Open Access Archivangelism

Cambridge University has provided a very clear step-by-step statement of how to comply with the new HEFCE/REF OA Policy, as well as the RCUK OA policy, and they are implementing it immediately:

"This policy comes into force on 1 April 2016. Yet at the University we want to  ensure this shift is managed sooner rather than later to ensure no research is omitted.” 

To derive the full benefit of the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit policy it is important that all UK universities also implement the email copy-request Button:

For DSpace: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy
For EPrints: http://wiki.eprints.org/w/RequestEprint

This ensures that researchers worldwide can immediately request (and authors can  immediately provide, with one click each) a single copy of closed-access deposits  for research purposes even during a publisher OA embargo period.

What makes the HEFCE/REF OA policy so important and powerful is that it ensures that all final drafts are deposited immediately, rather than only after a publisher OA embargo period has elapsed.

The Request-Copy Button in turn ensures that the immediate-deposit does not lie  fallow for a year.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Coombe, RJ Wershler, D & Zellinger, M (Eds) Dynamic Fair Dealing. U Toronto Press


Stevan Harnad

The only effective way to make inflated subscriptions unsustainable is for funders and institutions to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

Tim Gowers is quite right that “the pace of change is slow, and the alternative system that is most strongly promoted — open access articles paid for by article processing charges [“Gold OA”] — is one that mathematicians tend to find unpalatable. (And not only mathematicians: they are extremely unpopular in the humanities.)… there is no sign that they will help to bring down costs any time soon and no convincing market mechanism by which one might expect them to.”

This is all true as long as the other form of OA (“Green OA” self-archiving by authors of published articles in OA repsositories, mandated by funders and institutions) has not prevailed. Pre-Green Gold is "Fool's-Gold." Only Post-Green Gold is Fair-Gold.

The current Finch/RCUK policy, preferring Gold OA, has had its predictable perverse effects:

1. sustaining arbitrary, bloated Gold OA fees
2. wasting scarce research funds
3. double-paying publishers [subscriptions plus Gold]
4. handing subscription publishers a hybrid-gold-mine
5. enabling hybrid publishers to double-dip
6. abrogating authors' freedom of journal-choice [based on cost-recovery model, embargo or licence instead of on quality]
7. imposing re-mix licenses that many authors don't want and most users and fields don't need
8. inspiring subscription publishers to adopt and lengthen Green OA embargoes [to maxmize hybrid-gold revenues]
9. handicapping Green OA mandates worldwide [by incentivizing embargoes]
10. allowing journal-fleet publishers to confuse and exploit institutions and authors even more

But the solution is also there, as already adopted by University of Liege and FRS-FNRS (the Belgian Francophone research funding council), EC Horizon2020 and now also by HEFCE for REF2020.

a. funders and institutions mandate immediate-deposit
b. of the peer-reviewed final draft
c. in the author's institutional repository
d. immediately upon acceptance for publication
e. whether journal is subscription or Gold
f. whether access to the deposit is immedate-OA or embargoed
g. whether license is transfered, retained or CC-BY;
h. institutions implement repository's facilitated email eprint request Button;
i. institutions designate immediate-deposit the mechanism for submitting publications for research performance assessment;
j. institutions monitor and ensure immediate-deposit mandate compliance

This policy restores author choice, moots publisher embargoes, makes Gold and CC-BY completely optional, provides the incentive for author compliance and the natural institutional mechanism for verifying it, consolidates funder and institutional mandates; hastens the natural death of OA embargoes, the onset of universal Green OA, and the resultant institutional subscription cancellations, journal downsizing and transition to Fair-Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price, paid out of institutional subscription cancellation savings instead of over-priced, double-paid, double-dipped Fool's-Gold. And of course Fair-Gold OA will license all the re-use rights users need and authors want to allow.

In summary, plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Gold OA today are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.

______ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

______ (2013) Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014

______ (2013) Finch Group reviews progress in implementing open access transition amid ongoing criticisms. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog November 18th 2013

______ (2013) “Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog December 5th, 2013

There are two essential components to an effective “Green” OA mandate (i.e., a mandate that generates as close to 100% compliance, as soon as possible):

(1) The mandate must uncouple the date of deposit from the date the deposit is made OA, requiring immediate deposit, with no exemptions or exceptions. How long an OA embargo it allows is a separate matter, but on no account must date of deposit be allowed to be contingent on publisher OA embargoes.

This is exactly what the New HEFCE policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework has done.

(2) Eligibility for research assessment (and funding) must be made conditional on immediate-deposit (date-stamped by the journal acceptance letter). Again, this is in order to ensure that deposits are not made months or years after publication: no retrospective deposit.

The deposit requirement for eligibility for research assessment and funding is not itself an OA requirement, it is merely a procedural requirement: For eligibility, papers must be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Late deposits are not eligible for consideration.

This engages each university (always extremely anxious to comply fully with REF, HEFCE and RCUK eligibility rules) in ensuring that deposit is timely, with the help of the date-stamped acceptance letter throughout the entire 6-year REF cycle, 2014-2020.

These two conditions are what have yielded the most effective of all the Green OA mandates to date (well over 80% compliance rate and growing) at University of Liege and FRS-FNRS (the Belgian Francophone research funding council). Other mandates have since been upgrading to this mandate model: Harvard FAS has already adopted immediate-deposit as one of its conditions. So has the European Commission's Horizon2020. And now RCUK — thanks to HEFCE/REF — will reap the benefits of the immediate-deposit condition as well (see ROARMAP)

OA embargoes are another matter, and HEFCE/REF is wisely leaving that to others (RCUK, EU Horizon2020, and university mandates) to stipulate maximal allowable embargo length and any allowable exceptions. What HEFCE/REF is providing is the crucial two components for ensuring that the mandate will succeed: (1) immediate deposit as a (2) condition for REF-eligibility.

But let me add something else that will become increasingly important, once the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit requirement begins to propagate worldwide (as I am now confident it will: UK is at last back in the lead on OA again, instead of odd-man-out, as it has been since Finch):

The immediate-deposit clause and the contingency on eligibility for research assessment and funding also ensures that the primary locus of deposit will be the institutional repository rather than institution-external repositories. (Deposits can be exported automatically to external repositories, once deposited and once the embargo has elapsed; they can also be imported from extrenal repositories, in the case of the physicists and mathematicians who have already been faithfully depositing in Arxiv for two decades,)

But besides all that, many of the eprints and dspace institutional repositories already have — and, with the HEFCE mandate model propagating almost all of them will soon have the email-eprint-request Button:

This Button makes it possible for users who reach a closed access deposit to click once to request a copy for research purposes; the repository software emails an automatic eprint request to the author, who can click once to comply with the request; the repository software emails the requestor the eprint. (Researchers have been requesting and sending reprints by mail — and lately by email — for decades, but with immediate-deposit and the Button, this is greatly accelerated and facilitated. So even during any allowable embargo period, the Button will enhance access and usage dramatically. I also predict that immediate-deposit and the Button will greatly hasten the inevitable and well-deserved demise of publisher OA embargoes.)

Let me close by noting another important feature of the new HEFCE/REF policy: The allowable exceptions do not apply to the immediate-deposit requirement! They only apply to the allowable open-access embargo. To be eligible for REF2020, a paper must have been deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (with a 3-month grace period).

(No worries about HEFCE's optional 2 year start-up grace period either: Institutions will almost certainly want their REF procedures safely and systematically in place as early as possible, so everything can go simply and smoothly and there is no risk of papers being ineligible.)

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Postscript. Expect the usual complaints from the usual suspects:

(i) "This is a sell-out of OA! It's just Green Gratis OA, not Libre OA: What about the re-use rights? And if it’s embargoed, it isn’t even Green OA!"

Reply: Relax. Patience. A compromise was needed, to break the log-jam between the Finch/Wellcome Fool’s-Gold profligacy and publisher embargoes on Green OA. The HEFCE immediate-deposit compromise is what will break up that log jam, and it’s not only the fastest and surest (and cheapest) way to get to 100% Green Gratis OA, but also the fastest, surest and cheapest way to get from Green Gratis OA to Libre Fair-Gold OA.

(ii) "This is a sell-out to publishers and their embargoes."

Reply: Quite the opposite. It will immediately detoxify embargoes (thanks to the Button) and at the same time plant the seeds for their speedy extinction, by depriving publishers of the power to delay access-provision with their embargoes. It is also moots the worries of the most timorous or pedantic IP lawyer.

It thereby provides a mandate model that any funder or institution can adopt, irrespective of how it elects to deal with publisher OA embargoes.

And a mandate that can be simply and effectively implemented and monitored by institutions to ensure compliance.

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

Harnad, S (2006) The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model. Open Access Archivangelism 71

Rentier, B. (2009) Liege Mandate Definitely Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (or Dual Deposit/Release: IDOA/DDR) Open Access Archivangelism 502

______ (2011) Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model Open Access Archivangelism 864

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In, Open Access Week 2012

Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog. July 4 2012

______ (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cat’s grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September 3rd 2012

______ (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

______ (2012) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

______ (2012) Public Access to Federally Funded Research (Response to US OSTP RFI) Open Access Archivangelism 865/866

Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V & Harnad, S (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, A Swan & AA Baptista, Eds. Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na UMinho no Mundo.

Harnad, S (2013) Finch Group reviews progress in implementing open access transition amid ongoing criticisms. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog November 18th 2013

______ (2013) “Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog December 5th, 2013

______ (2013) Follow-Up Comments for BIS Select Committee on Open Access. UK Parliament Publications and Records, Spring Issue

______ (2013) Evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Open Access, Winter Issue, 119-123.

______ (2013) Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014

______ (2013) Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access. Written Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access, Winter Issue

______ (2013) Recommandation au ministre québécois de l'enseignement supérieur.

______ (2013) Comments on Canada’s NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. Canadian Tri-Agency Call for Comments, Autumn Issue

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

All this potential research money wasted — utterly wasted — on Fools Gold. Some Reflection from Wellcome Would be Welcome.

Falk Reckling: If Green OA would really work (Fools Green?), we would not need such compromises, but some of them could work: http://ioppublishing.org/newsDetails/Austria-open-access

There's no "Fools Green" just foolish OA policy (or non-policy). Green OA works perfectly well when it is effectively mandated (as it is by FRS in Belgium, U Liège, U Minho and others; see ROARMAP).

FWF, for example, fails to (1) mandate immediate institutional deposit, irrespective of publisher embargo on OA, and fails to (2) make research evaluation and funding contingent on immediate institutional deposit, as the effective Green OA mandates do. This effectively makes compliance with the FWF "mandate" completely contingent on publisher policy. OeAW does much the same.

It may seem more sensible to pay for Fools Gold than to think, pay attention to the empirical evidence, and design an effective policy, but in fact it's a regrettable and needless waste of time and money.

See:
Optimizing the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) Open Access Mandate: I & II

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In, Open Access Week 2012

Gargouri, Y, Larivière, V & Harnad, S (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, A Swan & AA Baptista, Eds. Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na UMinho no Mundo.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Falk Reckling: Stevan, I personally appreciate your efforts very much, always inspiring, but how to install a Green OA if most of the institutions in Austria have no repository and if a lot of researchers like to prefer to deposit the version of record ? That is the reason our OA policy offers equal options, see: http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/public_relations/oai/index.html

Falk, my suggestions:

(1) Mandate (i.e., require) institutional repository deposit of the refereed final draft immediately upon acceptance as a condition for research evaluation or FWF funding. (The FWF mandate will be backed up by a very similar EU Horizon2020 mandate.)

(2) If the fundee's institution does not yet have a repository, recommend OpenDepot as the provisional locus of deposit until the institution has a repository of its own.

Researchers will deposit, and institutions will create repositories and verify compliance, just as in every other country with an effective Green OA policy.

According to OpenDoar, Austria already has 9 institutional repositories (plus two disciplinary ones).

Falk Reckling: just have a look at that these repositories

Of course those repositories are mostly empty! That's the point! They will not fill until FWF and OeAW (and then the institutions themselves) adopt effective mandates. It is circular to say that there's no point to upgrade our Green OA mandates to make them effective because the repositories are empty! The empty repositories are the reason the mandates need to be upgraded. And the upgrade to immediate institutional deposit as a condition of evaluation and funding works. (Try it and you will see.) And I did say that institutional repositories would be created in response to effective Green OA mandates...

Wouter Gerritsma, wrote in GOAL:

"For two working groups of the Dutch University libraries I was asked to make a calculation for the costs of a 100% Gold open access model. It will only costs 10.5 million euro extra was my conclusion. Blogged at http://wowter.net/2014/03/05/costs-going-gold-netherlands/"

Unless I have misunderstand, this "10.5 million euro extra” for Dutch University Libraries means 10.5 million euro extra over and above what Dutch University Libraries are paying for subscriptions (34 million euros).

In other words, for a surcharge of 10.5 million dollars, Dutch University libraries can purchase gold OA for Dutch research output (assuming that suitable gold OA journals exist for all Dutch research output, and that all Dutch researchers are willing to publish in them).

But, at the same time, Dutch University libraries also have to continue to pay to subscribe to the research input from all other universities and research institutions worldwide, as long as the latter publish in subscription-based journals rather than gold OA journals (or are unwilling or unable to pay for gold OA).

This pre-emptive double-payment for gold OA I have come to call “Fool’s Gold."

What is being left out of this calculation, of course, is that the Netherlands, like all countries, can have OA at no extra cost at all by mandating green OA self-archiving of all of its research output in Dutch universities’ institutional repositories.

In other words, Wouter's calculations sound like a response to Sander Dekker's Dutch echo of the UK Finch Committee recommendations to pay extra for gold OA instead of just mandating green OA.

Such recommendations originate, not coincidentally, from the two countries with the heaviest concentration of the journal publishing industry, and hence the journal publishing industry lobby, as repeatedly voiced in the Netherlands by Sander Dekker, Netherlands State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

All the published objections to the Finch recommendations would apply to Dekker’s Dutch recommendations if they were ever to become a policy (mandate). Fortunately they are not mandatory and can and should be ignored in favor of mandating green OA, as the European Commission has done. The UK mandate will also (it is to be hoped) shortly shored up with an immediate-deposit requirement from HEFCE.

To understand why green OA needs to be mandated first, and how it will first provide OA, and then make subscriptions unsustainable, inducing publishers to cut costs and convert to Fair Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price by offloading all archiving and access provision onto the worldwide network of mandatory green OA institutional repositories, see:

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

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Wouter Gerritsma replied:

Stevan,
 
Yes we could have green with the current subscription models and repository infrastructure. But still some important players don’t allow green (Wiley, Nature and ACS to mention a few)
 
But all I wanted to do, and was requested to do, to make a calculation to see what it would cost if our junior minister Sander Dekker would get what he wanted. Complete Gold OA for the Netherlands.
 
It would cost us 43 instead of 34 million euro.
Currently we are spending already 34 (subscriptions) plus 4 million (OA APC). So we are rapidly falling into a trap of paying twice http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/30/paying-twice-or-paying-thrice-brienza/
 
Wouter  

Wouter,

Yes, of course I knew that you were only the messenger, and doing the calculation! It is the pressure from Sander Dekker (or, rather, from those who are putting the pressure on Sander Dekker!) that is behind the foolish idea of increasing the already overstretched Dutch research publication budget by 30% from 34M euros for subscriptions to 43M by adding payment for pre-emptive, over-priced, double-paid Fool's Gold OA!

But there is a solution for green OA embargoes: In the case of Elsevier, they're no problem, because Elsevier does not have a green OA embargo -- just a lot of empty, non-binding pseudo-legalistic double-talk about authors retaining the right to self-archive unembargoed "except if they are required [mandated] to exercise that retained right." 

That is of course patent nonsense. But for those timid authors who don't realize it, they can still be mandated to deposit the final refereed draft of their articles in their IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to keep it under "Closed Access" if they wish to comply with an embargo. The author can then provide individual access on a case-by-case basis: Users click the IR's eprint-request Button to request an individual copy, and the author can then comply with the request with one click.

Needless extra clicks for the (timid) author, but extra access too, and extra usage, uptake, and impact. (And a lot better than paying a needless extra 10M!)

And of course the result after a few years of mandatory immediate deposit, providing 60% immediate OA for the unembargoed deposits and 40% Button-mediated access will be that embargoes will quietly die their inevitable, well-deserved deaths, as more and more authors provide immediate OA instead of clicks.

Green OA embargoes, in other words, are illusory impediments, bits of FUD to confound timid authors. No sensible person on the planet believes they have any chance of actually holding back the Green OA dam (something the citizens of the Netherlands should understand!).

Best wishes,

Stevan

Comment on:
Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles
Open and Shut Feb 4 2014]

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1. Sixty percent of journals (including Elsevier) state formally in their copyright agreements that their authors retain the right to make their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version (Green) Open Access (OA) immediately, without embargo, by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories.

2. The Elsevier take-down notices did not pertain to the author’s final version but to the publisher’s version of record (and in the case of 3rd party sites like academia.edu they concerned not only the version but the location).

3. The IDOA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate is formally immune to take-down notices, because it separates deposit from OA:

4. For articles published in the 60% of journals in which authors formally retain their right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA, they can be self-archived immediately in the institutional repository and also made OA immediately.

5. For articles published in the 40% of journals that formally embargo OA, if authors wish to comply with the publisher’s embargo, the final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version can still be deposited immediately in the institutional repository, with access set as Closed Access (CA) during any embargo: only the title and abstract are accessible to all users; the full text is accessible only to the author.

6. For CA deposits, institutional repositories have an email-eprint-request Button with which individual users can launch an automated email request to the author for an individual copy for research purposes, with one click; the author can then decide, on an individual case by case basis, with one click, whether or not the repository software should email a copy to that requestor.

7. It is the IDOA + Button Strategy that is the update of the “Harnad-Oppenheim Prepint + Corrigenda” Strategy.

8. But of course even the IDOA + Button Strategy is unnecessary, as is definitively demonstrated by what I would like to dub the “Computer Science + Physics Strategy”:

9. Computer scientists since the 1980’s and Physicists since the 1990’s have been making both their preprints and their final drafts freely accessibly online immediately, without embargo (the former in institutional FTP archives and then institutional websites, and the latter in Arxiv, a 3rd-party website) without any take-down notices (and, after over a quarter century, even the mention of the prospect of author take-down notices for these papers is rightly considered ludicrous).

10. I accordingly recommend the following: Let realistic authors practice the Computer Science + Physics Strategy and let formalistic authors practice the IDOA + Button Strategy — but let them all deposit their their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted versions immediately.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

See Exchange on Elsevier Website regarding Elsevier Take-Down Notices (and please note that this concerns only authors' final drafts, not Elsevier's PDF version-of-record):

December 17, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Stevan Harnad: Tom, I wonder if it would be possible to drop the double-talk and answer a simple question: Do or do not Elsevier authors retain the right to make their peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites immediately, with no embargo? Just a Yes or No, please… Stevan

December 18, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Tom Reller (Elsevier): Hello Dr. Harnad. I don’t agree with your characterization of our explanation here, but nevertheless as requested, there is a simple answer to your question – yes. Thank you.

December 20, 2013
Stevan Harnad: Tom, thank you. Then I suggest that the institutions [and funders] of Elsevier authors ignore the Elsevier take-down notices (and also adopt an immediate-deposit mandate that is immune to all publisher take-down notices by requiring immediate deposit, whether or not access to the immediate-deposit is made immediately OA)… Stevan 

Do follow Peter Suber's wise advice to authors to try to retain their right to self-archive with OA un-embargoed -- but also deposit your final draft immediately upon acceptance whether or not you make your deposit OA immediately; and make sure your institution and funder both adopt an immediate institutional deposit mandate to ensure that all researchers deposit immediately. (And remember that this all concerns the author's final draft, not the publisher's PDF version-of-record.)

Paradoxically, publisher take-down notices for the publisher's proprietary PDF version-of-record are a good thing for the adoption of sensible, effective OA policies and practices: Sleep-walking authors and their institutions need to be awakened to the pragmatics and implications of the difference between the author's final, peer-reviewed, revised, accepted version and the publisher's PDF version-of-record: Green OA mandates are all about the former, not the latter.

Stevan Harnad

"The University of Calgary has been contacted by a company representing the publisher, Elsevier Reed, regarding certain Elsevier journal articles posted on our publicly accessible university web pages. We have been provided with examples of these articles and reviewed the situation. Elsevier has put the University of Calgary on notice that these publicly posted Elsevier journal articles are an infringement of Elsevier Reed’s copyright and must be taken down."

If Elsevier sends a take-down notice to a university, you have two simple options:

(1) Leave it up, and send the notice back to Elsevier with a copy of Elsevier’s policy on self-archiving.

or

(2) Re-set access as Closed Access and rely on the repository’s copy-request Button.

(If the take-down notice was because you deposited the publisher’s PDF, make the publisher’s PDF Closed Access and deposit the author’s final draft instead, and make that OA.)

And fix your mandate to make sure it specifies that the author’s final draft should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, not the publisher’s PDF.

(Calgary would have done better to respond pragmatically to this latest round of Elsevier FUD and bluff -- but, after all, this is exactly what FUD's for, isn't it?)

Rick Anderson [RA] wrote:

"[A] policy that actually makes deposit mandatory is a mandate… But it appears that many of the institutional policies listed on the ROARMAP site... as "mandates"… actually require no deposit at all. A few examples would be those of MIT ("The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author"), the University of Oregon library ("The Dean of the Libraries will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author"), and the University of Glasgow ("Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication.")… [T]hey are policies that require no deposit… [W]hy the insistence on calling such policies "mandates"? If they make no action mandatory, then why not simply call them policies? 

I agree that some of the "mandates" in ROARMAP are not really mandatory, although Merriam-Webster does give two senses of "mandate":

1  : an authoritative command...
2 :  an authorization to act...

Academics do need both: an official requirement (similar to publish or perish) (1) and official backing from their institutions and funders (2), to empower them to deal with their publishers.

But many of the first wave of mandates are indeed weak, and some are not even mandates at all. 

They are, however, increasingly being upgraded to ID/OA (immediate-deposit/optional-access) (Liège/FNRS model):

In the UK, HEFCE/REF's new policy will effectively make all funded research in the UK ID/OA, and the institutions will have to be the ones to ensure that researchers comply. 

The EC's new Horizon2020 is likewise an immediate-deposit mandate. 

Many (including me) are working hard to try to ensure that the US OSTP mandate and the Canadian Tri-Agency mandate will be ID/OA too. 

Both Minho and QUT have recently upgraded their institutional mandates to ID/OA. And several institutional mandate adoptions have lately been ID/OA.

The hope had originally been that the Harvard/MIT-style OA mandates, because they were (i) self-imposed faculty consensus policies, would be even more effective than administrative mandates, and that because they (ii) formally pre-assigned certain rights by default to their institutions in advance of submission for publication, they would strengthen authors' negotiating position with publishers. 

"Each Faculty member grants to (university name) permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles… Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author’s final version of each article no later than the date of its publication [e.g., by depositing it in the institutional repository]…"

But in practice the Harvard/MIT-model OA mandates (often just called OA "policies") seem to have turned out to be less effective than had been hoped: 

First, the Harvard model had (a) had to allow author waivers, which in and of itself rendered the policy non-mandatory; but this in itself is not the problem, because only about 5% of authors formally request a waiver. 

The problem is that (b) most authors neither waive nor deposit. 

The exact proportion of compliance is not known, because the policy is not binding on all faculty (because at Harvard not all Faculties have adopted it, and because at MIT a lot of collaborative project research is not bound by it) and (c) universities in general currently have no way of knowing what their total published research output is. (Enabling institutions to keep track of their  own research output was in fact one of the secondary purposes of OA mandates and institutional repositories.)

So, as with other OA policies, implementation at Harvard and MIT has been reduced to librarians trying to chase after authors to provide their papers, or trying to retrieve their authors' published papers from the web (where they have sometimes been made OA on institution-external sites). I believe librarians even try to retrieve their institutional authors'  papers from publishers' websites, when the library has licensed access -- but then they languish while the library or repository staff try to figure out whether or when they have the right to deposit them. (This, despite the fact that there are only 5% waivers of the default rights-retention clause!)

It is quite problematic that because of its distinguished source the Harvard OA policy model is being widely emulated in the US even though it is now 5 years since it was first adopted in 2008 and yet there are no data available on how well it works compared to other mandate models (or no mandate at all).

In principle, if Harvard takes it seriously that 95% of Harvard faculty have not waived a default rights-assignment policy, then they can make 95% of Harvard papers OA in Harvard's institutional repository immediately. The question is: which version? If authors have not provided their final refereed drafts, it is unclear what can be done with the publisher's PDF.

The Glasgow policy -- I agree it's not really a mandate, and I have just downgraded it to a non-mandate in ROARMAP -- is the weakest kind of OA policy of all: "Deposit if and when your publisher says you can!"

This is why it's so important that institutional and funder mandates should be (I) upgraded to all require immediate deposit and (II) harmonized to all require institutional deposit, with (III) deposit designated as the sole official mechanism for submitting refereed journal articles for individual performance review, institutional research assessment, research funding applications and fulfillment, and official academic CVs. 

(If institutional rights assignment is waived, the publisher has an OA embargo, and the author wishes to comply with the embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access instead of OA, and the repository's automated request-a-copy Button can provide "Almost-OA" during the embargo with one click each from each requestor and the author. But the deposit must be immediate in any case.)

The UK's HEFCE REF2020 and the EU's EC Horizon2020 mandates should soon both be harmonizing institutional mandates in this direction. Let's hope the US, Canada, Latin America, Australia and the rest of the research world will soon follow suit. OA is already fully within reach and absurdly overdue. Let's this time have the good sense to grasp it.

Stevan Harnad

I like Scott Pluchak's posting. We share a vision...

If you're interested in some of the objective evidence on the adoption rate (still too slow) and the effectiveness (quite remarkable, though depending on mandate-type) of OA self-archiving mandates, have a look at ROARMAP and the references below.

(You might also have heard of the US OSTP, EU Horizon2020 and UK HEFCE/REF2020 mandates, soon to come.)

Scott is certainly right that my thinking has been magical:

1. In 1994: I thought it would be enough to just just say "self-archive" and next day all researchers on the planet would do it. (Next day came, and nothing happened.)

2. It was magical thinking also to create CogPrints in 1997, in case researchers in my field weren't self-archiving because they didn't have a central place to self-archive (no success).

3. Magical thought too, that creating EPrints in 2000 (from which DSpace too emerged) -- so that all institutions could create their own OA repositories -- would do the trick (no dice).

4. A series of studies inspired by Lawrence 2001 -- demonstrating that OA increases citations -- made no significant difference either.

5. But then in 2003, things began to pick up, with the adoption of the very first Green OA mandate (Southampton ECS), followed by several more (notably QUT in Australia and U Minho in Portugal). ROARMAP launched, but adoptions were still just a trickle: decidedly unmagical.

6. Then in 2004 the UK Select Committee recommended that all UK institutions and funders mandate Green OA. And the trickle became a trend -- but still a very sluggish one. And most of the mandates were weak, ineffective ones. It would have taken magic to make them work.

7. So in 2006, Peter Suber and I independently proposed the immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA) (Peter called it the "dual-deposit-release" mandate), Southampton designed the automated request-a-copy Button for EPrints and Eloy Rodrigues designed its counterpart for DSpace. (Perhaps it was still magical thinking to imagine they would work -- or would even be adopted.)

8. But then in 2007, Bernard Rentier, rector of the University of Liège, became the first to adopt the ID/OA mandate and the Button.

9. We then waited a few years to see whether it would work.

10. And by 2010 it became evident that ID/OA + Button was working, and generating over 80% OA compared to about 30% for the weaker mandates and even less without mandates. And no magic was needed.

Meanwhile, Gold OA had been making some headway too, but even more slowly than Green, because it required authors to switch journals and because it cost them extra money; and in 2013 the economist John Houghton (in collaboration with publishing consultant Alma Swan) described exactly why Green needed to come first.

Is it magical to think the adoption of ID/OA + Button will become universal in the next few years? Perhaps. But let's be empirical, and wait for the evidence.

Meanwhile, I -- and many others -- will keep "tirelessly trotting out the facts" rather than just waiting passively… And does 1-10 really sound all that hedgehoggy to you? Seems more foxy to me (and a fox who is more of a pragmatist than just a preacher, polemicist or prestidigitator). -- But then I love both of those little creatures (the foxes and the hedgehogs), and would never either wear their hides or eat their flesh, any more than I would those of any other feeling creature (including pragmatists, preachers, polemicists and prestidigitators). And that's a lot bigger and more important thing than OA...

Gargouri, Y., Larivière, V., & Harnad, S. (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, Ed. title to come) http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. In Open Access Week 2012

Hitchcock, S. (2013) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. & Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)