Open Access Archivangelism

End of the gold rush? (Yvonne Morris, cilip): "In the interest of making research outputs publicly available; shorter and consistent or no embargo periods are the desired outcome. However, publishers… have argued that short embargo periods make librarians cancel subscriptions to their journals… The BIS report finds no evidence to support this distinction."

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I have long meant to comment on a frequent contradiction that keeps being voiced by OA advocates and opponents alike:

I. Call for Disruption: Serial publications are overpriced and unaffordable; publisher profits are excessive; the subscription (license) model is unsustainable: the subscription model needs to be disrupted in order to force it to evolve toward Gold OA.

II. Call for Protection: Serials publications are threatened by (Green) OA, which risks making the subscription model unsustainable: the subscription model needs to be protected in order to allow it to evolve toward Gold OA.

Green OA mandates do two things: (a) They provide immediate OA for all who cannot afford subscription access, and (b) they disrupt the subscription model.

Green OA embargoes do two things: (c) They withhold OA from all who cannot afford subscription access, and (d) they protect the subscription model from disruption.

Why do those OA advocates who are working for (a) (i.e., to provide immediate OA for all who cannot afford subscription access) also feel beholden to promise (d) (i.e. to protect the subscription model from disruption)?

University of Liège and FRSN Belgium have adopted -- and HEFCE and BIS (as well as BOAI-10: 1.1 & 1.6 and the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP)) have all proposed adopting -- the compromise resolution to this contradiction:

Mandate the immediate repository deposit of the final refereed draft of all articles immediately upon acceptance for publication, but if the author wishes to comply with a publisher embargo on Green OA, do not require access to the deposit to be made OA immediately: Let the deposit be made Closed Access during the allowable embargo period and let the repository's automated eprint-request Button tide over the needs of research and researchers by making it easy for users to request and authors to provide a copy for research purposes with one click each.

This tides over research needs during the embargo. If it still disrupts serials publication and makes subscriptions unsustainable, chances are that it's time for publishers to phase out the products and services for which there is no longer a market in the online era and evolve instead toward something more in line with the real needs of the PostGutenberg research community.

Evolution and adaptation never occur except under the (disruptive) pressure of necessity. Is there any reason to protect the journal publishing industry from evolutionary pressure, at the expense of research progress?

Stevan Harnad

Bo-Christer Björk & David Solomon (2013) The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Journal of Informetrics (in press)

Abstract: Publishing in scholarly peer reviewed journals usually entails long delays from submission to publication. In part this is due to the length of the peer review process and in part because of the dominating tradition of publication in issues, earlier a necessity of paper-based publishing, which creates backlogs of manuscripts waiting in line. The delays slow the dissemination of scholarship and can provide a significant burden on the academic careers of authors.
     Using a stratified random sample we studied average publishing delays in 2700 papers published in 135 journals sampled from the Scopus citation index. The shortest overall delays occur in science technology and medical (STM) fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities and business/economics. Business/economics with a delay of 18 months took twice as long as chemistry with a 9 month average delay. Analysis of the variance indicated that by far the largest amount of variance in the time between submission and acceptance was among articles within a journal as compared with journals, disciplines or the size of the journal. For the time between acceptance and publication most of the variation in delay can be accounted for by differences between specific journals.

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Now it's time to put two and two together (and this pertains more to the lag between acceptance and publication: the timing of peer review and revision is another matter):

1. The research community is clamoring for access, particularly those who are denied access to articles in journals to which their institutions cannot afford to subscribe.

2. In many fields, the most important growth region for taking up and building upon new findings, hence research progress, is within the first year of publication.

3. The average delay from acceptance to publication for subscription journals is about 6 months (and especially long for arts & humanities journals)

4. Björk and Solomon point out that for Gold OA journals the delay is much shorter: under 2 months.

5. The delay for Green OA self-archiving is even shorter: zero if self-archiving is immediate (and even negative if a pre-refereeing preprint has also been made OA even earlier).

6. Subscription journals say they are in favor of OA, but they need an embargo in order to keep their subscriptions sustainable.

7. Subscription journals already have a built-in "embargo" because of the 6-month delay between acceptance and publication.

8. So the 6-12-month Green OA embargoes demanded by STEM fields and even longer embargoes demanded by arts & humanities journals not only impede research progress by denying access during the embargo, but they compound the publisher-end delays between acceptance and publication.

This is why the Liege-model immediate-deposit mandate ( together with the repository-mediated request-sprint Button) -- now recommended by both HEFCE and BIS (as well as BOAI-10: 1.1 & 1.6 and the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP)) -- is so important:

It makes it possible for researchers to request -- and authors to provide -- immediate access with one click each as soon as the final, refereed, revised draft is accepted for publication, irrespective of publication lags or publisher OA embargoes.

Stevan Harnad

The Director General of the UK's Russell Group of universities, Wendy Piatt, responded as follows to the BIS Committee Recommendations on UK OA policy:

“We welcome the committee’s report, which highlights the vital role that ‘green’ open access can play as the UK moves towards full open access... [T]he committee rightly highlights that ‘green’ open access is a simple and cost-effective way of sharing research. We urge the Government to take note of the calls to reconsider its preference for ‘gold’ open access during the five year transition period."
      “However, we have real reservations about the committee’s recommendation to restrict embargo periods to six months for STEM subjects and 12 months for humanities, arts and social sciences. This will directly limit where researchers can publish, will constrain academic freedom and could potentially damage the international standing of UK universities.”

The substantive recommendations of the 2013 BIS Report (I, II) were:

1. that the Green OA deposit in the institutional repository should be immediate rather than delayed, whether or not Open Access to the deposit is embargoed by the publisher (during any OA embargo the repository's eprint-request Button can then enable the author to fulfill individual user eprint requests automatically with one click each if deposit was immediate),

2. that an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring timely mandate compliance should be implemented, and

3. that Gold OA publishing should either no longer be preferred or hybrid Gold should no longer be funded.

The only bearing these three recommendations have on author freedom-of-choice of journal is that they restore it: Whereas Finch/RCUK's current preference for publishing in Gold OA journals would have restricted author freedom of choice, BIS removes that restriction. Authors can publish in whatever journal they wish.

As to the BIS suggestion to reduce the maximum allowable Green OA embargo limit to 6-12 months from 12-24 months: the immediate-deposit mandate (plus the repository Button) largely moots this. As long as deposit is immediate, there would be nothing wrong with allowing an opt-out or waiver (as in the American opt-out mandate models, such as Harvard's) from the maximal embargo limit on an individual article basis, if the author demonstrates that it would restrict journal choice to have to comply with the embargo. The critical thing is that there should be no opt-out from immediate-deposit (which, if not immediately OA, has no bearing whatsoever on author freedom of choice of journals). Authors can publish in whatever journal they wish.

In response to the BIS Select Committee Report Dame Janet Finch writes:

Dame Janet Finch: "There are some unfortunate gaps in the Select Committee’s consideration. In particular their comments on the publishing industry take no account of a [sic] Learned Societies, whose publishing and other roles have been a major concern of our working group."

The substantive recommendations of the 2013 BIS Report (I, II) were:

1. that the Green OA deposit in the institutional repository should be immediate rather than delayed, whether or not Open Access to the deposit is embargoed by the publisher (during any OA embargo the repository's eprint-request Button can then enable the author to fulfill individual user eprint requests automatically with one click each if deposit was immediate),

2. that an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring timely mandate compliance should be implemented, and

3. that Gold OA publishing should either no longer be preferred or hybrid Gold should no longer be funded.

It is not at all clear how this amounts to "tak[ing] no account of a [sic] Learned Societies, whose publishing and other roles have been a major concern of our working group."

The Report does recommend shorter limits on the maximum allowable publisher embargo on OA, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the substantive recommendations above, which refer to the mandatory date of deposit, not to the date on which the deposit is made OA.

One could hardly have hoped for a better outcome from the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee's Report. If BIS's recommendations are followed then the UK will regain its global leadership role in the Open Access movement -- the role the UK has been playing ever since the pioneering Report in 2004 by Ian Gibson's Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology. That Report had recommended that UK's universities and funding councils should mandate Green OA self-archiving of all peer-reviewed research articles. In the ensuing years more and more of the rest of the world began to follow suit.

The 2013 BIS Report (I, II) now recommends mandating;

1. that the Green OA deposit in the institutional repository should be immediate rather than delayed, whether or not Open Access to the deposit is embargoed by the publisher (during any OA embargo the repository's eprint-request Button can then enable the author to fulfill individual user eprint requests automatically with one click each if deposit was immediate),

2. that an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring timely mandate compliance should be implemented, and

3. that Gold OA publishing should either no longer be preferred or hybrid Gold should no longer be funded.

The BIS recommendations now perfectly complement HEFCE's recommendation (as well as those of BOAI-10: 1.6) to make immediate-deposit a condition for eligibility for REF 2020 (thereby effectively recruiting universities to serve as the mechanism for ensuring timely compliance, following the highly successful mandate model of the University of Liège). This effectively fixes the flaws in the Finch Report. The UK's OA policy will now also be compatible with OA policies in the EU, the US and the rest of the world, doing them all one better with its explicit call for immediate institutional deposit and effective compliance monitoring.

There’s nothing wrong with OA growth in Australia ("Four issues restricting widespread green OA in Australia") that the adoption of the Queensland University of Technology's [QUT's] Green OA self-archiving mandate model by all Australian universities and research funding councils would not fix.

Issue 1 – Lack of data about what Australian research is available OA. The problem is not with knowing what’s OA in Australia. (Well configured repository software plus ROAR will tell you that -- and Google will find it.) A mandate compliance monitoring mechanism, however, is indeed needed. But the ones to monitor compliance are authors’ own institutions, by requiring deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication, time-stamped within days or weeks of the date of the acceptance letter, for all published articles. Immediate-deposit should be a condition for Australian national research funding and performance evaluation [ARC] as well as for institutional research performance assessment, as it is in Belgium by FRS-FNRS and the University of Liege, and as it has been proposed for UK funded research by HEFCE for REF 2020.

Issue 2 – Copyright transfer agreements. It’s always good to agree on fair copyright agreements, but trying to convince publishers to agree to those should on no account be holding up the mandating and provision of Green OA. And for journals that embargo OA, there’s always the immediate-deposit mandate and the repository’s eprint-request Button to provide immediate Almost-OA with one click from the requester and one click from the author.

Issue 3 – The academic reward system. The “academic reward system” is certainly not holding up OA. OA increases research uptake and impact, including citations. And the notion that OA needs some sort of preferential treatment for Gold OA journals, rather than just weighting them based on their track-record for quality, like all other journals, is and has always been complete nonsense, ever since it began to be mooted over a decade ago. The way to provide OA is to publish in the highest standard journal possible for one’s work, and then self-archive the refereed final draft. To pay to publish in a Gold OA journal just because it is OA (rather than because of its quality standards) is to pay for Fools Gold. (There is no OA problem for unrefereed or unpublished work; nor is getting academic credit for such work an OA problem.)

Issue 4 – Improved national discovery services. Discovery tools can always be improved, but they are already pretty powerful. They will not discover OA content that is not there. Hence the only thing that is really needed for OA is effective Green OA mandates, along with effective monitoring of compliance, in order to get it up there, out in the OApen, to be “discovered.”

Lee Jones makes some good points, but underestimates the power and purpose of some of the very HEFCE policy points that he questions.

It is the fact that HEFCE proposes to mandate the immediate, unembargoed deposit of the FAV (Final Author Version) in the author’s institutional repository — even if access to the deposit is not made immediately OA — that (1) restores authors’ freedom of journal choice, (2) protects authors from having to pay Gold OA fees, (3) takes publishers out of the loop for HEFCE OA Policy, and even (4) equips users to request and authors to provide “Almost-OA” to embargoed deposits, via the institutional repository’s eprint request Button, with one click each.

In the UK, (a) institutional repository start-up costs are mostly already bespoken, (b) repositories have multiple purposes, with OA only one of them, and they (c) allow archiving costs to be distributed and local, keeping them small, rather than big, like the costs of a national archive like France’s HAL or a global one like Arxiv. Central locus of storage is in any case an obsolete notion in the distributed digital network era.

See:

http://j.mp/HEFCEpolicy
http://j.mp/LOCUSofOA
http://j.mp/oaBUTTON

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Let Reflection Precede Recommendation

Lee Jones still needs to do a bit more homework.

I. Both major repository softwares have the Button (and the rest can easily create it, following the model):

http://wiki.eprints.org/w/RequestEprint
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy
II. Local institutional self-archiving is (a) multi-purpose (not just OA), (b) cheaper than central self-archiving (just local output), (c) distributes the costs (who should pay for the central repository -- Arxiv has trouble making ends meet -- and why, when it's not their own research output?), (d) reinforces and converges with funder self-archiving mandates (all research originates from institutions -- not all is funded), (e) serves an institution's other interests (showcasing as well as monitoring their own research output) and (f) makes it only necessary to deposit once, and in the same place, for all researchers (the rest can be accomplished automatically by automatic central harvesting, by discipline, institution, funder, or nation). See: http://j.mp/InstCent
III. You seem to have completely missed the point that immediate-deposit without OA is not Green OA self-archiving! Journals have no say whatsoever over institution-internal book-keeping if the deposit is Closed Access rather than Open Access. Indeed the Button is precisely for articles in journals that embargo Green OA, whether for a year or a lifetime.

IV. Your proposed advice to HEFCE to allow exceptions to the immediate-deposit requirement is unfortunately very counterproductive advice, based on a profound misunderstanding, conflating the immediate-deposit requirement with the immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving that Green-friendly publishers endorse and that embargoing publishers embargo. (It is immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving that CUP endorses, and even though I hope my former long-time publisher will never disgrace itself by withdrawing that endorsement, even if they do, all institutions and funders can still mandate immediate-deposit without immediate OA, and all authors can comply.

V. I'm not "cheer-leading" these proposals: I'm helping to design them. If you want to help too, the first thing you need to do is to wean yourself from anecdote and half-truths and get up to speed on the many, many things you don't know yet about OA and OA policy-making.

VI. HEFCE's proposed immediate-deposit requirement for eligibility for REF 2020 complements RCUK's mandate and will help reinforce RCUK's neglected Green component by providing the all-important Green compliance montoring and enforcement mechanism that the RCUK mandate sorely needs. And the ingenious thing about the HEFCE immediate-deposit requirement is that by its very nature it applies to just about all UK research output (hence just about all RCUK-funded output) because in 2004 a researcher does not yet know which will be his best 4 articles for HEFCE submission in 2020! So the only way to hedge his bets is to deposit all of them immediately... (Think about it!)
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/355015/

Yes, there's a flaw in the University of California Open Access (OA) mandate ["Open Contradictions," Editorial, The Daily Californian, 12 Aug 2013], and, yes, it has to do with the fact that U of C authors can opt out of compliance with the mandate.

But, no, the flaw is not that the U of C policy

"allows [authors] to pick and choose where their research goes, thereby creating a divide between those who can afford access to a private academic journal and those who cannot."

That researchers retain their right to choose the most suitable journal for their research is not a flaw but a virtue of any OA mandate. (In the UK, some OA mandates are trying to force authors to choose (and pay) to publish in journals based on the journal's OA policy instead of its quality (peer-review) standards, and that's very bad for both research and researchers -- and certainly unnecessary for OA.)

Nor does the U of C's mandate flaw have anything to do with whether the journal is "private" or "academic." Journals differ in their subject matter and quality standards; there are non-profit and for-profit journals at all quality levels, and that in turn has next to nothing to do with the journal's OA policy -- except that there is a new breed of junk journals that has lately been created on the cheap to provide pay-to-publish OA with low or no peer review quality standards. (See Beall's list.)

There are two ways for authors to provide OA: (1) publish in an OA journal that makes the article OA, often for a fee (this is called "Gold OA") or (2) publish in any journal, but also deposit the final, peer-reviewed draft in the author's institutional repository -- U of C's is called eScholarship -- and set access to the deposit as OA (this is called "Green OA") rather than Closed Access.

U of C has (wisely) mandated Green OA, not (like the UK) Gold OA. Hence journal choice is not at issue for U of C authors: They retain their right to choose to publish in the journal most suitable for their work. What is at issue is whether and when they can make their article OA: Some journals' copyright agreements require authors to embargo OA for 6 months, 12 months, or even longer.

Now we come to the real flaw of the U of C policy: If authors can opt out of the U of C mandate whenever a publisher embargoes OA, this nullifies the mandate and simply allows publishers to continue to determine whether and when articles are made OA.

But there is a very simple and natural solution that moots the publisher OA embargo: U of C needs to add an immediate-deposit clause with no opt-out. This means all authors must deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in eScholarship immediately upon acceptance for publication whether or not the journal embargoes OA. But in addition, eScholarship should implement the automated Request-Copy Button.

The repository's Button can email one copy of an embargoed deposit to an individual user on request: All it takes is one click from the user to request and one click from the author to fulfill the request. (This is not OA but "Almost-OA.")

Authors retain journal choice, as well as the choice to provide individual access even for embargoed deposits -- but they cannot opt out of immediate-deposit requirement itself: All articles, regardless of journal or journal policy, must be deposited in eScholarship immediately. The author can then either set access to the article as OA immediately, or can use the Button to provide "Almost-OA" during any publisher OA embargo.

Once the one-size-fits-all immediate-deposit mandate (with no opt-out) is adopted by universities and research funders worldwide, not only will it close the "divide between those who can afford access... and those who cannot), but it will help hasten publisher OA embargoes toward their natural, inevitable and well-deserved deaths under the mounting worldwide pressure and demand for immediate OA -- by mandating that all articles must be immediately deposited in repositories and taking publishers out of the loop completely, insofar as mandate compliance is concerned.

None of this can happen if universities continue to allow publishers to decide whether and when authors deposit and provide access, by allowing opt-out from OA mandates.

Aside from the default copyright-reservation mandate with opt-out, always add an immediate-deposit clause without opt-out.

The deposit need not be immediately made OA, but it needs to be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. While access to the deposit is embargoed, the repository can implement the eprint-request Button with which users can request and authors can provide the eprint with one keystroke each.

Deposit should always be done directly by the author (or the author's personal designee: student, research assistant or secretary). It is a big mistake to "submit" the paper instead to the provost's office. At other universities with this style of mandate the provost's office has sat on papers for years instead of depositing them; this is even worse than publication lag or publishers' OA embargoes.

If deposit is instead left to the provost's office, immediate-deposit will not become the natural milestone in the author's research cycle that it needs to become, in order to ensure that the deposit is done at all: The dated acceptance letter from the journal is sent to the author. That sets the date of immediate-deposit and also determines which version is the final, refereed accepted one. The publication date is uncertain and could be as much as a year or more after acceptance.

Mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication, but otherwise, having mandated the N-1 of the author keystrokes required for deposit, in case of embargo, leave the Nth keystroke to the author, in responding to Button-mediated eprint requests.

Put all administrative efforts instead into monitoring mandate compliance -- by systematically collecting the dated acceptance letters instead of the papers themselves, and ensuring that the repository deposit-date is within a few days or weeks of the acceptance date.

See also:

1st-Party Give-Aways Vs. 3rd-Party Rip-Offs
and
Almost-OA: "Frictional Access"

If supplying eprints to requesters could be delegated to 3rd parties like Repository Managers to perform automatically, then they would become violations of copyright contracts.

What makes the eprint-request Button legal is the fact that it is the author who decides, in each individual instance, whether or not to comply with an individual eprint request for his own work; it does not happen automatically.

Think about it: If it were just the fact of requesters having to do two keystrokes for access instead of just one (OA), then the compliance keystroke might as well have been done by software rather than the Repository Manager! And that would certainly not be compliance with a publisher OA embargo. "Almost OA" would just become 2-stroke OA.

No. What makes the eprint-request Button both legal and subversive is that it is not 3rd-party piracy (by either a Repository Manager or an automatic computer programme) but 1st-party provision of individual copies, to individual requesters, for research purposes, by the author, in each individual instance: the latter alone continues the long accepted tradition of reprint-provision by scholars and scientists to their own work.

If reprint-request cards had been mailed instead to 3rd-parties who simply photocopied anyone's articles and mailed them to requesters (with or without a fee) the practice would have been attacked in the courts by publishers as piracy long ago.

The best way to undermine the Button as a remedy against publisher OA mandates, and to empower the publishing lobby to block it, would be to conflate it with 2-stroke 3rd-party OA!

That practice should never be recommended.

Rather, make crystal clear the fundamental difference between 1st-party give-away and 3rd-party rip-off.

[Parenthetically: Of course it is true that all these legal and technical distinctions are trivial nonsense! It is an ineluctable fact that the online PostGutenberg medium has made technically and economically possible and easily feasible what was technically and economically impossible in the Gutenberg medium: to make all refereed research articles -- each, without exception, an author give-away, written purely for research impact rather than royalty income -- immediately accessible to all would-be users, not just to subscribers: OA. That outcome is both optimal and inevitable for research; researchers; their institutions; their funders; the R&D industry; students; teachers; journalists; the developing world; access-denied scholars and scientists; the general public; research uptake, productivity, impact and progress; and the tax-payers who fund the research. The only parties with whose interests that optimal outcome is in conflict are the refereed-research publishers who had been providing an essential service to research in the Gutenberg era. It is that publishing "tail" that is now trying to wag the research "dog," to deter and delay what is optimal and inevitable for research for as long as possible, by invoking Gutenberg-era pseudo-legal pseudo-technicalities to try to embargo OA, by holding it hostage to their accustomed revenue streams and modus operandi. OA mandates, the immediate-deposit clause, and the eprint-request Button are the research community's means of mooting these delay tactics and hastening the natural evolution to the optimal and inevitable outcome in the PostGutenberg era.]

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.)

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On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Joseph Greene wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

For what it’s worth, we recently did some investigation into this to try and find a loop-hole. We looked at it from an ILL point of view, e-journal subscription licensing and legal deposit provision and came to the conclusion that there is no loop-hole to exploit in traditional library service provision; if we were to implement the button it would have to be author mediated, not librarian mediated. Guess it would have to be stated in the CTA.

But why even try to search for a "loophole" that would allow the fulfillment of Button-press eprint-requests from users to be taken out of the hands of the author and put into the hands of a 3rd party?

Not only would that have made the Button illegal, thereby defeating its purpose in mooting publisher embargoes.

It would also have deprived the author of a useful metric of research impact: number of eprint requests (not quite the same thing as number of downloads).

(The eprint-request count is perhaps even a bit of a 2-edged sword, in that some authors may actually come to prefer the Button to OA, because of the feedback it provides as to who is requesting their work! We can be fairly confident, though, that the growth of OA mandates worldwide -- and with it the growth of immediate-OA as well as of Almost-OA from Button-generated eprint-requests -- will in most cases increase the pressure for immediate-OA, hastening the demise of OA embargoes, and with it the need for the Button.)

So, please, leave well enough alone. Mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication, but otherwise, having mandated the N-1 of the author keystrokes required for depositing the paper itself, with its metadata, leave the Nth keystroke (to fulfill Button-mediated eprint requests) to the author.

(I don't even think it's a good idea for the library to relieve the author of the responsibility to make the first N-1 keystrokes for depositing the paper itself, though this would certainly not be illegal: We are talking about a few extra minutes worth of keystrokes per paper -- over and above all the keystrokes of writing and revising it. Authors can delegate those N-1 keystrokes to secretaries, research assistants or students, if they like, but if they are instead left entirely to the library then immediate-deposit will not become the natural milestone in the author's research cycle that it needs to become, in order to ensure that the deposit is done at all: The dated acceptance letter from the journal is sent to the author. That sets the date of immediate-deposit, and also determines which version is the final, accepted one. There is publication lag. The journal's actual publication date is uncertain; it may not coincide with the calendar date of the journal issue; and it could be as much as a year or longer after acceptance. In other words, the indeterminacy of the journal publication date could be even longer than OA embargoes.)

(One of the flaws in the Harvard-style mandate -- OA rights reservation by default, with an author opt-out option -- is that instead of mandating that authors deposit in the repository, it mandates that they provide refereed draft to the Provost. But the Provosts have been sitting on those refereed drafts, again even longer than the embargoes they were meant to circumvent, instead of making them immediately OA, or at least Almost-OA.)

Mandate immediate-deposit and leave the rest in the hands of the author.

Put all administrative efforts instead into monitoring mandate compliance -- by systematically collecting the dated acceptance letters instead of the papers themselves, and ensuring that the repository deposit-date is within a few days or weeks of the acceptance date.

Stevan Harnad