Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: The reason the much stronger author licensing mandate has a far higher consensus/compliance hurdle to surmount is that it raises the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal non-acceptance.
    In contrast, the weaker author deposit mandate (ID/OA) faces only author inertia about doing the few extra keystrokes required. Author surveys and outcome studies on actual practice show that the vast majority of authors will comply with a deposit mandate, willingly.
    Hence it makes no sense at all to delay still further the certainty of immediately providing at least 63% OA + 37% almost-OA (by mandating immediate-deposit), to keep on waiting instead for a much stronger mandate (mandatory author licensing) for which achieving consensus on adoption is far more difficult and author willingness is far less certain. There can be (and are) stronger deposit mandates than ID/OA, but ID/OA is the default option, the mandate for which consensus on adoption is most easily achieved because -- unlike the stronger mandates -- it effectively moots all copyright concerns.
    If success can be achieved on adopting a stronger mandate, then by all means adopt the stronger mandate (such as Immediate-Deposit/Immediate-OA, or Immediate-Deposit plus a 6-month cap on embargoes, or Immediate-Deposit [without Opt-Out] plus Author Licensing with Opt-Out).
    But on no account delay the adoption of the weaker, certain mandate that is already within immediate reach, in order to hold out for a stronger, uncertain mandate that is not! It is fine to prefer to have a stronger benefit rather than a weaker one if both are within reach and you have a choice; but it is certainly not fine to fail to grasp a weaker benefit that is already fully within reach in order to hold out for a stronger but much less certain benefit that is not yet within reach. They are not mutually exclusive: Weaker will lead to Stronger.

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On 2-Dec-08, at 7:08 AM, Leo Waaijers [LW] wrote (in SPARC-OAForum):

LW: "this is about a comparison between a ‘mandate to self-archive’ and the usage of a ‘licence to publish’."

For comparability, it needs to be a comparison between a 'mandate to self-archive' and a 'mandate to successfully adopt a license to publish'. Neither self-archiving nor licensing is being done spontaneously by authors, hence we are talking about mandates in both cases, and the question is (1) for which mandate is it more likely that consensus on adoption will be achieved at all, and (2) what is the likelihood of compliance, if mandated? 

Moreover, both questions have to be considered separately for (i) funder mandates and for (ii) institutional mandates, as funders and institutions have different prerogatives. 

(Institutional consortia on mandates are yet another category, though at a time when consensus on adopting even individual institutional mandates is still hard to achieve, reaching successful consortial consensus on mandates is all the more difficult; the analogy with consortial consensus on subscription licensing is, I think, highly misleading: Subscription licensing consortia are based on strong shared interests on the part of institutional libraries, and no countervailing interests on the part of institutional authors; author licensing mandates, in contrast, involve the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance.) 

Hence the reason an author licensing mandate has a much higher consensus/compliance hurdle to surmount is that it raises the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance, whereas author deposit mandates face only the inertia about doing the few extra author keystrokes required -- and both surveys and outcome studies on actual practice show that most authors will comply with a deposit mandate, willingly.

LW: "Both tools only apply to the domain of toll-gated publishing where they try to improve the accessibility of publications. It is the copyright owner who decides about the conditions of access and reuse and the toll-gated domain is characterized by many access limitations and conditions that only may be lifted after payment. However, there is an important legal exception to that model; the fair use clause states that these access limitations do not apply for a personal copy."

Digital documents that are made freely accessible on the web can be accessed, read on-screen, downloaded, stored, printed-off, and data-crunched by any individual user. (They can also be harvested by harvesters like google.) That is the use that access-denied researchers urgently need most today, and that is all the use that ("Gratis") OA need provide today. (Moreover, the best chance of eventually fulfilling the stronger demands of "Libre" OA, and even an eventual transition to universal Gold OA publishing, is first to mandate and provide universal Green Gratis OA.)

LW: "In the self-archiving approach the author assigns the full copyrights to a publisher and subsequently utilises the fair use clause to facilitate access to the publication. The licence to publish leaves the copyrights with the author, gives the publisher the right of first publishing and adopts an embargo period for other publishing modes."

This is incorrect, I am afraid. In the self-archiving approach, the author makes the article freely accessible online, and the rest comes with the territory. As I said, this is done with the official blessing of the journal for 63% of journals, providing full OA for all those articles. For the remaining 37%, the author has the option of intially depositing them in Closed Access rather than Open Access (but depositing them immediately in nonetheless) and letting users rely on the "email eprint request" button during any publisher embargo. This is "Almost OA" -- and once immediate-deposit mandates are universally adopted, the resultant universal deposit itself will -- over and above immediately providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA -- soon usher in 100% OA as a matter of natural course. All along, the only real hurdle has been keystrokes; hence all we really need to surmount that hurdle is universal keystroke mandates.

It makes no sense at all to keep delaying still further the certainty of immediately providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA (by mandating immediate-deposit) -- in order to keep trying instead for a much stronger mandate (mandatory author licensing) on which a consensus for adoption is much harder to achieve (because of the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance) and author compliance much more uncertain -- just because of the interim possibility of 37% almost-OA owing to publisher embargoes with an immediate-deposit mandate. Indeed, even the successful universal adoption of a "licence to publish [that] leaves the copyrights with the author, gives the publisher the right of first publishing and adopts an embargo period for other publishing modes" would leave users worse off during the embargo than universal ID/OA.

Providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA immediately is already fully within reach and long overdue. We should not delay grasping it for one minute longer, in quest of something stronger yet not now within rich and far less certain.

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

Note that there can be -- and are -- stronger self-archiving mandates than ID/OA, but that ID/OA is the default option, the mandate for which consensus on adoption is most easily achieved and all legal concerns are completely mooted. If success can be achieved on adopting a stronger mandate -- such as Immediate-Deposit/Immediate-OA, or Immediate-Deposit plus a 6-month cap on embargoes, or Immediate-Deposit [without Opt-Out] plus Author Licensing with Opt-Out -- then by all means adopt the stronger mandate. But on no account delay the adoption of the weaker, certain mandate that is already within immediate reach, in order to hold out for a stronger, uncertain mandate that is not!

LW: "For a fair comparison of the two tools, let’s assume that in both cases an institutional mandate applies."

I am afraid that that is not at all a realistic comparison, because it simply assumes (a) that the probability of success in achieving consensus on adopting the mandate in the first place is equally probable for both mandates, the weaker and the stronger one, and that (b) compliance is equally probable in both cases, weaker and stronger. Neither of these assumptions is correct because of the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance. Neither handicap is shared by the weakest, easiest and surest ID/OA mandate, which is only about keystrokes, and already fully within all institutions' immediate rich.

LW: "When it comes to mandating self-archiving, the only party involved is the author. That makes such a mandate relatively easy of course. But it also has a high price. Open Access remains to the publisher’s discretion."

The weakest mandate is always relatively the "easiest" (to agree on, adopt, and comply with) but it is also infinitely preferable to no mandate at all, with continued delay and debate, instead, about stronger mandates. Let the weaker mandates be adopted universally, now, and then let's debate about strengthening them!

What the ID/OA guarantees, immediately, is 63% OA + 37% almost-OA. Every day we keep delaying and speculating about stronger mandates, less certain of consensus and compliance, we are simply losing yet another day of 63% OA + 37% almost-OA, needlessly, after already having allowed years and years of needless delay, and needlessly lost research access, progress and impact.

LW: "Currently that’s a complete mess. Publishers’ policies vary widely when it comes to permitting access to different versions (pre-print, post-print, pdf) for different uses (author’s web site, institutional window, educational usage, commercial usage) after different embargo periods. In the meantime for personal copies an end user may use the request button in the same way as she uses the SFX button of her library. (Why not combine the two buttons?). Under the circumstances the request button is a smart invention. Kudos for you!"

    (1) The variation in publisher policy is completely described and covered by 63% OA + 37% almost-OA for OA's target content: the peer-reviewed postprint. (For the preprint, the figure is even higher; and the publisher's proprietary PDF is completely irrelevant.)

    (2) The SFX button is largely for licensed (i.e., toll-gated) content for institution-internal users. The "email eprint request" ("Almost-OA") Button, in contrast, is for all IR-deposited content, worldwide, for any user. There is a world of difference there (and again, the institutional-library subscription-licensing perspective is profoundly misleading, just as it is with the analogy of multi-institution subscription-licensing consortia.)

Nevertheless, yes, it would be fine to add to SFX all links to Closed Access IR deposits and their "email eprint request" buttons (if Ex Libris is interested). The objective, after all, is to interlink all citations. But to make the exercise worthwhile, we must first mandate deposit...

LW: "When an institution considers mandating the usage of the licence to publish they should involve the publishers as well. It would be unfair just to issue such a mandate and leave the authors to the mercy of the publishers."

    (a) Institutions' employees, and funders' fundees can be mandated, but publishers cannot: They are not within employers' and funders remits.

    (b) A big funding agency like NIH might be in a position to summon publishers to the table, and to apply their clout for the research they fund, but individual universities certainly cannot.

    (c) Institutional library consortia have clout on subscription licensing agreements, but author licensing is another matter, and involves another party: authors.

    (d) Meanwhile, authors would indeed be left "to the mercy of their publishers"  (because of the problem of authors' free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance) if individual institutions adopted the stronger author licensing mandates without prior successful consortial negotiations.

    (e) So let's go ahead and adopt the weaker ID/OA mandate that is already within universal reach, at no risk to the author; and let's pursue stronger mandates thereafter, rather than needlessly continuing to delay OA still longer, this late in the day, in order to keep holding out for a possible future stronger-mandate.

LW: "It’s my guess that negotiations with publishers may not be prospectless. A common interest, not only for authors and their institutions but also for (some) publishers is to raise their social and academic profile and clear the operational situation. In order to have a stronger position institutions should combine their efforts in (national) consortiums. By the way, I allready know of several occasions where a publisher (including Elsevier and even Wiley) has published articles without the copyrights being transferred to them." 

    (i) It is not at all evident that the interests in and benefits from OA to authors, institutions and funders are matched by corresponding interests and benefits to publishers!

    (ii) Yes, by all means, if such consortial negotiations are "not prospectless," pursue them: But not at the price of failing to grasp what is already immediately within reach, which is individual institutional (and funder) Green OA self-archiving mandates.

    (iii) (The occasional individual exception to copyright transfer that has been accommodated for decades by publishers is not the same as a blanket acceptance of universal copyright retention.)

LW: "To conclude. Indeed, in the toll gated domain I prefer mandating the usage of the licence to publish over mandating of self-archiving. The first option involves a higher commitment of the institutions which makes it tougher of course. But the operational result is much clearer and better sustainable."

It is fine to prefer to have a stronger benefit rather than a weaker one if both are within reach and you have a choice; but it is certainly not fine to fail to grasp a weaker benefit that is already fully within reach in order to keep holding out for a stronger but much less certain benefit that is not yet within reach -- especially when they are not mutually exclusive: Weaker will lead to Stronger.

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

LW: "Thanks for your reply. You have a point that there are 58 self-archiving mandates and no licence-to-publish mandates so far. I will allow for that in the future."

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Leo Waaijers recommends (1) that authors should retain copyright, (2) that institutions should use metrics richer than just the journal impact factor to assess their researchers, and (3) and that "supra-institutional organisations" (such as the European University Association) should "take the necessary initiative" for "[s]witching to Open Access" [OA] from the "traditional subscription model."
    It is good for authors to retain copyright whenever they can, but it is not necessary -- and hence gratuitously raises the bar -- if stipulated as a precondition for providing or mandating OA: The only thing necessary for providing or mandating OA is that authors should deposit in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) (and that their institutions and funders should mandate that they deposit) the final drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles, which 63% of journals already formally endorse making OA immediately upon acceptance. (The remaining 37% can be provisionally deposited in Closed Access, likewise immediately upon acceptance, with the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button tiding over all user needs during any publisher embargo, during which the author can also try to negotiate copyright retention with the publisher, if he wishes. But on no account should copyright retention be required as a precondition, either for depositing or for adopting an institutional mandate to deposit.)
    It is good to use richer metrics, but these will not generate OA; rather, OA will generate richer metrics.
    Institutions can mandate deposit in IRs, and deposits can be made OA, but this is Green OA self-archiving of articles published in "traditional subscription model" journals; it is not Gold OA journal publishing. Institutions and funders cannot mandate that publishers switch to Gold OA publishing, nor should they try to mandate that authors switch to Gold OA journals just for the sake of providing OA, since OA can already be provided by mandating Green OA self-archiving, without constraining authors' choice of journal.

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In Ariadne 57, October 2008, Leo Waaijers has written an article on "What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access."

Since Open Access (OA) itself needs no "easing," I assume that what Leo meant was something more like: "What Institutions Can Do to Facilitate a Transition to Open Access."

In his article, Leo made three recommendations, which I discuss in an exchange below:

On 1-Dec-08 Leo Waaijers wrote in SPARC-OAForum:

LW:
Dear Stevan,

Most authors do not self-archive their publications spontaneously. So they must be mandated. But, apart from a few, the mandators do not mandate the authors. In a world according to you they themselves must be supermandated. And so on. This approach only works if somewhere in the mandating hierarchy there is an enlightened echelon that is able and willing to start the mandating cascade.

Leo, you are quite right that in order to induce authors to provide Green OA, their institutions and funders must be induced to mandate that they provide Green OA, as far too few authors will otherwise do the few requisite keystrokes. Authors can be mandated by their institutions and funders to do the keystrokes, but institutions and funders cannot be mandated to mandate (except possibly by their governments and tax-payers) -- so how to persuade them to mandate the keystrokes?

The means that I (and others) have been using to persuade institutions and funders to mandate that their authors provide OA have been these:

(1) Benefits of Providing OA: Gather empirical evidence to demonstrate the benefits of OA to the author, institution, and funder, as well as to research progress and to tax-paying society (increased accessibility, downloads, uptake, citations, hence increased research impact, productivity, and progress, increased visibility and showcasing for institutions, richer and more valid research performance evaluation for research assessors, enhanced and more visible metrics of research impact -- and its rewards -- for authors, etc.).

(2) Means of Providing OA: Provide free software for making deposit quick, easy, reliable, functional, and cheap, for authors as well as their institutions. Provide OA metrics to monitor, measure and reward OA and OA-generated research impact.

(3) Evidence that Mandating (and Only Mandating) Works: Gather empirical data to demonstrate that (a) the vast majority of authors (> 80%) say, when surveyed, that they would deposit willingly if it were mandated by their institutions and/or funders, but that they will not deposit if it is not mandated (< 15%) (Alma Swan's surveys); and that (b) most authors (> 80%) actually do what they said in surveys they would do (deposit if it is mandated [> 80%] and not deposit if it is not mandated [< 15%] even if they are given incentives and assistance [< 30%] (Arthur Sale's Studies).

(4) Information about OA: Information and evidence about the means and the benefits of providing OA has to be widely and relentlessly provided, in conferences, publications, emails, discussion lists, and blogs. At the same time, misunderstanding and misinformation have to be unflaggingly corrected (over and over and over!)

There are already 58 institutional and funder Green OA mandates adopted and at least 11 proposed and under consideration. So these efforts are not entirely falling on deaf ears (although I agree that 58 out of perhaps 10,000 research institutions [plus funders] worldwide -- or even the top 4000 -- is still a sign of some hearing impairment! But the signs are that audition is improving...)

LW:
To create such a cascade one needs water (i.e. arguments) and a steep rocky slope (i.e. good conditions). The pro OA arguments do not seem to be the problem. In all my discussions over the last decade authors, managers and librarians alike agreed that the future should be OA also thanks to you, our driving OA archivangelist.

But alas it is not agreement that we need, but mandates (and keystrokes)! And now -- not in some indeterminate future.

LW:
So, it must be the conditions that are lacking. This awareness brought me to the writing of an article about these failing conditions. Only if we are able to create better conditions mandates will emerge and be successful on a broad scale. A fortiori, this will make mandates superfluous.

I am one of the many admirers of your splendid efforts and successes in the Netherlands, with SURF/DARE, "Cream of Science," and much else.

But I am afraid I don't see how the three recommendations made in the Ariadne article will make mandates emerge (nor how they make mandates superfluous). On the contrary, I see the challenge of making the three recommendations prevail to be far, far greater than the challenge of getting Green OA self-archiving mandates to be adopted. Let me explain:

LW Recommendation 1: Transferring the copyright in a publication has become a relic of the past; nowadays a “licence to publish” is sufficient. The author retains the copyrights. Institutions should make the use of such a licence part of their institutional policy.

Persuading authors to retain copyright is a far bigger task than just persuading them to deposit (keystrokes): It makes them worry about what happens if their publisher does not agree to copyright retention, and then their article fails to be published in their journal of choice.

Doing the c. 6-minutes-worth of keystrokes that it takes to deposit an article -- even if authors can't be bothered to do those keystrokes until/unless it is mandated -- is at least a sure thing, and that's the end of it.

In contrast, it is not at all clear how long copyright retention negotiations will take in each case, nor whether they will succeed in each case.

Moreover, just as most authors are not doing the deposit keystrokes spontaneously, but only if mandated, they are not doing the copyright retention negotiations either: Do you really think it would be easier to mandate doing copyright retention than to mandate a few keystrokes?

(Harvard has adopted a kind of a copyright-retention mandate, though it has an opt-out, so it is not clear whether it is quite a mandate -- nor is it clear how well it will succeed, either in terms of compliance or in terms of negotiation [nor whether it is even thinkable for universities with authors that have less clout with their publishers than Harvard's]. But there is a simple way to have the best of both worlds by upgrading the Harvard copyright-retention mandate with opt-out into a deposit mandate without opt-out that is certain to succeed, and generalizable to all universities -- the Harvards as well as the Have-Nots. To instead require successful copyright renegotiation as a precondition for providing OA and for mandating OA, however, would be needlessly and arbitrarily to raise the bar far higher than it need be -- and already is -- for persuading institutions and funders to mandate deposit at all: "Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause.")

LW Recommendation 2: The classic impact factor for a journal is not a good yardstick for the prestige of an author. Modern digital technology makes it possible to tailor the measurement system to the author. Institutions should, when assessing scientists and scholars, switch to this type of measurement and should also promote its further development.

This is certainly true, but how does using these potential new impact metrics generate OA or OA mandates, or make OA mandates superfluous? On the contrary, it is OA (and whatever successfully generates OA) that will generate these new metrics (which will, among other things, in turn serve to increase research impact, as well as making it more readily measurable and rewardable)!

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds. h

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance

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

LW Recommendation 3: The traditional subscription model for circulating publications is needlessly complex and expensive. Switching to Open Access, however, requires co-ordination that goes beyond the level of individual institutions. Supra-institutional organisations, for example the European University Association, should take the necessary initiative.

The European University Association has already taken the initiative to recommend that its 791 member universities in 46 countries should all mandate Green OA self-archiving! Now the individual universities need to be persuaded to follow that recommendation. The European Heads of Research Councils have made the same recommendation to their member research councils. (I am optimistic, because, for example, 6 of the 7 RCUK research funding councils have so far already followed the very first of these recommendations to mandate -- from the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology.) And the 28 universities that have already adopted Green OA self-archiving mandates show that institutional mandates are at last gathering momentum too.

But if it is already considerably harder to mandate author copyright-retention than it is to mandate author self-archiving in their institutional repositories (Green OA), it is surely yet another order of magnitude harder to mandate "Switching to Open Access" from the "traditional subscription model":

If authors are likely to resist having to renegotiate copyright with their journal of choice at the risk of not getting published in their journal of choice, just in order to provide OA, they are even more likely to resist having to publish in a Gold OA journal instead of in their journal of choice, just in order to provide OA -- especially as they need do neither: They need merely self-archive.

And journal publishers are likely to resist anyone trying to dictate their economic model to them. (Moreover, publishers' economic policies are beyond the bounds of what is within the university community's mandate to mandate!)

So mandating Green OA is still the fastest, surest, and simplest way to reach universal OA. Let us hope that the "enlightened echelon" of the institutional hierarchy will now set in motion the long overdue "mandating cascade."

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Comment on EU Green Paper:
"Copyright in the Knowledge Economy"
(Send your own comments here -- till Nov 30)

I am commenting only on the bearing of EC policy on one specific body of content: The 2.5 million articles per year published in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals in all fields of science and scholarship.

The authors of all these articles neither receive nor seek royalty or fees from access-tolls to their users or their users' institutions. These authors only seek that these research findings should be accessed and used as fully and widely and possible, to the benefit of research progress and applications, and hence to the benefit of the society that funds their research and their institutions.

Making this specific body of research accessible free for all on the Web ("Open Access") will maximise its usage and impact. It does not require a major or even minor reform in copyright law. All it requires is that the authors of these 2.5 million annual peer-reviewed research articles make them open access by depositing them in their own institution's/university's Repository. Sixty-three percent of journals already formally endorse depositing the author's final, revised, peer-reviewed draft in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, and immediately making that deposited draft accessible free for all.

For that 63% of articles, it should be evident that no copyright reform whatsoever is needed. What is needed is that the authors' institutions and funders mandate (require) that they deposit and make them Open Access immediately upon acceptance by those journals.

The remaining 37% of articles can also be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, but unless their publisher endorses making them immediately Open Access, the deposit has to be set initially as Closed Access (accessible only institution-internally, to the author and his employer).

It is here that legislation can help, although it is not certain that even that is necessary: A Europe-wide law requiring that publicly-funded research and research produced by employees of publicly funded universities must be made openly accessible will exert the requisite pressure on the remaining 37% journals so that they too should endorse that the deposited articles are immediately made Open Access rather than Closed Access.

Note that peer-reviewed research is fundamentally unlike books, textbooks, software, music, and videos. It is in its very essence author give-away content, written only to be used, applied and built-upon. Unlike the creators of the other kinds of content, all the authors of the annual 2.5 million peer-reviewed journal articles want them to be free to all would-be users.

Hence, whatever rationale there may be for changing copyright law for all the other kinds of digital content, in the case of the target content of the Open Access movement, no change is necessary other than a formal publisher endorsement of making the author's final draft freely accessible online.

Free online access provides for the following forms of usage: Being able to find online, link, view online, download, store, print-off (for individual use) and data-mine. These uses all come automatically all come automatically with free online access. Open Access content is also harvested by search engines like google.

But there are further uses, over and above these, that some fields of research feel they need, including modification and republication. It is likely that free online access will moot the need for copyright modification to guarantee these further uses, but there is no harm in trying to stipulate them formally in advance, as long as it is not treated as a prerequisite for Open Access, of for Open Access Mandates.

COPYRIGHT REFORM SHOULD NOT BE MADE A PRECONDITION FOR MANDATING OPEN ACCESS

Stevan Harnad

ABSTRACT: Free online access ("Open Access," OA) to all the articles published annually in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals , in all disciplines and all languages, is optimal and inevitable. It has, however, been delayed by misunderstandings about copyright. It has been wrongly thought that universities and research funding councils cannot mandate the immediate deposit of all their research article output in their OA repositories unless they can somehow change authors' copyright transfer contracts first. Unless institutional consensus can be quickly and successfully reached on adopting an OA deposit mandate that requires the author to contractually reserve the right to make the article OA immediately, the adoption of OA mandates should not be weakened by copyright reservation clauses from which authors can opt out (as in the Harvard University mandate) or by allowing deposit itself to be delayed for an embargo period (as in the EU mandate). Deposit should in all cases be mandated to take place immediately upon acceptance for publication. Over 60% of journals already endorse making the deposit immediately Open Access. For the rest, the deposit can be Closed Access for the time being, disclosing only its bibliographic metadata. The repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button can then allow users webwide to request, and authors to provide, an email eprint with just a few extra keystrokes for the Closed Access articles. This 60% OA and 40% "almost-OA" will fulfill worldwide research needs for now, faciilitate universal OA mandates, and usher in 100% OA soon thereafter, on the strength of OA itself and its manifest benefits alone. Copyright and publishing reform can then follow. Trying to make those reforms precede instead, as a contractual precondition, is both unnecessary and a great strategic mistake, delaying consensus on mandates or allowing delays or opt-outs, at a great continuing loss in research access, usage and impact.

Copyright Regulation in Europe

Optimizing Harvard's Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

Open Access and Open Data

Copyright retention is not a prerequisite for self-archiving

Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Unlike with OA's primary target, journal articles, the deposit of the full-texts of books in Open Access Repositories cannot be mandated, only encouraged. However, the deposit of book metadata + plus + reference-lists can and should be mandated. That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need most: a book citation index. ISI's Web of Science only covers citations of books by (indexed) journal articles, but book-based disciplines' biggest need is book-to-book citations. Citebase could provide that, once the book reference metadata are being deposited in the IRs too, rather than just article postprints. (Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to book citation count.) Analogues of "download" metrics for books are also potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank. In the Humanities it also matters for credit and impact how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books ("Demotic Metrics"). IRs can not only (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book metadata deposits, to add to their IR stats. IRs can also already harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts today, as a first step toward constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index. The Dublin humanities metrics conference was also concerned about other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts. Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and  web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources. We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.

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The deposit of the full-texts of book-chapters and monographs in Open Access Repositories should of course be encouraged wherever possible, but, unlike with journal articles, full-text book deposit itself cannot be mandated.

The most important additional thing that the OA movement should be singling out and emphasizing -- over and above the Immediate Deposit (IR) Mandate plus the email-eprint-request Button and the use of metrics to motivate mandates -- is the author deposit of all book metadata+plus+reference+lists in the author's OA Institutional Repository (IR). That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need the most.

This has been mentioned before, as a possibility and a desideratum for institutional (and funder) OA policy, but it is now crystal clear why it is so important (and so easy to implement).

By systematically ensuring the IR deposit of each book's bibliographic metadata plus its cited-works bibliography, institutions (and funders) are actually creating a book citation index. 

This became apparent (again) at the Dublin humanities metrics conference, when ISI's VP Jim Pringle repeated ISI 's (rather weak) response to the Humanities' need for a book citation index, pointing out that "ISI does cover citations of books -- by journal articles."

But that of course is anything but sufficient for book-based disciplines, whose concern is mainly about book-to-book citations! 

Yet that is precisely what can be harvested out of IRs (by, for example, Citebase, or a Citebase-like scientometric engine) --  if only the book reference metadata, too, are deposited in the IRs, rather than only article postprints. That immediately begins making the IR network into a unique and much-needed book-citation (distributed) database. (Moreover, Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to this.)

And there's more: Obviously OA IRs will not be able to get book download counts -- analogous to article download counts -- when the only thing deposited is the book's metadata and reference list. However, in his paper at this Dublin conference, Janus Linmans -- in cleaving to his age-old bibliometric measure of library book-holdings lists as the surrogate for book citation counts in his analyses -- inadvertently gave me another obvious idea, over and above the deposit and harvesting of book reference metadata:

Library holdings are just one, weak, indirect metric of book usage (and Google Book Collections already collects some of those data). But far better analogues of "downloads" for books are potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank, but eventually including conventional book vendors too (metrics do not end with web-based data):

The researchers from the Humanities stressed in Dublin that the book-to-book (and journal-to-book and book-to-journal) citation counts would be most welcome and useful, but in the Humanities even those do not tell the whole story, because it also matters for the credit and impact of a Humanities' researcher how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books too. (Let us call these non-academic metrics "Demotic Metrics.")

Well, starting with a systematic Amazon book-sales count, per book deposited in the IR  (and eventually extended to many book-vendors, online and conventional), the ball can be set in motion very easily. IRs can not only formally (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) systematically harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book items to add to their IR stats for each deposit.

And there's more: IRs can also harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts, already today, as a first approximation to constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index, even before the practice of depositing book metadata/reference has progressed far enough to provide useful data on its own: Whenever book metadata are deposited in an IR, the IR automatically does (i) an Amazon query (number of sales of this book) plus (ii) a Google-Books/Google-Scholar query (number of citations of this book).

These obvious and immediately feasible additions to an institutional OA mandate and to its IR software configuration and functionality would not only yield immediate useful and desirable metrics and motivate Humanists to become even more supportive of OA and metrics, but it would help set in motion practices that (yet again) are so obviously optimal and feasible for science and scholarship as to be inevitable. 

We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.

One further spin-off of the Dublin Metrics Conference was other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts! Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and  web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources.

In "Appearance and Reality," Bradley (1897/2002) wrote (of Ayer) that 'the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is wholly impossible ... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory.

Well, one might say the same of those who are skeptical about metrics: There are only two ways to measure the quality, importance or impact of a piece of work: Subjectively, by asking experts for their judgment (peer review: and then you have a polling metric!) or objectively, by counting objective data of various kinds. But of course counting and then declaring those counts "metrics" for some criterion or other, by fiat, is not enough. Those candidate metrics have to be validated against that criterion, either by showing that they correlate highly with the criterion, or that they correlate highly with an already validated correlate of the criterion. One natural criterion is expert judgment itself: peer review. Objective metrics can then be validated against peer review. Book citation metrics need to be added to the rich and growing battery of candidate metrics, and so do "demotic metrics."

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220, Trondheim, Norway.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J. W., Champion, T. and Harnad, S. (2006) Extending journal-based research impact assessment to book-based disciplines. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35.

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.

Harnad, S. (2008) Self-Archiving, Metrics and Mandates. Science Editor 31(2) 57-59

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista.

Fred Friend (JISC) wrote:

"Under your Plan B, what would stop publishers increasing the Closed Access embargo period to two years?"

The question is a good one, a natural one, and a pertinent one:

(1) "Plan B" is a contingency plan, in case the Conyers Bill should defeat the current NIH OA Policy (i.e., "Plan A").

(2) If the Conyers Bill were to pass, not only Plan A but all protection from publisher embargoes would be dead in the water (hence embargoes could in principle be made infinitely long).

(3) Plan B is accordingly designed to free the NIH Mandate from any dependence at all on publishers to decide when research (postprints) may be deposited.

(4) Plan B is to make all research postprints OA as soon as they can be, but to require that the actual deposit of all postprints in authors' Institutional Repositories be made immediately upon acceptance for publication, and to rely on almost-OA (via the semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button) for deposits that for any reason cannot be made OA immediately.

(5) With Immediate-Deposit mandated universally, "Almost-OA" (via the Button) serves research and public needs almost as well as OA during any embargo period.

(6) Universal Deposit mandates, plus the resulting enormous growth in usage and impact via OA and Almost-OA, will make it harder and harder for publishers to justify embargoes, while at the same time making embargoes virtually ineffectual:

(7) Hence embargoes will die their natural and well-deserved deaths once universal Deposit (Plan B) is mandated, by all research institutions and funders, worldwide, paving the way for full, immediate OA.

(8) It is far less clear whether Plan A [Delayed, Post-Embargo Deposit] can or will be universally adopted, by all research institutions and funders, worldwide -- nor whether, even if it were, it would ever lead to immediate-OA.

(9) Even with the Button, Delayed-Post-Embargo Mandates cannot provide immediate almost-OA. (NIH requires immediate "submission" but it is deposited -- in PubMed Central -- only after the embargo.)

(10) Hence it is in fact Plan A that locks in publisher embargoes, not Plan B!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Suber wrote in OA News:

PS: " I agree that [a Deposit Mandate [DM] plus the "email eprint request" Button] would be a good fallback in the (unlikely) event that the Conyers bill passes. But I can't agree that it would 'hasten universal OA more effectively than the current NIH mandate'"

There are three issues here, not one!

(1) Replacing the current NIH mandate with a DM if the current mandate is defeated.

(2) Adding DM to the current NIH mandate even if it is not defeated.

(3) And the question of what would have been the effect of adopting DM in the first place.

On all three, I think the answer is very definitely that DM (whether added or substituted) would hasten universal OA more effectively. (And I actually think Peter would agree about all three of these; the seeming disagreement may be just a verbal one.)

Note that what I said was that an NIH Deposit Mandate (Immediate Deposit, with optional Closed Access plus the "Almost-OA" Button) would hasten universal OA far more effectively than the current NIH (Delayed OA-Deposit) Mandate.

I said universal OA because I was not referring merely to OA for NIH-funded research, nor to the effect of the NIH mandate only on NIH-funded research:

It is far easier for other funders and institutions to reach agreement on adopting Deposit Mandates of their own (Immediate Deposit of all articles, with the option of Closed Access and the "email eprint request" Button during any publisher embargo) because that completely removes copyright concerns, publishers, and the publisher's lobby from the decision loop. For embargoed articles, DM is merely an internal record-keeping mandate, yet with the Button it can also provide almost-OA -- and will almost certainly lead to full OA once the practice becomes universal.

So the first reason an NIH DM would be (and would have been) more effective is that, being free of legal obstacles, it is universally adoptable. Many funders and even institutions have instead copied, or tried to copy, the NIH Embargoed OA Mandate (with deposit mandated only after the publisher OA embargo has elapsed).

These legally encumbered mandates have either failed to be adopted elsewhere altogether, because of unresolved legal concerns (I know of many that have been under debate for years), or they have been adopted, cloning the NIH model, with the loss of the opportunity for Almost-OA during the embargoes (and an uncertainty about whether and when deposit actually takes place).

That represents a (i) a loss of any mandate at all, among the would-be mandates that failed to be adopted because of the avoidable copyright concerns, (ii) a loss of a good deal of Almost-OA during the embargo periods for the adopted mandates, and (iii) continuing delay in reaching universal OA, for which universal deposit is a necessary precondition!

So, yes, the NIH mandate would have been more effective, both for NIH OA and for universal OA, if it had been a DM: It would have generated immediate Almost-OA for NIH and more DMs worldwide. DM can still be added to the NIH mandate now, whether or not the Conyers Bill passes. If Conyers fails, that will make NIH an Immediate DM plus Embargoed OA Mandate -- which is much better than just an Embargoed OA Mandate. If Conyers passes, then it will make NIH just an Immediate DM, which is still better than no mandate for NIH, still provides Almost-OA during any embargo, and is far more conducive to consensus for universal adoption.

PS: " The NIH mandate provides (or will soon provide) OA to 100% of NIH-funded research, not OA to 63% and almost-OA to 37%"

If Conyers passes, then (as Peter agrees), DM is the right Plan B. But even if Conyers fails, why not add DM to the current NIH embargoed OA mandate, and have at least embargoed OA for 100% of NIH-funded research plus immediate almost-OA during the embargo (and a better mandate model for universal adoption)?

PS: " [Nor can I agree that] "there is no way to stop [an NIH immediate DM plus the Button] legally". ...if Congress wanted to, it could block closed-access deposits too."

Of course Congress can vote into law anything that the Supreme Court does not rule unconstitutional and the President does not veto. But it does seem a bit far-fetched to imagine that Congress would make a law to the effect that NIH is forbidden to require the deposit of a copy of the publications it funds, for internal record-keeping purposes. (And such a bizarre law would be sui generis, nothing to do with copyright.)

Nor does it seem likely that Congress would make a law that US researchers could no longer send reprints of their research to researchers requesting them, as researchers worldwide have been doing for a half century. (And this too would be an ad hoc law, though, at a stretch, it could be portrayed as a curb on Fair Use.)

PS: "However, I would like to see the NIH add the email request button even if the Conyers bill goes down in flames. Then the policy would provide embargoed OA to 100% of NIH-funded research, and almost-OA during the embargo period."

I think we are in complete agreement! Substitute DM + Button for the current NIH Mandate if Conyers fails, and add DM + Button even if it succeeds. (But that doesn't just mean the Button: It means adding the requirement to deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication.)

The only thing missing from this agreement is the one additional (but crucial) further facilitator of universal adoption of DMs: NIH should specify that its preferred mode of deposit is to deposit the postprint in the author's own Institutional Repository (if there is one) and then to port it automatically to NIH from there, via the SWORD protocol:

"One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

    Re: Conyers Bill:  "Bill Would Block NIH Public Access Policy"
    (Science, 11 September)

Plan B for NIH Public Access Mandate: A Deposit Mandate
(And It's Stronger Than Plan A!)

Let us hope that the Conyers Bill, resulting from the publisher lobby's attempt to overturn the NIH Public Access Mandate, will not succeed. 

But in case it does, I would like to recommend making a small but far-reaching modification in the NIH mandate and its implementation that will effectively immunize it against any further publisher attempts to overturn it on legal grounds. And this Plan B will actually help hasten universal OA more effectively than the current NIH mandate:

(1) NIH should mandate deposit of the refereed final draft of all NIH-funded research, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(2) But access to that deposited draft need only be made Open Access when there is no publisher embargo on making it Open Access; otherwise it may be made Closed Access.

(3) Open Access means that the full text of the deposited draft is freely accessible to anyone, webwide, immediately.

(4) Closed Access means that the full text of the deposited draft is visible and accessible only to the depositor and the depositor's employer and funder, for internal record-keeping and grant-fulfillment purposes. (Publishers have no say whatsoever in institutional and funder internal record-keeping.)

(5) For all deposits, however, both Open Access and Closed Access, the deposited article's metadata (author, title, journal, date. etc.) are Open Access, hence visible and accessible to anyone, webwide. 

(6) Now the essence of this strategy: NIH should also implement the "Email Eprint Request" Button, so that any would-be user, webwide, who reaches a link to a Closed Access article, can insert their email address in a box, indicate that a single copy of the postprint is being requested for research or health purposes, and click.

(7) That eprint request is then emailed by the repository software, automatically and immediately, to the author of the article, who receives an email with a URL in it that the author can then click if they wish to have the repository software automatically email one individual copy of that eprint to that individual requester.

(8) This is not Open Access (OA). But functionally, it is almost-OA. 

(9) Many journals (63%) already endorse immediate OA.

(10) Closed Access plus the Button will further provide almost-OA for the remaining 37%. 

(11) That means an NIH Deposit Mandate guarantees either immediate OA (63%) or almost-OA (37%) for 100% of NIH-funded research, and 100% of research's immediate-access needs are fulfilled, almost-immediately, during any embargo period, worldwide.

(12) In addition, an NIH Deposit Mandate will encourage universities in the US and worldwide to adopt Deposit Mandates too, for all of their research article output, not just NIH-funded biomedical research output. 

(13) The spread of such Deposit Mandates across institutions and funders globally will inevitably lead to a transition to universal OA for all research output as a natural matter of course, as the mandates ensure the universal practice of immediate deposit, and the resultant pressure for the benefits of instant access becomes irresistible.

(14) Lastly, to make the almost-OA Button even more powerful and easier to implement, NIH should stipulate that the preferred locus of deposit is the author's own Institutional Repository, which can then export the deposit to PubMed Central using the automatized SWORD protocol.

The fact is (and everyone will see this clearly in hindsight) that, all along, the online medium itself has made OA a foregone conclusion for research publications. There is no way to stop it legally. 

It is only technological short-sightedness that is making publishers and OA advocates alike imagine that the outcome is somehow a matter of law and legislation. It is not, and never has been. 

It is only because we have been taking an obsolete, paper-based view of it all that we have not realized that when authors wish it to be so, the Web itself has made it no longer possible to prevent researchers from freely distributing their own research findings, one way or the other. There is no law against an author giving away individual copies of his own writing for research purposes. Researchers have been doing it -- by mailing individual reprints to individual requesters -- for at least a half century.

And NIH need only mandate that authors deposit their (published research journal) writings: giving them away for free can be left to the individual author. The eventual outcome is obvious, optimal, natural, and inevitable.

I strongly urge OA advocates to united behind this back-up strategy. It will allow us to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. 

Institutional Repositories (IRs) are for institutional research output (mostly their authors' final drafts of their published, peer-reviewed journal articles). IRs are not for institutional buy-in of the output of other institutions. (That would be an institutional library.) The way Open Access (OA) works is that an institution makes its own research output free for all online, in order to maximize its visibility, usage and impact. By symmetry, the institution's users also get access to the output of all other institutions' IRs, for free. No subscriptions, no fees, no consortia, no need for an institutional affiliation for anyone but the author of the work in the IR.

That’s OA. Almost-OA is when some of the IR material is still under a publisher embargo, so it is deposited as Closed Access instead of Open Access, and can be accessed using the IR’s almost-immediate “email eprint request” Button during the embargo. Almost-OA is not OA, but together with universal Immediate Deposit mandates, it will soon usher in universal OA.

In contrast, Joseph Esposito’s “Almost OA” is just a variant on institutional consortial licensing. It has no more to do with OA than being Almost Pregnant has to do with parity.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: SHERPA/RoMEO is listing the paid OA charges of non-Green publishers. On no account should any author or institution ever have to pay money to a publisher in order to be able to comply with a mandate to provide Open Access (OA). That would be a perverse distortion of the purpose of both OA and OA mandates; it would also profoundly discourage funders and institutions from mandating OA, and authors from complying with OA mandates.
    SHERPA has an outstanding record for supporting and promoting OA, worldwide. The OA movement and the global research community are greatly in their debt. However, SHERPA alas also has a history of amplifying arbitrary, irrelevant and even absurd details and noise associated with publisher policies and practices, instead of focusing on what makes sense and is essential to the understanding and progress of OA.
    I urge SHERPA to focus on what the research community needs to hear, understand and do in order to reach 100% OA as soon as possible -- not on advertising publisher options that are not only unnecessary but counterproductive to the growth of OA and OA mandates. Authors and funders who are foolish enough to squander their money on paying non-green publishers for OA (instead of just depositing their postprints anyway and relying on the IR's "email eprint request" Button during any embargo) can find out the prices for themselves. SHERPA/ROMEO is not a publishers' price catalogue.

---

The SHERPA/RoMEO site says:

"Where a publishers' standard policy does not allow an author to comply with their funding agency's mandate, paid open access options may enable an author to comply."

On no account should any author have to comply with any mandate to provide Open Access (OA) by having to pay money to a publisher.

That would be a grotesque distortion of the purpose of both OA and OA mandates.

It would also profoundly discourage funders and institutions from mandating OA, and authors from complying with OA mandates.

If a journal is not one of the 63% of journals that are already Green on immediate OA self-archiving then the right strategy for the author is to deposit the refereed final draft in their institutional repository anyway, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Access to that deposit can then be set as Closed Access instead of Open Access during the publisher embargo, if the author wishes. The repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button can then provide all would-be users with almost-OA during the embargo.

Most OA mandates tolerate an embargo of 6-12 months. Once immediate deposit is universally mandated by 100% of funders and institutions, that will provide at least 63% immediate-OA plus at most 37% almost-OA, immediately, for a universal total of 100% immediate-OA plus almost-OA.

After OA mandates are adopted universally, the increasingly palpable benefits of the resulting OA for research, researchers, and the tax-paying public will ensure that the rest of the dominos will inevitably fall of their own accord: Access embargoes will soon die their natural (and well-deserved) deaths, yielding 100% immediate-OA.

SHERPA has an outstanding record for supporting and promoting OA, worldwide. The OA movement and the global research community are greatly in their debt. However, SHERPA alas also has a history of amplifying arbitrary, irrelevant and even absurd details and noise associated with publisher policies and practices, instead of focusing on what makes sense and is essential to the understanding and progress of OA.

I urge SHERPA to focus on what the research community needs to hear, understand and do in order to reach 100% OA as soon as possible -- not on advertising publisher options that are not only unnecessary but counterproductive to the growth of OA and OA mandates.

---

Charles Oppenheim, U. Loughborough, replied:

"Stevan misunderstands the purpose of SHERPA/ROMEO.  It is there to report publishers' terms and conditions, to help authors decide where to place their articles. To argue that it should not list those publishers that are not "green" is akin to asking an abstracting service not to record those articles that the editor happens not to agree with.
 
Some funders, such as Wellcome,  encourage the applicant for funding to include the cost of paying a "gold" journal in their funding bid. If it is to perform a useful information function, SHERPA/ROMEO has to reflect current reality, not ideal future scenarios."

I can only disagree (profoundly) with my comrade-at-arms, Charles Oppenheim, on this important strategic point!

I certainly did not say that SHERPA/ROMEO should only list Green Publishers! It should list all publishers (and, more relevantly, all their individual journals).

But along with all the journals, SHERPA/ROMEO should only list and classify the journal policy details that are relevant to OA, OA mandates, and the growth of OA.

Those four relevant journal policy details are these:

(1) Does the journal endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the refereed postprint? If so, the journal is GREEN.

(2) Does the journal endorse the immediate OA self-archiving of the unrefereed preprint only? If so, the journal is PALE-GREEN.

(3) Is the journal neither GREEN nor PALE-GREEN? If so then the journal is GRAY.

(4) If the journal is PALE-GREEN or GRAY, does it endorse OA self-archiving after an embargo? If so, how long?

That's it. All the rest of the details that SHERPA/ROMEO is currently canonizing are irrelevant amplifications of noise that merely confuse instead of informing, clarifying and facilitating OA-relevant policy and decisions on the part of authors, institutions and funders.

Amongst the irrelevant and confusing idiosyncratic publisher details that SHERPA/ROMEO is currently amplifying (and there are many!), there are two that might be worth retaining as a footnote, as long as it is made clear that they are not fundamental for policy or practice, but merely details for two special cases:

(i) What version is endorsed for OA self-archiving: the author's final draft or the publisher's PDF?

(ii) Where does the journal endorse self-archiving: the author's institutional repository and/or central repositories?

The reason these details are inessential is that the default option in both cases is already known a priori:

(i) Self-archiving the author's final draft is the default option. A publisher that endorses self-archiving the publisher's PDF also authorizes, a fortiori, the self-archiving of the author's final draft. (IP pedants and pundits might have some fun thrashing this one back and forth, citing all sorts of formalisms and legalisms, but in the end, sense would prevail: Once the publisher has formally authorized making the published article OA, Pandora's box is open [sic], and residual matters concerning authors' prior versions or subsequent updates are all moot [as they should be].)

The default option of self-archiving the postprint is sufficient for OA, hence the PDF side-show is a needless distraction.

(ii)  Self-archiving in the author's institutional repository is the default option. A publisher that endorses self-archiving in a central repository also endorses, a fortiori, self-archiving in the author's own institutional repository.

The default option of self-archiving in the institutional repository is sufficient for OA, hence the matter of central deposit is a needless distraction. (Where direct central deposit is mandated by a funder, this can and will be implemented by automatic SWORD-based export to central repositories, of either the metadata and full-text or merely the metadata and the link to the full-text.)

Hence (i) and (ii) are minor details that need only be consulted by those who, for some reason, are particularly concerned about the PDF, or those who need to comply with a funder mandate that (neelessly) specifies direct central deposit.

There is absolutely no call for SHERPA/ROMEO to advertise the price lists of GRAY publishers for paid OA! I can only repeat that that is grotesque. Let authors and funders who are foolish enough to squander their money on paying those non-GREEN publishers (instead of just relying on their tolerated embargo limits plus the Button) find out the prices for themselves. (SHERPA/ROMEO is not an abstracting service; nor is it a publishers' price catalogue!)

---

Peter Millington, SHERPA, replied:

PM: "It is a pity that Prof. Harnad is only interested in "default" and "sufficient" options, and not in the best options, or indeed the most appropriate options. While author's final post-refereed draft is sufficient and acceptable for open access and research purposes, it is not the best."

OA is the best for research purposes. We don't yet have it. And it's long overdue.

I'm not sure whose purposes the publisher's PDF is best for, but whoever they are, their purposes are getting in the way of what is best for research purposes.

PM: "The best is the published version (publisher's PDF if you will). At the very least, this is the authoritative version vis-à-vis page numbers for quoted extracts and the like."

This issue has been much discussed in these pages: OA is needed (urgently) for all those users who can't afford paid access to the publisher's PDF. What these would-be users lack is access to the text, not a means of quoting extracts. Extracts can be quoted by paragraph number. Pages are on the way out anyway. What is urgently needed is access to the text. Publishers are far more willing to endorse self-archiving of the author postprint than the publisher's proprietary PDF. Hence author postprint self-archiving is the default option (if maximal OA, now, is the goal).

PM: "Also, it significantly expedites deposition to be able to use the publisher's PDF rather than having to generate your own, with all the complications that that may entail."

Significantly expedites deposition of what, where, by whom? I have deposited nearly 300 of my papers in the Southampton ECS IR. It takes me 1 keystroke and 1 second to generate PDF from TeX or to generate PDF or HTML from RTF. What complications do you have in mind?

PM: "In my view, the publishers who permit the use of their PDFs deserve to be applauded for their far-sightedness. Other publishers should be encouraged to do likewise."

The publishers to be applauded are the ones that are Green on immediate OA deposit of the postprint, regardless of whether they specify the author's postprint or the publisher's PDF. That's the line separating who is and isn't on the side of the angels regarding OA. The rest is trivial and irrelevant.

PM: "SHERPA therefore makes no apologies for having published our 'good list'"

SHERPA ROMEO could do a far, far greater service in informing authors and institutions, and in promoting OA, if it at long last got rid of all its superfluous categories and colour codes (yellow/preprint, blue/postprint, green/preprint+postprint, white/neither, and now "good"/PDF) and simply published a clear list of all the journals that endorse postprint self-archiving, regardless of whether the postprint is author-draft or publisher PDF and regardless of whether the journal also happens to endorse unrefereed preprint self-archiving -- and call that GREEN.

That, after all, is what OA is all about, and for.

PM: "(Some may concur with Prof. Harnad in regarding the Paid OA list as the "bad list", but I couldn't possibly comment.)"

The only thing authors need to know about these journals is that they are GRAY (and perhaps also how long they embargo access-provision).

PM: "As for where material may be deposited, Prof. Harnad states that permission to deposit in institutional repositories should be the default, implying that this would be sufficient. However, as before, institutional repositories alone are not the best option. Surely the best policy must be to be able to deposit in any open access repository - institutional and/or disciplinary."

No, the best policy is to allow deposit in any OA repository and to explicitly prefer IR deposit wherever possible. That is the way to integrate institutional and funder OA mandates so as to generate a convergence and synergy that will systematically cover all of OA space quickly and completely.

PM: "In any case, SHERPA/RoMEO has no choice but to reflect/quote the terminology for repository types used in the publishers' open access policies, CTAs, and related documentation. These are often wanting in clarity and are not always fully thought through. If the publishers do better, it follows that SHERPA/RoMEO's data will also improve."

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if SHERPA/ROMEO could lead publishers toward clarity, rather than just following and amplifying their obscurity (and their often deliberate obscurantism)?

This is all said in the spirit of unabating appreciation for all that SHERPA does do for OA -- but with an equally unabating frustration at what SHERPA persists in not doing for (and sometimes unwittingly doing against) OA, even though it would be ever so easy to fix.

This continuing insistence upon amplifying incoherent publisher noise simply because it is there cannot be described as a service to OA. And SHERPA does have a choice: It can do better for the research community without waiting for publishers to improve.

---

Andria McGrath replied:

AM: "It may be foolishness on the part of the funders, but I'm afraid it is the case that ALL the UK medical funders do insist that articles reporting research funded by them are posted on UK PubMedCentral within 6 months."

I have a simple solution, both for individual authors and for institutions who are trying to comply with a funder mandate to self-archive centrally articles that are published by journals that only endorse institutional OA self-archiving:

(1) Deposit the (refereed) postprint institutionally, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(2) If the journal is Green on immediate OA, make the deposit immediately OA (otherwise rely on the "email eprint request" Button).

(3) If setting access to the deposit to OA is embargoed, set the access to OA when the embargo is over.

(4) If a funder requires deposit in UK PubMedCentral, set up SWORD for your IR so it will export the deposit to UKPMC at the requisite time -- and then let UKPMC worry about access-setting for the UKPMC version.

The author has complied with the funder mandate by depositing in his IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, and by setting access to the IR deposit as OA at the end of the publisher embargo. 

That's all there is to it. Funders cannot mandate any more of an author. And if the funder wants to pay publishers for the right to make the central UKPMC version OA, let them pay the publisher themselves.

The funder mandates are deposit mandates, not payment mandates. Comply by depositing institutionally, providing OA institutionally, and exporting the deposit to UKPMC. That's all there is to it.

AM: "I have just been going through Romeo trying to determine which of the major publishers allow this without the payment of article processing charges and there are very few. So far I have come up with BMJ Publishing, CUP, Company of Bioloigsts and Nat. Acad. Sci. that do allow this."

Fine. When those IR deposits are exported via SWORD to UKPMC, there will be no charge to be paid. For publishers other than those four,  there may be; that is not the problem of the author or his institution. And anyone construing the funder mandates as implying that it is the problem of the author or his institution, and that the mandate entails any further expense to the author or his institution, is profoundly misconstruing the mandate, the rationale for the mandate, and the rationale for OA.

Andria, you will have to get used to the fact that steps have been taken without carefully thinking them through. The funder OA mandates were very timely and welcome, and extremely important historically. But some (by no means all!) of them were also vague, careless, and, to a great extent "monkey see, monkey do" (many taking their cue from NIH and the Wellcome Trust, who themselves had not thought it through carefully enough). 

MRC simply adopted the wrong (because inchoate) mandate model. Other RCUK councils (such as, ARC, BBSRC, STFC) picked a better one. So did Europe's ERC, and now the EC, based on the EURAB model, which is the IDOA mandate model, the optimal one, and leads to none of these nonsensical consequences.

Good sense will eventually prevail, but until then, those who are trying to implement the existing mandates should not try to put themselves through impossible hoops -- and on no account should they lead their authors and institutions into grotesque and gratuitous expenses or constraints that were never the intention of either OA or OA mandates.

Just follow the sensible steps (1) - (4) above, and the rest will take care of itself as a matter of natural course.

AM: "As far as I can tell, Elsevier, Humana, Int Med Press, Wiley, Karger, Kluwer, Royal Soc and Springer do not allow self archiving in UK PMC by authors within 6 months, so that all authors funded by the medical charities are going to be forced into paying article processing charges to comply with their funders requirements if they publish in these publishers journals or in fully open access journals that make charges, like BMC."

Not only is it pure absurdity to imagine that the funder mandates were actually mandates for authors and their institutions to pay publishers for paid OA, but it is equally absurd to imagine that they were mandates for authors to publish only with publishers who endorse central self-archiving! 

Every single one of the eight publishers you list is on the side of the angels as regards OA: They are all Green on immediate deposit in the author's institutional repository, and the immediate setting of access to that deposit as OA.

Did anyone really imagine that OA was about more than that? That it further required publishers to consent to deposit in central repositories, for someone's capricious reasons? (The saga is made even sillier by the fact that if the blinkered centralists had sensibly targeted universal IR deposit first, then the dominos would -- and will -- fall for central repositories soon enough anyway! But instead they are creating gratuitous obstacles for OA itself, by putting centrality itself before OA -- and for absolutely no good reason, since all OA IRs are fully interoperable and harvestable anyway.)

And don't even get me started on the fatuousness of having decided to copycat PMC with a UKPMC! As if there were another category of biomedical research, consisting of UK biomedical research, requiring a central repository of its own: "Let me see now, what is it that British researchers -- and British researchers alone -- have found discovered about AIDS." (I hope no one replies that "one can search across PMC and UKPMC jointly," because that is the whole point! Search is done across distributed contents, not by going to -- or requiring -- one particular locus-of-deposit. Think OAIster, Citeseer or Google Scholar, not UKPMC! At most, UKPMC could simply be a harvester of UK biomedical output, for actuarial purposes, wherever its physical locus might happen to be.)

AM: "In view of this I do find it useful to have the extra information that Romeo is adding, and I would welcome even more specific info about publisher's policies re PMC. If I have any of this wrong I would be very grateful if people would let me know."

I think you have a good deal of it very, very wrong -- but it's not your fault, and you are not alone. I just wonder whether we will persist in bumbling in this misdirection for a few more years, yet again, until we discover we have goofed, or we will manage -- mirabile dictu -- to rally the good sense to fix it in advance...

Your weary and fast-wizening archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

One can only leave it to posterity to judge the wisdom of the Max Planck Society in being prepared to divert "central" funds toward funding the publication of (some) MPS research in (some) Gold OA journals (PLoS) without first mandating Green OA self-archiving for all MPS research output.

It is not as if MPS does not have an Institutional Repository (IR): It has EDOC, containing 108,933 records (although it is not clear how many of those are peer-reviewed research articles, how many of them are OA, and what percentage of MPS's current annual research output is deposited and OA).

But, despite being a long-time friend of OA, MPS has no Green OA self-archiving mandate. I have been told, repeatedly, that "in Germany one cannot mandate self-archiving," but I do not believe it, not for a moment. This is pure lack of reflection and ingenuity:

At the very least, Closed Access deposit in EDOC can certainly be mandated for all MPS published research output as a purely administrative requirement, for internal record-keeping and performance-assessment. This is called the "Immediate Deposit, Optional Access" (IDOA) Mandate.

And then the "email eprint request" Button can be added to EDOC to provide almost-OA to all those deposits that the authors don't immediately make OA of their own accord (95% of journals already endorse immediate OA in some form).

Then the MPS can go ahead and spend any spare money it may have to fund publication instead of research.

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This should not be construed as any sort of critique of PLoS, a superb Gold OA publisher, producing superb journals. Nor is it a critique of paying for Gold OA, for those who have the funds.

It is a critique of paying for Gold OA without first having mandated Green OA.

(For that is rather like an institution offering to pay for its employees' medical insurance for car accidents without first having mandated seat-belts; or, more luridly, offering to pay for the treatment of its employees' secondary-smoke-induced illnesses without first having mandated that the workplace must be smoke-free.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum