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Sunday, December 23. 2007From Father Christmas to all the little boys and girls wishing for Open Access![]() Dear Father Christmas, My wish goes towards allowing any researcher free access to current scientific information -- and when I say free, I mean without any constraint of fees, subscription, copyright. And what would be better than having open archives/repositories? But I know this is pure utopia. Even you, Father Xmas, are you on Open Access? Since you are a creation of human intellect, someone must have an exclusive copyright on you, so is it even allowed to quote you without permission? How to get out of this dilemma? Recently, in France and Germany, lawmakers wrote a new law, punishing anybody intending to infringe copyright with enormous fines... My fellow European scientists are afraid and no longer dare to express their ideas. Father Xmas, give us some suggestions to be discussed in our Forum, but do not tell anybody else: we don't want to be prosecuted... REPLY FROM FATHER XMAS, NORTH POLE: Dear little boys and girls everywhere who yearn for Open Access: Yes, there is a way that you can have the Open Access you say you so fervently desire. But Father Christmas cannot give it to you, any more than Father Christmas can give you big muscles, if that is what you yearn for. All Father Christmas can do is tell you how you yourselves can build the big muscles you desire (by exercising daily with increasing weights). And for Open Access it is exactly the same: It depends entirely on you, dear children, each and every one of you. Nor can you build big muscles from one day to the other. If you try to lift too heavy a weight, too early, you only cause yourself muscle strain. So don't insist on too much overnight. Start with one simple fact that is easy to assimilate: There is nothing whatsoever -- nothing physical, nothing legal -- that prevents you from depositing your own final, peer-reviewed drafts (postprints) of every single one of your own current research journal articles in an OAI-compliant Institutional Repository, right now: Nothing. Not copyright law. Not technology. Not cost. Not expertise. No point in writing to Father Christmas to wish for that, because it is already entirely in your own hands:That's all. If all the little boys and girls did that before Christmas this year, on Christmas day all the current research worldwide would be visible worldwide, 62% of it already Open Access (because 62% of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving). For the remaining 38% deposited in Closed Access, the metadata (author, title, journalname, date etc.) would be immediately visible worldwide, so any user who wanted to access the full-text could immediately email the author to request an eprint by email. That is not immediate 100% OA, but it is almost-immediate, almost-OA. Many Repositories already have a button whereby eprints can be requested and emailed semi-automatically: one keystroke from the requester, one keystroke from the author. If all of you deposited all your current postprints before Christmas, boys and girls, all Repositories would soon have that button. And the growth of the OA muscles in this way, worldwide, keystroke by keystroke, would soon hasten the natural and well-deserved death of the remaining publisher-embargoes. (Yes, dear children, it is within the spirit of Christmas to speak about the "death" of evil things, such as plagues, hunger, war, injustice, and research access embargoes!) So, dear little boys and girls, there are some things for which wishing or writing a letter to Santa Claus is not quite enough. Time to start exercising your little fingers. And if you find doing the keystrokes for depositing all your current articles before Christmas too low an ergonomic priority as long as it remains voluntary -- first, congratulations for having published so much at such a young age! And second, instead of just writing to St. Nick, I suggest writing to the Principal, Rector, Vice-Chancellor or Provost of your school, to make known to them your fervent desire for OA, pointing out also your faintness of will about doing the keystrokes voluntarily as long as you feel you would be doing those dactylographics alone. Father Christmas's elves understand that as little researchers, you are already so busy and overloaded that you cannot steal the time to exercise your fingers in this way while your school gives you so much other homework to do if your other school-mates are not required to do it too. So if you all write to your Principal asking that the school itself should make this digital muscle-building part of its standard athletic curriculum for all its pupils -- making the keystrokes mandatory for all of you -- then that mandate will ensure OA self-archiving its proper place in your hierarchy of priorities. The rewards will be felt in your year-end marks (if you don't mind Father Christmas talking about such unpleasant matters at a time we should be thinking of toys rather than toil!), because self-archiving builds the citations as surely as it builds muscles. So don't worry about reforming copyright law. Copyright law is just the Cheshire Cat's grin, suspended in thin air, without you. It will reform itself in due course, if you just do what is already in your own hands (and always has been, ever since the dawn of the online era), right now, on the night before Xmas 2008. Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.Your faithful old Kris Kringle Wednesday, November 14. 2007No Need To Keep Waiting For Gold OA![]() MS: "The practice of author payment for open access journals may work for the hard sciences, but it presents major difficulties for various categories of scholars..."Paying to publish journal articles presents difficulties for any author who does not have the money to pay, regardless of field. But it is not an obstacle to providing Open Access (OA) itself: Although only about 10% of journals are OA journals ("Gold OA Publishing"), over 62% of journals are "Green," meaning that they have already given their green light to all their authors to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts ("postprints") OA by depositing them in their own Institutional (or Central) Repositories (IRs) upon acceptance for publication -- and immediately making them OA ("Green OA Self-Archiving"). Another 29% of journals endorse immediate OA self-archiving of the pre-refereeing preprint, with embargoes of various lengths on making the postprint OA. (The IR software also makes it possible for all users to request and for all authors to provide almost-instant almost-OA even for Closed or Embargoed Access postprints on an individual Fair-Use basis by means of a semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" button. That means 62% instant OA plus 38% almost-instant almost-OA.) OA self-archiving (Green OA) costs nothing. But it should also be pointed out that the majority of Gold OA journals today do not charge for publication -- and those that do, waive the fee if the author cannot afford to pay. (The much larger number of hybrid-Gold publishers -- offering the author the option to pay for Gold OA -- do not waive the Gold OA fee, but most of them are also Green.) MS: "(1) social sciences and humanities, where grants are smaller and fewer than in the natural and physical sciences."All authors in the social sciences and humanities should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication. MS: "(2) graduate students and younger scholars."All graduate students and younger scholars should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication. MS: "(3) scholars in the third world."Scholars in the third world should therefore provide Green OA (62% instant, 38% almost-instant) to all their articles now, by depositing all their postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication. MS: "The author-pay model puts people in the above categories (and others) at a serious disadvantage. It would effectively leave out an entire sector of scholarship in the third world. Panglossian arguments about convincing funding agencies to pay for author charges, or transferring university library budgets from subscriptions to author charges, ignore the current financial plight of research in most of the world today."No need of Pangloss for OA: All authors can provide Green OA to articles (62% immediate full OA, 38% almost-immediate almost-OA) by self-archiving their postprints in their IRs, today. Green OA self-archiving mandates from researchers' own institutions and funders are now on the way worldwide. (The US congress has recently approved a particular big NIH Green OA Mandate, in a Health Bill which has just been vetoed by President Bush, but it may still be adopted if the veto is over-ridden, and could be implemented by NIH and US universities in light of congressional adoption in either case. Six of seven UK research funding councils have already mandated Green OA after it was recommended but not adopted by Parliament. There are already a total of 32 funder and university mandates adopted worldwide, and at least nine more proposed or pending.) Once adopted globally, these Green OA mandates will immediately provide 62% OA and 38% almost-OA, and the Closed Access embargoes will soon recede under the growing pressure from the powerful and obvious benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the tax-paying public that funds them, and the vast R&D industry. (Eventually, 100% Green OA may even lead to the cancellation of non-OA journals, thereby releasing those institutional subscription funds to pay the much lower costs of Gold OA publishing for an institution's researchers -- costs which reduce to just those of peer-review alone, with all access-provision and archiving now offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA IRs.) But there is no need to keep waiting for Gold OA: Green OA can be provided right now. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, October 23. 2007AAAS (Green), Nature (Pale-Green), ACS (Gray)![]()
AAAS is fully Green on immediate OA self-archiving of the peer-reviewed postprint; hence there is nothing we need to convince AAAS of![Identity Deleted]: "At the AAAS 2007 meeting held in San Francisco, Tony Hey, in his presentation to a panel chaired by Christine Borgman, made the point that some form of open access to text and data would be the norm in about ten years from now. Ironically, AAAS [along with ACS] is among the few leading professional societies which opposes open access tooth and nail! What can we do to convince the AAAS management (as well as the ACS management) to see the point that is obvious to us? Some believe that AAAS opposes OA while commercial publishers such as Nature Group supports OA in some form..." (Indeed, it is Nature that back-slid to pale-Green in 2005: Nature started out being Green, but then introduced a 6-month embargo on self-archiving coinciding with the announcement that the NIH agreed had agreed to embargoes.) But it is ACS (American Chemical Society) that is Gray. And although it is a good idea to keep trying to convince them, my own guess is that ACS will be among the very last of the publishers to go Green. ACS was rumored to be one of the three publishers that backed PRISM. (The other two were rumored to be Elsevier, which is fully Green, and Wiley, which is Pale-Green). ACS is the Learned Society with the biggest and most remunerative publishing operation. With Chemical Abstracts they make a lot more money than the American Physical Society (APS), which was the very first of the Green publishers, and which set the standard for all the rest. The strongest weapon against the ACS's Gray policy is the movement for data-archiving. (The two strongest contingents of the movement for data-archiving are in Biology and in Chemistry; I have branched this to Peter Murray-Rust, Jeremy Frey, and Michael Hursthouse.) The chemical research community, accustomed to the status quo, with Chemical Abstracts and the other ACS products and services, is one of the most quiescent on the movement to provide OA to journal articles, but they can be roused on the subject of data-archiving. And, ironically, ACS is also the most vulnerable there: Other publishers, since they do not publish data, have no big stake in data-archiving, one way or another. But for ACS, data-archiving (just like article-archiving) represents (or appears to them to represent) a risk to their revenue-streams. So chemists are among the most difficult to rally in favor of OA, but they can definitely be aroused in favor of data-archiving. And in chemistry, of all fields, the two are very closely coupled, since many chemical publications (e.g. in crystallography) consist of just the description of a new molecule. See: (1) Southampton Crystal Structure Report Archive/EPSRCSo NSF is a potential ally in influencing the ACS. So too would be NIH (if it weren't the victim of ACS's successful anti-OA lobbying at the moment); and the UK's EPSRC (which is obviously conflicted on this issue, being the last of the UK funding councils to still hold out as non-Green!) One last point: Please do not confuse a publisher's stand on Gold OA (publishing) with their stand on Green OA (self-archiving). Gold OA is welcome, but it is Green OA that is urgently needed. In this regard, AAAS (Green) is fully on the side of the Angels, whereas Nature (Pale-Green) is not. The only two differences between AAAS and Nature are that (1) AAAS is still (nominally) supporting the "Ingelfinger Rule" on prepublication preprints (but that is not a legal matter, and those authors who wish to ignore the unjustified and unenforceable Ingelfinger Rule can ignore it). and (2) Nature has begun to experiment with Gold. This experimentation can be cynical and self-serving, but it is not, I think, in the case of Nature. In the case of ACS, however, which has begun to "experiment" with the Trojan Horse of "AuthorChoice," it has become the only Gray publisher, as far as I know, to have the temerity to ask its authors to pay extra for the right to self-archive: paying for Green! ![]() On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Alma Swan replied: Alma Swan: "There is no need to shame Nature because those who think self-archiving is worth doing, do it despite Nature's embargo, as I showed by my little study on Nature Physics: see "Author compliance with publisher open access embargoes: a study of the journal Nature Physics."I agree completely with Alma: It is, and always has been, perfectly possibly -- and practised -- to go ahead and self-archive with impunity, sensibly ignoring all the formal nonsense about only being allowed to post on "a Windows-based personal website on Tuesdays if you have a blue-eyed maternal uncle"! Those who elect to self-archive spontaneously are sensible enough to know that the "permissions barriers" are in reality all just so much unenforceable Wizard-of-Ozzery. But the fact remains that only about 15% of researchers elect to self-archive spontaneously! That is why the mandates are needed. And whereas rightly dismissing the posturing of publishers as mere Wizard-of-Ozzery is an easy option for individual authors, already inclined to self-archive spontaneously (as generations of Green self-archiving computer-scientists and physicists and others have by now amply demonstrated), it is not an easy option for most institutions and funding agencies contemplating the adoption of formal self-archiving mandates. They must adopt a policy that is not only practically feasible, but also formally legal. (Even there, I don't think the institutions are at any real risk, but they are at a perceived risk.) That is why -- despite being in possession of her strong, welcome, and compelling evidence on how many Nature authors do self-archive immediately indifferent to Nature's shameful 6-month embargo -- Alma is a co-author of the optimal institutional (and funder) self-archiving policy, which recommends (if you cannot agree on the stronger version, which is to require immediate deposit and immediate, unembargoed Open Access) a weaker compromise, namely, the ID/OA mandate: require immediate deposit, but merely encourage immediate OA -- allowing the option of a Closed Access embargo period for the likes of Nature authors): "[drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement]"So, yes, the embargoes are a paper tiger, but we still have to offer a formal policy option that treats their appearance of being real as if it were really real, and can be adopted universally without any worry about illegality, or even the appearance of illegality)! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, October 18. 2007Time to Update the BBB Definition of Open AccessOn Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Frederick Friend wrote: "I also agree with [Peter Suber, Peter Murray-Rust and Robert Kiley] that the UKPMC re-use agreement is vital for future academic developments. With hindsight we were too slow to pick up on the significance of the changes to copyright transfer agreements in the 1990s by which authors now assign all electronic rights to publishers. Blanket assigning of electronic rights has created and is still creating barriers in the electronic re-use of subscription content. We cannot afford to make the same mistake of neglect on the arrangements for academic re-use of OA content, whether green or gold."I am afraid that this is more a matter of misunderstanding than of disagreement: (1) The disagreement (with PS, PM-R and RK) was not about whether or not it is a good idea for the author to retain certain electronic rights. (It is a good idea for the author to do so, wherever possible. However, rights-retention is not a necessary prerequisite for Green OA self-archiving, nor for Green OA self-archiving mandates. Hence it would be a big mistake to imply otherwise: i.e., to imply that authors cannot self-archive, and/or their institutions/funders cannot mandate that they self-archive, until/unless the author successfully negotiates rights-retention. That would not only be incorrect, but it would be a gratuitous deterrent to self-archiving and to self-archiving mandates, hence to OA.)I am sorry to sound like a pedant, but these details are devilishly important, and need to be understood quite explicitly: Concerning (1) (i.e., rights retention as a prerequisite to Green OA self-archiving), what I said was that for the 62% of articles published in Green journals -- i.e., those that have explicitly endorsed the immediate OA self-archiving of the postprint (whether final draft or PDF) -- no further rights are needed to self-archive them, hence no further rights need to be negotiated as a precondition for self-archiving. The self-archived work is "protected" by standard copyright, and it is also OA, with all the attendant usage capabilities (of which I listed nine, covering all uses that research and researchers require, which are also all the self-same uses for which OA itself was proposed). I also said that for the 38% of articles published in non-Green journals -- i.e., those journals that have not yet explicitly endorsed the immediate OA self-archiving, by the author, of the postprint (whether final draft or PDF) -- the strategy that I recommend is (a) mandated Immediate Deposit, Optional Closed Access and reliance on the semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button to cover usage needs during the embargo. I agreed, however, that it is possible to disagree on this strategic point, and to prefer instead (b) to try to negotiate rights retention with the non-Green publisher or else to (c) publish instead with a Gold OA publisher that provides the requisite rights. There is of course nothing at all wrong with strategy (b) and/or (c) as a matter of individual choice in each case. But strategy (a) is intended as the default strategy for facilitating exception-free self-archiving, and especially for facilitating the adoption of legal-objection-immune, exception-free self-archiving mandates. So far, the only "right" at issue is the right to self-archive -- the right to provide immediate Green OA. It is that Green OA that I was arguing was sufficient to provide full OA (and the 62% of journals that are Green have already endorsed it.) But now we come to (2): certain "re-use" rights and capabilities that purportedly go beyond those that already come with the territory, with Green OA self-archiving. Now we are no longer speaking of the right to self-archive, obviously, but of the right to create certain kinds of "derivative works" that one may re-publish (and perhaps even re-sell). What I said there was that the right to re-publish, re-sell, and create derivative works for re-publication or re-sale is not part of OA. They are something extra (approaching certain kinds of Creative Commons Licenses). Most important, those extra rights are not necessary for research and researchers, they go far beyond OA, and they would handicap OA's already too-slow progress towards universality if added as a gratuitous extra precondition on counting as "full-blooded OA." The very idea that these extra rights are needed comes not from the intuitions of the library community about how to include subscription content in course-packs -- those needs are trivially fulfilled by inserting the URLs of Green OA postprints in the course-packs, instead of inserting the documents themselves! -- but from intuitions about data-mining from (some sectors) of the biological and chemical community (inspired largely by the data-sharing of the human genome project as well as similar chemical-structure data-sharing in chemistry). There are very valid concerns about research data sharing: note that such data are typically not contained in published articles, but are supplements to them that until the online era had no way of being published at all, because the data-sets were too big. So the concern is about licensing these data to make them openly accessible and to prevent their ever becoming subject to the same access-barriers as subscription content. This is a very important and valid goal but, strictly speaking, it is not an OA matter, because these research data are not part of the published content of journal articles! So, yes, providing online access to these data does definitely require explicit rights licensing, but no one is stopping their authors (the holders of the data) from adopting those licenses! (The appropriate CC licenses exist.) And there's certainly no reason to pay a Gold OA publisher for those extra rights or rights agreements for data, which are hitherto unpublished content that can now be licensed and self-archived directly. This brings us to the second case, the case that I suspect those who see an extra rights problem here have most in mind: It concerns the content of published journal articles, both inasmuch as the articles may indeed contain some primary data, as opposed to merely summaries, descriptions and analyses, and inasmuch as the article texts themselves can be seen as constituting potential data. This is where data-mining rights and derivative-works rights come in: "Naked" Green OA -- simply making these published full-texts accessible online, free for all -- is not enough (think these theorists) to guarantee that robots can data-mine their contents and that the results can be made accessible (published, or re-published) as "derivative works," unless those extra "rights" (to data-mine and create derivative works) are explicitly licensed. My reply is very simple: robotic harvesting and data-mining come with the free online territory as surely as individual use does. Remember that we are talking about authors' self-archived postprints here, not the publishers' proprietary PDFs, whether Gray or Gold. If the journal is Green, it endorses the author's right to deposit the postprint in his OA IR. The rest (individual accessibility, Google, Scirus, OAIster, robotic harvestability, and data-mining) all come with that Green OA territory. So the contention is not about the Green OA self-archiving of the postprints published in the 62% of journals that are Green. Is the contention then about the 38% of articles published in non-Green journals? I agree at once that if the author feels he cannot make those articles Green OA immediately, and instead deposits them as Closed Access, then, with the help of the IR's "Email Eprint Request" Button, only re-use capabilities (1)-(7) [(1) accessing, (2) reading, (3) downloading, (4) storing (5) printing, (6) individual data-mining, and (7) re-using content (but not text) in further publications] are possible. This is definitely not OA; it is merely almost-OA. Missing is full-text (8*) robotic harvesting and (9*) robotic data-mining. If, to try to avoid this outcome, an author who fully intends to deposit his postprint immediately upon acceptance regardless of the outcome, first elects to try to negotiate the retention of more rights with his publisher -- or even elects to publish with a paid Gold publisher rather than deposit as Closed Access, with almost-OA -- that's just fine!That author is intent on self-archiving either way. The problem with holding out for and insisting upon more rights is (1) the author who would not deposit except if the publisher was Green (or Gold), and -- even more important -- (2) the institutions that would not mandate depositing except if all publishers were already Green (or Gold). It is those authors and those institutions that are the main retardants on universal OA today. If most universities already mandated immediate-deposit either way (OA or CA), I would do nothing but applaud the efforts to negotiate the retention of more rights -- even unnecessary ones! -- But it would still remain true that no rights retention at all was necessary in order to deposit all postprints (and attain almost-OA), and that only a publisher endorsement of Green OA self-archiving was needed to attain full OA (1-9*). And it would remain true that re-publication, re-sale and "derivative-works" rights had nothing to do with either OA or the real needs of research and researchers. [I am not, by the way, dear readers, "adulterating" OA; I am accelerating it, whereas those who are needlessly raising the barriers are (unintentionally) retarding it. Nor do, did or will I ever -- even should the string of B's get still longer! -- accept those parts of the increasingly gilded BBB "definition" of OA that are and ever have been unnecessary or incoherent, hence counterproductive for OA itself -- although I shame-facedly confess to having failed to pick up on that incoherence immediately in B1. That's what comes of being slow-witted. Blackballed from B2, I (with many others) was merely window-dressing at B3, which was really just, by now, ritually reiterating B2. If there is any "permission" barrier at all, it is a psychological one, and it pertains only to the "permission" to provide Green OA, no more -- something I always carefully call "endorse" (or sometimes "bless") rather than "permit" or "allow," because I think that's all just a matter of Wizard of Ozery too, and will be seen to have been such in hindsight, once this maddenly molluscan trek to the optimal and inevitable is at long last behind us...] One last point -- made in full respect and admiration for Peter Suber. Peter understands every word I am saying and always has. His position, of all the people on this planet, is closest to my own. But Peter in fact has grander goals than I do. His "FOS" (Free Online Scholarship) movement predated OA, and had a much bigger target: It included no less than all of scholarship, online: not just journal articles, but books, multimedia, teaching materials, everything. And the freedom was a greater freedom than freedom to access and use the scholarship. I greatly value, and fully support Peter's wider goals. But I don't think they are just OA. They are FOS. (I shall be remembered only as an impatient, testy, parochial OA archivangelist, whereas Peter will be rightly recognised as the patient, temperate, ecumenical archangel of FOS.) But OA does have the virtue of being the easier, nearer, surer subgoal. I think that every time a little divergence arises between Peter and me, it is always a variant of this: He still has his heart and mind set on FOS, and it is good that he does. Someone eventually has to fight that fight too. But OA is narrower than that, and it is also nearer; indeed it is within reach. Hence it is ever so important that we should not over-reach, trying to attain something that is further, and more complicated than OA, when we don't yet even have OA! For we thereby risk needlessly complicating and further delaying the already absurdly overdue attainment of OA. I think that is what is behind our strategic difference on (1) whether OA requires the elimination of all "permission" barriers or (2) whether, after all, the elimination of all "price" barriers -- via Green OA self-archiving (which is and always has been my model, and my ever-faithful "intuition pump") -- does give us all the capabilities worth having, and worth holding out for. Re-publication rights and the right to create derivative works may be essential for FOS, and for the Creative Commons in general. But they are not essential for OA in particular; and it would be an unnecessary, self-imposed handicap to insist that they should be. That would merely raise barriers for OA where there are and need be none. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, October 14. 2007Re-Use Rights Already Come With the (Green) OA Territory: Judicet Lector![]() As not one, not two, but no fewer than three of my valued OA comrades-at-arms have so far publicly registered their disagreement with my position on one (possibly two) points of detail concerning "re-use" rights, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a closer look at these points to see exactly what is and is not at issue: Individual re-use capabilities. The concern is about "re-use rights," but I prefer to speak of "re-use capabilities." My OA comrades suggest that these consist of more than just the ability to read, and they are certainly right about that: If a document is OA -- i.e., if its full-text is freely accessible online, immediately and permanently, webwide -- then that means that any individual, webwide, can (1) access the document online, (2) read it, (3) download it, (4) store it (for personal use), (5) print it off (for personal use), (6) "data-mine" it and (7) re-use the results of the data-crunching in further research and research publications (however, they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it). Robotic harvestability. In addition to the individual re-use capabilities (1-7), there are the following: (8*) Robotic harvesters like Google can harvest the freely available Web-based text (exactly as they harvest all other texts that are freely available on the Web) and inverse-index it, thereby making it searchable by boolean full-text search in their search engines. (9*) Robotic data-miners can also harvest the text, machine-analyse it, and re-use the results of their data-crunching for research purposes in further research and research publications (however, they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it). The Green OA territory. All the above -- (1)-(7) plus (8*)-(9*) -- already come automatically with the (Green) OA territory when a full-text is made freely accessible online, immediately and permanently, webwide. It is for this reason that I continue to insist -- and this is the fundamental point of disagreement with my three OA comrades -- that there is no need whatsoever for any further re-use rights beyond what already comes automatically with the Green OA territory. In particular, there is no need to pay extra for Gold OA, in order to "purchase" these "extra" re-use rights. Nor is there any need to add any further re-use rights to Gold OA copyright agreements (although formalizing the rights is always fine, and a good idea). Gold OA includes Green OA. If you have paid a publisher for Gold OA, you have, among other things, certainly paid for the right to deposit your refereed final draft ["postprint"] in your own OA Institutional Repository (along with any XML tagging you may wish to add to facilitate usage, search, harvesting and data-mining): hence you already have (1)-(9*). Hence what you are paying for, if you elect to pay for Gold OA, is not extra re-use rights, but simply Gold OA, which already includes Green OA, which in turn already provides all the requisite re-use capabilities. Gold OA without Green OA? If any author (or funder) were ever to pay for "Gold OA" without thereby also getting the publisher's blessing to deposit the refereed final draft (postprint) in the author's own Institutional OA Repository (Green OA), then that author (or funder) would be doing something exceedingly foolish. (I know of no "Gold OA" today that does not automatically include Green OA.) But, apart from that, paying for Gold OA is still an unnecessary expenditure today for all except those to whom money is no object and who consider paid Gold OA to be worth the cost because it helps promote Gold OA, reinforcing the fact that it is a potentially viable cost-recovery model. Gold OA itself is certainly not necessary for any re-use needs that are purportedly not fulfillable through Green OA alone. ![]() "Harvesting rights"? I will close on the sole potentially substantive matter on which my three OA comrades do have at least a theoretical point -- but, I will argue, a point that has no practical import: The reason I put an asterisk after 8* and 9* is that it can be argued that whereas the individual uses (1) - (7) do indeed come with the territory if one makes a document freely accessible on the web, this does not necessarily cover robotic uses such as harvesting. "Could?" is trumped by "Does." I will give a very simple and pragmatic answer: "Can," "could," "cannot" and "could not" are all trumped here by "does." My OA comrades are needlessly reasoning hypothetically in this case, when the objective evidence is already in: "If authors were to self-archive their articles on the web, freely accessibly (Green OA), as described above, could robots like Google harvest and data-mine them?" The answer is a resounding "yes": they could, and can, as demonstrated by that fact that they already do, without exception or challenge, and have been doing so for years now! Articles vs. books. We are not talking here about the full-texts of books, ambivalently provided to Google by their publishers (and authors), or scanned directly by Google, with certain conditions imposed by their publishers and authors on their re-use. We are talking about authors' final drafts (postprints) of their peer-reviewed journal articles, self-archived free for all by their authors in order to maximize their accessibility, usage and impact. In the case of books, there can be and have been contentious harvesting issues. But in the case of self-archiving, not a single article's harvestability has been contested, and we already have a decade and a half of precedent and practice behind us in this. So those who are worrying about the need to formally guarantee Google's (and other harvesters') "right" to do what they are already doing, without exception or challenge, since the advent of the Web, are worrying about a notional obstacle, not a real one. OA is not about or for re-publication or re-sale, online or in print; OA is about access and use. Before replying to insist that I am wrong about about "re-use" being a nonproblem for self-archived postprints, may I ask my readers please to recall (i) the parentheticals I carefully inserted earlier, concerning both individual users and harvesters: "(though they may not re-publish or re-sell the full-text itself, in "derivative works," either online or in print, without permission, beyond a reasonable number of quoted/cited excerpts: instead, they may only link to the OA full-text's URL in such derivative works, leaving the user to click to access it)". None of that is part of OA, nor has it ever been ("BBB" Declarations to the contrary notwithstanding). OA is a brand new possibility, opened up by a brand new medium: the Web. "Online re-publishing or re-sale rights" were never part of OA, any more than on-paper re-publishing or re-sale rights were -- nor do they need to be, because of everything that comes with the OA territory (i.e., with being freely accessible to one and all online). What about Gray publishers? Recall also that (ii) Gold OA already includes Green OA (as part of what you are paying for) and that (iii) with Gray publishers (i.e., those that are neither Green nor Gold) the interim solution for now is Immediate Deposit mandates plus the semi-automatized "Email Eprint Request" (or "Fair Use") Button for any Closed Access deposits. That does provide for individual researchers' uses and re-uses even for this "Gray" literature (meaning non-Green, non-Gold journal articles) -- although it does not provide for robotic harvesting and data-mining of the (Closed Access) full-texts, just their metadata. IDOA and the Button -- or Paid Gold OA? Here, as I said, my colleagues and I may agree to disagree on the second, minor point, as to whether (a) it is a better strategy to rely, for now, on mandated IDOA and the Button for articles published in non-Green journals (38%), trusting that that will eventually force those journals to go Green (62%)? or, rather, (b) it is a better strategy to pay for Gold OA right now? But note that what is not at issue either way is whether Gold OA itself requires or provides "re-use" rights over and above those capabilities already provided by Green OA -- hence whether in paying for Gold OA one is indeed paying for something further that is needed for research, but not already vouchsafed by Green OA. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, October 4. 2007Departmental Repositories, Institutional Repositories, and Research Record-KeepingOn Mon, 1 Oct 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: NM: I know that Dr Leslie Carr wrote: "...we genuinely can't answer questions about the percentage of our research output that gets put into our repository, because we have [no] independent way of knowing what the size of our research output is!"The ever-alert Napoleon Miradon, has raised two very important and valid questions in connection with my posting about Les Carr's estimates of the current deposit rate in the repository of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. One of the questions is an explicit empirical one, and the other is an implicit methodological one. I shall answer the methodological question first. Reformulated explicitly, the question is: The answer is that that can only be estimated today by consulting external databases, such as ISI's Web of Science, or ACM's Digital Library (or Google Scholar), to sample what has been published, and then to check back to see whether they are in the Repository. That is what Les Carr did, and that is where his percentages come from.Since, apart from their Repositories themselves, there is today no record of their total research output, Southampton -- and most other universities and departments worldwide -- have no way of knowing what their total research output is: The point to note here is that one of the added benefits of having an OA Repository and a self-archiving mandate is that once the deposit rate has been confirmed (by such external sampling) to be at or near 100%, the Repository itself can be used as the internal record of the institution's or department's research output. Count that -- alongside the fact that it maximises the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output -- as yet another reason for having an OA Repository, and for mandating deposit: It is a very powerful and effective form of internal record-keeping, so an institution (or department) can track its own research productivity as well as submit it for external performance assessment. Having and filling its own OA Repository also releases the institution or department from the need to consult and rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor its own research output. But I think M. Miradon in fact understood the fact that Repository deposit rates currently have to be estimated through sampling; I have only made the methodological point explicit for readers who might have needed the clarification. We now move on to M. Miradon's empirical point: He has done a bit of random sampling himself, and indeed he has managed to do this using a Southampton-internal record of Southampton publications: He has sampled the staff publications list in Southampton's Department of Civil Engineering, and he has found many publications to be absent from Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science's IR: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ But the explanation for this is very simple: I was reporting the results for the 4-year-old Repository and mandate of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton (ECS), not the Department of Civil Engineering! I stressed -- in connection also with Arthur Sale's recommendation that universities should promptly proceed with adopting bottom-up departmental mandates ("patchwork mandates") until/unless they have rapid consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide mandate -- that ECS's mandate, the world's first OA mandate as far as I know, was a departmental mandate, not a university-wide mandate. Which prompts me to describe a few more historical details about self-archiving policy at the University of Southampton: As anyone can see by consulting ROARMAP, Southampton does have another, bigger Repository, and another Repository policy: It has a university-wide Institutional Repository (IR) -- ePrints Soton -- and has had it for nearly as long as it has had the ECS Departmental Repository ("DR"). Southampton also now has a university-wide mandate proposal (not yet announced), one that has even been officially approved; but it has not yet been officially adopted. (Don't ask me why it is taking Southampton so long to adopt its approved self-archiving mandate! I have no idea, except that I note that the delay is depressingly commensurate with similar bureaucratic delays at many other institutions. All the more reason for individual departments like ECS to push ahead with Arthur Sale's "Patchwork Mandate" rather than sitting around waiting for their university to get its act together: Southampton has at least 13 EPrints Repositories; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.) Last point: I confidently count a self-archiving mandate a success if it generates a deposit rate of 100%. That means the keystrokes are getting done; and it is (and always was) keystrokes alone that have been standing between the research community and the 100% Open Access to its own research output that has been within its reach ever since the dawn of the online era. Les Carr points out that some of the ECS Repository deposits are Closed Access (CA) rather than Open Access (OA). That is not a problem, because the Repository's semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (also known as the "Fair Use" Button) can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA during a Closed Access embargo period, providing for all user needs until either embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths under mounting webwide pressure from the increasingly palpable benefits of OA, or authors simply tire of performing the extra keystrokes involved in fulfilling individual eprint requests one by one, and hit the master key that transforms their deposit from "CA" to "OA" once and for all. A slightly more problematic case is the one where the authors have only done the keystrokes to deposit their metadata, but have failed to do the last keystroke, the one that deposits their full-text (whether as OA or CA). There we have a visible but orphaned reference, with no text to request or send. The EPrints IR software has not implemented a second button, with which would-be users can prod the author to deposit the missing text (and then send it), because we are confident that this dysfunctional practice is becoming increasingly rare and will remedy itself with time and experience of its own accord -- inasmuch as it needs to be remedied at all: For there are cases where an author may legitimately wish to deposit only a paper's metadata, for record-keeping purposes, but not the text itself. Examples would be seminars and conference papers that are written but not published, being merely precursors of later published papers. And of course there are books, of which the author may not wish to deposit the full text! ECS's self-archiving mandate applies only to published, peer-reviewed articles (in journals or refereed conference proceedings). Authors are not obliged to deposit every text they have ever keyed, let alone make them all OA! NM: I have received some results from a random spidering of staff publication lists at www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=nnnnI am afraid I did not explain sufficiently explicitly: U. Southampton has a number of other Repositories (at least 13) besides that of the ECS Department. The biggest of them is the university-wide IR, ePrints Soton. However, as explained in my reply above, whereas the departmental mandate of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was officially adopted in January 2003, the university-wide mandate, though already officially approved some time ago, is still (for reasons unknown to me!) awaiting official adoption. In the meanwhile, the university as a whole has no self-archiving mandate yet, so whatever deposits you find in ePrints Soton will be the usual spontaneous (unmandated) ones (for which the worldwide baseline deposit rate is about 15%), probably increased in this case beyond that baseline also by library mediation and encouragement (which Arthur Sale's analyses show to produce a better deposit rate, but nothing anywhere near Alma Swan's predicted 80-90% for mandated deposit). The deposit of only a subset of a researcher's total publications reflects the fact that depositing current and future papers requires far fewer keystrokes and effort than depositing one's full prior opus (which may even require scanning and OCR) -- though eventually that should of course all be deposited too!. I hope this dispels any further ambiguity! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, September 15. 2007More Reasons for the Immediate Deposit Mandate and the Eprint Request Button
In the online era, the days of reprint requests ought to be over, with Open Access taking their place. But some research funders and universities are still hesitating about mandating Open Access Self-Archiving, because they are concerned about publishers' embargoes. Here is the solution:
Even where a publisher embargoes or does not endorse OA self-archiving, universities and research funders can and should still go ahead and mandate immediate deposit anyway, with no exceptions or delays, but allowing the deposit to be made Closed Access instead of Open Access during any publisher-imposed embargo period. ![]() See how the paper reprint request era, and its prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, already anticipated most of this: Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations? Scientometrics 56: 283-286.Stevan HarnadAbstract: Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range 1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent correlation between the number of requests and citations to article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55; 95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that received most reprint requests are cited more often.Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93–101.Abstract: This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed each year, most being triggered by Current Contents...Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the World Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic Archive. The Scientist 13(4):14.Excerpt: It is the utopian expectation of those who live in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has major consequences for the future. American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, August 26. 2007Validating Open Access Metrics for RAE 2008The United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is doing two things right. There are also two things it is planning to do that are currently problematic, but that could easily be made right. Let's start with what RAE is already doing right: (+1) It is a good idea to have a national research performance evaluation to monitor and reward research productivity and progress. Other countries will be following and eventually emulating the UK's lead. (Australia is already emulating it.)But, as with all policies that are being shaped collectively by disparate (and sometimes under-informed) policy-making bodies, two very simple and remediable flaws in the reformed RAE system have gone detected and hence uncorrected. They can still be corrected, and there is still hope that they will be, as they are small, easily fixed flaws; but, if left unfixed, they will have negative consequences, compromising the RAE as well as the RAE reforms: (-1) The biggest flaw concerns the metrics that will be used. Metrics first have to be tested and validated, discipline by discipline, to ensure that they are accurate indicators of research performance. Since the UK has relied on the RAE panel evaluations for two decades, and since the last RAE (2008) before conversion to metrics is to be a parallel panel/metrics exercise, the natural thing to do is to test as many candidate metrics as possible in this exercise, and to cross-validate them against the rankings given by the panels, separately, in each discipline. (Which metrics are valid performance indicators will differ from discipline to discipline.) Hence the prior-funding metric (-1a) needs to be used cautiously, to avoid bias and self-fulfilling prophecy; and the citation-count metric (-2b) is a good candidate, but only one of many potential metrics that can and should be tested in the parallel RAE 2008 metric/panel exercise. (Other metrics include co-citation counts, download counts, download and citation growth and longevity counts, hub/authority scores, interdisciplinarity scores, and many other rich measures for which RAE 2008 is the ideal time to do the testing and validation, discipline by disciplines, as it is virtually certain that disciplines will differ in which metrics are predictive for them, and what the weightings of each metric should be.) Yet it looks as if RAE 2008 and HEFCE are not currently planning to commission this all-important validation analysis, testing metrics against panel rankings for a rich array of candidate metrics. This is a huge flaw and oversight, although it can still be easily remedied by going ahead and doing such a systematic cross-validation study after all.(-1a) Prior research funding has already been shown to be extremely highly correlated with the RAE panel rankings in a few (mainly scientific) disciplines, but this was undoubtedly because the panels, in making their rankings, already had those metrics in hand, as part of the submission. Hence the panels themselves could explicitly (or implicitly) count them in making their judgments! Now a correlation between metrics and panel rankings is desirable initially, because that is the way to launch and validate the candidate metrics. In the case of this particular metric, however, not only is there a potential interaction, indeed a bias, that makes the prior-funding metric and the panel ranking non-independent, and hence invalidates the test of this metric's validity, but there is also a deeper reason for not putting a lot of weight on the prior-funding metric: For such a systematic metric/panel cross-validation study in RAE 2008, however, the array of candidate metrics has to be made as rich and diverse as possible. The RAE is not currently making any effort to collect as many potential metrics as possible in RAE 2008, and this is partly because it is overlooking the growing importance of online, Open Access metrics -- and indeed overlooking the growing importance of Open Access itself, both in research productivity and progress itself, and in evaluating it. 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).This brings us to the second flaw in HEFCE's RAE 2008 plans: (-2) For no logical or defensible reason at all, RAE 2008 is insisting that researchers submit the publishers' PDFs for the 2008 exercise. Now it does represent some progress that the RAE is accepting electronic drafts rather than requiring hard copy, as in past years. But in insisting that those electronic drafts must be the publisher's PDF, the RAE is creating two unnecessary problems.To recapitulate: two pluses -- (+1) research performance itself, and (+2) conversion to metrics -- plus two (correctable) minuses -- (-1) failure to explicitly provide for the systematic evaluation of a rich candidate spectrum of metrics against the RAE 2008 panel rankings and (-2) failure to require deposit of the authors' papers in their own IRs, to generate more OA metrics, more OA, and more UK research impact.(-2a) One unnecessary problem, a minor one, is that the RAE imagines that in order to have the publisher's PDF for evaluation, they need to seek (or even pay for) permission from the publisher. This is complete nonsense! Researchers (i.e., the authors) submit their own published work to the RAE for evaluation. For the researchers, this is Fair Dealing (Fair Use) and no publisher permission or payment whatsoever is needed. (As it happens, I believe HEFCE has worked out a "special arrangement" whereby publishers "grant permission" and "waive payment." But the completely incorrect notion that permission or payment were even at issue, in principle, has an important negative consequence, which I will now describe.) The good news is that there is still time to fully remedy (-1) and (-2), if only policy-makers take a moment to listen, think it through, and do the little that needs to be done to fix it. Appendix: Are Panel Rankings Face-Valid? It is important to allay a potential misunderstanding: It is definitely not the case that the RAE panel rankings are themselves infallible or face-valid! The panelists are potentially biased in many ways. And RAE panel review was never really "peer review," because peer review means consulting the most qualified specialists in the world for each specific paper, whereas the panels are just generic UK panels, evaluating all the UK papers in their discipline: It is the journals who already conducted the peer review. So metrics are not just needed to put an end to the waste and the cost of the existing RAE, but also to try to put the outcome on a more reliable, objective, valid and equitable basis. The idea is not to duplicate the outcome of the panels, but to improve it. Nevertheless -- and this is the critical point -- the metrics do have to be validated; and, as an essential first step, they have to be cross-validated against the panel rankings, discipline by discipline. For even though those panel rankings are and always were flawed, they are what the RAE has been relying upon, completely, for two decades. So the first step is to make sure that the metrics are chosen and weighted so as to get as close a fit to the panel rankings as possible, discipline by discipline. Then, and only then, can the "ladder" of the panel-rankings -- which got us where we are -- be tossed away, allowing us to rely on the metrics alone -- which can then be continuously calibrated and optimised in future years, with feedback from future meta-panels that are monitoring the rankings generated by the metrics and, if necessary, adjusting and fine-tuning the metric weights or even adding new, still to be discovered and tested metrics to them. In sum: despite their warts, the current RAE panel rankings need to be used to bootstrap the new metrics into usability. Without that prior validation based on what has been used until now, the metrics are just hanging from a skyhook and no one can say whether or not they measure what the RAE panels have been measuring until now. Without validation, there is no continuity in the RAE and it is not really a "conversion" to metrics, but simply an abrupt switch to another, untested assessment tool. (Citation counts have been tested elsewhere, in other fields, but as there has never been anything of the scope and scale of the UK RAE, across all disciplines in an entire country's research output, the prior patchwork testing of citation counts as research performance indicators is nowhere near providing the evidence that would be needed to make a reliable, valid choice of metrics for the UK RAE: only cross-validation within the RAE parallel metric/panel exercise itself -- jointly with a rich spectrum of other candidate metrics -- can provide that kind of evidence, and the requisite continuity, for a smooth, rational transition from panel rankings to metrics.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Tuesday, August 7. 2007Model University Self-Archiving Policy
![]() I am keen to have my publications archived where they are likely to be found by interested readers. After your encouraging reply [suggesting that I deposit, by default, peer-reviewed final manuscript drafts rather than the publisher's PDF], I spent a whole day retrieving 63 manuscript drafts of articles and tidying them up for deposit in the Leicester Research Archive. Because PDFs of the published versions are already in my own web space, I inserted a hyperlink on each manuscript version, directing readers to the PDF version.I would advise you to to forward this exchange to the IP policy-makers at U Leicester, because the logic of the current UL policy has to be more carefully thought through. I am sure UL's motivation is to help, not hinder UL's research impact while ensuring everything is in conformity with the law. A few minor but critical changes in the current policy will accomplish both goals: maximal impact, and full legality: A month later, less than half of my manuscripts are in the Leicester Research Archive. The archive has been seeking permission from the publishers [as a precondition] for archiving each manuscript draft, and, for those for which permission has been granted, have also carefully deleted the hyperlinks that I inserted at the top of each manuscript draft.This is the policy that urgently needs to be carefully thought through again, as it has a few major, unnecessary flaws that are easily remediable, but do need to be remedied: (Deleting hyperlinks to the PDFs on your website makes no sense at all!)(1) All manuscripts should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Deposit itself is entirely the prerogative of UL, an internal matter, not requiring permission from anyone. It is only access-setting to that deposited document -- i.e. Open Access vs. Closed Access -- that can depend in part on publisher policy. I am not convinced of the value of manuscript drafts on their own. Researchers cannot rely on them, even if they are in fact faithful versions of the published articles, which is seldom the case because of copy-editing alterations that are often not even discussed with authors.You are judging this against the wrong baseline: Please do not think of OA self-archiving as a substitute subscription access (for now). The self-archived draft is a supplement to the subscription draft, provided for those who are denied subscription access. You can make your final draft as faithful as you judge necessary. But it would be a profound error in judgment and priorities to deprive would-be users of access altogether, when they can't afford subscription access at all, mistakenly thinking you are thereby protecting them from being deprived of the copy-editing!(a) If a potential user has access to either the publisher's paper version or PDF, they can and will use that. Those are not the users for whom the self-archived version is being provided. Even if one had confidence in the accuracy of a manuscript version, it would be impossible to quote from it, because the pagination would be missing. I don't find other researchers' manuscript drafts nearly as useful as final PDFs.Again, you are weighing this entirely from the wrong viewpoint: Those who can't access it, cannot read or use your research at all. (And of course one can quote from a manuscript version. One quotes it, specifying the section and paragraph number instead of the page! That is in fact more accurate and scholarly than a page reference. And if the copy-editor (of the article one is writing, in which one is quoting from an article for which one only has access to the final draft, not the PDF) requests page-spans, that's the time to tell the copy-editor that one does not have subscription access, so let them look up the page numbers -- or use the even better scholarly indicator of section name and paragraph number.) You said that "Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well". Worse than that, the person handling my submissions believes that publishers need to be contacted for each item, and that "unfortunately I do have to wait for permission to archive them, even if they are drafts. Generally publishers do not allow the 'as published versions' to be archived by anyone apart from themselves on their own sites and so for us to archive them, or provide links to sites, other than the publisher's official site, may breach copyright law... Unfortunately we are not allowed to even archive the drafts from the following publications which you have articles in [followed by a list]".This UL provisional policy has not been thought through and needs only a few simple parametric changes to make it sensible and effective: (i) The manuscript can and should be deposited immediately. No one's permission is needed for that, and the metadata are then immediately visible webwide, and the "Fair Use" Button can start doing its job. The Leicester Archive policy is very wrong on this score. I urge you to take it up with the administration, because currently they are shooting themselves in the foot, gratuitously, with this flawed policy, so easily corrected. Yes, there are other Archives (e.g. Depot or CogPrints) you could deposit it in, but it would be a great pity if Leicester did not sort out its own deposit policy, as it is so simple to do: I. All manuscripts should be deposited immediately. II. Not only the archivists but the authors should be able to deposit, as they can in virtually all of the other IRs worldwide. Almost no IR restricts depositing to proxy archivists (and those few that do are making a big mistake in imposing this needless and counterproductive restriction). III. If there are worries about rights, check Romeo, and, if the archivist wishes, also write to the publisher. But meanwhile, deposit immediately and set Access as Closed Access if in doubt. IV. Implement the "Fair Use" Button. V. Adopt the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) policy. ![]() I am having similar problems at University of Hertfordshire.Yes there is a draft code of practice! ![]() 2. Professor Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, which has an OA self-archiving mandate (designed by Prof. Sale) has also provided a "Generic Risk Analysis of Open Access For Your Institution".EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Universities are invited to use this document to help encourage the adoption of an Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at their institution. Note that this recommended "Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access" (IDOA) policy model (also called the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") has been specifically formulated to be immune from any delays or embargoes (based on publisher policy or copyright restrictions): Deposit, in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR), of the author's final, peer-reviewed draft of all journal articles is required immediately upon acceptance for publication, with no delays or exceptions; but whether access to that deposit is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access (with only the metadata, but not the full-text, accessible webwide) is left up to the author, with only a strong recommendation to set access as Open Access as soon as possible (immediately wherever possible, and otherwise preferably with a maximal embargo cap at 6 months). 3. Model policies for research funders have also been drafted (collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad, by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement). 4. And here is the OA Self-Archiving Policy of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (the first OA self-archiving mandate - from 2001): Stevan Harnad1. It is our policy to maximise the visibility, usage and impact of our research output by maximising online access to it for all would-be users and researchers worldwide. American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, August 5. 2007How the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate + the "Fair Use" Button Work
The only thing standing between the research community and 100% Open Access (OA) is: K E Y S T R O K E S ![]() Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate:Immediate Deposit + Immediate Open Access (62%)EITHER OR (optionally, in case of a publisher embargo) ![]() 1. In the case of an embargoed (Closed Access) deposit the would-be user sees this: ![]() 2. Clicking on the Request button allows eprint requester to insert email address (and, optionally, to specify reason for requesting eprint): ![]() 3. Author of eprint receives email request and can click either to email eprint (automatically) or reject request: ![]()
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