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Friday, March 21. 2008Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse: IIIPaul Gherman: "At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant work contacting publishers to find out what their policy and procedures are. One discovery is that some of them intend to charge authors between $900 and $3,000 to submit articles to NIH. Some will allow for early posting, if the fee is paid."Such are the wages of whim. But they are easily fixed, free of charge: (1) NIH specifies the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR) as the locus for the mandated direct deposit. (PubMed Central can then harvest the metadata or full-text.)The (outrageous) notion of being charged $900 - $3000 per paper for complying with the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is something the NIH has invited upon itself by not thinking through the details of the mandate sufficiently, and mandating direct 3rd-party repository deposit instead of integrating the NIH mandate with Harvard-style university mandates, requiring immediate deposit in the university employee's own IR, without exceptions or opt-outs, and with embargoed OA access-setting the only (temporary) compromise. I am confident that this will be the ultimate outcome in any case. The only question is: How long will it take all the wise and well-intentioned parties involved to take a deep breath, think it through, and do it, instead of hurtling ahead with alternatives they have already committed themselves to, without thinking them through sufficiently rigorously...? See: "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, March 4. 2008Surf Foundation Publisher Policy Survey![]() The gist of the survey result is that more and more publishers are moving toward explicitly endorsing author open-access self-archiving, and that the majority already endorse it. This is good to know, but it was already evident from the EPrint Romeo statistics (derived by clarifying the SHERPA-Romeo data, and presenting it at the individual journal level). These statistics have been available and regularly updated for several years now. Two comments: (1) The Surf Foundation survey obscures the results somewhat, because it uses the needlessly profligate, irrelevant and confusing colour codes of SHERPA-Romeo ("green", "blue", "yellow", "white") when all we need to know is:Stevan HarnadGREEN (62%) (journals that endorse immediate open-access self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint)(2) There is some confusion about what is meant by "open access" in the Surf report (whether (i) Gold Open Access journal publishing, (ii) Green Open Access author self-archiving, or (iii) the adoption of the JISC/SURF licensing recommendations). American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, February 22. 2008Harvard's OA Policy and the Hybrid Copyright Retention and Deposit Mandate![]() SUMMARY: My OA comrade-at-arms, Peter Suber, in an OA News posting that I quote and comment upon below, compares Harvard's (CMo) Copyright-Retention Mandate with opt-out and (DMn) an Immediate Deposit Mandate with no-opt-out. The amendment of the Harvard draft policy that I am urging, however, is not to substitute DMn for CMo but to upgrade CMo to CMo+DMn so as to jointly mandate BOTH CMo AND DMn (the former with an opt-out option, the latter without). That way the Harvard policy will not only capture (1) all the deposits that would have been made by authors who did not opt out of the CMo clause but also (2) all the deposits that would otherwise not have been made at all, because the authors had opted out of the CMo-only mandate. The amended mandate loses nothing at all of what would have been generated by the original Harvard mandate alone, it only adds further gains, while still allowing opt-out from copyright retention. Peter Suber: I'm not saying that the Harvard-style mandate will generate a higher level of compliance and OA than a dual deposit-release style mandate (or what Stevan calls immediate deposit/optional access). I think this remains to be seen.I agree that whether it would be CMo or DMn that generated a higher level of compliance and of OA would remain to be seen (after Harvard's proposed CMo trial period of three years -- although we do already know from Arthur Sale's data that DMn approaches 80-100% within two years). But that is not what I propose. I propose adding the Deposit Mandate (with no opt-out) (DMn) to Harvard's current Copyright Retention Mandate (CMo) (with opt-out, exactly as it already is now): Not CMo vs. DMn, but CMo vs. CMo+DMn. That will insure the Harvard mandate against the possibility of another needless loss of three years of research usage and impact (as happened with the unsuccessful first version of the NIH OA policy, until it was upgraded, three years later). And as the Harvard policy is likely to have many emulators worldwide during the three-year trial period (as the NIH policy did), it is especially important to give them them the right model to follow. Peter Suber: At Harvard, faculty will give the institution permission to host copies of their articles in the institutional repository, when they don't opt out, and Harvard will take responsibility for making the actual deposits.There are two components here: (1) the CMo mandate itself, with its all-important question of how great its opt-out rate will be, plus (2) an implementational detail: Harvard engages to do the deposit on the author's behalf (this is elsewhere called mediated or "proxy" deposit). There are things to be said for and against the implementational detail (mediated deposit): Yes, it's easier for an author if all he needs to do is pass his digital paper to someone else to deposit it for him. Many repositories have tried that, with a certain amount of success. But authors depositing for themselves (or their students or assistants doing it for them) is a more direct way of doing it then putting the paper in a central queue, and it has some perks of its own: potentially faster turnaround time, more direct author control, and, perhaps most important, assimilation into the author's standard work-flow for drafting and publishing a paper. In reality, the deposit only takes a few extra minutes' worth of keystrokes per paper, over and above all the keystrokes already performed in writing it and submitting it for publication. Direct author deposit moots the risk of delay in waiting for indirect deposit mediated by a third party (neither the author nor the journal). The jury is still out on which of the two ways of implementing deposit is the more reliable and efficient procedure (but my guess is that it will prove to be direct author deposit, just as it did with word-processing, email, and online searching). Peter Suber: If Harvard is fleet and efficient in making these deposits, then it could provide immediate OA to all the articles not subject to opt-outs (which, for the sake of argument, let's peg at 95% of the total).The implementational detail (of direct vs mediated deposit) can be set aside as an open empirical question. It does not seem to me to be sufficient, however, to assume, for the sake of argument, a 95% non-opt-out rate -- especially in weighing CMo vs. CMo+DMn. If, three years hence, the non-opt-out rate turned out to have been 75%, 50% or 25% (let alone 4%, as in the case of the failed first policy of NIH), the implications concerning whether it would have been better to adopt CMo or CMo+DMn from the outset would be very different. So everything rides on what the opt-out rate for CMo would actually turn out to be. And no one has any idea, as this would be the first CMo mandate. But since the comparison is CMo vs. CMo+DMn (rather than CMo vs. DMn), it is not clear that we even need to know how the deposit rate and the OA rate for CMo alone would have compared with the OA rate for DMn alone. We do already know from Arthur Sale's empirical analyses as well as the growth data on the other mandated IRs, that the compliance rate for DMn mandates approaches 100% within 2 years. So with CMo+DMn we know we would have at least 80-100% deposits -- plus whatever deposits CMo alone would have generated, over and above that. (There is no need to know or assume how many that would have been: CNo+DMn would inherit them all!) Peter Suber: If Harvard is slow to make these deposits, then it will miss a beautiful opportunity arising from the permissions it will have in hand, and may as well defer to publisher embargoes.Peter is expressing concern here about the possible delay in mediated deposit (I share that concern) and comparing that delay to the delay arising from publisher embargoes. But a far bigger worry is the opt-out rate, hence the size of the loss in deposits (both the OA deposits and Closed Access, almost-OA deposits) with CMo alone. (As it happens, my proposed amendment, CMo+DMn, did include an implementational suggestion too, one that would help remedy this: The Harvard Mandate does not currently stipulate how the paper is to be provided to the Provost's office for mediated deposit. One potential way is by email. But another is by the author depositing it directly in a Harvard Institutional Repository and then just emailing the Provost's office the URL plus the permission. That would cover all those cases where the author does not opt-out of the CMo component of CMo+DMn -- as well as all the direct deposits that opt out of the CMo clause but comply with the DMn clause.) So even in cases where the author elects to opt out of the CMo clause of CMo+DMn, there would still be the binding DMn clause, requiring the deposit in the Institutional Repository; and hence there would be the resultant OA and almost-OA that that in turn generates. (The CMo+DMn's no-opt-out DMn clause alone would contribute 80-100% deposits within two years.) Peter Suber: Likewise, if opt-outs are rare, the level of OA could approach 100%; if they are common, it would be much lower.We indeed have no idea what the opt-out rates of a CMo mandate would be, with or without mediated deposit. If opt-out is low, it's low, if it's high, it's high. Unlike with DMn, we do not know in advance what it will be. (But we do know that another prominent policy with an opt-out -- the initial NIH non-mandate -- failed dramatically until the opt-out was removed by upgrading it to a mandate -- but only after the attendant loss of another three years of research access, usage and impact. Hence the pre-emptive strategy for Harvard's proposed CMo mandate, to avoid the needless extra risk during the three-year trial period, would be to upgrade to CMo+DMn from the outset.) Peter Suber: By contrast, under a dual deposit-release strategy, Harvard could have 100% of the articles on deposit. But a good percentage of them would be subject to publisher embargoes and about one-third of them would be subject to flat publisher prohibitions on OA archiving.First, we must again recall that we are talking here about adding the no-opt-out DMn clause to CMo, not about replacing CMo with DMn. The current publisher policy figures are the following: 62% of journals endorse making postprint deposits OA immediately (and an additional 29% for preprints); about 38% only endorse making postprint deposits OA after an embargo period -- which ranges from 6 months to forever. (Let's round off the immediate/embargo ratio at 60% of deposits set as immediate OA and the remaining 40% of deposits set as "Closed Access," but with almost-OA provided for that 40% during the embargo by means of the semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button.) Now here is the crucial point: Peter is here comparing the deposit rate (100%) and OA rate (60%) for a no-opt-out DMn-only mandate with the corresponding deposit and OA rate for a CMo-only mandate allowing opt-out (in the latter case both the deposit and OA percentages being, identically, the unknown CMo non-opt-out percentage: XX%). But the relevant comparison for my proposed amendment would be this deposit percentage and OA percentage (both identically XX%) for CMo-alone versus the total deposit and OA percentages for CMo+DMn: Those total CMo+DMn percentages are, respectively, XX% + 100% = 100% and XX% + 60% (which is at least 60%, plus whatever the non-opt-out copyright retention rate is for the articles that are not already part of that 60%). In other words, compared to CMo alone, there would be no loss in copyright retention and only potential gain in OA with CMo+DMn. And let's not forget that, with 100% deposit, there will also be systematic almost-immediate, almost-OA for all the non-OA deposits (thanks to the semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button). That too is a pure gain, with no accompanying loss, compared to the current CMo-only policy. Peter Suber: Hence, each type of policy risks delayed OA (one through institutional sluggishness, one through publisher embargoes), and each risks incomplete OA (one through faculty opt outs and one through deference to publisher policies).Peter is here comparing (1) delay because of mediated deposit arising from CMo alone with (2) delay because of publisher embargoes arising DMn alone. But for the proposed amendment, the pertinent comparison would be between CMo alone and CMo+DMn. And that comparison shows that there would be no losses and only gains, if CMo were upgraded to CMo+DMn, whether we reckon in terms of opt-outs, deposits, OA, almost-OA or delays. Here's another way to put this same point. The comparison between CMo and CMo+DMn must take into consideration: Hence it is essential to include in one's reckoning the (1) unknown Green opt-outs and their resulting non-deposits and OA loss, plus the (2) unknown Pale-Green and Gray opt-outs and their resulting non-deposits and loss of almost-OA. Both of these would arise from opt-out because of unwillingness or failure to renegotiate copyright as required by CMo.(1) Green publishers that endorse immediate author postprint self-archiving but do not agree to rights-retention (i.e., they insist on exclusive rights transfer despite the pressure from CMo mandates like Harvard's): Authors who would not want to renounce those journals, would opt out of CMo. Hence no deposit and no OA, even for those Green journals. (Harvard's speed in doing mediated deposit, though salient too, is not, I think, nearly as critical as the risk of loss from (1) and (2).) Peter Suber: If the two key variables -- speed of deposit and level of opt-outs-- work in Harvard's favor, then its policy could be better than a dual deposit-release strategy. But if not, not. Because this is contingent, I can't recommend one type of policy over the other without knowing more about the probabilities.Again, this empirical uncertainty is only pertinent to a comparison between the CMo policy and the DMn policy. But the comparison I am recommending is between the CMo policy and the CMo+DMn policy. There we can already calculate apriori that CMo+DMn can only do better, not worse, than CMo alone, on all points of comparson: deposits, delays, opt-outs, OA, and almost-OA. Peter Suber: Because Harvard's is the first university-level mandate to focus on permissions rather than deposits, it deserves a chance to show how well it can work.Yes it does. But adopting CMo+DMn instead of CMo alone will not diminish that chance one bit: It will just add additional, independent likelihood of success to it. Or, to put it another way, CMo+DMn makes it possible to experiment with a Copyright Mandate without any need to sacrifice the already demonstrated success and benefits of a Deposit Mandate in exchange. Peter Suber: Can the two types of policy be blended, so that Harvard faculty give permissions (subject to an opt-out) and make deposits (not subject an opt-out)? Yes. But if Harvard is fleet and efficient in making the deposits, that won't be necessary.The degree to which CMo+DMn would generate (1) more deposits, (2) more OA and (3) more almost-OA than CMo alone depends not on Harvard's speed of mediating deposit but on what the (unknown) opt-out rate for CMo alone would prove to be. CMo+DMn is accordingly an insurance policy. Whether an insurance policy was indeed necessary is only known after the insured period has elapsed. But in this case, since the insurance policy would cost nothing but a consensus from Harvard on upgrading to CMo+DMn, I think Harvard has nothing to lose and everything to gain if it upgrades now, from the outset, rather than waiting for the three year trial period to elapse, and another three years of research usage and impact to be needlessly lost, as NIH did. The following is not from Peter's blog posting but from an off-line email exchange (reproduced with permission): Peter Suber (email): "I'd have no objection to the addition of [a DMn] mandate (indeed, I'd be among the first to call for the addition of such a mandate) if it would improve upon the procedures Harvard puts in place to make the deposits itself."CMo+DMn would not only improve on the implementation of the submission and deposit process, but -- incomparably more important -- it would improve on the deposit rate, the OA rate, and the almost-OA rate! All the gains would be from the (unknown) percentage of authors who would opt out of the present CMo-only mandate. And CMo+DMn would not lose anything from what the present CMo-only mandate would generate from the authors (XX%) who would not opt out. Peter Suber (email): However, it's certainly possible that if the original resolution had included a deposit mandate, it would not have been adopted by faculty. We'll never know."Peter, when you give your talk at Harvard's Berkman Center on March 17 (assuming that the CMo policy has not been miraculously upgraded to CMo+DMn in the meanwhile!), would you consider explicitly raising the following three questions: Because if CMo+DMn was not even considered in the Harvard FAS deliberations -- or if it was not adopted because of concern that a policy without an opt-out would not be complied with -- then it might be helpful to point out to your hosts (1) Alma's Swan's international, cross-discipline author survey results, which found that 95% of researchers report they would comply with an OA self-archiving mandate from their universities or their funders (81% of them willingly); and (2) Arthur Sale's comparative studies on actual author behaviour, which confirmed that the OA self-archiving rates for universities with an OA self-archiving mandate (with no opt-out!) approach 80-100% within 2 years of adoption, whereas universities where deposit is not mandatory languish at deposit rates of c. 15%.(i) Was Harvard's successful consensus on adopting CMo reached because of the "C" (Copyright Retention) or the "o" (the option to opt out)? With CMo+DMn Harvard has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Perhaps if this is made sufficiently clear now, an immediate upgrade is still possible, rather than having to wait for a 3-year trial period to decide (as with the first, failed NIH policy). Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, February 20. 2008Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit ClauseSome Journals (Alas) Still Demand Exclusive Copyright Transfer I think I understand fully what Michael Carroll, Peter Suber and the current draft of the Harvard Policy are saying. My shorthand descriptor -- "copyright retention" -- captures precisely the feature of the Harvard policy that should, I urge, be modified (ever so slightly). Many journals currently require authors to transfer exclusive rights to the publisher in exchange for publication. Let me hasten to add: I think this is deplorable. I don't think authors should have to do it. And I am certain publishers will cease to make this a condition of publication once OA prevails: some have already ceased demanding it. But some have not. And among the some who have not are some of the journals that authors (including Harvard authors) most want to publish in. And that's the point: In order to be able to grant Harvard the license that the current Harvard OA Mandate requires, Harvard authors would have to successfully renegotiate the retention of their rights (i.e., they must negotiate a non-exclusive license) with those journals. (Under the transfer of exclusive rights to the publisher, it is not the author to whom users must apply to seek permission or license for the sorts of re-use rights that the Harvard author's addendum asks authors to transfer to Harvard -- it is to the publisher, the holder of all exclusive rights.) And if the journal is their journal of choice, and the negotiation is unsuccessful, then the Harvard author must either opt out of the Harvard mandate or not publish in his journal of choice. And that's exactly what my recommended amendment is intended to avert: by requiring deposit independently of requiring copyright retention (or reservation, or renegotiation). Then the opt-out can be from the copyright renegotiation requirement only, and not from the deposit requirement too. This preserves all the virtues and intended benefits of the current Harvard mandate, and adds the further benefit of 100% deposit, with no opt-out. (Access to two thirds of those deposits can then immediately be set as Open Access, because their journals already officially endorse it; and the remaining third can be set to Closed Access for the time being, with the Institutional Repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" ["Fair Use"] button providing almost-immediate almost-OA during any access embargo period -- until the growing OA ushers in the natural, inevitable and well-deserved death of access embargoes as well as exclusive copyright transfer.) But co-bundle the Harvard mandate instead with the copyright retention requirement, and its opt-out clause, and it is hardly even a mandate at all, its probability of success, deposit rate, and adoptability by other universities is diminished -- all needlessly, with no corresponding gain, just a loss. Upgrade Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate By Adding a No-Opt-Out Deposit Mandate: No Loss, Only Gain Michael Carroll, Peter Suber and I are in complete agreement on every point of substance save one: What is the mandate that is the most likely to generate the most OA? Michael and Peter (and Harvard!) think it is a Copyright Retention Mandate with opt-out (CRM). I think it is a Deposit Mandate without opt-out (DM), which can be trivially added to the Copyright Retention Mandate with opt-out (CRM). In other words, Harvard can have its (CRM) cake, and eat it (DR) too! That contingency is completely missing in Michael's analysis of my proposal. Michael points out that even if a Harvard author opts out of CRM, he can still deposit his article if he wishes to. But if voluntary deposit -- just for the sake of the benefits of OA, or just because one's university or funder had invited deposit -- had been capable of generating enough OA, then (1) mandates would not have proved necessary, (2) NIH's invitation policy would not have failed and would not now have had to be upgraded to an immediate deposit mandate, and (3) the hundreds of institutional repositories with invitations instead of mandates worldwide would not be hovering for years at spontaneous deposit rates of 5-15% while the (still few) mandated repositories approach 100% within two years. An opt-out mandate is not a mandate. That is why I urge that the Harvard opt-out CRM mandate be upgraded to add a non-opt-out DM clause. Absolutely nothing is lost, and a great deal is gained. For the papers whose authors can and do opt for CRM, Harvard will have immediate OA. For the papers whose authors opt out of CRM, Harvard will still have 100% immediate deposit, with immediate OA for about two thirds of it and almost-OA for the remaining third. (Even if it is assumed that the articles for which the authors opt for CRM are identical to the deposits that could have been set to immediate OA anyway, there is still the gain of one third almost-OA and 100% deposit with DM+CRM but not with CRM alone.) I hope that makes the logic and the contingencies of my proposal still clearer. I might add that exactly the same logic was used in designing the ID/OA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate itself (the one Peter calls the Dual Deposit/Release mandate): There the logic was that if an institution could not reach agreement on adopting the stronger immediate OA mandate (for copyright reasons, say), then it makes no sense to adopt a delayed-deposit mandate, or, worse, an opt-out "mandate," which allows the publisher's embargo policy to determine that date at which the deposit is made: It makes far more sense to mandate immediate deposit in every instance, with the publisher's embargo policy applicable only to the date on which the deposit is made OA ("released"), thereby allowing almost-OA to tide over the embargo, thanks to the Button. Last point: my position would be closest to Michael Carroll's option "(c) even if they would marginally improve scholalry communication, the costs of negotiating copyright with publishers is not worth this benefit" -- except that it is not exactly the benefits of OA I am talking about here but the benefits of a successful OA mandate. (Because every opt-out means no OA.) Once immediate deposit is safely mandated universally, and it has generated free online access for researchers worldwide to all refereed postprints, we can examine at our leisure what else researchers needed that didn't already come with that free online territory. But please, let's get there first, and not be held back by pre-emptively over-reaching (and thus inviting opt-out) when 100% free online access is already within our grasp -- if only we manage to mandate the keystrokes! Stevan Harnad Thursday, February 14. 2008Weaken the Harvard OA Mandate To Strengthen It![]() Terry, the Harvard OA Mandate is potentially so important that I hope both political sense and pragmatism still have time to prevail, so as to remedy the few but fundamental flaws in the current draft Mandate.Stevan, I'm sure your version is preferable to the one actually passed by FAS. Some of us urged a more forceful approach. However, those with a better political sense thought otherwise. The irony is that the Harvard Mandate needs a less forceful approach, not a more forceful one, in order to be much more powerful and effective. Remedying Flaws in the NIH and Harvard OA Mandates. An analogy with the history of the NIH OA policy is especially instructive and revealing here: The original draft of that NIH policy also had (three) fundamental flaws -- (1) that it was not a mandate (it was a request rather than a requirement), (2) that it allowed deposit itself to be delayed as long as a year, and (3) that it insisted on direct central deposit (in PubMed Central) instead of deposit in the author's own university's Institutional Repository (IR) (and then central harvesting to PubMed Central). The NIH policy failed, completely, but it took three years to realize and remedy this failure. The remedy was (1) to upgrade the NIH policy to a mandate and (2) to require immediate -- not delayed -- deposit (allowing an embargo of up to one year, but applicable only to the date at which access to the deposit was set as OA; the deposit itself had to be immediate). (The NIH insistence on central deposit (3), instead of institutional deposit and central harvesting, has not yet been remedied. But Harvard's institutional mandate, if its own flaws can be corrected so its policy can be adopted by all universities, US and worldwide, will also remedy this last of the three NIH mandate's flaws.) Four years ago I went to Washington to try to explain to Norka Ruiz Bravo's group at NIH exactly how and why the three small but crucial changes (1)-(3) in the draft NIH policy needed to be made if it was to succeed. It was decided not to heed the advice, and to go ahead and adopt the draft policy as it was. As a result, three more years of NIH research access and impact were then lost, needlessly. (And during those three years, all the biomedical funders on the planet were reflexively imitating the failed NIH policy!) ![]() (The access embargo is applicable only to the date of OA-setting, not the date of deposit -- which is just fine, because of the potential power of repositories' automatized "email eprint request" Buttons to fulfill all research usage needs for Closed Access deposits during any embargo interval). The one remaining flaw in the NIH mandate is the one that the right mandate from Harvard now would help to remedy: Mandate Institutional Deposit. Funder and University OA Mandates need to be complementary and convergent. NIH still insists on mandating direct central deposit in PubMed Central -- instead of reinforcing and building upon university mandates; it should instead likewise mandate deposit in each author's own University Institution Repository (IR). (From there, PubMed Central -- and any other central repository or indexer -- could harvest the deposits, with the author needing only to provide NIH with the URL!). Universities and research institutions are, after all, the providers of all research output, both funded and unfunded. A realistic, viable mandate from Harvard now would be taken up by all universities worldwide. And it would ensure that funder mandates, too, would begin stipulating direct, convergent deposit in authors' own University IRs, instead of divergent deposit, helter-skelter, in diverse CRs. Then any central collections and indexes we desire could automatically be harvested (or exported) from the worldwide distributed network of OA IRs -- using the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol, with which all IRs are compliant, and which was created for that specific purpose. Funder/University Collaboration to Make All Research Output OA. Then universities and research institutions will not only be able to help funders implement and monitor compliance with the funders' self-archiving mandates (as part of their fulfillment conditions for receiving the institutional overheads from those grants): They will also be able to complement and universalize those funder OA mandates (which only cover the self-archiving of funded research output) with (Harvard-style) institutional OA mandates of their own, for self-archiving all of their institutional research output, both funded and unfunded. That is the natural synergy that will systematically scale up to make all of the planet's research output OA -- across all disciplines, institutions, languages and nations. Mandating Copyright-Retention is a Needless Deterrent. But if NIH's mistake had been to make its mandate too weak (only (1) a request, with (2) an allowable year-long delay in deposit), Harvard's mistake now is needlessly making its mandate too strong, thereby necessitating the further addition of a compensatory "opt-out" clause -- which in turn makes the Harvard policy needlessly weak (indeed, no longer a mandate at all)! The reason Harvard had to add its opt-out clause is obvious: Otherwise the policy would have faced a predictable (and justified) author revolt: (That is the sense in which "better political sense" prevailed!) It is one thing to demand that the article be deposited in Harvard's IR. That just costs a few keystrokes, and brings palpable benefits to the author and institution. But it's quite another thing to demand that the author accept the risk of failure to successfully negotiate copyright retention with his journal of choice, and thereby being forced to publish in a lesser journal. An Opt-Out Mandate Is Not a Mandate. (Whether or not this risk is real, it is definitely a reasonable, perceived risk for publish-or-perish authors, even at Harvard, and hence a risk that rightly obliged those with "better political sense" at Harvard to add the opt-out clause. Without the opt-out clause it is unlikely that the policy motion could have passed at all.) But with an opt-out clause, a mandate is no longer a mandate: it's just a request! And the reason the NIH request had failed was that it had been just a request rather than a mandate! Allow Opt-Out Only From Copyright Retention. The right remedy is hence to modularize the Harvard mandate, so as separately (a) to require immediate deposit, with no opt-out, and also (b) to request/require copyright-retention -- but to allow an opt-out from the latter. Copyright Retention Is Desirable But Unnecessary for OA. In reality, for at least 62% of refereed postprints and a further 29% of pre-refereeing preprints, there is no need for copyright retention at all in order to provide OA because this 91% of journals have already officially endorsed immediate OA self-archiving in one form or the other. (Online access, free for all, by the way, moots all of the other uses for the sake of which authors -- and lawyers and librarians -- imagine that copyright would need to be retained and licensed: Virtually all the other uses already come with the territory, once a paper is made free online; and whatever doesn't, soon will, once all papers are made free online.) To fulfill all immediate research usage needs for any of the articles from those journals that have not yet endorsed immediate OA self-archiving (38% for postprints, 9% for preprints), the IRs will all have the semi-automatic almost-immediate, almost-OA Button. (This will not only provide for all immediate usage needs during any embargoes, but it will also soon bring the rest of the journal policies into line with those that already endorse immediate OA self-archiving, under mounting pressure from the worldwide research community's growing experience with -- and increasing reliance and eventual insistence upon -- the palpable benefits of OA, thanks to the growing number of mandates.) Weaken the Harvard OA Mandate To Strengthen It. So nothing is lost by weakening the Harvard policy, as recommended, so as to make immediate deposit mandatory, with no opt-out, allowing opt-out only on the (unnecessary) requirement to retain copyright. Eliminate Need For Opt-Out Loophole. In the current draft of its mandate, by bundling the two together, and allowing opt-out on the entire package, Harvard instead gets the worst of both: the author deterrent effect of insisting on copyright retention, plus the resultant loophole from Harvard authors simply choosing to opt out of depositing altogether. Harvard's rationale was that its authors, if they have to opt out paper by paper, will find it too tiresome to keep opting out, and will prefer to try to renegotiate copyright with their journals instead. Much more likely, authors will draft standard form letters for the Provost's office saying "The right journal for this work is journal X, and journal X does not allow copyright retention, so I regret but I must opt out for this work."). An opt-out letter is ar easier (and more likely of success) than the (real and apparent) risks of trying to renegotiate copyright. And the Provost's Office is certainly in no position to argue with Harvard authors on the appropriate outlet for their work. Authors Will Not Deposit Unless Mandated. Journals would no doubt be quite pleased if Harvard decided to over-reach and needlessly mandate copyright retention, with opt-out, instead of just mandating immediate deposit, without opt-out: That way the journals that have endorsed immediate OA self-archiving could appear progressive on OA, confident that absent a deposit mandate very few authors bother to self-archive spontaneously (as the first NIH policy and many other non-mandatory policies have repeatedly shown: indeed, that was exactly what gave rise to the deposit mandate movement). So because the current wording of the Harvard policy does not mandate the deposit itself, but only the copyright retention, along with the option of opting out, the journals can again count on most authors taking the path of least resistance: opting out. (Publishers are already singing the praises of this opt-out option as "author choice.") Don't Wait Three Years to Correct the Flaws, as NIH Did. As with the failed NIH policy, if Harvard does not upgrade its policy now, it will take three years to confirm empirically that the draft policy has failed. Yet Harvard's mandate is so easy to fix pre-emptively now, with no loss at all in any of its intended effects, only the gain of a far greater likelihood of compliance and more OA. The ground has already been tested by other universities who have as already adopted a deposit mandate. There Are Already 37 Successful Deposit Mandates. It is not even clear why Harvard feels it needs to independently re-invent the OA-mandate wheel, when there are 15 successful university mandates and 22 successful funder mandates adopted already, not one of them needing to mandate copyright retention or to allow opt-out. All that is needed is for Harvard to adopt ID/OA, and all the other universities of the world would follow suit! The notion that copyright retention is the solution to the research accessibility problem is far from new: It was prominently mooted a decade ago in Science magazine by 12 co-authors and has gotten precisely nowhere since then, despite being repeatedly revived, notionally, in university after university, by either the library or legal staff, year after year. Copyright Retention is a Needless, Disabling Deterrent. The reason requiring copyright retention is a nonstarter is that it contains a gratuitous, disabling deterrent: needlessly putting at risk the actual and perceived probability of being accepted by the author's journal of choice. Hence the need to allow opt-out, which in turn effectively reduces any mandate to a mere request. An ID/OA mandate does not have that deterrent. Deposit mandates have already been demonstrated, repeatedly, to successfully approach 100% compliance within two years of adoption. ID/OA does not require copyright retention, nor an opt-out clause. Deposit Mandate Will Eventually Lead to Copyright Retention Too; But OA First! And, most ironically of all, ID/OA will almost certainly lead, eventually, to copyright retention too! But to do that, it must first reach 100% OA. And universal Deposit Mandates will ensure that. Needlessly attempting instead to impose the stronger mandate first will not. I hope Harvard will make the small parametric adjustments needed to maximize the likelihood that its historic mandate will succeed, and will be emulated by all other universities worldwide. I close with a re-posting of the specific small but crucial changes in the wording of the mandate that are needed to prevent the copyright-retention requirement from compromising the deposit requirement. Current Draft of Harvard OA Mandate. First, here is the draft Harvard OA mandate as it now stands. [passages that are flagged for modification are in brackets]: Text of Motion on behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing:Proposed Revised Draft. Now here are the small but crucial changes that will immunize the deposit requirement against any opt-outs from the copyright-retention requirement. Note the re-ordering of the clauses, and the addition of the underscored passages. (Other universities may also omit the two indented clauses preceded by asterisk ** if they wish): Proposed revision:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, February 12. 2008Optimizing Harvard's Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving MandateIt is a great (and widespread) mistake to treat the problems of (1) journal overpricing, (2) publishing reform, and (3) copyright reform as if they were all the same thing as the problem of (4) research access. They are not. Open Access (OA) to research can be provided, quickly, easily, and directly, without first having to solve (1)-(3). And, once provided, OA can help pave the way toward solving (1)-(3). But conflate OA with (1)-(3) from the outset, and all you do is delay and handicap OA. ![]() The Harvard proposal is to try the opyright-retention strategy: Retain copyright so faculty can (among other things) deposit their writings in Harvard's OA Institutional Repository. Let me try to say why I think this is the wrong strategy, whereas something not so different from it would not only have much greater probability of success, but would serve as a model that would generalize much more readily to the worldwide academic community. [Note: The first two concerns I raised yesterday have since proved unfounded: [I had not yet seen the exact wording of the motion when I first posted this on Tuesday.] The mandate -- successfully adopted Tuesday afternoon -- applies only to articles, and only to the final, refereed draft of those articles. But the 3rd and principle concern (about mandatory copyright retention) stands.(3) Copyright Retention is Unnecessary for OA and Needlessly Handicaps Both the Probability of Adoption of the Policy and the Probability of Success If Adopted. Copyright retention is always welcome wherever it is desired and successfully negotiated by the author. But there is no need to require retention of copyright in order to provide OA. Sixty-two percent of journals already officially endorse authors making their postprints OA immediately upon acceptance for publication by depositing them in their Institutional Repository, and a further 30% already endorse making preprints OA. That already covers 92% of Harvard's intended target. For the remaining 8% (and indeed for 38%, because OA's primary target is postprints, not just preprints), they too can be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, with access set as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access. To provide for worldwide research usage needs for such embargoed papers, both the EPrints and the DSpace IR software now have an "email eprint request" button that allows any would-be user who reaches a Closed Access postprint to paste in his email address and click, which sends an immediate automatized email request to the author, containing a URL, on which the author need merely click to have an eprint automatically emailed to the requester. (Mailing article reprints to requesters has been standard academic practice for decades and is merely made more powerful, immediate, ubiquitous and effective with the help of email, an IR, and the semi-automatic button; it likewise does not require permission or copyright retention.) This means that it is already possible to adopt a universal, exception-free mandate to deposit all postprints immediately upon acceptance for publication, without the author's having to decide whether or not to deposit the unrefereed preprint and whether or not to retain copyright (hence whether or not to opt out). This blanket mandate provides immediate OA to at least 62% of OA's target content, and almost-immediate, almost-OA to the rest. This not only provides for all immediate usage needs for 100% of research output, worldwide, but it will soon usher in the natural and well-deserved death of the remaining minority of access embargoes under the growing global pressure from OA's and almost-OA's increasingly palpable benefits to research and researchers. (With it will come copyright retention too, as a matter of course.) It is also a policy with no legal problems, no author risk, and hence no need for loopholes and opt-outs. Needlessly requiring authors instead to deposit their unrefereed preprints and to commit themselves to retaining copyright today puts at risk both the consensus for adoption -- [note that this first worry is now moot insofar as adoption by Harvard itself is concerned, because the Harvard mandate was successfully adopted!, but it still stands for adoption by other universities] -- and, if adopted, the efficacy of the Harvard policy itself at risk, because of author resistance either to exposing unrefereed work publicly or to putting their work's acceptance and publication by their journal of choice at risk. It also opens up an opt-out loophole that is likely to reduce the policy compliance rate to minority levels for years, just as did NIH's initial, unsuccessful non-mandate (since upgraded to an immediate deposit mandate), with the needless loss of 3 more years of research usage and impact. I strongly urge Harvard to reconsider, and to adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access mandate (ID/OA) that is now being adopted by a growing number of universities and research funders worldwide, instead of the copyright-retention policy now being contemplated. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, January 27. 2008On Open Access, Self-Interest and Coercion![]() JJO'D: "...Whether to include [books] in OA "mandates" is Stevan Harnad's question, and since I regard such mandates with skepticism, that question doesn't concern me."But the question of mandates does concern a bigger and bigger constituency, now that the Australian Research Council, 6 of 7 UK Research Councils, the European Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the US National Institutes of Health, and a growing number of universities have already mandated OA self-archiving -- and the vast sleeping giant of universities worldwide is just about to awaken and follow suit: plus22 funder mandates, That's a total of5 proposed funder mandates, So this might be an opportune time to re-examine the basis of one's skepticism about OA mandates...37 mandates already adopted and JJO'D: "I am struck by the assertion that "all authors would want OA for their articles" if certain conditions are met. That's an interesting hypothesis, but I would simply underscore that the number of authors who currently do want OA for their articles is low enough that Harnad and others recommend they be coerced to achieve the goal. That fundamental disjuncture is important to understand and is advanced by empirical work, not by thought experiments."(1) "Coerced" is a rather shrill term! (Is every rule that is in the public interest -- smoking bans? seatbelt laws? breathalyzer tests? taxes? -- coercion? Is academia's "publish or perish" mandate "coercion"?) (2) It is empirically incorrect to assume that the number of authors that do want OA for their articles is the same as the number who spontaneously self-archive or publish in an OA journal today: (3) Considerable empirical work has been done on these questions: The surveys by Alma Swan and others have repeatedly shown that (a) many authors still don't know about OA, and (b) many of those who know about it agree that they would want it for their articles, but they fear (wrongly) that it might be illegal, prejudicial to their publishing in their journal of choice, or just plain (c) too complicated and time-consuming to do it. (4) As a matter of empirical fact, (a) - (c) are all wrong. (5) More important, the surveys have found that although most authors still do not self-archive, 95% report that they would self-archive if their institutions and/or funders mandated it -- and 81% of them report they would do so willingly. (6) In other words, most authors regard Green OA self-archiving mandates not as coercion, but as facilitation, for doing what they would want to do, but otherwise daren't (or otherwise could not assign it the proper priority in their academic publish-or-perish obligations). (7) By way of still further empirical confirmation, Arthur Sale's many studies have shown that institutional self-archiving policies are successful -- and institutional OA repositories successfully approach capture of 100% of institutional research output -- if and only if they are mandates. (8) All of that is empirical; there is one thought-experiment, however, and that is the various speculations and counter-speculations about whether or not Green OA self-archiving mandates will "destroy peer-reviewed journal publication" (see APPENDIX below). (9) I fully agree that the only way to settle that question too, is empirically -- and the mandates will do just that. (10) All indications are that if and when mandated Green OA should ever make the journal subscription model unsustainable, the only thing that will happen is a natural transition to Gold OA publishing, with (a portion of) the institutional subscription savings simply redirected to paying the (reduced but nonzero) costs of Gold OA: implementing peer review. Would all peer-reviewed journal article authors indeed want OA for their published articles if they knew copyright was no obstacle and knew that self-archiving time/effort was trivial?APPENDIX: As noted above, I think we already know the answer to that question, indirectly, from the multidisciplinary surveys that have already been conducted and published. But suppose we wanted a still more direct answer: Suppose we were to ask authors -- only about peer-reviewed journal articles (not books, irrespective of whether books are peer-reviewed) -- the following question (which needs to be as detailed as it is, in order to short-circuit irrelevancies, enthymemes, and incorrect assumptions): I am willing to wager that the vast majority of authors in all disciplines would reply FOR (and that if we added a box "if AGAINST, please state WHY," the reasons given by the minority who were AGAINST would all, without exception, be either factually incorrect, logically incoherent, or simply irrelevant)."IF there existed no legal or practical copyright obstacles to doing it, and IF doing it involved negligibly little time and effort on your part (< 5 minutes of keystrokes per paper over and above all the time it took to write it), THEN would you be FOR or AGAINST making your own published journal articles Open Access so that all their potential users could access them, rather than just those whose institutions could afford paid access to the journal in which your article happened to be published?" That, I think, is the only real issue (especially given that a huge wave of institutional and funder self-archiving mandates is now growing worldwide: See Peter Suber's forthcoming SPARC Open Access Newsletter on February 2, 2008). Some critics of OA mandates still seem to be seeing the self-archiving and the self-archiving mandate question as somehow imperiling the publication of articles in the author's peer-reviewed journal of choice: But articles published in the author's chosen peer-reviewed journal were part of the conditional (IF/THEN) in the above conditional question. Hence any remaining reluctance about self-archiving can only be based on speculations ("thought experiments") about the future of journal publishing; those speculations would go into the "WHY" box, and then each one (they are all well-known by now!) could easily be shown to be groundless, empirically and logically: (a) Self-archiving would bypass peer review. (Incorrect: The premise of the question had been that you deposit your published, peer-reviewed journal articles.)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, January 23. 2008Open Access and Open DataThe arch-analyst of apertivity, Richard Poynder, has published yet another excellent interview, this time time with Peter Murray-Rust, a dedicated advocate of Open Data (OD). Here are a few comments on some important differences between Open Access (OA) and Open Data (OD). The explicit, primary target content of OA is the full-texts of all the articles published in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. This is a special case, among all texts, partly because (i) research depends critically on access to those journal articles, because (ii) journals are expensive, because (iii) authors don't seek or get revenue from the sale of their articles, and hence have always given them away to any would-be user, and because (iv) lost access means lost research impact. Research data are also critical to research progress, of course, but the universal practice of publishing research findings in refereed journal articles has not extended to the publication of the raw data on which the articles are based. There have been two main reasons for this. One was the capacity of the paper medium: There was no affordable way that data could be published alongside articles in paper journals. The other was that not all authors wanted to publish their data, or at least not right away: They wanted the chance to fully data-mine the data they had themselves gathered, before making it available for data-mining by other researchers. The online era has now made it possible to publish all data affordably online. That removed the first barrier (although there are still technical problems, which Peter Murray-Rust and others discuss and are working to overcome). But the question of whether and when an author makes his data open is still a matter for the author to decide. Perhaps it ought not to be the author's choice -- but that is a much bigger and more complicated question than OA (for in OA all authors already want to make their published articles freely accessible online). That difference in scope and universality is one of the reasons the OA and OD movements are distinct ones: OD has both technical and political problems that OA does not have, and it is important that OA should not be slowed down by inheriting these extraneous problems -- just as it is important that OD should not be weighed down by the publisher copyright problems of OA (which do not apply to OD for the simple reason that the authors do not publish their data, hence do not transfer copyright to a publisher). So far, this is all simple and transparent: OA and OD have different target contents, with different problems to contend with. OA's solution has been for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the self-archiving of all of OA's target content, making it free for all online. But an interesting overlap region is thereby created between OA and OD: for article texts are themselves data! And one of the most important purposes for which the OD movement has sought to make data freely available online -- apart from the purpose of making it available for collaboration and use by all researchers -- is data-mining, by individuals as well as by software, and for re-publication in further 3rd-party online databases. Data-mining can be done not only on raw research data, but on article texts too, treating them as data: text-mining. Here too, the interests of OA and OD are perfectly compatible and complementary -- except for one thing: If text-minability and 3rd-party re-publication were indeed to be made part of the definition of OA (i.e., not just removing price barriers to access by making research free for all online, but also "removing permissions barriers" by renegotiating copyright) then this would at the same time radically raise the barriers to achieving OA itself (just as insisting on making the paper edition free would), making it contingent on authors' willingness and success in renegotiating copyright with their publishers. The online medium itself had been the critical new factor that had made it possible to remove price barriers to access, by making research articles toll-free online. But the price for going on to insist on the removal of both price barriers and "permissions barriers" jointly, as part of the very definition of OA, would have been to raise the problem of overcoming permissions barriers as a barrier to overcoming price barriers! For the new online medium that made toll-free online access possible, did not, in and of itself, redefine copyright, any more than it redefined ownership of the paper edition. Toll-free online access (OA) will lead to copyright reform (and publishing reform, and perhaps eventually also to the demise of the paper edition). But the online medium alone, in and of itself, simply made toll-free online access possible -- and that is hence the proper definition of OA. (After all, copyright retention by authors was perfectly possible in the paper era. In and of itself, it is not an online matter at all -- although the online medium, and OA itself, will eventually lead to it.) Peter Murray-Rust is right that there was some naivete about some of this at the time of the drafting of the BOAI definition of OA (which I signed, even though I later opted for an updated definition of OA, one that resolved this ambiguity in favor of immediate OA and its capacity to grow). More than naivete, there was ignorance and lack of foresight, both about the technical possibilities and about the practical obstacles. It was the online medium that had made OA possible: Toll-free access for all users had not been possible or even thinkable in the paper era, either to articles or to data, for both economic and practical reasons. But with the advent of the online era, toll-free access online became thinkable, and possible. Indeed it was already within reach: The only thing authors had to do was to make their articles and data accessible free for all, online. But most article authors did not make their articles freely accessible online -- even though they all, without exception, sought no income from them their sale, wanting them only to be used, applied, cited and built upon. Most authors remained paralyzed because (1) they were worried about copyright and because (2) they didn't know how to provide OA, imagining that it might require a lot of time and effort. ![]() The IDOA solution works for OA -- it provides immediate OA for all the articles that are published in the 62% of journals that already endorse immediate OA. And for the 38% that do not, the articles are deposited as Closed Access; the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button then provides users with almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period. But this solution does not work for OD, because (a) depositing data cannot be mandated, it can only be encouraged and because (b) making article-texts re-usable by 3rd-party text-miners and re-publishers as data requires permission from the copyright holder. That is not part of IDOA, and the "email eprint request" button does not cover it either. So the strategic issue is whether to insist on something stronger than IDOA -- at the risk of not reaching consensus on any mandate at all -- or waiting patiently a little while longer, to allow IDOA mandates to become universal, generating toll-free online access (OA), with its immediate resultant benefits to research and researchers -- and to trust that the pressure exerted by those very benefits will lead to the demise of embargoes as well as to OD (for both data and texts) in due course. I would accordingly urge patience on the part of the OD community, as well as to the Gold OA (publishing) and copyright-reform communities (even though I am by no means patient by nature myself!). Their day will come soon too! But first, please allow Green OA to take the natural course that is now wide open for it, paving the way with universal IDOA mandates generating toll-free online access to research, and all its immediate benefits. The strategic course to take now is to allow those mandates to propagate globally. This is not the time for over-reaching, raising the ante for OA higher than what the mandates can provide, and thereby only jeopardizing their chances of being adopted in the first place. 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).Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, January 16. 2008Critique of EU Council's Conclusions (again heavily influenced by the publisher anti-OA lobby)![]() Institutional Versus Central Deposit: Optimising DRIVER Policy for the OA Mandate and Metric Era Also to be discussed at the DRIVER Summit is this statement by the EU Council (not to be confused with the European Research Council (ERC), which has mandated OA self-archiving!) The EU Council's Conclusions show the tell-tale signs of penetration by the publisher anti-OA lobby; familiar slogans, decisively rebutted many, many times before, crop up verbatim in the EU Council's language, though the Council does not appear to realize that it has allowed itself to become the mouthpiece of these special interests, which are not those of the research community: Council of the European Union: Conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservationHere is my critique of this EU Council statement (all boldface quotes are from the Council's statement, the underscores have been added): "the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost to the reader under economically viable circumstances, including delayed open access"(1) 'At no cost to the reader' conflates site-licensing and Open Access (OA). This wording was no doubt urged by the publisher lobby. The focus should be on providing free online access webwide. That is OA, and that makes the objective clear and coherent. (2) 'Delayed open access' refers to publisher embargoes on author self-archiving. If embargoes are to be accommodated, it should be made clear that they apply to the date at which the access to the embargoed document is made OA, not to the date at which the document is deposited, which should be immediately upon acceptance for publication. The DRIVER network of Institutional Repositories (IRs) can then adopt the 'email eprint request' button that will allow individual users to request and receive individual copies of the document semi-automatically. (3) What should be deposited in the author's own institutional IR immediately upon acceptance for publication is the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft ('postprint'), not the publisher's PDF (or XML). There are far more publisher embargoes on the PDF/XML than on the postprint, and the postprint is all that is needed for research use and progress. The postprint is a supplementary version of the official publication, provided for OA purposes; it is not the version with the primary digital preservation problem. (4) Digital preservation should not be conflated with OA provision: There is a (separate) problem of the digital preservation of the publisher's PDF/XML, but this is not the same as the problem of providing OA to the author's postprint. The postprint, though it can and should be preserved, is not the canonical copy of the publication, so the two preservation tasks should not be conflated. (5) Self-archiving research data is also a different matter from self-archiving research publications. Data-archiving is not subject to a publisher embargo, and it needs independent preservation, but data-access and data-preservation should not be conflated with OA provision. (6) Deposit should be directly in each author's own IR: Distributed institutional depositing and storage should not be conflated with central harvesting and indexing: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally. (7) Direct central deposit should be avoided except in cases where the author is institutionally unaffiliated or the author's institution does not yet have an IR. For those cases, there should be at least one provisional default repository such as DEPOT. (8) Research (publications and data) should not be conflated with other forms of digital content. The problems of cultural heritage archiving, for example, are not the same as those of research publication archiving. Nor are the problems of archiving the same as the problem of access-provision (OA). "ensure the long term preservation of scientific information -including publications and data"This is an example of the complete conflation of OA-provision with digital preservation, including a conflation of authors' supplementary postprints with the publisher's original, as well as a conflation of research publications with research data. DRIVER will not have a coherent programme unless it clearly and systematically de-conflates OA-provision from digital preservation, primary publications from authors' supplementary postprints, and publication-archiving from data-archiving, treating each of these separately, on its own respective terms. "experiments on and wide deployment of scientific data infrastructures with cross-border, cross-institution and cross-discipline added-value for open access to and preservation of scientific information"This again conflates OA provision with digital preservation and conflates publications with data. It also conflates both of these with IR interoperability, which is yet another matter. (And webwide OA is, by definition, cross-institution, cross-border and cross-discipline, so that is a non-issue.) What is an issue, however, is institutional versus central depositing, and it is crucial that DRIVER have a clear, coherent policy (insofar as research archiving is concerned -- this does not necessarily apply to other forms of digital content): Deposit Institutionally: Harvest/Index/Search Centrally. The emphasis of DRIVER should accordingly be on ensuring that the distributed IRs have the requisite interoperability for whatever central harvesting, indexing, search and analysis are needed and desired. "promoting, through these policies, access through the internet to the results of publicly financed research, at no cost to the reader, taking into consideration economically sustainable ways of doing this, including delayed open access"Economic sustainability is again a red herring introduced by the publishing lobby into language that should only concern the research community and research access. The economic sustainability of publishing is not DRIVER's concern. DRIVER's concern should be interoperable OA-provision (plus whatever cultural-heritage and other forms of archiving DRIVER wishes to provide the infrastructure for). Nor are publisher access-embargoes DRIVER's concern: DRIVER should merely help ensure immediate deposit in IRs, and it should facilitate research usage needs through IR interoperability as well as the IRs' email eprint request button. "2008 working towards the interoperability of national repositories of scientific information in order to facilitate accessibility and searchability of scientific information beyond national borders"Insofar as research is concerned, it is not the interoperability of national repositories that is crucial but the interoperability of all OA IRs. "2009 contributing to an effective overview of progress at European level, informing the Commission of results and experiences with alternative models for the dissemination of scientific information."This is again a red herring (for both the EU and for DRIVER) introduced by the publishing lobby: Research archiving and OA-provision are neither a matter of alternative publishing models nor a matter of alternatives to the generic peer-reviewed publication model. Publishing reform and peer review reform are not DRIVER matters. They can and will evolve too, but DRIVER should focus on the deposit of current published research as well as research data in IRs, and the interoperability of those IRs. That is the immediate problem. The rest is merely speculative for now. "B. Invitation to the Commission to implement the measures announced in the Communication on "scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation", and in particular to: 1. Experiment with open access to scientific publications resulting from projects funded by the EU Research Framework Programmes by: defining and implementing concrete experiments with open access to scientific publications resulting from Community funded research, including with open access."This is a vague way of saying that the publishing lobby has persuaded the EU not to do the obvious, but to keep on 'experimenting' as if what needed to be done were not already evident, already tested, already demonstrated to work, and already being done, worldwide (including by RCUK, ERC, NIH, and over a dozen universities): The EU should mandate that all EU-funded research articles (postprints) are deposited in the fundee's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. Access can be set in compliance with embargoes, if desired. And data-archiving should be strongly encouraged. DRIVER's concern should be with ensuring that the network of IRs has the requisite interoperability to make it maximally useful and useable for further research progress. THE FEEDER AND THE DRIVER: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally Stevan Harnad DRIVER is designing an infrastructure for European and Worldwide Open Access research output, stored in institutional and disciplinary repositories, now increasingly under institutional and research-funder mandates. It is critical for DRIVER to explicitly take into account in its design (as some research funders have not yet done, because they have not yet thought it through) that institutional and disciplinary (central) repositories (IRs and CRs), although they are fully interoperable and at a par in that respect, nevertheless play profoundly different roles. Universities and research institutions are the FEEDERS-- the primary providers of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines -- for both kinds of repositories (IRs and CRs). This difference in role and function must be concretely reflected in the design of the DRIVER infrastructure. The primary locus of deposit for all research output is the researcher's own institution's IR (except in the increasingly rare case of institutionally unaffiliated researchers). Thanks to OAI-interoperability, the metadata for those deposits, or even the full-text deposits themselves, can also be harvested by (or exported to) any number of CRs -- discipline-based CRs, funder-based CRs, theme-based CRs, national CRs, European CRs, global CRs. Neither IRs nor CRs will fill without deposit mandates. This is a hard lesson, that has been learned very late (NIH, for example, made the mistake of requesting rather than requiring deposit, the NIH policy failed, and three years of research impact was consequently lost); but the lesson has now at long last indeed been learned. So the number of institutional and funder mandates is now set to grow dramatically. Institutions of course always mandate deposit in their own IRs. Many funders have mandated deposit, indicating that deposit can be in either IRs or CRs. But a few funders still stipulate, dysfunctionally, that deposit must be in CRs. This is a symptom of not having thought OA through. Funders are of course greatly to be commended for mandating OA, but their short-sightedness on the question of locus and means of deposit needs correction, and DRIVER can and should help with this, pre-emptively, rather than blindly following the unreflective and incoherent trends in the air today. Indeed DRIVER must take a coherent position, if it wants OA content to be provided and OA repositories to be filled, reliably and fully. The model that DRIVER should adopt in designing its infrastructure is "Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally." That is the way to scale up -- simply, swiftly, systematically and surely -- to 100% OA. I give the reasons in detail in my talk tomorrow, but for now, I just want to point out the principle points: Institutions (i.e., universities and research institutes) are the providers -- the source -- of all research. Institutions have a direct interest in showcasing and managing their own research output, but they have been even more sluggish than funders in adopting mandates. If funders mandate central deposit, they neither cover all of OA output nor do they collaborate coherently with the providers (the institutions) to scale up systematically to providing OA to all of their institutional research output. The OAI protocol makes it possible to harvest content from all OAI-compliant repositories. That is the coherent, systematic pattern of content provision for which DRIVER should be designed, not an incoherent patchwork of arbitrary institutional and central depositing and repositories that will neither scale up to all of OA nor accelerate its attainment. Not all research is funded; not all research fits into defined disciplines; disciplines are not all independent. Disciplines, being overlapping and redundant, would entail that discipline-based depositing had to be be overlapping and redundant. Depositing can be mandated once, but not multiply. The natural way to ensure that a paper is present in multiply loci (institutional, (multi)-disciplinary, national, etc.) is to deposit it at source – i.e., institutionally – and then harvest or import its metadata (or both its metadata and the paper itself) into whatever CRs we decide we need. That is what the OAI interoperability protocol itself was designed for. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the very notion of Central Repositories already betrays something of a misunderstanding of the online medium: Is Google a central repository? Is it a repository at all? Do people deposit directly in Google? OAIster, Citebase (and many other central OAI services like them) are an even better model: OAIster and Citebase were explictly designed to be OAI service-providers -- functional overlays on the distributed OA content-providers. Do CRs -- disciplinary, interdisciplinary, national and international -- really need to be any more than that? Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, January 2. 2008Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally![]() There remains, however, an important point that does need to be brought out, because it's not over till we reach 100% OA, because mistakes have been made before, because those mistakes took longer than necessary to correct, and because a big mistake (concerning the locus of the deposit) still continues to be made. First, a slight correction on the chronometric facts: Peter Suber wrote:"If NIH had adopted an OA mandate in 2004 when Congress originally asked it to do so, it would have been the first anywhere. Now it will be the 21st."Actually, if the NIH OA mandate had been adopted when the House Appropriations Committee originally recommended it in September 2004, it would have been the world's third Green OA self-archiving mandate, not the first. And Congress's recommendation in September 2004 was the second governmental recommendation to mandate Green OA self-archiving: The first had been the UK Parliamentary Select Committee's recommendation in July 2004. (1) The Southampton ECS departmental mandate was (as far as I know) the very first Green OA self-archiving mandate of all; it was announced in January 2003 (but actually adopted even earlier). QUT's was the second OA mandate, but the first university-wide one, and was announced in February 2004. (See ROARMAP.)Moreover, the recommendation to mandate self-archiving had not only been part of the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ from its inception in 2002, but the FAQ's contents had actually preceded the existence of the BOAI by several years, with the recommendation itself -- that departments, universities and funders should mandate self-archiving -- already in circulation since about 1999. (The FAQ was also already quite specific at that time about mandating the self-archiving of the author's final accepted draft, rather than the publisher's PDF. Its one glaring error was to advocate central self-archiving -- but that was corrected as soon as the OAI protocol was formulated, making it possible to create the first OAI-compliant Institutional Repository software in 2000, thereby returning to the original distributed, institutional model of self-archiving of 1994.) In contrast, to see where the precursor to the NIH mandate stood in 1999, one must re-read the original e-biomed proposal of May 1999. There was still a bumpy and meandering road ahead (via the PLoS petition in 2001 and the Bethesda Statement in 2003), with several false starts and dead ends (among them the first NIH non-mandate itself!), before the realization that what had been needed all along was self-archiving and a Green OA self-archiving mandate. "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)Now NIH's has indeed instantly become by far the most important of the Green OA self-archiving mandates to date in virtue of its size and scope alone, but it still hasn't got it right! The upgrade from a mere request to an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) mandate was indeed an enormous improvement, but there still remains the extremely counterproductive and unnecessary insistence on direct deposit in PubMed Central. This is still a big defect in the NIH mandate, effectively preventing it from strengthening, building upon and complementing direct deposit in Institutional Repositories, and thereby losing the golden (or rather green!) opportunity to scale up to cover all of research output, in all fields, from all institutions, worldwide, rather than just NIH-funded biomedical research in PubMed Central: an altogether unnecessary, dysfunctional, self-imposed constraint (in much the same spirit as having requested self-archiving instead of mandating it for the past three lost years). Even the benefits of Congress's wise decision to mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication -- thereby transferring the allowable 12-month embargo to the date at which access to that deposit is set to Open Access, rather than allowing any delay in the date on which the deposit itself is done -- are lost if that deposit is required to be made directly in PubMed Central, rather than in each author's own Institutional Repository (and thence harvested to PubMed Central): With direct IR deposit, authors can use their own IR's "email eprint request" button to fulfill would-be users' access needs during any embargo. And, most important of all, with direct IR deposit mandated by NIH, each of the world's universities and research institutions can go on to complement the NIH self-archiving mandate for the NIH-funded fraction of its research output with an institutional mandate to deposit the rest of its research output, likewise to be deposited in its own IR. This will systematically scale up to 100% OA. The hope is that -- recognizing that similar mistakes have been made in the past, and that that has cost dearly in years of lost OA, and recognizing that the remedy is ever so simple, with no loss, only gain ("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally") -- the NIH will still have the sound sense, in the euphoria over the successful passage of the mandate itself, to optimize its mandate now, so it can do the maximal good in the minimal time, across all fields and institutions, worldwide. "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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