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Friday, November 3. 2006First Things First: OA Self-Archiving, Then Maybe OA PublishingBecause converting journals to OA publishing requires the willingness of the journals to convert, and that willingness is not there (with good reason, as the experiment puts their current revenue streams at risk, and it is not at all clear yet whether the cost-recovery model will scale, and is sustainable at this time). And because OA is for the benefit of research, researchers, and the public that funds them. It is by and for researchers that research is provided. So mandating self-archiving, by and for researchers, can and is being done, and it has already been demonstrated to work successfully. No "policing" necessary, just a formal mandate. Nor is either self-archiving or the mandating of self-archiving cumbersome, time-consuming or expensive.Sale, Arthur (2006) The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles. First Monday 11(10) October. What is cumbersome and time-consuming is waiting and trying to convert journals to OA publishing, one by one, instead of researchers just providing OA by and for themselves, now. And what is expensive is for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders, and their funders funders (the tax-paying public) to keep needlessly losing potential returns on their investment in research, in the form of research uptake, usage, applications, citations, productivity and progress.Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. And it is for the journals, not the researchers, that converting to OA publishing right now is risky and expensive. For if journals ever do eventually convert, then the institutional subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to cover OA publication costs. It's just that journals will not take the risk of converting of their own accord right now, and they certainly cannot be mandated to do it. And as subscriptions are not yet being cancelled, there is no extra cash available to pay OA publishing costs. (A self-archiving mandate for researchers might possibly set the cancellation process into motion, but that is not the objective of OA: The objective of OA is OA, and self-archiving mandates will already have provided OA irrespective of whether they eventually go on to generate cancellation pressure.) CA: "[Some] OA advocates... think that they must either archive all the peer-reviewed journals again in OA (in which case national licenses, implemented worldwide, would surely be cheaper and quicker in converting research articles into a public good) "It is not journals that are self-archived by authors, it is each author's own journal articles, in their own institutional repositories. That is the obvious and optimal way to supplement non-OA access with OA access for those would-be users who cannot afford the non-OA access. It is not a substitute for journal publishing. National licenses are a non-starter: Not only would they be encouraging oligopoly, but they would be spending non-existent money (poached from research funds?) to pay for what is already being paid for via subscriptions today. What is needed now is OA, not a means of funding what is already funded. (If and when OA self-archiving should ever generate unsustainable cancellation pressure, then that will be the time to talk about redirecting funds from the windfall subscription savings to cover publication costs.) CA: "or else clone the traditional journal online but charge the author"The traditional journal is already cloned online (virtually all journals are hybrid today) and the only issue is, once again, conversion to OA publishing: Publishers cannot and need not be cloned or coerced into converting. If research, researchers, their institutions and their funders want and need OA so badly -- and they do -- then they need simply provide it for themselves, by mandating OA self-archiving. CA: "Both solutions are neither creative nor adequate: they are fundamentally incompatible with the technology and economy of the internet. The WWW Galaxy means that dissemination is cheap and certification is expensive - a reversal of the premises of the Gutenberg Galaxy, in which peer review was cheap and printing costly."Peers review for free and the cost of peer review has gone down, not up, in the PostGutenberg Galaxy (sic). But peer review is implemented by autonomous, answerable journals, with answerable track-records for quality. Apart from the Gutenberg-era function of text-generation and access-provision, now obsolescent, journals are merely peer-review service-providers and certifiers. But the demand for the journal's official paper and online editions has not yet subsided, so it is all wrapped in one non-OA product, paid for by subscription/licenses. Unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get journals to convert to OA publishing (at a rate faster than the glacially slow rate at which they are converting now), it is better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe. And unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get researchers to self-archive voluntarily, it is likewise better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe. (Theorizing about the severing of peer review from access-provision certainly won't do it!) CA: "Surely, it is important to think through the consequences for open access to research articles? It seems amazing that OA advocates would go about re-erecting price barriers by ignoring the possibility of providing publishing services that are free to readers and authors -- like ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc."(1) Arxiv, SSRN and RePec (and CogPrints, and Citeseer, and OAIster and Google Scholar) are not publishing services. (2) They are access-provision mechanisms. (3) That is the very same thing what author self-archiving in Institutional Repositories -- and institutional and funder mandates to do so -- amounts to. (4) And all those articles continue to be submitted to and published in peer-reviewed journals. Those are all supplements to -- not substitutes for -- journal publishing. OA publishing is indeed a substitute for non-OA publishing, but not nearly enough publishers are doing it, and there's no way to mandate them to do it. And it would be absurd for the research community to wait until they decide to do it, since the research community can already mandate itself to provide OA today, by supplementing non-OA access with self-archived OA access, immediately. I agree that author charges today are premature. CA: "Indeed, how do we justify author charges of USD 1000, 2000 or even 3000 per article when there is positive proof that open access to research articles may be had for USD 1, 2 or 3 per article?"No one needs to justify them: Those authors who can pay them, and wish to, should go ahead and pay them. Those who cannot, should self-archive (and their institutions and funders should mandate they do it, extending their existing publish-or-perish mandate to publish-and-self-archive, for the good of the research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and the public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is being performed). CA: "The WWW Galaxy heavily favours the severance of the certification of knowledge claims from the dissemination of research papers."Separating peer review provision from access provision in the PostGutenberg Galaxy. So far, so good (though perhaps that should be from exclusive access provision). CA: "Underlying this shift is the emergence of an academic cyberinfrastructure based on open transmission protocols and open-source software that, in turn, favours open content and open access."To the extent that "knowledge claims" refers to new research findings, reported in peer-reviewed journals, what's new is the Internet, and the possibility of supplementing the existing ways of providing access to peer-reviewed research (viz, journal subscriptions) with new ways (viz, making a version freely accessible online). CA: "'Openness' is fundamentally compatible with the knowledge-based economy if market profits are made from nonexclusive rights."This is a bit too general, but if you mean nonexclusive rights to provide access, then that sounds fine (for peer-reviewed research). CA: "The present conflict between scholars and commercial publishers around "open access" is based on a misunderstanding,"The conflict is not particularly with commercial publishers alone, if we are talking about the same conflict, because noncommercial (learned society) publishers have been as vocal in their attempts to oppose or minimize OA as commercial publishers have been. But the real obstacle is not publishers (of either kind) at all: The obstacle is and always has been the inertia of the research community itself. (And the remedy for that inertia will be to extend the publish-or-perish mandate to: publish-and-provide-OA.)Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. CA: "for business models in scientific publishing that are based on the pursuit and enforcement of exclusive intellectual property rights will not persist because technological and economic conditions disfavour them strongly."In "scientific publishing"? Does that include books, and textbooks? For if it's again just journal articles, then we are back to the one and the same special case (and it's not just science, but peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles too.). CA: "The compatibility of open science and the knowledge-based economy may be enhanced if the dissemination of research articles is severed from their certification."It is severed if it is the certified research that is disseminated, but if it is uncertified research, then it is hanging by a skyhook. CA: "As the marginal cost of digital dissemination plummets, there is a case for the public funding of the electronic dissemination of research articles. Public funding could ensure effectively that dissemination is free to authors and readers - while reaping savings of several orders of magnitude as first copy costs in the WWW Galaxy fall to 1/10th or less of the cost in the Gutenberg Galaxy."I couldn't quite follow: Certified (peer-reviewed) articles can be made available free on the web by their authors. Yes. But "first copy costs" are a print-run issue, and hence they are publisher matters, not author matters. CA: "This is, however, not true for the certification of knowledge, especially by peer review, which is likely to become more costly if it is to be of any service to readers and authors."Why more costly? The peers review for free. The journals implement the peer review, and the cost of that is covered out of subscription revenue from selling the paper edition and the publisher's online edition. "Non-exclusivity" merely requires that authors be able to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts accessible free online for those who cannot afford the publisher's version. And if ever the institutional subscription demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition should fall to unsustainable levels, the cost of peer review can be covered out of the very same institutional windfall savings on subscription cancellations. And those costs are likely to be a lot lower than what is being spent on subscriptions now, because the hypothesis is that demand for the paper and publisher's online edition vanishes (and with it the associated costs). CA: "On the assumption that the decoupling of certification and dissemination is desirable and likely, research articles should be disseminated with a nonexclusive copyright license. This does not require any changes in law, but merely a different contractual arrangement whereby certifiers (e.g. publishers, learned societies, institutional repositories and whatever new organisations might emerge) will not be able to claim an exclusive copyright."Indeed. But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, because the demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition have not only not vanished, but they are paying the costs of peer review too. Whereas what is missing is OA! So what is needed now is not decoupling of certification and dissemination, but the self-archiving of the authors' peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints"). Nor should this self-archiving wait for the successful renegotiation of rights by authors. The postprints should immediately be deposited in their authors' Institutional Repositories (IRs) in any event. CA: "Presently publishers collect monopoly rents because authors transfer the copyright of their papers to the publisher. If copyright for the article is no longer transferred exclusively, but licensed non-exclusively, then a competitive and efficient market for knowledge services will emerge."Sixty-nine percent of journals have already given their green light to immediate author self-archiving. For the remaining 31%, the immediate-deposit/delayed-access mandate (plus the semi-automatic email-eprint-request button) is the solution. Copyright retention and nonexclusive licensing are a good idea where the author is willing and able to negotiate them, but they are not a prerequisite for providing free access today, and on no account should either self-archiving or self-archiving mandates wait for or be thought of or portrayed as being any way conditional upon the successful author negotiation of rights. CA: "Economic modelling of the potential impact of the open access dissemination of research results is under way. In a first estimate it is valued at roughly $2bn for the UK, $3bn for Germany, $6bn for Japan and $16bn for the USA -- assuming a social return to R&D at 50% and a 5% increase in access and efficiency (Houghton and Sheehan 2006). This lends salience to the anticipation of the emergence and growth of a new knowledge industry around the certification of knowledge and the provision of services to readers and authors. This new industry will sit atop the open access dissemination of research articles and further contribute to growth and innovation."I would say that the implications of those (and other) estimates of the economic benefits of OA are not implications for the publishing industry but for the research community and the public that funds them: They do not imply that publishing reform is the immediate priority today, but that providing OA is. And this can be done, and will be done, by self-archiving -- and by mandating self-archiving. Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).Stevan Harnad Thursday, October 12. 2006CIHR Proposes 99.99% Optimal OA Self-Archiving MandateCanadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has proposed a 99.99% optimal Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: CIHR grant and award holders must:There is only one unnecessary and confusing clause in CIHR's policy: (2b). (2b) is redundant with [1]! (2b) says the author must publish in a journal that allows [1]. But that is already implicit in [1] -- it is not a sub-option of [2]. [1] is the requirement to self-archive immediately (and to set access as Open Access within 6 months). Alternative [2] is to publish in an Open Access journal. That covers all the alternatives! (2b) is completely redundant. So (2b) should simply be dropped. That's all, really. There are still a few minor changes that would make the policy simpler, clearer, and more systematic and coherent. In order to encourage a uniform practice that will generalize and apply to all fields, whether or not funded by CIHR, it would be best if CIHR's uniform rule consisted of just these 5 components: I. must deposit final peer-reviewed manuscript (or published version)This way, everything gets deposited immediately, and access is OA within 6 months. The IR should be the preferred default locus, from which PubMed Central or other archives can harvest, but direct deposit elsewhere can be allowed as an option if the researcher has no institutional IR yet. During any Closed Access embargo interval, IR's will have the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button to fulfill any individual requests for a single email copy -- Fair Use -- from would-be users who see the postprint's openly accessible metadata: available for DSpace IRs and for EPrints IRs. (CIHR also requires making research data and materials available for reasonable requests: Might as well recommend -- but not require -- that they are self-archived too, wherever possible!) Bravo CIHR! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum PS: Note that, unlike the Wellcome Trust's Self-Archiving Mandate, CIHR's proposed mandate does not offer to fund option (2a) (publishing in an Open Access or hybrid "Open Choice" journal). Apparently CIHR did not feel it had the spare cash for this. This is quite understandable (although no doubt some publishers will complain vociferously about it): The fact is that all potential publication funds are currently tied up in covering the costs of institutional subscriptions, worldwide. If and when self-archiving should ever lead to institutional subscription cancellations that make the subscription model unsustainable, then those very institutional windfall savings themselves will be the natural source for the cash to cover OA publishing costs. No need to take it from research funds at this time, when it is unaffordable. OA is the immediate and urgent (and long-overdue) priority today, not pre-emptively cushioning a hypothetical transition to another publishing cost-recovery model (except where the spare cash is available). Please note that a public consultation has been launched to seek comments on CIHR's proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs. Wednesday, September 27. 2006Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?We are so close to the adoption of Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates worldwide (with five of eight RCUK Research Councils plus the Wellcome Trust having already adopted them in the UK, the FRPAA proposing their adoption in the US, the EC Recommendation A1 proposing their adoption in Europe, at least 125 US university provosts expressing their support, and a number of individual universities and research institutions already adopting institutional self-archiving mandates of their own). This is the opportune time to think of optimizing the formulation of these mandates, so that they systematically interdigitate with one another to generate all of OA's target content, across institutions, disciplines, and nations worldwide, to confer the maximum of benefit in a minimum of time. A seemingly small parametric or verbal variant can make a vast difference in terms of the amount of OA a self-archiving mandate produces, and how quickly and reliably. WHAT: The primary target content is the author's final, peer-reviewed draft ("postprint") of all journal articles accepted for publication.Other contents are more than welcome too -- pre-refereeing preprints, research data, theses, book-chapters, etc. -- but let us not forget that peer-reviewed research is the primary target and raison d'être of the OA movement."The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles..." [Budapest Open Access Initiative] (Only the final peer-reviewed draft need be deposited, not the publisher's proprietary PDF or XML, which should instead be linked, via a direct pointer to its URL or DOI on the publisher's website.) WHERE: The optimal locus for self-archiving is the author's own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR).That is the locus which, once mandated, will systematically scale up to cover all of research output space, worldwide. It is highly inadvisable to mandate direct deposit in a Central Repository (CR) -- whether discipline-based, funder-based, multidisciplinary or national. The right way to get OA content into CRs is to harvest it, via the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol, from the distributed OAI-compliant IRs. Not only should research institutions -- the primary research-providers -- mandate the self-archiving of their own researchers' output in their own institutional IRs, but research funders too should mandate that their fundees self-archive in their own institutional IRs. That is the most natural, universal and systematic way to reach 100% OA worldwide, and also the fastest and surest. WHEN: The author's final, peer-reviewed draft (postprint) should be deposited in the author's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication.Most journals now endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their authors. But for the minority of journals that do not, the deposit should be mandated to be immediate anyway, and any allowable delay or embargo should apply only to the access-setting (i.e., whether access to the deposited article is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access, in which only the author can access the deposited text). This is called the "Immediate Deposit / Optional Access" (ID/OA) mandate (or the "Dual Deposit/Release Strategy") and it is infinitely preferable to any delayed-deposit policy: In the ID/OA, the article's metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) are immediately accessible webwide in any case, and would-be users can request individual email copies from the author via the IR's semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button during any embargoed access period. The case for immediate access is exactly the same as the case for Open Access itself: otherwise research uptake, usage, impact, productivity and progress are needlessly delayed or lost. And in many fast-moving fields the "growth tip" for research progress is within the first 6-12 months from the time new results are available. WHY: The purpose of mandating OA self-archiving is to maximize research usage and impact by maximizing user access to it.The motivation for the Open Access movement -- and hence for OA self-archiving by researchers and OA Self-Archiving Mandates by researchers' institutions and funders -- is to maximize research access in order to maximize research uptake, usage, impact, productivity and progress, for the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions and funders, and the tax-paying public that supports them and in whose interests the research is being conducted and published. HOW: Depositing a postprint in an author's IR and keying in its metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) takes less than 10 minutes per paper.However, surveys show that only 15% of authors will self-archive unless it is mandated. Just requesting or recommending deposit does not work. Deposit analyses comparing mandated and unmandated self-archiving rates have shown that mandates (and only mandates) work, with self-archiving approaching 100% of annual institutional research output within a few years. Without a mandate, IR content just hovers for years at the spontaneous 15% self-archiving rate. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, September 20. 2006Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-ArchiverCornell University's copyright advice pages are numerous and confusing because they take a scatter-shot approach to everything -- from Cornell user rights for the use of other people's work to the negotiation of rights for Cornell authors' own work. In all of this, it is next to impossible for a would-be self-archiving author to figure out what Cornell's legal experts advise regarding depositing their peer-reviewed articles in Cornell's Institutional Repository (IR). (If anyone has managed to pinpoint Cornell's position on that, within that copious Cornell copyloquy, I would be grateful if they would excerpt it for us. Otherwise, all I find is advice that I should retain as many rights as possible, which is fine, but does not answer the question of a would-be self-archiver, trying to decide whether I have the right to self-archive this paper, now.) Fortunately, the answer to that question is available even without having to find one's way through Cornell's cornucopia, and it is this (the "Immediate Deposit, Optional Access" policy, ID/OA). (1) Deposit all your final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts (postprints) in Cornell's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. (2) Set access to the postprint as Open Access immediately if it is published in one of the 69% of journals that are already green on postprint self-archiving. (3) Otherwise provisionally set access to the postprint as Closed Access and notify the journal that you will set access as Open Access on [Date, one month from today] if you do not hear anything to the contrary.Now go ahead and deposit, without any further hesitation, immediately. And negotiate copyright retention, or postprint-self-archiving rights whenever you can. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, September 1. 2006Self-Archive Now: No Need to Negotiate Rights
OhioLINK has made a very welcome recommendation to self-archive.
What is missing from the otherwise useful information that OhioLINK lists, curiously, is a link to the BOAI Self-Archiving FAQ, which has been in place since 2002! And whereas it is always good to negotiate the retention of rights if an author can and wishes, it is erroneous to imply that that is a necessary precondition for self-archiving. Ninety-four percent of journals already endorse immediate (non-embargoed) OA self-archiving; for articles published in the remaining 6% there is the readily available optionof depositing their full-texts and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication, but making only their metadata immediately accessible webwide, while provisionally setting access to their full-text as "Closed Access" during any publisher embargo period: Meanwhile almost-immediate, almost-OA for each individual would-be user can still be provided by the author on one-on-one basis, via the semi-automatic EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button now being added to the principle Institutional Repository (IR) softwares. Hence it is now possible to self-archive 100% of the final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles whether or not the author can or wishes to successfully negotiate the retention of rights. Do not wait for successful rights negotiation before self-archiving -- or before mandating self-archiving. Self-archive now, for the sake of research impact and progress (and negotiate after, if you wish). And on no account feel that you need to switch journals in order to do this! Original American Scientist Open Access Forum Thread began:Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, August 11. 2006Optimal OA IR Preprint and Postprint Deposit and Withdrawal PolicyTechnically speaking, the GNU EPrints software allows deposited papers to be removed instantly by the author/depositor. But whether it is the author/depositor who can remove the paper or a mediator/moderator/approver is a matter of individual IR (Institutional Repository) policy, not of software capability. It is merely a permissions parameter-setting on the software. Given that IRs' principal problem today is not withdrawal but deposit (IRs are still mostly empty), I strongly recommend that departments and institutions drop the foolish and unnecessary mediator/moderator/approver phase, and set the parameter so that authorised institutional users (i.e., all employed researcher/authors) can deposit/approve and delete/approve their own papers, instantaneously. There is no need to make the simple deposit process seem complicated or threatening by interposing a moderator into either the deposit or the withdrawal procedure. (If it is felt that there is a need for vetting deposits, let the deposits be monitored subsequently, not moderated antecedently, and let the deposits [not the removals] be over-ruled by the monitor, as and when needed (plagiarism, libel, quackery), after the deposit by the authorised institutional researcher/author or proxy has been made, not before [when it would needlessly hold up the deposit and frustrate authors, who need encouragement today -- not the opposite, with foolish, arbitrary rules and delays].) As to the worry about withdrawal in general: We are talking here about (i) unrefereed preprints and (ii) refereed postprints of published articles. This distinction needs to be borne clearly in mind, in setting IR policy: UNREFEREED PREPRINTS: If you want authors to be willing to deposit their unrefereed preprints at all, you must allow them to remove them at will, instantaneously. (Discourage removal, by all means, but don't disallow it.)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, July 9. 2006Against Needless Pruning of Research's Growth TipNIH Director Elias Zerhouni was interviewed by Susan Morissey in Chemical and Engineering News: July 3, 2006 Volume 84, Number 27 pp. 12-17 (1) It is hard to see (1a) why it is zealotry to insist that researchers (sic) need immediate rather than delayed access to publicly funded research findings -- or (1b) how the tax-paying public's interest is in the middle!Zerhouni: "What I've found with [the open access] issue is paralysis [emphasis added]. You have the zealots on one side who are hammering for open access right away. And then on the other side, you have the zealots who say that open access is absolutely not right. In the middle is the taxpayers' interest. Public research is not funded to have its uptake, usage and applications (for the benefit of the public that funds it) embargoed from all those researchers who cannot afford access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Open access has now been repeatedly demonstrated to both increase and accelerate research usage and impact. Immediate access is the growth tip for rapidly progressing fields of research. Needlessly delaying access at the growth tip produces a counterproductive and unjustifiable bottleneck in research that is in the interests of neither research progress nor the public that funded it. Nor is there as yet any evidence whatsoever that immediate access "causes a loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals": This is being assumed, a priori, instead of being tested objectively, by requiring immediate access, monitoring the outcome annually, and making suitable adjustments only if and when there is ever any evidence that they are needed. What induces paralysis is making these adjustments a priori, as NIH has done, requesting instead of requiring open access, and allowing it to be delayed instead of immediate. The failure of the NIH "request" policy is already apparent after the needless loss of two more years of potential research impact and progress since its first needlessly flawed NIH implementation two years ago. Those losses in research usage and impact owing to needless access embargos will themselves become directly measurable with time. In the meanwhile, the maximization of research access and progress are kept in a needless state of paralysis that is anything but a "middle ground." (2) The primary and urgent purpose of open access is certainly not so that "scientists have access to [NIH's] portfolio of research so they can see what [NIH] has funded"! It is so scientists can use and apply the research findings, immediately, for the benefit of the public that funded it for that very purpose ("CURES"). (3) It is true that "It is also important that at some point the public, which pays for 99.5% of this research, is not prevented from having access to it" -- but that is not the primary purpose of open access! Its purpose is immediate scientific usage and applications, for the benefit of the public. (4) Even though it is certainly not the primary reason for open access that "NIH needs a database of the research it funds so that it can have accountability and the ability to analyze its own portfolio," NIH can have that portfolio by requiring immediate deposit without even necessarily requiring that the articles be made publicly accessible immediately! Individual scientists who need to know and use the findings immediately, however, could have immediate access through the simple expedient of the EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST button that is now being implemented in researchers' own institutional repositories -- if, that is, the immediate deposit of the full text is systematically mandated. (Otherwise email eprint requests are a hopelessly time-consuming, uncertain and low-yield strategy.) Hence the "happy medium" is to require immediate deposit in the researchers' own institutional repositories and to harvest the deposits into PubMed Central after whatever embargo period NIH judges necessary (a priori) to insure that this is not "done at the expense [of the] viability of peer-reviewed scientific publishing." To instead allow an a-priori deposit embargo is to guarantee continued paralysis -- an outcome happy for no one (except perhaps some publishers). Requesting delayed deposit in PubMed Central instead of requiring immediate deposit is not a happy medium, and it has already been shown to be nonviable. And the way the viability of an adaptation is determined in biological evolution is through its adaptive consequences. There is an element of "intelligent design" in this, in requiring research self-archiving at all; and we already know that self-archiving's consequences for research and researchers are positive. We don't yet know what effect mandated self-archiving will have on publishing, except that to date -- after 15 years of spontaneous self-archiving, which has in some fields reached 100% -- self-archiving itself has had no negative effect at all.Zerhouni: "I'm not driven by what the popular thing to do is; I'm driven by what's right... I believe... a happy medium can be found. But if the happy medium causes a loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals, it won't work." The happy medium is to require immediate deposit and allow delayed access-setting. And the way to find out whether or not it will work is to do it, and thereby test objectively whether it causes any "loss of viability in being able to produce good articles and good journals." That's not what's popular; it's what's right: for research and researchers -- and for the tax-paying public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is conducted. Journals need to adapt to what is best for research, researchers and the public. Otherwise it's the happy tail wagging the unhappy dog. "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Friday, June 30. 2006Fixing the few flaws in the RCUK self-archiving mandates by pinning down WHEN and WHERE to depositThe three RCUK self-archiving mandates (ESRC, BBSRC, MRC), though extremely timely and welcome per se, are still needlessly wishy-washy about one important thing: When the deposit should take place. Some (ESRC and BBSRC) say, vaguely, "at the earliest opportunity." Others (BBSRC) say "within six months of publication". And there is also hedging with: "depends upon publishers' agreements with their author". None of this is specific enough for a clear, effective mandate. These are open-ended loopholes needlessly inviting non-compliance or opt-out. But there is an extremely simple way to fix them, and I and others will be pushing very hard for the fix to be implemented and announced formally, so they can serve as emulable policy models for the rest of the research world. (1) Deposit of the full text and metadata should take place immediately upon the article's acceptance for publication.So with immediate deposit mandated, but immediate OA-setting only strongly recommended where possible (94% of journals have already given immediate author OA self-archiving their green light), the EMAIL-EPRINT button will tide over any embargo period (max. 6 months) for the 6% of articles that are not immediately OA. But the immediate-deposit requirement itself has to be made crystal clear, lest the mandate turn out to be so fuzzy and open-ended as to be no mandate at all! Also, all councils should mandate deposit preferentially in the author's own institutional repository (IR). Central repositories can harvest from there, if they wish. Direct deposit in a central repository is unnecessary, nonoptimal, and does not scale; it should only be done in cases where an author's institution does not yet have an IR. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, May 27. 2006Plugging the Loopholes in the Proposed FRPAA, RCUK and EU Self-Archiving MandatesPre-emptively avoiding loopholes and pitfalls is indeed the optimal strategy. And it is precisely for that reason that instead of recommending that you emulate exactly the proposals of the FRPAA, the RCUK, or the European Commission, which all still have some needless weaknesses as well as loopholes, I recommend that you change two of their parameters to make your own policy recommendation the optimal one: The two changes are small but absolutely crucial: (1) Mandate immediate deposit for all accepted papers (rather than mandating deposit only after an interval determined by the publishers, or after a fixed 6-month embargo).This separate Dual Deposit/Release (DD/R) policy requires that the full text and metadata be deposited immediately, not after a delay; and it requires that the metadata (only) be immediately set to Open Access, so they are visible and accessible worldwide immediately upon deposit; but it allows the option of not setting access to the full-text itself as OA immediately. In effect, it thereby transfers the force of any embargo/delay onto OA access-setting instead of onto the deposit itself, which (to repeat) must be immediate. The US is probably the only country in the world that has enough collective weight to go even further, because it represents such a large proportion of the authorship of so many journals, and of the funding of so much published research: The US can, I think, with impunity put a cap (of six months, or even less) on the maximal allowable embargo period. The Wellcome Trust has already done this, telling their authors: "If your publisher does not agree to a cap of 6 months on the embargo, choose another publisher!" Wellcome, however, has the advantage, for this admirable and bold move, that they are a private funder. So all an author can do, if he does not like the Wellcome's terms, is to choose another funder. But the US Federal funding agencies are governmental, so they can be lobbied, not only by publishers but also by researchers and their institutions, if they object to the terms: And researchers may well object to being told that they cannot publish in the journal of their choice if it does not agree to a 6-month embargo cap! But the Dual Deposit/Release (DD/R) mandate removes even this possible obstacle to the adoption of the policy; for it does not require either switching publishers or contravening the terms of their copyright agreement. It allows embargoed access-setting but mandates immediate deposit (and then semi-automatic email-eprint requests in the repository software will take care of any gap-period in which the metadata are visible and accessible but the full-text is Closed Access). I think this slight parametric change answers your remaining concerns. That's 93% of journals, not publishers (as some publishers publish more journals than others). I have reached the figure on the basis of each journal's own official author self-archiving policy, as indexed, by journal as well as by policy, in the Romeo directory, for over 9000 journals, including all the principal ones.ANON: "In the case of FRPAA 2006, one has to be dependent on the mercy of the journal publishers, presuming that 93% of them will immediately allow the researcher to deposit his research in OA. Please let us know how you have reached that figure." But note that the Dual Deposit/Release (DD/R) policy would be immune to publisher objections and policies even if 100% of journals had had an embargo, because it does not mandate Open Access! It simply mandates immediate repository deposit, which is an internal record-keeping matter, and that is in no way the business of publishers or anyone else. What gives the Dual Deposit/Release (DD/R) policy its power is that (a) it also mandates the immediate deposit of the bibliographic metadata (author, title, journal name, date, etc.), which no one can embargo, and (b) the webwide, uniform visibility and accessibility of the metadata immediately makes the existence of the article visible as well, and allows each individual would-be user who finds that the article is Closed Access to use the semi-automatic eprint-request button we have designed for the GNU Eprints Institutional Repositories (since implemented for the Dspace repository software as well, and easily implementable by all other repository softwares) to request that the author email him the full-text. So whereas the dual mandatory-immediate-deposit plus optional-delayed-release policy does not mandate OA per se, it instead -- in exchange for immunity from all possible objections on the grounds of either copyright or author choice of journal -- requires immediate deposit in all cases, no exceptions or delays, and relies on (trivial) technology to fill any access-needs during any embargo-gap. (It is unlikely, by the way, that once the Dual Deposit/Release mandate is widely adopted, embargoes will survive for very long -- and in the meanwhile, all usage needs will be filled by the software technology, using the unique capabilities of the new medium). If the adoption of the proposed mandates instead keeps being delayed and delayed, as it has been now for the past 3 years, for the very reasons you are here raising, everywhere (except the Wellcome Trust plus the six institutions that have already mandated self-archiving) -- and even if the mandates are adopted as delayed deposit mandates (as the Wellcome policy is, with a cap of 6 months on the permissible delay) -- the result will be that embargoes will only become more deeply entrenched instead of being defused, as they are by the mandatory-immediate-deposit plus optional-delayed-release policy, which fixes both the date of deposit and the practise of depositing for all authors and papers uniformly and optimally, allowing no exceptions. It may be useful for you to bear in mind -- and also to inform your policy advisees -- that the real thing that has been holding back 100% OA for a dozen years now has not been copyright policy but keystrokes: Authors have not been depositing their articles in their institutional (or central) repositories. Two international, cross-disciplinary surveys for JISC by Key Perspectives have shown that most authors don't and won't self-archive spontaneously, but 95% of them will do see if/when mandated to do so by their funders and/or their institutions. And the actual experience of the (few) institutions that have already gone ahead and mandated self-archiving confirms the predictions of these JISC surveys. The self-archiving mandate should be thought of as a mandate to perform those all-important keystrokes -- for record-keeping as well as metadata-exposing purposes -- immediately upon acceptance for publication, which is the natural date, the date when usage of the research can and should begin, and the date that provides a fixed, objective landmark for all papers. (Swan et al. have written an excellent strategic analysis of the question of institutional versus central repositories: There is also excellent further policy guidance here [1] and [2] ) Once a "Keystroke Mandate" becomes widely implemented, 100% OA will not be far behind; but keep delaying the keystrokes because of other worries, or over-reaching, and you only keep delaying 100% OA. The timing of the deposit is now independent of any publisher embargo periods, which instead apply only to the timing of the Open Access-setting for the (Closed Access) full text. The policy need make no mention of embargo periods, except to recommend setting access OA immediately or as soon as possible. Not the law I have just described! It is completely unaffected. Please also see also the self-archiving FAQ on this very question.ANON: "Nevertheless, a public law can not be dependent on the assumptions, if this 93% of publishers tomorrow decide not to allow researchers to deposit in OA, the law is then helpless." What is needed right now is not a law that guarantees 100% OA; what is needed is a mandate that guarantees 100% immediate deposit of the full-texts and 100% immediate visibility of the metadata. Nature will take care of the rest.ANON: "In summary, there is a difficulty in constructing a law that guarantees 100% of OA even if the researcher/research-institute is willing to do so." But delaying and delaying the adoption of the policy (or weakening it to ineffectuality by allowing fixed or open-ended deposit-delays in order to comply with every possible embargo) is a way of guaranteeing that 100% OA will remain a long, long way off! The obstacle is keystrokes, and what is needed is a keystroke mandate, i.e., an immediate-deposit mandate, for internal record-keeping and external visibility purposes only. That is not an "OA law" but a law specifying conditions on the fulfilment conditions for receiving public funding for research: The resulting publications must be immediately deposited in an OAI Repository and must immediately make their metadata visible. Once that law is in place, 100% OA will quickly ensue of its own accord. But keep delaying the law by agonising instead over what will allow immediate OA for the full text in all cases -- or what interval can be agreed upon for delayed deposit -- and 100% OA will be delayed for yet another needless decade, You are quite right that immediate deposit, immediate access to the metadata, plus the email-eprint feature is not OA! But (1) it is almost OA, (2) it will rapidly usher in OA, and (3) it is infinitely more useful to research and researchers, now -- and for the very reasons that OA is so important and needed -- than continuing to delay and agonise over legislation that will somehow manage to formally accommodate publisher copyright agreements, and lobbies, and author choice, all at once, and in advance.ANON: "Moreover, the semi-automatic email is not open access as the term is being used in the legal texts or definition of OA. It depends on the will of the author/publishers et al and access is platform/ technology depended. A legislation has to be platform/ technology neutral/ independent." However, it is not true at all that the Dual Deposit/Release "keystroke" mandate depends on the will of the publishers, nor that access is platform/technology dependent. All of OA, and indeed the definition of OA, is dependent on some technology (the Internet and the Web) and in particular, on the OAI protocol for metadata-harvesting and interoperability. Hence all Open Access Repositories are OAI-compliant. That's easy, free, and all that's needed. And the mandate is platform-neutral too: It just requires immediate deposit of the full-text and immediate webwide visibility of the metadata. The rest will take care of itself. As to dependence on the author's will: All authors of all 2.5 million annual articles in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals want to have as many users and citers of their research as they possibly can. That is why, in paper days, they would take the time, trouble and expense to mail paper reprints to individual reprint requesters. With the DD/R mandate, this is all reduced to one author keystroke, upon receiving the semi-automated eprint-request generated by the repository software. The only thing now standing in the way of that option today is the other N-1 keystrokes needed to deposit the full-text and the metadata into the repository. And that is what the DD/R "keystroke" mandate is for! Researchers never sought royalty revenue for their articles, and they never sought to deny access. Mandate the requisite N-1 keystrokes and they will do the Nth one happily for each individual eprint request (and to re-set access from Closed Access to Open Access when the embargo expires or they tire of doing the individual keystrokes -- whichever comes first!). No. A law based on conditions of funding (whether funding of research grants or funding of research or academic institutions) can have no power over what it does not fund. But it need not. The effects of a self-archiving mandate on funded research will propagate to non-funded research rapidly as the beneficial effects of Open Access on research accessibility, impact and progress are increasingly felt across the entire world research community.ANON: "In some cases, especially in social sciences, researchers build their papers on their research experiences from various sources, not necessarily with that of current research funding. So, can government law bind them in a strict legal sense to make their publications OA?" Right now, to repeat: the only thing holding us back from the feeling of those beneficial effects, and from their propagation across disciplines and around the world, is keystrokes -- not copyright: keystrokes. Hence an immediate-keystroke mandate is all that is needed. The (proposed) law does not tell the fundee where to publish. (It is already required that funded findings be published ["publish or perish"]). The discipline and research community dictates where to publish (in the highest quality peer-reviewed journal whose content and quality standards it successfully meets). The DD/R mandate would add only that the fundee must deposit the publication (if it is an article rather than a book) in an OAI-compliant repository (preferably his own institutional IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. You are not talking above merely about depositing but about OA-depositing (i.e., depositing and setting access to the full-text immediately to OA rather than CA). So if thus making the full-text freely available online would violate the copyright agreement with the publisher, the only thing the FRPAA can do, if it wishes to mandate immediate OA-deposit, is to require the fundee not to sign such an agreement (as the Wellcome Trust requires, for agreements with embargoes exceeding 6 months).ANON: "If the journal publisher allows... the researcher to deposit the paper in [immediate] OA it is fine; otherwise the researcher is in danger of violating the copyright law of illegally distributing, reproducing, copying, extracting copyright material over the internet." But such a requirement would in turn be open to the author/institutions objection that it constrains the author's free choice as to where to publish. So the solution is to require deposit only (not OA-deposit), and merely to encourage OA-access setting whenever and as soon as possible. There is no other current solution: only the endless pre-emptive debating about what the publisher would/should/could require and what the author would/should/could do -- in other words, the effective pre-emptive "embargo" on the very adoption of a self-archiving mandate that we have been stalled in now for three years! Continuing that debate simply invites more years of lobbying, delay, and accumulating access/impact loss. What is needed is an immediate keystroke mandate, immune to debate or delay. (Then continue the debate while the keystroke mandate is having its natural effect.) This ground has already been covered, over and over, many times before, in the past three years. There is no resolution, only inaction. It is time for action, and the Keystroke Mandate is the requisite action. No, a (lawyer-dictated) inventory of provisos and exceptions will only make the mandate, confused, confusing and ineffectual: Immediate deposit of full text and metadata. No exceptions. No delays. And as access-setting is not at issue, publishers, hence author journal-choice, are both out of the loop.ANON: "So the solution to this problem cannot be within the technological systems of OA, [e.g., the email-eprint button of the IR software], but the OA Act would have to make exceptions for such cases. The FRPAA does not mention such exceptions - hence it needs to be rectified from this pitfall. A legal expert would be able to throw some light on it, I believe." Words stand in our way: The purpose of a Keystroke Mandate is of course Open Access. But call it an "Open Access Mandate" instead and you are up against the inventory of provisos and exceptions (that will in any case not add up to 100% OA). It is the tail wagging the dog. Mandate the immediate keystrokes, now, and then go back to debating the provisos and exceptions. Nor has technology anything to do with it, other than the online medium itself, that new medium on which the very concept and possibility of OA are predicated (Open Online Access). Read the opening words of the BOAI statement: "An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good: OAI-compliance is highly desirable, and easily feasible too, but need not be mentioned in any law, if you think it will produce a paralysing technology-dependence debate. Same for the trivial eprint-request button, implemented in both of the major free softwares for OAI IR creation (Eprints and Dspace)... Just mandate the immediate keystrokes and nature will take care of all the rest... Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, May 8. 2006Strengthening the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
As presently drafted, the wording of the the timely and extremely welcome US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) stands to create needless problems for itself that could even make it fail under the already-gathering opposition from the publisher lobby.
Yet the FRPAA's flaws are ever so easily correctable: The gist of the problem is all there in this well-meaning quote by Senator John Cornyn (R, co-sponsor of the bill (with Senator Joe Lieberman, D: quotation is from Robin Peek's Newsbreak article in Information Today). JC: "Making this information available to the public will leadThis same logic underlies the Bill itself. The publisher lobby will (quite rightly) jump straight onto the two profound errors in this reasoning, and they will use it, for all its worth, against the Bill: (1) For most of the research literature, the public has neither the expertise nor the interest to read it.Yet the remedy is so absurdly simple: The pressing reason for making research accessible to everyone is not because the general public has a pressing interest in reading it, nor because the public's reading it will result in cures. It is so that researchers -- those specialists by and for whom it was written, the ones with the expertise to use, apply and build upon it -- can access and apply it, to the benefit of the general public who paid for it. In Senator Cornyn's quote, the following sentence comes second, and too late, already undone by the first statement (and the logic is similarly backwards in the Bill itself): JC: "This bill will give the American taxpayer a greater return on its research investment."The right way to put it is: "Making this information available to all researchers who can use, apply and build upon it will lead to faster discoveries, innovations and cures, thereby giving American taxpayers a greater return on their research investment. As a side bonus, the tax-paying public too will have access to as much as they may feel they wish to read of the research they have funded."Today, most of published research is not accessible to much of its potential research-user population because no researcher's institution can afford paid access to more than a fraction of it. That's the real public rationale for mandating self-archiving: so that the tax-paying public that funds the research can benefit from the "discoveries, innovations and cures" that will arise from making research findings accessible to all researchers who can use and apply them. UK: " Maximising the Return on the UK's Public Investment in Research"Of course, the general public can and will be able to read whatever they wish of research too, if it is made OA. But it is foolish in the extreme to base the case for making research OA on the putative pressing need for the public to read it, and the putative "discoveries, innovations and cures" that the reading public will provide as a result! Why would the FRPAA make such a silly strategic error? Because, superficially, the right of the tax-paying public to access the research that they have paid for looks like a spinnable "public good" issue as well as a spinnable "public right-to-know" issue. In that (flawed) form, it looks like viable political-campaign material. But what makes it look like such a compelling naive-voter issue is also its fatal weakness, once the publisher lobby -- which is not at all naive -- attacks it: because the two points I have made above are dead-obvious, and can stop the momentum of OA dead in its tracks if the FRPAA has no stronger rationale to back it up with. Here is what I would immediately say if I were in the publisher lobby (and believe me, the publishers are already busy saying it): "The government wants to put the revenues of a viable industry at possible risk simply because it thinks the general public has a burning need to read mostly-technical texts written for a small population of specialists. (Here we have some public-library data on the infinitesimal rate at which the general public actually consults this kind of specialized material when it is made freely available to them: Is this what all the fuss is about? Because if it's instead just about access to the kind of clinical-health-related material that we do have evidence the public wants to consult, we can easily work out a side-deal instead of the FRPAA that leaves most of the research literature in closed access, as it is now, with some exceptions for articles of potential clinical relevance and hence public interest).The requisite stronger rationale to counter these obvious (and valid) criticisms is precisely: research, from researchers, to researchers, for the sake of the research funder, the public -- along with the empirical evidence (from comparative usage and impact data for articles within the same journal issues that have and have not been made OA by their authors by self-archiving them) that the "small population of specialists who already have access to the research" is in reality only a fraction of its potential research usership. But the primary, solid and unassailable rationale -- the real rationale for OA all along: research for researchers -- needs to be put first, up-front, rather than trying to put the self-archiving mandate across under the banner of the weaker, defeasible rationale: "research for public use." [This could be supplemented by the case for the need for access to the primary research literature for students who are learning to become researchers (again not the general public).] Nothing at all is lost from remedying the FRPAA wording in this way. Public access still comes with the OA territory. But it immunizes the Bill, pre-emptively, against these obvious (and valid) prima facie publisher counter-arguments, whereas the current version is positively provoking them. In addition to this remediable flaw in the FPRAA's fundamental rationale for mandating self-archiving, there is also the functional flaw I mentioned in my previous posting on this topic (that of allowing any delay at all). This second flaw is also easily remedied (by what Peter Suber has come to call the "dual deposit/release policy") which is simply to mandate immediate deposit for all FRPAA-funded articles, and allow the 6-month delay only for the timing of the OA access-setting (Open Access vs. Closed Access), rather than for the timing of the deposit itself. That way, the new "Request Email Eprint" button -- now implemented in both the Eprints and Dspace Institutional Repositories and allowing individual users to request an email version directly from the author, semi-automatically -- will tide over any 6-month delay almost as effectively as immediate OA for all those would-be users who need it. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
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