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Thursday, July 17. 2008The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH Is. PART I.![]() ![]() Peter Suber: "Stevan is mixing up unrelated issues. The APA "deposit fee" had nothing to do with the distinction between disciplinary repositories (like PMC) and institutional repositories. If the NIH mandated deposit in IRs instead of PMC, then the APA would demand a $2,500 fee for deposit in IRs, and the fee would be equally noxious and indefensible. Even if the NIH's preference for PMC were as foolish as Stevan says it is (a criticism I do not share), it would not justify the APA fee."Peter seems to be replying with a hypothetical conditional, regarding what the APA would have done. But the APA has already been formally endorsing immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR for six years now. Moreover (see below), the publisher, Gary Vandenbos, has confirmed that APA has not changed that policy, nor are there plans to change it. What needs to be changed is just one small implementational detail of NIH's Public Access Policy: the requirement to deposit directly in PMC. The locus of deposit should be the author's own IR. PMC can harvest the metadata and link to the full-text in the IR. This will cost NIH authors nothing. APA itself has no plans to repeal its commendable 6-year-old Green OA self-archiving policy. (It would certainly have put APA in a very bad light if, having given its authors the green light to self-archive in their own IRs, APA then decided to slap a $2500 traffic ticket on them for going ahead and doing so!) Date: 15 Jul 2008 23:28:40 -0400Date: 16 Jul 2008 2:05:49 AM EDT (CA), Peter Suber: "Stevan points to a 2002 APA policy statement, still online, which allows self-archiving in IRs. But he doesn't point out that the APA's newer policy statement describing the "deposit fee" effectively negates the older green policy, at least for NIH-funded authors. The new policy prohibits NIH-funded authors from depositing their postprints in any OA repository, disciplinary or institutional."The 2002 APA policy statement is not only still online and still in effect, but we have the publisher's word that there is to be no change in that policy. The proposed fee only pertains to deposit in PMC. APA Policy on Posting Articles on the Internet ...Update effective June 1, 2002...Authors of articles published in APA journals may post a copy of the final manuscript... on their Web site or their employer's server after it is accepted for publication... APA does not permit archiving with any other non-APA repositories... Peter Suber: "The title of Stevan's post suggests that he's defending the APA's 2002 self-archiving policy. I join him in that. But the body of his post attempts to defend the 2008 deposit fee as well: "Although it looks bad on the face of it...things are not always as they seem." Not always, but this time."Not this time, and never for a publisher that is Green on OA. Once a publisher is Green on OA, there is nothing more that can or should be demanded of them, by the research community. The ball is now in the research community's court. It is up to research institutions and research funders to design sensible policies that will ensure that the researchers they employ and fund actually provide Green OA for their joint research output. Not all research is funded (and certainly not all by NIH), but (virtually) all researchers have institutions. And all institutions are just a piece of free software, some server-space, and a few hours of sysad set-up and maintenance time away from having an IR, if they do not already have one. The sensible OA mandate, from both institutions and funders (like NIH) is to require deposit in the researcher's own IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication. If there is an embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access during the embargo. The IR's "email eprint request" button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA for all user needs during any embargo. If funders or others want to create institution-external, central collections of already-OA content, based on subject matter, funding source, nationality, or whatever, then they can harvest the metadata and link to the full-text in the IR in which it was deposited. But there is certainly no reason to insist that it be deposited directly in their collections. Google, for example, quietly harvests everything: no need to deposit things directly in Google or Google Scholar. And no charge. Peter Suber: "Both arguments are moot for a while, now that the APA has taken down the new policy statement for "re-examination". (See the 7/16/08 update to my blog post on the policy.)"I don't doubt that well-meaning OA supporters who have not thought it through are now railing at APA instead of resolutely requesting that NIH make the minor modification in its otherwise admirable, timely, and welcome policy that would put an end to this nonsense and let researchers get on with the urgent task of providing OA by depositing their own research in their own OA IRs, free for all, webwide. Epilogue and Homily: The influence of the pro-OA lobby has become gratifyingly strong and swift: A new policy is in the works. In an e-mail from Alan Kazdin, APA president:but it would be useful if the heads of OA advocates worldwide were focused, commensurately strongly, on using their growing influence to promote what will actually generate universal OA, swiftly and surely, rather than dissipating it on the short-sighted distractions -- such as Gold Fever, Preservation Panic, Copyright Compulsion, and, here, Supererogatory Centralism -- which are only delaying rather than facilitating OA: (For the record, and the too literal-minded: Of course a $2500 fee for depositing in PMS is absurd, but what reduced us to this absurdity was needlessly mandating direct deposit in PMS in the first place. Time to remedy the absurdity and let researchers' fingers do the walking so we can all reach 100% OA at long last.) A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, July 8. 2008Nature's Offer To "Let Us Archive It For You": Caveat Emptor
NOTE: Since this posting, Peter Suber has informed me [and since then announced] that Nature had informed him that they were willing to do proxy deposit not just in Central Repositories like PubMed Central, but in Institutional Repositories too, immediately upon acceptance (if it can be done in batch -- and it can: see this link).
If that is the case, then I withdraw all but one of my criticisms below, with apologies for having impugned Nature's motives. However, the one remaining criticism stands: Nature would do open access a lot more good by dropping its access embargo than by offering to save Nature authors a few minutes worth of keystrokes. There is still great and widespread confusion among still mostly passive authors about WHO should deposit WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW. Publishers doing proxy deposits in diverse repositories at diverse times is not conducive to grasping the home truth that the most natural, reliable and direct way for all authors to self-archive all their articles, simply, systematically, and convergently, is to deposit their own articles in their own institutional repositories, immediately upon acceptance for publication (and leave any further collecting to automatic batch harvesting). We are talking about a few keystrokes. Any arbitrary scrambling or complexification of this simple home truth is simply compounding confusion and inaction. (Before you ask: There are also provisional DEPOTs for authors whose institution does not yet have its own repository.) Nature has circulated the following Press Release: NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP TO ARCHIVE ON BEHALF OF AUTHORSNo, as of 2003, Nature had given its green light to immediate author self-archiving of the author's final refereed draft, but in January 2005 Nature abruptly withdrew its green light and instead imposed a 6-month embargo on self-archiving in anticipation of NIH's announcement in February 2005 that it would allow an embargo of 6-12 months on its OA self-archiving recommendation. The NIH recommendation became a mandate 3 years later, but Nature continues to impose a 6-month embargo. I would not call that "encouraging self-archiving." I would call that Nature trying to make the best of what it considers a bad but now inescapable bargain. Later in 2008, NPG will begin depositing authors' accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), meeting the requirements for authors funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and a number of other major funders in the US, the UK and Canada who mandate deposition in either PMC or UKPMC. NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in future.In other words, now that there is no choice but to comply with these biomedical funder mandates (all clones of one another, and all pertaining only to biomedical research, all stipulating PubMed Central as the direct locus of the deposit and all allowing an access embargo of 6-12 months), Nature is trying to retain maximal control over the remaining degrees of freedom, by "relieving" authors of the burden of doing the deposit (i.e., taking deposit out of the author's hands), by ensuring that the deposit does not occur before the embargo occurs, and by ensuring that the locus of deposit is PubMed Central rather than the author's Institutional Repository (IR) [this last plaint is mooted if Nature is indeed willing and able to do immediate proxy deposits in authors' IRs too]. The result of this co-opting of self-archiving is: In other words, while appearing to be doing OA a service, this Nature policy is actually doing Nature a service and only giving OA the minimal due that is already inherent in the NIH and kindred mandates.(1) The self-archiving practice is made less likely to generalize beyond non-NIH/biomedical research. "We are announcing our intention early in the process to solicit feedback from the community and to reassure authors that we will be providing this service," said Steven Inchcoombe, Managing Director of NPG. "We invite authors, funding bodies, institutions, archives and repositories to work with us as we move forward."Translation: "We are offering to take over the burden of doing the few extra keystrokes that self-archiving mandates entail in exchange for retaining control over self-archiving and its likelihood of scaling up to universality and immediacy across disciplines and institutions. Let's now hope that the appetite for OA stops there: embargoed, journal-mediated central access to NIH-funded biomedical research in PubMed Central and the like..." As a researcher, my response would be: "Thank you, but I'll still go ahead and do the keystrokes myself, depositing my own final refereed draft in my own institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication. That way I can provide immediate OA to those of my deposits that are published in the 63% of journals that, unlike Nature, are already fully green. And for the rest, my IR's Request a Copy Button will help me provide almost-instant, almost-OA to fulfill the immediate-usage needs of researchers webwide who cannot afford access to (say) Nature's paid version and cannot afford to wait until Nature's embargo expires. Then, at the end of the Nature embargo, my deposits can also be exported to PubMed Central or harvested by any other central collections that may also want to host them -- but they will already be OA in my IR in any case.""Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally" Initially, the service will be open to authors publishing original research articles in Nature, the Nature research titles and the clinical research section of Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine. NPG will then extend the service to society and academic journals in its portfolio that wish to participate.Let's hope that authors and their institutions will be wise enough not to once again leave their research output entirely in the hands of publishers. In the online age, journal publishers render their essential service in managing peer review and certifying its outcome with their journal-name and its track-record, but there is no longer any earthly reason why they should continue to retain exclusive control over the access-provision process, particularly in order to embargo it! For eligible authors who opt-in during the submission process, NPG will deposit the accepted version of the author's manuscript on acceptance, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. There will be no charge to authors or funders for the service.Deposit is only a few keystrokes, and the only place it makes sense to deposit upon acceptance is the author's own institutional repository, which hosts all the institution's research output (not just biomedical research funded by NIH and held and embargoed by Nature) and makes it possible for the author to provide immediate almost-OA during any embargo period (thanks to the Button). "NPG is committed to serving as a partner to the scientific and medical communities," continued Steven Inchcoombe. "We believe this is a valuable service to authors, reducing their workload and making it simple and free to comply with mandates from their institution or funder. We recognise that publishing in an NPG title can be a career high-point for researchers, and want to ensure that our authors enjoy the best possible service from their publisher of choice."Minus the hype, this is an offer to spare you a few keystrokes in exchange for retaining control over access provision to your work, blocking access for 6 months, and reducing the probability and speed with which self-archiving and self-archiving mandates will scale across all disciplines and all institutions worldwide. NPG has been an early mover amongst subscription publishers in encouraging self-archiving. In 2002, the publisher moved from requesting copyright transfer for original research articles to requesting an exclusive license to publish. In 2005, NPG announced a self-archiving policy that encourages authors of research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript to PubMed Central or other appropriate funding body's archive, their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites.After a six-month embargo, rescinding (in 2005) Nature's previous (2003) green light to provide immediate Green OA upon acceptance for publication. In all cases, the manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication...And retaining control over that is the real motivation behind this generous offer, along with the brakes it puts on scaling beyond NIH (and kindred) funded biomedical research, destined for PubMed Central, to all research, from all institutions, across all scientific and scholarly disciplines. [possibly moot] NPG's policies are explained in detail at this web page.And their consequences are explained above. Advice to Nature authors: Accept the offer, but deposit your final refereed draft in your IR immediately upon acceptance anyway, allowing you and your institution to retain control of it, as well as to provide almost-OA to it immediately. Once all researchers do this, all access-embargos will die their well-deserved deaths of natural causes soon thereafter. (Could Nature's announcement be an attempt at damage control after its recent ill-received attack on its competitor, Gold OA publisher PLoS? If so, then some more critical reflection is needed on Nature's part as to why it continues to embargo access to the refereed final draft while its other competitor, Science, is already fully Green. [Science, in turn, might ponder why, unlike Nature, which has abandoned it, Science continues to cling to the obsolescent "Ingelfinger Rule," ruling out the self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint before publication: This self-serving edict is neither a legal matter nor an OA matter, but it too is inimical to research progress, and a distinct anachronism.]) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, June 16. 2008Nature's Fall from Aside the Angels"We also support and encourage self-archiving of the author’s final version of accepted articles."But if you look in the Romeo directory of publisher self-archiving policies, you will find that whereas Nature is indeed among the 92% of journals that have endorsed the immediate self-archiving of the author's unrefereed first draft (the preprint), Nature is not among the 63% of journals that have endorsed the immediate self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint) -- the one that is the real target of OA, and indispensable for research usage and progress. Nature used to be "green" on the immediate self-archiving of both preprints and postprints, but, electing to take half of NIH's maximal allowable access embargo as its own minimum, Nature became one of the few journals that back-slid in 2005 to impose a 6-month embargo on open access to the peer-reviewed final draft. ![]() Maxine Clarke, Publishing Executive Editor, Nature, replied: "Don't forget that people can always read the article in the journal, Stevan, as soon as it is published! The vast majority of scientists are either at an institution with a site license or can access the journal free via OARE, AGORA or HINARI, so they don't even have to take out a subscription."But what about those would-be users worldwide who are "[n]either at an institution with a site license [n]or can access the journal free via OARE, AGORA or HINARI"? Is there any reason whatsoever why they should all be denied access for six months if they (or their institutions) do not "have [the funds] to take out a subscription"? Because that, Maxine, is what OA is really all about. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, May 25. 2008OA Primer for the Perplexed: IPeter Murray-Rust continues to misunderstand, and hence misrepresent OA. The picture is a lot simpler than Peter makes it sound. Here's a simple glossary: 1. Research Data vs. Research Articles: Data: Research generates raw data. 2. OA1 (Free Access) vs OA2 (Free Re-Use): OA1: Articles made accessible/useable free online for users who do not have subscription access to the journal in which they are published.(There is only one OA1 but there are several degrees of OA2, depending on which re-uses are licensed.) 3. The Green vs. Gold Roads to OA: Green OA: Authors make their articles and/or their data OA1 or OA2 by self-archiving them online.Green OA self-archiving by authors, mandated by their universities or funders, can in principle provide OA1 or OA2, for either articles or data or both. However, it would be difficult, resisted by many authors, and probably unjust for universities to mandate Green OA1 for data or to mandate Green OA2 for either articles or data. (Funders are in a position to mandate more.) Researchers may not want to make their data either freely accessible/useable or re-usable, and they may not want to make their articles freely re-useable. However, all researchers, without exception, want their articles freely accessible/usable (OA1). This is the reason Green OA1 mandates are the highest priority. Authors all want Green OA1 and they report that they will comply, willingly (see Swan studies) and actually do comply (see Sale studies) with Green OA1 mandates from their universities and funders to self-archive their articles. Moreover, OA1 for articles prepares the way and is likely to lead to OA1 and OA2 for data, as well as to some OA2 for articles. That is why Green OA1 self-archiving and Green OA1 self-archiving mandates should be assigned priority. Peter Murray-Rust, who is concerned exclusively with OA2 (re-useability) for both articles and data, persistently misunderstands much of this, especially the practical causal path and its attendant priorities. Here are the kinds of misunderstandings that keep recurring in Peter's discussion of Green OA1 [translations are provided in brackets]: PMR: "Green Open Access [OA1 to articles] is irrelevant to Open Data [OA1 or OA2 to data] (I think it makes it harder, others disagree)."No, OA1 to articles is not irrelevant, either to OA1 to articles or data, or to OA2 (licensed re-use rights) to articles and data. Nor does OA1 make it harder to achieve OA2 (for articles or data). But it would certainly make it harder to achieve Green OA1 for articles through Green OA1 mandates if we tried pre-emptively to insist on OA2 instead, or first. PMR: "There is no explicit mention in the GreenOA upload model [Green OA1 to articles] for items other than the “full-text” [data]."There is no "GreenOA upload model" but there is Green OA1 self-archiving of articles, and Green OA1 mandates to self-archive articles. Data and OA2 can certainly be mentioned in these mandates, but they cannot be mandated (because not all authors wish to provide OA1 to their data, or OA2 to their articles or data, whereas all authors wish to provide OA1 to their articles (even if it needs to be mandated to get them to actually do it!). PMR: "The primary goal of Stevan Harnad - expressed frequently to me and others - is that we should strive for 100% GOA [mandated Green OA1 to articles]compliance and that discussions on Open Data, licences and other matters [OA2 to articles, OA1 or OA2 to data] are a distraction and are harmful to the GOA process."What is distracting and harmful for getting consensus and compliance on Green OA1 mandates, hence for getting OA1 to articles, is not the discussion of OA2 or of data, but the suggestion that it is not enough to mandate OA1 to articles. The time to insist on more than Green OA1 mandates is when Green OA1 is already faithfully mandated and provided, not before Green OA1 mandates have prevailed. PMR: "if Open Data [OA2 to data] is irrelevant or inimical to GOA [OA1 to articles] then it is hard to see GOA [OA1 to articles] as supportive of Open Data [OA2 to data]."Pre-emptive insistence on OA2 to data (or articles) is inimical to achieving consensus and compliance on mandating OA1 to articles. Achieving OA1 to articles will certainly facilitate going on to achieve OA1 and OA2 to data as well as achieving some OA2 to articles. PMR: "my main argument is that lack of support for Open Data in GOA [OA2 to data and articles] is potentially harmful to the Open Data movement [OA2 to data and articles]. Let’s assume that Stevan’s approach succeeds and we get 100% of papers in repositories through University mandates, funders et. al... [This] GOA [mandated OA1 to articles] will encourage the deposition of full-text only [articles, not data]"Green OA1 mandates can encourage OA1 to data and OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but they cannot mandate them, because all authors want OA1 for their articles but not all authors want OA1 for their data or OA2 for their articles and data. And pre-emptively insisting on more will only result in getting less (i.e., less consensus and compliance on OA1 for articles). PMR: "So my major concern is that GreenOA [OA1 to articles] will lead to substandard processes for publishing scientific data. I’d be happy to find Repositories that insist on data upload [OA1 to data]."I would be happy if we had 100% OA1 and OA2 to both articles and data, but I know of no realistic way to achieve that, and certainly not directly, because it is not the case that 100% of authors want it already, in principle. But 100% of authors do want OA1 to their articles already, in principle, and they can and do provide that OA1 it in practice if it is mandated. I find it hard to imagine that the universal practice of providing OA1 to articles can fail to strengthen the inclination to provide OA1 and OA2 to data and articles as well. On the other hand, it is easy to see how insisting pre-emptively on the latter could prevent even the former from coming into universal practice. PMR: "a GreenOA paper [OA1] may often be a cut-down, impoverished, version of what is available - for a price - on the publishers website. It may, and usually will, lack the supporting information (supplemental data). It will probably not reproduce any permissions that the publisher actually allows. So - if we concern ourselves with matters other than human eyeballs and fulltext - it is almost certainly a poorer resource than the one on the publisher site."This point is truly perplexing. What is available on a (non-OA) publisher's website is not even OA1, so what is the point of talking about OA1's impoverishment to those would-be users who are not rich enough to afford the publisher's version? And, yes, OA1 (free online access/use) is not OA2 (free online access/use and re-use licenses, to either article or data), because not all authors wish to provide OA2 to their articles or data, and Green OA1 mandates hence do not attempt to mandate it. However, data too can certainly be self-archived in Institutional Repositories (IRs) if the author wishes, and IRs have the metadata tags for specifying re-use rights (OA2), if any, for all deposited articles and data. PMR: "Many funders... require ultra-strong-OA for their archival... [OA2 to articles and data] And several [Gold OA2] publishers... also insist on CC-BY [OA2 to articles]. This is, of course, great for scientific data [OA2 to data]. But it’s a long way from GreenOA [OA1 to articles]."Yes, some funders can and do mandate more than OA1 to articles. He who pays the piper calls the tune -- so funders are in a better position to do this than universities are (and funders do not need authors' consensus or consent, as universities do, for the conditions they attach to receiving research funding). But so far that funder-mandated OA2 applies only to articles (and usually only after an embargo period), not to data (although funders could in principle mandate data self-archiving too, and eventually will, I hope). What Gold OA publishers provide is another matter; the OA1 problem is the problem of the 90% of journals that are non-OA, not the 10% that are OA. (Moreover, most Gold OA journals, too, provide only OA1, as Peter Suber has pointed out, not OA2.) PMR: "Even if the IRs contained all the data appropriate to the publications how do we discover it?"If authors self-archive their data, the IRs allow them both to link the data with the corresponding articles and to specify the re-uses licensed. PMR: "GreenOA [OA1] is designed to be simple. Stevan Harnad argues that it can be accomplished with 'one-click'."No, it is not OA1 self-archiving that is one-click, it is almost-OA via the "Fair Use" Button -- for deposits that are not Open Access (OA1) Closed Access. The deposit of the full-text itself takes under six minutes' worth of keystrokes, as described in Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) A Longitudinal Study of the Practice of Self-Archiving.Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, May 4. 2008Lower Bound Needed for Permission-Barrier-Free Open Access
![]() "Price-Barrier-Free OA" (regardless of what name we agree on) does not need an upper or lower bound, because it is not on a continuum. It just means free access online. However, as I have suggested before, it does need to be shored up a bit by stating the obvious: (1) The free access is to the full digital document (not just to parts of it, or just to its metadata).For Green Price-Barrier-Free OA self-archiving and Green Price-Barrier-Free OA self-archiving mandates, all of these specifications are dead-obvious, irrespective of what proper name we choose to designate it. They are spelled out only for the pedantic, the obtuse, and those who might otherwise be tempted to exploit the word "OA" for other agendas, contrary to the rationale for OA, which is to maximize research access, uptake, usage and impact in the online age. But in the case of Permission-Barrier-Free OA, regardless of the name (and even in the case of the BBB definition), a minimal lower bound has to be specified, otherwise the condition is so vague as to make no sense. The BBB definition gives examples, but it does not commit to a lower bound. That is like saying "hot" means temperatures like 30 degrees, 300 degrees or 3000 degrees. That still leaves one in perplexity about what, between 0 degrees and 30 degrees, counts as not hot: In particular, does Price-Barrier-Free OA alone count as Permission-Barrier-Free OA? The answer is No, but the only way to give this condition substance is to specify a minimal lower bound for Permission-Barrier-Free OA. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, April 15. 2008How to Upgrade Sweden's New UCB Open Access Policy to a Green OA Mandate![]() ![]() The pertinent current passages are these: 3. All employees at the University College of Boras must register their publications in BADA.The all-important distinction UCB has failed to make is the one between (a) depositing a document and (b) making it Open Access. The full text of a document can always be deposited in an Institutional Repository and made Closed Access, which means that no one can access it except the author and the webmaster. No legal restrictions can be placed on such internal institutional record-keeping for an institution's own research output. The metadata are accessible and visible webwide, but the full text is not. Then there is the option to make the deposit Open Access. This can be done in accordance with the journal's copyright policy. 62% of journals already endorse immediately making the deposit Open Access. (See Romeo [n.b, it is momentarily malfunctioning!]) ![]() All that needs to be done is to change the word "register" in clause 3 above to "deposit", and in clause 5, in the first sentence, the phase should not be "published in an open digital archive" but "made Open Access"; and then replace "deposit manuscripts to BADA" with: "make the deposited manuscript Open Access" according to... etc., as follows: 3. All employees at the University College of Boras must deposit their publications in BADA -- [the final refereed draft ("postprint") immediately upon acceptance for publication].With the above changes the UCB policy not only becomes a mandate (which has been demonstrated by Professor Arthur Sale in Australia to work successfully to generate 100% OA within about 2 years) rather than just a request or invitation, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to fail. But such a policy would be in conformity with the unanimous recommendation of the Council of the European University Association, representing 791 universities in 46 countries. It would also be in line with the policy of the European Research Council and the flagship of the European universities' Open Access mandate: University of Liege, of which the Rector, Professor Bernard Rentier, is also founder and director of EurOpenScholar, which is dedicated to promoting OA mandates all over Europe. I urge UCB to make the few small changes required to make UCB's current policy into the model Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access ((DOA) mandate, the optimal OA policy for UCB, a model for the rest of Scandinavia, and the 42nd Green OA mandate worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, April 10. 2008On the Risks of Over-Reaching and Over-DefiningKlaus Graf wrote: Umm, a bit shrill! But here's my (6-step) answer:"How many people must die because an OA guru says 'There is a need to update BBB' and denies the need of re-use?" (1) We have neither price-freedom nor permission-freedom today. (So if people are dying because of that, they're dying.)So "How many people must die"? Klaus thinks it will be fewer if we reach further, trying for both price-freedom and permission-freedom in the same swoop (at the risk of getting neither). I think it will be fewer if we first grasp what is already within our reach, because that is not only sure to give us most of what we want and need immediately (price-freedom), but it is also the most likely way to get us the rest (permission-freedom) thereafter too. (By the way, if we don't update BBB, then Green OA is not OA, and Green OA mandates are not providing what they say and think they are providing, but something else. Nor have I been talking about OA for a decade and a half now, but about something else. "If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever wooed...") Amen."Kripke (1980) gives a good example of how "gold" might be baptized on the shiny yellow metal in question, used for trade, decoration and discourse, and then we might discover "fool's gold," which would make all the sensory features we had used until then inadequate, forcing us to find new ones. [Kripke] points out that it is even possible in principle for "gold" to have been inadvertently baptized on "fool's gold"! Of interest here are not the ontological aspects of this possibility, but the epistemic ones: We could bootstrap successfully to real gold even if every prior case had been fool's gold. "Gold" would still be the right word for what we had been trying to pick out all along, and its original provisional features would still have provided a close enough approximation to ground it, even if later information were to pull the ground out from under it, so to speak." [Harnad 1990] Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, April 9. 2008Harold Varmus on the NIH Green Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate![]()
Varmus, Harold (2008) Progress toward Public Access to Science. PLoS Biol 6(4): e101 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060101Harold Varmus welcomes the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate and the increased access it brings, but says it isn't enough because (1) it doesn't provide enough usage rights, (2) it is subject to embargoes, (3) it only covers research from mandating funders, (4) it doesn't reform copyright transfer. He instead stresses his preference for publishing in Gold OA journals, which provide (1) - (4). (He has said elsewhere that he does not consider Green OA to be OA.) I believe Professor Varmus is mistaken on all four counts because of a miscalculation of practical priorities and an underestimation of the technical power of Green OA. Green OA can be mandated, whereas Gold OA cannot (and need not be). What is urgently needed by research and researchers today is OA, and that is provided immediately by Green OA. (Green OA is also likely to lead eventually to a transition to Gold OA.) Professor Varmus also speaks of Green OA self-archiving as if it were a matter of central "public libraries" (like PubMed Central, which he co-founded, along with co-founding PLoS) that are "inherently archival" and provide only embargoed access rather than immediate access. In reality the greatest power of Green OA self-archiving mandates resides mostly in self-mandates by institutions (such as Harvard's), rather than just funder mandates like NIH's. Institutions are the producers of all research output, and their Green OA self-mandates ensure the self-archiving of all their own published article output, in all disciplines, funded or unfunded, in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs). Those IRs are neither libraries nor archives. They are providers of immediate research access for would-be users worldwide, and they also provide an interim solution for usage needs during embargoes: (1) USAGE RIGHTS. Self-archiving the author's final refereed draft (the "postprint") makes it possible for any user, webwide, to access, link, read, download, store, print-off, and data-mine the full text, as well as for search engines like google to harvest and invert it, for Google Scholar and OAIster to make it jointly searchable, for Citebase and Citeseer to provide download, citation and other ranking metrics, and for "public libraries" like PubMed Central to harvest them into archival central collections. This provides for all the immediate access and usage needs of all individual researchers. Certain 3rd-party database, data-mining, and republication rights are still uncertain, but once Green OA mandates generate universal Green OA, these enhanced uses will follow naturally under the growing pressure generated by OA's demonstrated power and benefits to the worldwide research community. Over-reaching for Gold now risks losing the Green that is within our immediate grasp. ![]() This provides for all the immediate access and usage needs of all individual researchers during any access embargo. Once Green OA mandates generate universal Green OA, access embargoes will die their well-deserved natural deaths of their own accord under the growing pressure generated by OA's demonstrated power and benefits to the worldwide research community. Again, grasp what is within reach first. (3) UNFUNDED RESEARCH. Funder mandates only cover funded research, but they also encourage, complement and reinforce institutional mandates, which cover all research output, in all disciplines. Institutions' own IRs are also the natural, convergent locus for mandating direct deposit by both institutional and funder mandates. All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable, so their contents can be exported to funder repositories such as PubMed Central, and institutions can help monitor and ensure compliance with funder mandates as well as with their own institutional mandates -- but only if direct deposit itself is systematically convergent rather than diverging to multiple, arbitrary, institution-external deposit sites. (4) COPYRIGHT RETENTION. Copyright retention is always welcome, but it is not only not necessary for providing Green OA, but, in asking for more than necessary, it risks making authors feel that it may put acceptance by their journal of choice at risk. Consequently, Harvard, for example, has found it necessary to add an opt-out clause to its copyright-retention mandate, which not only means that it is not really a mandate, but that it is not ensured of providing OA for all of its research output. An immediate deposit IR mandate without opt-out (and with the Button) provides for all the immediate access and usage needs of all individual researchers, and once Green OA mandates generate universal Green OA, copyright retention will follow naturally of its own accord. First things first. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, April 2. 2008The American Physical Society Is Not The Culprit: We Are (Part II)[See also the original posting to which this is a follow-up: Part I.] Re: "Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban" and "Traditional journals and copyright transfer" Following an exchange of correspondence with Jonathan Oppenheim and Bill Unruh about the above posting, I want to stress that I agree completely with Jonathan Oppenheim's and Bill Unruh's ends: (1) Derivative Works. Authors should be able to publish new articles which "differ in some reasonable way from the original work, even while possibly retaining much of the original." I also think APS authors can already do this, and that APS would no more try to prosecute its authors for this practice than it tried to prosecute them for practicing self-archiving (before APS went on to adapt to evolving practice by formally adopting its Green OA policy, the first Green OA publisher policy, and a model for them all). With derivative works too, formal APS policy will eventually adapt to evolving practice that is to the benefit of research progress in physics. Let practice again precede and guide precept. (Note that published postprints are in fact "derivative works" relative to unpublished preprints.) (2) Creative Commons Licensing. I am also fully in favor of CC licensing -- but not as a precondition for OA self-archiving today. All authors should adopt the CC license of their choice whenever they can. And where they cannot, they should just go ahead and self-archive under the Green publisher's current copyright agreement. (If the publisher is not Green, authors should immediately deposit anyway; and if they wish to set access to their deposit as Closed Access instead of OA during an embargo period, they should rely on their repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button to provide almost-immediate, almost-OA for all would-be users during any publisher embargo.) (I do believe, though, that CC licensing will prevail as a matter of natural course, after universal OA has prevailed.) So whereas I agree with Jonathan's and Bill's ends, I do not agree with their means. Rather than trying to force an immediate formal policy change (if APS feels it needs more time to think it through), I think Jonathan and Bill should just go ahead and practice what they seek to practice: publish new articles which differ in some reasonable way from the original work, even while possibly retaining much of the original, or post them to wikis like Quantiki if they wish. APS formal precept will again follow evolving practice in due course, as it did with author self-archiving. (By the way, the meaning of the enigmatic title "The American Physical Society is Not the Culprit: We Are" was of course that the reason we don't yet have universal OA [and all that follows from it] is that we are not yet universally self-archiving: I have dubbed this "Zeno's Paralysis.") Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, March 21. 2008One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind![]() PS: "It's one thing to argue that the NIH policy should mandate deposit in the author's institutional repository (when they have one)..." ![]() Even more would, if NIH mandated IR deposit as the preferred default option. And those universities who don't yet have an IR are only a piece of free software and a few days' sysad start-up time from having one -- and not just for their NIH output, but for all their research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines. The goal of the OA movement is to make all research output OA. But it is not just the OA content itself that needs to be "interoperable": OA mandates from funders need to be interoperable with OA mandates from institutions. Institutions are -- without exception -- the source, the providers, of all research output, worldwide. Hence funder OA mandates should not be competing with institutional OA mandates, needlessly and counterproductively, but adapting to, facilitating and reinforcing them. It is not at all too late to correct this small -- but crucial and easily-fixed -- bug in the recent, welcome, timely flowering of funder OA mandates, to create a synergy with the potentially far bigger blooming of institutional OA mandates that is also on the horizon (as heralded by Harvard's recent OA mandate). NIH need merely specify that the preferred means of fulfilling the NIH OA mandate is for NIH fundees to deposit their articles in their own institution's IR, and just send NIH each deposit's URL, so that PubMed Central can harvest it therefrom. One small step for NIH, one giant leap for mankind. PS: "But as long as the NIH is mandating deposit in PMC, and as long as a journal meets the NIH's criteria for depositing articles on behalf of authors, then I don't see any reason why authors shouldn't take advantage of the option."The reason is simple: The NIH mandate, as it stands, does not scale up to providing a systematic means of covering all of institutional research output, NIH and non-NIH, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines worldwide. NIH research output is just a small -- but extremely important -- subset of US and worldwide research output: NIH, the world's biggest (nonmilitary) research funder, is providing a model for research funder mandates worldwide, a model that will be influential, closely watched, and widely emulated. It is all the more critical, therefore, that the NIH mandate should be systematically scalable -- that it should interoperate coherently (rather than compete or conflict) with OA mandates from the research providers themselves -- the universities and research institutions worldwide -- as well as with other funder mandates, in other fields and other countries worldwide. If, instead, authors and their institutions were now to begin ceding responsibility for compliance with the NIH OA mandate to their publishers as their proxies, relying on them to deposit their work in PubMed Central in their place, this would deprive the NIH mandate of any possibility of growing to cover all of research output, in all fields, worldwide. (It would also add to the compliance-monitoring and fulfillment problem that the Wellcome Trust, which has a similar funder mandate, is just now discovering -- and NIH will soon discover it too.) Publisher proxy deposit would at the same time tighten the control of publishers over a process that should be entirely in the hands of authors themselves: the provision of supplementary free access to their give-away work for those who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's proprietary version. (Proxy deposit would also encourage publishers to charge for compliance with the NIH mandate.) Publisher proxy deposit would also lose the three special, scalable strengths of the NIH mandate, which are (1) that the NIH mandate applies specifically to the researcher's peer-reviewed final draft (the postprint, on which restrictions are the fewest), not necessarily to the publisher's proprietary PDF; (2) that the NIH mandate is a researcher self-archiving mandate, binding on researchers (not their publishers), and based on each researcher's right (and responsibility) to maximize access to his own give-away findings; and (3) that the NIH mandate is a coherent component of a universal mandate to provide OA to all research output, not just to NIH-funded research output, in PubMed Central. It is crucially important to remind ourselves very explicitly that what we are talking about here is just keystrokes -- i.e., about who should do the few keystrokes that make a piece of peer-reviewed research OA. We are talking, very specifically, about a few minutes' worth of keystrokes per paper (over and above the many keystrokes that already went into writing it in the first place). The natural ones to do those keystrokes are the authors themselves (or their assistants, students or assigns); and the natural place for them to do it is in their own IRs. It makes as little sense to consider offloading the task of performing those few keystrokes onto publishers (or even onto institutional librarians) as it would be to offload onto any other party the task of keying in the paper itself, in these days of personal word-processing. So although most authors today are still not doing those few extra keystrokes of their own accord (and that is precisely the problem that the OA mandates are meant to remedy) it would be exceedingly short-sighted to propose that the remedy is to invite authors' publishers to do those keystrokes for them (possibly even at additional cost). That dysfunctional remedy is remarkably reminiscent of the grotesque degree of control over the dissemination of our own giveaway research findings we have unwittingly been ceding to our publishers throughout the paper era (the "Faustian Bargain"): the very disease that OA is meant to cure, in the online era, at long last. And needlessly insisting on direct deposit in PubMed Central is the very heart of the problem. Yet the cure is ever so simple: NIH need merely stipulate that the preferred means of fulfilling the NIH OA mandate is for each researcher to deposit the postprint in his own university's IR and send NIH the URL. PS: "I did object to journal deposit under the older, voluntary policy, because it gave publishers the decision on the length of the embargo. Under the new policy, however, the length of the embargo is already set by the time the author signs the copyright transfer agreement. Hence, journal deposit cannot change the terms of the deal."That leaves only the six other serious reasons militating against publisher deposit: (1) Publisher proxy deposit in an external repository needlessly competes with institutional IR self-archiving mandates instead of facilitating them; (2) it defeats the benefits of an immediate-deposit mandate, where the IR's "email eprint request" button could have tided over worldwide research usage needs during any publisher embargo by providing almost-immediate, almost-OA; (3) it loses the benefits of having specified that the OA deposit target is the author's postprint, not necessarily the publisher's PDF; (4) it leaves publishers in control of providing OA (and even facilitates their charging for it); (5) it leaves IRs empty, and non-NIH content non-OA; (6) it leaves researchers' fingers paralyzed. PS: [update] "My response above was limited to publishers who do not charge fees, and I share Stevan's objections to those who would charge fees."My objections are not just limited to publishers who charge fees: They concern any publisher proxy deposit, and indeed any funder mandate that does not stipulate that the author's own institutional IR is the preferred default locus for deposit wherever possible. PS: "Or if there's some subtle way in which it can, then I'll join Stevan's call on authors to make the deposits themselves. I already agree with him that, if the policy were to mandate deposit in the author's IR, then author deposits would make much more sense than journal deposits."Peter, the ways in which both publisher proxy deposit and direct institution-external deposit are counterproductive for the growth of OA and OA mandates are far from subtle. I fervently hope that you will support my call on authors (or their collaborators) to make the deposits themselves, preferably in their own IRs, providing NIH with the URL. And of course also the call on NIH to allow -- indeed welcome -- IR deposit and PubMed Central harvesting rather than just direct PubMed Central deposit. (And, while we're at it, the call on universities, like Harvard, to mandate deposit, without opt-out, rather than just mandating copyright-retention, with opt-out!) This slight change in the implementational details of the NIH policy would be a small step for NIH, but a huge step for the growth of OA worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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