depositing their postprints in their IRs for all would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher's proprietary version.

-- Universities proposing to obtain rights from their faculty should also work with publishers to avoid adverse effects on the system of web-based peer-reviewed journals which currently underpins today’s unprecedented rate of scientific advancement

It would be excellent if all authors reserved OA self-archiving rights in their copyright agreements with their publishers. Then all authors could immediately deposit all their peer-reviewed research in their IRs, and immediately make them OA without any further ado. But for at least 63% of journals, formally reserving that right is already unnecessary, as those journals are already Green, so those articles can already be made immediately OA today by self-archiving them in the author's IR.

For the remaining 37%, their authors can likewise already deposit the postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance without the need of either copyright reservation or any formal endorsement or permission from the publisher: if they wish, they can set access to the deposit as "Closed Access" -- meaning only the author can access it. Then the authors can provide "Almost OA" to those deposits with the help of their IR's "email eprint request" button: Individual would-be users who reach a Closed Access deposit link (led there by the deposit's OA metadata) need merely press the Button and insert their email address in order to trigger an immediate automatic email to the author to request a single copy for personal research purposes; the author receives the eprint request, which contains a URL on which he can click to trigger an immediate automatic email to the would-be user containing a single copy of the requested postprint. This is not OA, but it is Almost-OA.

OA is indisputably better for research and researchers than Almost-OA. But 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA will tide over the worldwide research community's immediate usage needs for the time being, until the inevitable transition to 100% OA that will follow from the worldwide adoption of Immediate IR Deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

This is the information on which the research community needs to be clearly briefed. The publishing community's conjectures about funding models are important, and of undoubted interest to the publishing community itself, but they should in no way constrain the research community in maximizing access to its own refereed research output in the Web era by mandating IR deposit universally.

To repeat:

What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers' current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is much harder, however, for institutions to successfully achieve consensus on adopting an IR deposit mandate at all if the mandate in question is a copyright-reservation mandate rather than an IR deposit mandate. And because it is even harder to ensure compliance with a copyright-reservation mandate (because of authors' worries that the negotiations with their publishers to reserve immediate-OA self-archiving rights might not succeed and might instead put at risk their right to "choose how and where to publish"), the one prominent institutional copyright reservation mandate (Harvard's) contains an author opt-out clause that makes the mandate into a non-mandate. The simple solution is to add an Immediate-Deposit requirement, without opt-out. Even simpler still, adopt an Immediate-Deposit mandate as the default mandate model suitable for all, worldwide, and strengthen the mandate only if and when there is successful consensus and compliance in favor of a stronger mandate.]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Publishing Lobby at 13:10 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, January 13. 2009

STM Publisher Briefing on Institutional Repository Deposit Mandates

[Two members of STM have kindly, at my request, allowed me to see a copy of the STM Briefing on IRs and Deposit Mandates. I focused the commentary below on quoted excerpts, but before posting it I asked STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to include the quotes. As I do not yet have an answer, I am posting the commentary with paraphrases of the passages I had hoped to quote. If I receive permission from Michael, I will repost this with the verbatim quotes. As it stands, it is self-contained and self-explanatory.

(Permission since received. Please see the version with verbatim quotes HERE.)]

STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES

[Publisher policy on IRs is concerned with how IR deposit mandates might affect publishing and publishing revenues, particularly in the case of refereed final drafts.]

[Publishing and distribution today is successful and adequate. IRs publish an inferior version.]

[Publishing by IRs compromises quality, preservation and discoverability.]

[Exclusive copyright transfer is essential so the availability of alternative versions does not prevent publishers from making ends meet. Publishers add value in return for the exclusive rights.]

[It is not just publishers that think IRs pose risks; librarian Dorothea Salo has questioned IRs' costs and usefulness in “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel”.]

(Publishers might do better to pay serious attention to the substantive rationale and evidence concerning IR deposits and IR deposit mandates, rather than to the opining of roach motel keepers.)

[It is inaccurate to speak of IR policies as “authors’ rights” policies or “open access” policies.]

IR deposit mandates are accurately described as institutional open access policy. (But IR deposit mandates are certainly not "authors' rights" policies.)

[Talking points in responding to the media: subscription publishing does require exclusive copyright transfer; perhaps OA publishing doesn't.]

[Should we endorse IR deposit? Under what conditions?]

[Should we make distinctions between preprint repositories, unmandated IRs and mandated IRs?]

[Should we only endorse IR deposits that are open only to institution-internal users?]

Let there be no ambiguity about this: Such a policy would be Gray, not Green, on OA IR self-archiving.

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only after an embargo period?]

Without an embargo, this policy would be fully Green, and neither IRs nor OA ask for anything more. With an embargo, it would be Gray.

[Should we only allow links from IRs to final versions on the publisher's website?]

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only for a fee?]

Paying to deposit in researchers' own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community.

[Inform the media that publishers have made journal articles more accessible today than ever before.]

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress by making all research accessible to all of its would-be users webwide (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe) that the OA movement was launched. And that is why Green OA self-archiving, generated by funder and institutional IR deposit mandates, is growing, to the great benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers' research and institutions.

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.)

[Online refereed journals are crucial for funders, universities, authors, and authors' careers.]

[Depositing in an IR is not equivalent to journal publishing, with its editing, peer review, and other added values.]

[IRs might provide a lower quality option that makes publishers unable or unwilling to perform their value-added services.]

[IRs cost money and should only be created if they have a distinct goal rather than just parallel publishing and access-provision]

[Researchers should be advised of the damage IRs could do to research publication and dissemination.]

[Researchers should stay free "to choose how and where to publish."]

[Institutions that want their employees to reserve certain rights for their published journal articles should collaborate with journal publishers so as not to damage their business.]

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Publishing Lobby at 15:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, December 29. 2008

Open Access: The Devil's in the Details

(1) Two Kinds of OA: Gratis and Libre: There are two kinds of Open Access (OA) -- "gratis" (free online access) and "libre" (free online access plus certain re-use rights) -- but Gideon Burton seems to be writing about OA as if there were only one kind ("libre"). (See: "Open Access: 'Gratis' and 'Libre'")

The gratis/libre distinction matters a lot, because it is critical to the strategy for successfully achieving OA (of either kind) at all. There is still very little OA today, but most of what OA there is is gratis, not libre. The fastest and surest way to achieve 100% OA is for universities and funders to mandate OA, and they are at last beginning to do so. But universities and funders can (and hence should) only mandate gratis OA, not libre OA. All peer-reviewed journal article authors are "give-away authors": They want their work to be freely accessible online. But most do not want their texts themselves (as opposed to just their findings) to be re-used and re-mixed as if they were data, software, or disney cartoons. Author-sanctioned re-use rights can come after we have reached 100% gratis OA; needlessly insisting on them pre-emptively only hampers progress toward reaching 100% OA itself. (See: "The Giveaway/NonGiveaway Distinction")".

(2) Two Ways to Reach 100% OA: The Golden Road and the Green Road: There are two roads to 100% OA, the "golden road" of authors publishing in OA journals and the "green road" of authors publishing in conventional journals but also self-archiving their articles in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) to make them OA. (See: "OA Publishing is OA, but OA is Not OA Publishing").

The green/gold distinction matters even more than the gratis/libre distinction, because Green OA can be mandated by universities and funders, whereas gold OA cannot. Moreover, most journals already have a green (63%) or pale-green (32%) policy on author OA self-archiving, whereas only about 15% of journals are gold OA journals, and the rest cannot be mandated by universities and funders to convert. Universal green OA self-archiving mandates may eventually induce publishers to convert to gold, but they cannot do so if we do not first adopt the green mandates. "Gold Fever" -- treating OA as if it just meant gold OA -- is the single most common error made by commentators on OA (whether proponents or opponents). (See: "Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA").

(3) Two Ways Not to Try to Mandate OA: Too Strong and Too Weak: Gideon Burton is a proponent of a green OA mandate at his own university (Brigham Young University, BYU), and this is very timely, valuable, and welcome. But in advocating the Harvard mandate model -- which is not just a mandate to provide green, gratis OA by depositing articles in the institutional repository, but a requirement for authors to successfully negotiate with their publishers the retention of certain re-use rights -- Gideon is advocating a mandate that is both stronger and weaker than necessary. Not only does such a nonoptimal mandate model make it less likely that a consensus will be successfully reached on adopting an OA mandate at all (has BYU adopted this OA mandate?) but it also makes full author compliance uncertain even if a consensus on adoption is successfully achieved. (See: "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?")

The reason the Harvard mandate model is too strong is that it requires more than just self-archiving in the university's IR: It requires successful rights renegotiation by each author, with each publisher. But since only Harvard authors are subject to the mandate, and not their publishers, the successful outcome of such a negotiation cannot be guaranteed. So the Harvard mandate allows authors to opt out -- which in turn weakens it into something less than a mandate, as authors need not comply. The mandate is too strong, in that it demands more than necessary, which in turn makes it necessary to allow opt-out, weakening it more than necessary. And the mandate is also needlesly weak in that it fails to require immediate deposit, without opt-out, irrespective of the success or failure of rights renegotiations. On the Harvard model, if any author elects to opt out of rights renegotiation, he need not deposit at all.

And yet a mandate to deposit the author's final, peer-reviewed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, regardless of whether rights have or have not been successfully renegotiated, can provide immediate OA to at least 63% of deposits (as noted above, because 63% of journals are already green on author OA self-archiving) and immediate "Almost-OA" for the remaining 37%

(thanks to the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button, whereby any user webwide who reaches any deposit to which access is closed rather than open -- because the publisher has vetoed or embargoed OA to the deposit -- can, with just one click, request a single copy for personal research use, and the author can in turn, likewise with just one click, authorize the immediate automatic emailing of that single copy to the requester by the IR software).

"Almost OA" can tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo period -- but only if immediate deposit is mandated, without opt-out. The Harvard model does not mandate immediate deposit, without opt-out. Most Harvard authors may have the clout and the gumption to successfully negotiate rights retention anyway, but it is far from clear that all, most or even many authors at other universities worldwide would have Harvard-authors' clout or gumption. So not only are many likely to opt out of such an opt-out mandate, but they and their institutions are hence far less likely to opt for adopting such a needlessly strong (and weak) mandate in the first place.

So I suggest that BYU (and all other universities -- and funders too) opt for the optimal green gratis OA mandate -- Immediate Deposit (without Opt-Out) plus Optional Access-Setting (as OA or Closed Access plus the "Almost-OA" Button). (I call this mandate the IDOA mandate and Peter Suber calls it the DDR (Dual Deposit Release) mandate.) If a stronger mandate can successfully achieve consensus on adoption, then by all means adopt that! But on no account delay or imperil achieving successful consensus on adopting a mandate at all, by insisting on a needlessly stronger mandate -- and on no account needlessly weaken the mandate by allowing opt-out from deposit itself. The devil is indeed in these seemingly minor details. (See: "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Definition of Open Access at 11:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, December 7. 2008

Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?

SUMMARY: Which Green OA Mandate should an institution adopt?
    ID/OA: The Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting (ID/OA) mandate immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author's choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher (with no guarantee of a successful outcome). The other alternative candidate mandates are:
    ID/IA: The Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate is stronger than ID/OA. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out or waiver for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all -- i.e., it is weaker than ID/OA. Hence not one of the existing mandates to date is ID/IA.)
    ID/DA: The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow access embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But an Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access (ID/DA) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simply identical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that's just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consensus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)
    DD/DA: Next there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself may be delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, DD/DA is in fact needlessly weaker than ID/OA, because it arbitrarily loses the 37% Almost-OA that authors can provide semi-automatically via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses. (DD/DA further risks needlessly losing a lot of the 63% OA as well, by not requiring immediate deposit in any case.)
    Author Licensing Mandate ("author addendum", "rights reservation"): Last, and almost as strong as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate is a negotiated author-licensing mandate ("author addendum"). But how can such a mandate reach consensus on adoption and compliance with authors who are concerned that it would put their papers at risk of not being accepted by their journal of choice whenever the licensing negotiation fails? As a consequence, there exist no ID/IA mandates either, only ID/IA with an optional author-opt-out (waiver) (as in Princeton's mandate) -- which again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or opt-out, and is hence needlessly weaker than ID/OA (if a mandate with waiver/opt-out is indeed a mandate at all! This has been remedied in Harvard's mandate, which adds copyright reservation [with a waiver option] with ID/OA [with no waiver option]).
    It is because of this logic and these pragmatics that ID/OA is the default baseline mandate: Anything weaker than ID/OA is gratuitously weaker than necessary (and generates less OA than ID/OA). Anything stronger (such as ID/IA without opt-out, or mandatory licensing without opt-out) is more than welcome, if an institution can successfully reach consensus on adoption and compliance. But no institution (or funder) has yet managed that, hence holding out for an over-strong mandate leads to the adoption of no mandate at all. (And designate deposit as the sole means of submitting refereed publications for performance evaluation.)

The following are replies to some queries I received about Elsevier's Authors' Rights Policy on Green OA Self-Archiving:

Q: "The Elsevier Authors' Rights policy states that authors may...
'Post a personal manuscript version of the article on the author's personal or institutional website or server... This means an author can update a personal manuscript version (e.g., in Word or TeX format) of the article to reflect changes made during the peer-review process. Note [that] such posting may not be for commercial purposes... and may not be to any external, third-party website.'
"Does this not exclude posting to a repository? And if so, can Elsevier still qualify for Green status given such a restriction?"
The Green OA author-rights policy of Elsevier (and of many other Green publishers) explicitly excludes posting to a 3rd-party repository (in order to avoid sanctioning free-riding from rival publishers). The author's own institutional repository, in contrast, is of course simply an institutional website/server.

And that is just fine for OA -- in fact, better than fine, for the following reasons:

All Open Access repositories -- whether institutional or institution-external -- are interoperable, because they comply with the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. So if you deposit your full-text in any one of them, it is functionally as if you had deposited it in any or all of them, because central harvesters (such as OAIster and Elsevier's own Scirus) can and do harvest the metadata from all those repositories, and then provide a search interface that collects the links to all the distributed repository contents into one searchable global OA repository (or several, by subject, or nation, or funder, or what-have-you) -- just as Google and Google Scholar likewise do.

So not only does Elsevier's Green author-self-archiving policy acknowledge the right of every single Elsevier author to make (the author's refereed final draft of) every single one of his Elsevier articles OA, but it helps correct an extremely counterproductive and ill-thought-out -- though well-intentioned -- bug in many of the current OA self-archiving funder-mandates, in which direct central deposit (in PubMed Central) is mandated, needlesly, instead of direct institutional deposit (which can be followed by central metadata-harvesting or automatic SWORD-based export to PubMed Central).

It is quite natural to ask: "If all repositories are interoperable, what difference does it make whether mandates specify central self-archiving or institutional self-archiving?"

To understand the reply, one must first clearly apprehend that:

-- not all research is in one field
-- not all research is funded by any given funder
-- not all research is funded at all
-- all research originates from institutions
-- yet most institutions have not yet mandated self-archiving

As all research originates from a university or other research institution, institutions are the universal providers of all refereed research output. Hence, to systematically ensure that all refereed research -- from all institutions, in all fields, whether funded or unfunded -- is self-archived, it is essential that all self-archiving mandates -- whether from institutions of funders -- be convergent and mutually reinforcing, rather than divergent and competitive.

In other words, both funders and institutions need to mandate self-archiving in the author's own institutional repository. That way funder and institutional mandates reinforce one another: For example, NIH's mandate, which technically applies only to NIH-funded biomedical research, would vastly increase its scope if it stipulated institutional deposit; that would immediately extend the reach of the NIH mandate to all institutions receiving NIH funding, thereby encouraging each of them to adopt institutional mandates of their own to cover all their research output, and not just the NIH-funded subset. And it would of course also encourage universities to create institutional repositories, if they have not done so already. (Institutions -- already quite obsessively involved in preparing and vetting their research grant proposals, are also the natural ones to monitor and ensure compliance with the funder's deposit mandate as part of the grant's fulfillment conditions, and especially if they have a institutional deposit mandate of their own. And again, one convergent deposit and locus -- institutional -- is enough for an author; the rest can be handled by automatic harvesting or exportation.)

Nothing whatsoever is lost with convergent mandates: NIH can still harvest all of its funded research into PubMed Central; so can any other harvesters, into their own collections. (And import/export can also be done automatically, via the SWORD protocol.) There is absolutely no need for -- and many reasons against -- authors depositing directly in PubMed Central or any other central collection: Not only does that fail to encourage and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates for all the rest of each institution's (non-NIH) research output, but, apart from creating needless confusion and ambiguity about locus of deposit, it even puts authors at (perceived) risk of having to do multiple deposits in order to fulfill both funder and institutional mandates.

(Here too, the risk is perceived rather than real, because the SWORD protocol can of course transfer contents in both directions, whereas the real problem is inducing the adoption of mandates from both funders and institutions, and particularly from the universal providers, the institutions: It is precisely there that collaborative, convergent mandates from funders are a great help whereas divergent, competitive mandates are a gratuitous hindrance.)

So some of the funder mandates to date, welcome though they were and are, have failed to think things through (and failed to fully understand IRs, and OAI-interoperability and OA itself) in needlessly mandating direct central deposit. (That's rather like requiring providers to deposit directly in google, instead of depositing on their own distributed websites, from which google can then harvest.)

This inadvertent error can and will still be corrected, of course, but the correction needs to happen sooner rather than later, because meanwhile divergent funder mandates are slowing the growth of the potential institutional mandates that represent the real lion's share of global research output across all disciplines (and research access and impact continues to be needlessly lost).

NIH has so far been unresponsive about reconsidering its unnecessary and counterproductive requirement to deposit directly in PubMed Central (and a number of CopyCat funders elsewhere have been simply aping NIH, equally unreflectively). The work of those who are trying to create a systematic synergy that will result in the rapid global growth of OA mandates by the sleeping giant (the world's universities and research institutions), is thereby made more difficult than necessary -- but here, Green publishers' restrictions on depositing in 3rd-party central repositories may prove to be a serendipitous aid in converging on convergent deposit mandates and practices. Q: "Having made the case for Immediate Deposit/Optional Access-setting (ID/OA), it's not clear how you can be so complacent about the Optional Access-setting part. Surely in order to achieve the goal of genuine open access, articles must not only be deposited immediately, but also made freely available. Now clearly, the weaker the mandate, the more likely is its adoption; this is a matter of tactics. But what if all institutions adopt ID/OA, but then do not Open Access on the deposits? Has anything been gained? (Perhaps you’d reply yes, because one has to win the first battle before being free to fight the second?)"
(1) I am not at all worried about the (37% of) articles that might, under the ID/OA mandate, be deposited as Closed Access (hence not OA but only "Almost-OA," thanks to the repositories' semi-automatic, almost-instantaneous, "email eprint request" button).

I have been at this for over a decade and a half now, and for that decade and a half, we have not had the at-least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA that we could have had, if we had adopted ID/OA mandates. Instead, all we had is what we have now: the <15% of all articles that are being self-archived spontaneously (unmandated), plus the even smaller percentage of all articles that are being published in Gold OA journals.

    (2) So I am unworried about universal ID/OA mandates, but definitely not unworried about continuing to do without them, just waiting instead in the hope that (a) either spontaneous self-archiving will somehow increase to 100% on its own, without the need of any mandate at all, (b) or that agreement on even stronger OA mandates will somehow be reached, or (c) that all publishers will somehow agree to convert to Gold OA publishing!

    (3) Just continuing to advocate and wait for (a) or (c) is, I hope all will agree, not a sensible strategy after all these years.

    (4) As for stronger mandates, consider the options: In place of the ID/OA (Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting) mandate -- which immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author's choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher -- we have the following alternative candidates:

(4a) There is the stronger Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all -- hence weaker than ID/OA. Not one of the existing 58 mandates is ID/IA.)

(4b) The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But such an ID/DA (Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simply identical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that's just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consenus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)

(4c) Then there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself is delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, that is in fact weaker than ID/OA, because it loses the 37% Almost-OA accessible via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses.

(4d) Last, and almost as strong as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate (4a) is a negotiated author licensing mandate ("author addendum"). But how can such a mandate (for authors to use the author addendum) reach consensus on adoption with authors who are concerned that it would put their papers at risk of not being accepted by their journal of choice whenever the licensing negotiation fails (because the publisher declines)? As a consequence, there exist no ID/IA mandates either, only ID/IA with an optional author-opt-out (as in Princeton's mandate) -- which again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or opt-out, and is hence weaker than ID/OA (if a mandate with an opt-out is indeed a mandate at all! This has been remedied in Harvard's mandate, which adds copyright reservation (with a waiver option) with ID/OA (with no waiver option)).

It is because of this logic and these pragmatics that ID/OA is the default baseline mandate: Anything weaker than ID/OA is gratuitously weaker than necessary (and generates less OA than ID/OA). Anything stronger (such as ID/IA without opt-out, or mandatory licensing without opt-out) is more than welcome, if an institution can successfully reach consensus and compliance -- but no institution (or funder) has yet managed that, hence holding out for an over-strong mandate leads to the adoption of no mandate at all.

The most common mandates are DD/DA, with and without embargo caps, but those are all weaker than ID/OA, and hence should be upgraded to at least ID/DA, whether with or without an embargo cap.

Licensing mandates are rarer, but as they have opt-outs, they too are weaker than ID/OA. Again, however, they can easily be upgraded to add ID/OA (without opt-out) alongside the "mandatory" licensing (with opt-out), and then they are fine.

So the reason we can all be relaxed and satisfied with ID/OA is that it is the default baseline for all OA mandates. Where a stronger one can be agreed, it should of course be adopted. And it makes no sense to arbitrarily adopt a still weaker mandate -- DD/DA or author-licensing with opt-out -- since upgrading either of those to ID/OA is free of objections, either in institutional copyright worries or in author worries about journal choice. But on no account should no mandate at all be adopted, in favor of an unending quest for a mandate stronger than ID/OA: Adopt ID/OA now, and then try to agree on a stronger upgrade thereafter (and meanwhile, designate deposit as the sole means of submitting refereed publications for performance evaluation).

(Note that I did not list a universal conversion to Gold OA publishing on the part of publishers as being among the mandate options, because, on the one hand, institutions and funders can only impose mandates on their own employees and fundees; not on publishers. And, on the other hand, continuing to sit around trying to persuade publishers to convert to Gold OA of their own accord is likely to extend our waiting time even closer to the time of the heat death of the universe than continuing to sit around trying to reach agreement on stronger mandates, instead of just going ahead and adopting ID/OA right now.)Q: "How do you know that the university servers/websites in which Elsevier allow authors will be OAI compliant?"
Because just about all Institutional Repositories today are OAI-compliant! OAI-interoperability was part of the rationale for the institutional repository movement -- a movement that was itself set in motion by the OA movement (in 2000) but has alas since moved off in other directions of its own (often vague and aimless ones, not carefully thought through in advance).
Q: "Why do you think Elsevier has adopted a Green policy on self-archiving?"
I cannot second-guess the motivation. Elsevier is a commercial company. Unlike (some) Learned Society and University publishers, its primary allegiance is not to science but to the bottom line.

My guess is that Elsevier realized that OA is inevitable, and unstoppable. So they have settled on just trying to slow it down, if possible. At first, I think Elsevier's Green policy on author self-archiving was based on three calculations: (1) that a Green policy on author self-archiving might quiet the growing clamour for OA, perhaps even (2) reducing the widespread hostility against Elsevier for their aggressive pricing policies, while (3) not many individual authors would be likely to actually go ahead and self-archive. If this was indeed Elsevier's reasoning, then they were right on all three counts.

But what Elsevier did not reckon on was the emergence and growth of the movement for institutional and funder self-archiving mandates. (While it was adopting a Green Policy on author self-archiving, in order to satisfy the author demand for OA, Elsevier was also lobbying -- vigorously, but in the end unsuccessfully -- against Green OA self-archiving mandates. (Elsevier, along with the American Chemical Society [the non-Green publisher giving Learned Societies such a bad name] had been among the prime supporters of the notorious "prism"/pitbull anti-OA coalition that backfired so badly when exposed in Nature.] So I am quite ready to forgive and forget Elsevier's failed attempt to lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates; their Green policy on author self-archiving (though it too was not necessary for Green OA to prevail in the end) has nevertheless been more helpful than the lobbying has been harmful, and historians will make due note of that.

Finally, before anyone asks (again), my own view of the way things will go in the future for publishing (about which I no longer speculate publicly, because speculation and counterspeculation on this question has been for far too long yet another distraction from practical action toward providing immediate Green OA) is described here, here, and here. Speculations aside, all empirical evidence to date has been that conventional subscription-based publishing and Green OA self-archiving can co-exist peacefully, even in fields where Green OA self-archiving has already reached 100% years ago.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Posted by Stevan Harnad in Self-Archiving Mandates at 01:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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