Open Access Archivangelism

David Wiley's version of the double-payment objection is only partly correct. To the extent that both research funding and research library funding are paid by the tax-payer, there is indeed some double-paying — but the one who gets the free ride is the publisher, who gets to charge for access to material most of which was funded by the tax-payer.

(But not so for peer review, which the publisher manages, though the reviewing is again actually being done for free by the peers. Nevertheless, an honest broker is needed to manage the peer review, or else it’s vanity press. The cost of managing peer review is much less than the cost of publishing, but it will be an invariant expense that needs to be paid no matter what.)

The double-pay objection is incorrect, however, when it is made from the standpoint of the subscriber institution. (Private universities’ journal budgets are not paid by tax-payers; and even public universities cover it partly out of student fees or other sources.) The institutional librarians who say “Our institution takes the trouble and expense to provide the research, gives it to publishers for free, only to have to buy it back for subscrption fees” are mistaken: An institution has its own research output: It’s buying in the research output of other institutions with its journal subscriptions. (So unless one thinks the same argument ought to be applied to books, there’s no valid double-pay objection here.)

But, last, the real rationale for Open Access is not the fact that tax-payers feel a burning wish or need to read the peer-reviewed reports of the often highly specialized research they fund. It is that if the research they have funded is to provide the maximal benefits to the tax-payers who funded it, it should be accessible to all of its intended users: the researchers who are in the position to use, apply and build upon the scholarly or scientific findings, and not just those whose institutions can afford a subscription to the journal in which they happen to be punished.

But the moral is the same: Both research funders and universities should mandate that all their peer-reviewed research articles are made freely accessible to all their potential users online (“Green OA”). If and when making all this peer-reviewed research freely available online makes journal subscriptions unsustainable as the way of recovering the costs of peer review, institutions can pay those true costs, by the outgoing article, out of just a fraction of their annual windfall savings from their subscription cancellations.

Harnad, S. (2007) The “Double-Pay”/”Buy-Back” Argument for Open Access is Invalid. Open Access Archivangelism. Sep 9 2007

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

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

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In response to the above comments, DW wrote that "we’re both on the same team," and we are! So readers should see the follwing exchange as fine-tuning the strategic details:

DW: "[SH] seems to think publisher free riding is a bigger problem than asking taxpayers to pay multiple times for access to research"

The access problem is the problem of publisher access-tolls (subscriptions, licenses) preventing research from being accessible to all of its intended users. Hence publisher free-riding (apart from peer review) is the problem.

What I said was that in those cases where there really is double payment by the tax-payer -- funding both the research itself and the subscription to the resulting published articles -- that subscription cost (apart from the peer review) is largely based on publisher free riding. The remedy for that is indeed to mandate that fundees make their articles free for all online. (We agree on all of this.)

But I also said that (a) not all or most journal subscriptions are paid with taxpayer funding and that the real problem is (b) neither double-payment nor (c) taxpayer access to the research but (d) researcher access to the research (so the research can be used and applied, to the benefit of the taxpayer).

DW: "My post doesn’t bring up the notion of institutions as objectors on the twice pay grounds. The objections [SH] raises above must be baggage... from previous conversations. My post is focused very clearly on taxpayers..."

The twice-pay argument is most frequently used by university librarians (that's why it's prior baggage to the twice-pay issue; see the references I cited).

But not all (perhaps not even most) research is taxpayer-funded, whereas virtually all research is university-produced (or research-institute-produced). Hence for global research access across all fields of research, funded and unfunded, OA mandates from the universal research-providers -- universities and research institutes -- are by far the biggest factor.

The rationale for university OA mandates is not based on twice-pay arguments at all; and the rationale for funder OA mandates is only partially based on the twice-pay argument. the rationale for both funder and university mandates is based on the need for research to be accessible to all of its intended users, in order to maximize the progress and benefits of research.

About this conclusion -- the primary rationale for providing OA is for the sake of uptake and usage by its intended users, namely, researchers -- you wrote that this was as if I had said:

DW: “Normal taxpayers aren’t capable of understanding research so it’s ok if only qualified, PhD-holding people have access... [This] smacks of Pre-Reformation ideas about restricting access to the scriptures..."

But that was neither what I said nor what I meant: In order to get researchers to make their research OA -- and in order to get their institutions and their funders to mandate that they make their research OA -- you have to find a rationale that is valid, and that applies to all research. The twice-pay argument applies only to a subset of funded research, and the taxpayer-access argument is hardly an argument at all, since most research isn't of the slightest interest to taxpayers, whereas researcher access to research is in the interest of all taxpayers (if funding the research in the first place was in their interest!).

Besides, making research OA makes it freely accessible to everyone anyway, researchers and taxpayers alike: That comes with the territory. (OA provides free access to all, even if the primary rationale for providing OA is to ensure that research is accessible to all the users for which it is primarily written.)

DW: “It's unclear to me why universities are acceptable actors here [mandating Green OA self-archiving] when they weren’t two paragraphs above."

Two paragraphs above I pointed out that the universities' version of the pay-twice argument was incorrect, that the taxpayer version of it was only partially correct (for a minority of funded research) and that the fundamental rationale for both funder and university OA mandates is the same: To ensure that all research, funded and unfunded, is made accessible to all of its intended users.

DW: "taxpayers (the research funders) should implement measures (legislatively, through their representatives) that guarantee them access to research findings"

Agreed! And universities should also implement measures (administratively, through their research auditing and performance evaluation procedures) that guarantee open access to their research findings.

And the primary rationale for both these mandates is so that all research should be accessible to all of its intended users, not just to those who can afford subscriptions to the journals in which it was published. Open access is optimal for all research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the taxpaying public that funds the funders (and institutions).

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s' Slumbering Giant': The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2008) How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates Open Access Archivangelism. March 2 2008.

Chris Armbruster wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

CA: "I have some doubts that the juxtaposition of institutional versus central repository is helpful (any longer)"

No longer helpful for what?

It is not only helpful but essential if what one is interested in is filling repositories with the target content of the OA movement (refereed journal articles). For in order to fill repositories, you have to get their target contents deposited. And to get their target contents deposited you have to mandate deposit. And to mandate deposit you have to specify the locus of the deposit. And the only two locus options are institutional and central. And for the probability of achieving consensus and compliance with mandates it makes a huge difference where the mandates propose to require the author to deposit: institutionally or centrally, because that in turn determines whether the author will have to deposit once, in one place, institution-internally, or more than once, in more than one place, institution-externally. The prospect of having to do multiple deposit is a deterrent to the depositor. And the prospect of having to compete with institution-external deposit mandates is a deterrent to achieving consensus and compliance with institutional deposit mandates.

So those for whom the distinction between institutional and central repositories is not "helpful" are perhaps those for whom it is immaterial or secondary whether repositories get filled or remain near-empty, because their primary concerns are instead at some other, more abstract or idealized level:

CA: "that is why the proposition is to henceforth distinguish between four ideal types of repositories on an abstract level, so as to be able to examine each specific repository in more detail."

Alas, while we are theorizing at an abstract level about ideal repository types, real, concrete repositories remain mostly empty, in no small part because of some funders' failing to adopt practical, realistic mandates on locus of deposit, mandates that converge rather than compete with institutional mandates.

The abstract distinctions among the four "ideal types of repositories" (apart from three of them being of doubtful substance) have nothing to do with this crucial concrete distinction, three of the four being "subtypes" of central repository.

To repeat: Only a portion of OA's target content is funded, but all of it originates from institutions.

CA: "For example PMC was a subject-based repository, but it languished before it became a research repository (capturing publication outputs) due to a national mandate, which is compatible with also having a UK PMC and PMC Canada."

The only thing that changed with PMC was that it went from being an empty repository to being a less-empty repository when full-text deposit was mandated for NIH-funded articles.

That had nothing to do with its changing from being a "subject" repository to a "research" repository. Its target contents were always the same: biomedical research articles. The only difference is that the mandates increased somewhat the proportion of PMC's total target content that actually got deposited.

But the cost of that welcome increase was also a greater opportunity lost and a bad example set -- because NIH (and now its emulators) insisted on direct deposit in a central repository (PMC, and now its emulators) instead of allowing -- indeed preferring -- institutional deposit, and then harvesting, importing or exporting (one or many) central collections and services therefrom.

That would have facilitated institutional mandates for all the rest of OA's target content, not just research funded by NIH (and its emulators), by spurring institutions -- the universal providers of all research output -- to mandate institutional deposit for all the rest of their research output too, funded and unfunded.

Not all funders copied NIH, however, and there is still hope that NIH will rethink its arbitrary and counterproductive locus-of-deposit policy, in the interest of all of OA's target content: "NIH Open to Closer Collaboration With Institutional Repositories"

CA: "The point here is to examine (here: for the life sciences) past and (possible) future repository development and help stakeholders make informed decisions."

Help which stake-holders make which decisions about what, and why?

While repositories remain near empty -- and that includes PMC (or its emulators) whose target contents comprise all of US (or other nations' or funders') biomedical research -- the only substantive thing at stake is content; and the "stake-holders" are mostly institutions and their researchers, who also happen to be the providers of all that content, funded and unfunded, across all nations and funders.

CA: "Another example: the Dutch system looks like a network of institutional repositories, but is now part of a national gateway (NARCIS)."

But what does this example show? The only relevant question is: what proportion of their own annual research output are those Dutch institutional repositories actually capturing?

The last time I asked Leo Waaijers, he admitted quite frankly that no one has checked. But unless there is something different about the air breathed in the Netherlands, all indications are that their institutional repositories, like repositories everywhere, are only capturing about 15% of their target output. That is the approximate deposit rate for spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving, worldwide. Only deposit mandates can raise that deposit rate appreciably -- and so far the Netherlands has no OA mandates.

It matters how you do the arithmetic. An institutional repository can calculate its annual deposit rate by dividing its annual full-text article deposits for that year by the institution's annual article publication total for that year.

But for a central repository -- or for a "network of institutional repositories" -- you have to make sure to divide by their respective annual total target output. For the Netherlands, that's the total annual article output from all the institutions in the NARCIS network. And for PMC it's all of US biomedical research article output.

Otherwise one gets carried away in one's idealized abstractions by the spurious fact that central repositories often have much more content, in absolute terms, than individual institutional repositories. But remedying this "denominator fallacy" by dividing annual deposit counts by their total annual target content count quickly puts things back into practical perspective.

(And this is without even mentioning the question of time-of-deposit, which is almost as important as locus-of-deposit: Many of the central repositories -- e.g. PMC -- have access embargoes because funder mandates have allowed them (and have even left it in the hands of publishers rather than fundees to do the deposits, even though it is fundees, not their publishers, who are subject to funder mandates). Institutional repositories have a powerful solution for providing "Almost OA" to closed access deposits during any embargo period -- the "email eprint request" Button. This Button is naturally and easily implemented by the repository software at the local institutional level, but would be devilishly difficult -- though not impossible -- to implement at the central level (especially where there is proxy deposit by publishers) because it requires immediate email approval by the author of eprint requests from the would-be user, mediated automatically by the repository software.)

[Leo Waaijers has since responded on jisc-repositories as follows: "Currently 25% of the Dutch national research output published in 2008 is available in Open Access... For the moment we have no mandates. The Netherlands Research Organisation NWO has announced one. Six or seven universities have a mandate for doctoral theses."]

25-30% is the level to which Arthur Sale showed that deposit rates can be laboriously raised if one provided incentives (of which the Dutch "Cream of Science" is an example), but only mandates can propel deposits toward 100%.

CA: "Moreover, the major institutions in the network are research universities. Thus the question arises, if Dutch repository development could be improved if stakeholders used the notion of research repository and national repository system to consider their options (rather than thinking that the institutions must do the job)."

What on earth does this "arising question" mean at this late stage of the game? We have researchers, the ones who do the research and write the articles. They are (mostly, 85%) not depositing until and unless it is mandated by their institutions and/or funders. This is now unchangingly true for decades.

Now what -- in specific, concrete, practical terms -- is it that using "the notion of research repository and national repository system to consider their options (rather than thinking that the institutions must do the job)" is supposed to do to fill those empty repositories? Is there any evidence that theorists' abstract contemplations about ideal repository subtypes translate into concrete, practical action on the part of researchers 85% of whom consistently fail to deposit unmandated into any-which repository across the years?

CA: "In two decades of immersion in digital worlds, we have witnessed the development of various repository solutions and accumulated a better understanding of what works and what doesn't. The main repository solutions may be distinguished as follows:"

Before we go on: The only thing we have learned in two decades -- apart from the fact that computer scientists, physicists and economists deposit spontaneously, unmandated (two of them institutionally, one of them centrally) at far higher than the global baseline 15% rate -- is that the only thing that will raise the spontaneous deposit rate is deposit mandates (from institutions or funders).

That lesson has nothing whatsoever to do with "various repository solutions" (central or institutional, abstract or concrete, real or ideal, actual or notional).

CA: "Subject-based repositories (commercial and non-commercial, single and federated) usually have been set up by community members and are adopted by the wider community. Spontaneous self-archiving is prevalent as the repository is of intrinsic value to scholars."

Spontaneous self-archiving is "prevalent" at the steadfast rate of about 15%, and that is the problem.

The nature of the repository has absolutely nothing to do with this, one way or the other. It is a matter of "community" practice.

And, as noted, the few scholarly "communities" that have adopted spontaneous self-archiving practices unmandated (computer scientists, physicists and economists) did so very early on in these two decades, continuing their pre-Web pratices, two of them institutionally and one of them centrally; and they did so mainly to share preprints of unrefereed drafts early in their research cycle. The value they found in that practice predated the Web and had absolutely nothing to do with repository type (since two communities did it institutionally and one did it centrally).

(And if it's hard to get authors to make their final drafts of refereed, published articles publicly accessible unless the practice is mandated, it would be incomparably harder to get authors from the "communities" that have their own reasons for not wanting to make their unrefereed drafts public to do so, against their wills: their institutions and funders certainly cannot mandate it!)

"Commercial" vs. "non-commercial" also sounds like a can of worms: In speaking of "repositories," are we mixing up the Free-Access (OA) ones with the Fee-Access ones? And those that contain full-texts with those that contain only metadata? And those that contain articles with those that contain other kinds of content? If so, we are not even talking about the same thing when we speak of repositories, for all I mean is OA repositories of the full-texts of refereed research journal articles.

CA: "Much of the intrinsic value for authors comes from the opportunity to communicate ideas and results early in the form of working papers and preprints, from which a variety of benefits may result, such as being able to claim priority, testing the value of an idea or result, improving a publication prior to submission, gaining recognition and attention internationally and so on."

We are comparing apples and oranges. OA's primary target is not and has never been unpublished, unrefereed drafts.

Distinguish the self-archiving of OA's target content -- refereed articles -- from the self-archiving of unrefereed preprint drafts. The latter practice has been found very useful by some disciplines (computer science, physics, economics) for a long time -- indeed before the Web. But this practice has not caught on with other disciplines, for an equally long time, in all likelihood because most disciplines are not interested in making their unrefereed drafts public. (Some may find this practice unscholarly; others might find it potentially embarrassing professionally; in some disciplines it might even be dangerous to public health.)

And the overall global self-archiving rate remains the baseline 15% unless self-archiving is mandated.

CA: "As such, subject-based repositories are thematically well defined, and alert services and usage statistics are meaningful for community users"

This not only conflates unrefereed draft-sharing with OA and repositories with services over repositories, but it also mixes up cause and effect. There is no central repository functionality that cannot just as well be provided over distributed or harvested repositories. And there is no repository that cannot succeed if it manages to capture its target content. Otherwise, the rest of the functional details are merely decorative, for empty repositories.

And neither OA's nor OA mandates' target is unrefereed drafts (though they are of course welcome if the author wants to deposit them too).

CA: "Research repositories are usually sponsored by research funding or performing organisations to capture results. This capturing typically requires a deposit mandate."

It makes no difference whether one calls a repository of, say, biomedical research a "subject" repository or a "research" repository. That's just words. And both institutions and funders "sponsor" them. All that matters is whether or not deposit is mandated, because that is what determines whether the repository is full or near-empty.

Armbruster & Romary are conflating "mandated repository" with "central research repository." All OA repositories are "research repositories" because all have the same target content: refereed research articles. And both central and institutional deposit can be mandated.

Armbruster & Romary seem to keep missing the sole substantive point at issue, which is that institutions are the universal providers of all of OA's target content, funded and unfunded, across all research subjects and all nations -- and funder mandates requiring direct central deposit compete with and discourage institutional mandates for all the rest of OA's target content, by requiring (from already-sluggish authors) divergent, multiple institution-external deposit instead of convergent one-stop institution-internal deposit (which can then be imported, exported or harvested by central collections and services).

CA: "Publications are results, including books, but data may also be considered a result worth capturing, leading to a collection with a variety of items."

It's nice to get more ambitious in speculating about what one would ideally like to see deposited, but let us not lose sight of practical reality today: Authors (85%) are not even depositing their refereed research articles until it is mandated. These are articles that -- without a single exception -- authors want to be accessible to any would-be user, for they have already published them.

In contrast, it is certainly not true that all, most or even many authors today want to make their unpublished research data (perhaps still being data-mined by them) or their published books (perhaps still earning royalty revenue, or hoping to) or their unrefereed drafts (perhaps embarrassing or even dangerous until validated by peer review) publicly accessible to all users today.

Now, does it not make more sense to try to encourage authors to provide OA to content that they would already wish to see freely accessible to any would-be user today -- by mandating the practice -- rather than imagining (contrary to fact) that authors are already providing OA to content that many of them may not yet even wish to see freely accessible to any would-be user today?

CA: "Because these items constitute a record of science, standards for deposit and preservation must be stringent."

Stringent standards for deposit? When most authors are not even bothering to deposit at all? That seems an odd way to try to generate more deposits! Rather like raising the price of a product that no one is bothering to buy at current prices.

(No, it's not raising the quality of the product either: Users are the ones who benefit from repository functionality; but it is authors that we are trying to induce to provide the content to which this user-functionality is applied.)

And is the scientific record not already in our journals and libraries, on paper and online? And is peer review not a already stringent enough standard?

Yes, peer-reviewed articles need to be preserved, but what has that to do with authors depositing it in an OA repository? and usually deposited in the form of a refereed final draft which is not the canonical "version of record," but merely a supplementary version, to provide OA for those would-be users who do not have subscription access to the journal in which the canonical version -- the one that really needs the preservation -- was published).

This is the old canard, again -- conflating digital preservation with Open Access provision -- and perhaps also conflating unpublished preprints with published postprints.

And as to record-keeping: Yes, both institutions and funders need to keep records -- indeed archives -- of the research output that they employ and fund researchers to produce. Again, the natural locus for that record is the institutional repository, which the institution can manage, monitor and show-case, and from which the funder can import, export or harvest its funded subset if it wishes. Direct institution-external deposit, willy-nilly, would be like institutions relying on their banks to do their record-keeping instead of themselves.

CA: "The sponsor of the repository is likely to tie reporting functions to the deposit mandate, this being, for example, the reporting of grantees to the funder or the presentation of research results in an annual report."

Yes, both grant fulfillment and annual research output recording and evaluation can and should be implemented through repository deposit mandates, by both funders and institutions. But the question remains: What should be the locus of deposit? and should there be one convergent locus of deposit, for a researcher and/or article, or multiple divergent ones?

The obvious answer, again, is one-time, one-place institution-internal deposit, mandated by both institutions and funders, and the rest by institution-external import/export/harvesting therefrom.

CA: "Research repositories are likely to contain high-quality output. This is because its content is peer-reviewed multiple times (e.g. grant application, journal submission, research evaluation) and the production of the results is well funded."

This is extremely blurred and vague.

Inasmuch as refereed journal articles report funded research, they have been both grant-reviewed and peer-reviewed, so that's double-counting.

Accepted grant proposals are not part of OA's target content, and are just a book-keeping matter for institutions and funders.

Research evaluation is done on the basis of research performance and impact, including refereed publications as their primary input. We are again double-counting if we dub as triply peer-reviewed content that is simply standardly peer-reviewed articles, deposited for research evaluation in a repository.

This sounds mostly like massaging the obvious without stating the obvious: None of it happens if the content in question is not deposited. Deposit needs to be mandated, and the locus of the deposit needs to be institutional, not central, to avoid needlesly placing divergent multiple-deposit burdens on the (already sluggish) author.

CA: "Users who are collaborators, competitors or instigating a new research project are most likely to find the collections of relevance"

Yes indeed -- if they are deposited. And they will only be deposited if deposit is mandated. And mandates need to be convergent rather than competitive in order to reach consensus on adoption and compliance. And hence the sole stipulated locus of deposit needs to be institutional. The rest is all just a matter of harvesting and services over distributed institutional repositories.

CA: "National repository systems require coordination - more for a federated system, less for a unified system. National systems are designed to capture scholarly output more generally and not just with a view to preserving a record of scholarship, but also to support, for example, teaching and learning in higher education. Indeed, only a national purpose will justify the national investment. Such systems are likely to display scholarly outputs in the national language, highlight the publications of prominent scholars and develop a system for recording dissertations. One could conceive of such a national system as part of a national research library that serves scholarly communication in the national language, is an international showcase of national output and supports public policy, e.g. higher education and public access to knowledge"

You are talking about a harvesting service. No need for it to be a direct locus of deposit.

Which brings us back to the sole real priority, which is concerted, convergent mandates from institutions and funders (and national governments) to deposit (once only) in institutional repositories, minimizing the burden on authors.

CA: "Institutional repositories contain the various outputs of the institution."

And all other repositories -- subject-based, funder-based, or national -- likewise contain "the various outputs of the institution," institutions being the sole universal providers of all research output.

CA: "While research results are important among these outputs, so are works of qualification or teaching and learning materials. If the repository captures the whole output, it is both a library and a showcase. It is a library holding a collection, and it is a showcase because the online open access display and availability of the collection may serve to impress and connect, for example, with alumni of the institution or the colleagues of researchers."

It is highly desirable for universities to make their courseware freely accessible online. But it is a different agenda from OA's. And it has an even lower deposit rate today than OA: MIT is the only institution that has a policy of making its courseware openly accessible.

If people are not yet recycling their waste, what needs to be done is to mandate waste recycling, not to find other worthy things it would be a good idea to do, but that people are likewise not doing, such as giving up cigarettes -- or other worthy things that a (near-empty) waste-recycling depository could host, aside from its target contents, such as charity-donation booths.

Besides, some courseware -- especially material prepared in the hope of writing a best-selling textbook -- is more like data, books, unrefereed preprints (and software, and music and movies): discretionary give-aways, depending on the author, rather than universal give-ways, written solely for uptake and impact, like refereed research articles.

So let's not remain oblivious to the vast shortfall in OA's target content by blurring it with fantasies about other kinds of content (much of it absent too!).

As for theses: The natural solution for them is to treat them the same way as journal articles: mandate deposit in the institutional repository (as more and more universities are now beginning to do).

CA: "A repository may also be an instrument of the institution by supporting, for example, internal and external assessment as well as strategic planning."

Yes, and this is yet another rationale for mandating deposit of OA's target content: refereed research publications. Australia and the UK are beginning to link their institutional repositories to submissions for research assessment nationally, and universities like Liège are doing so for internal performance assessment.

CA: "Moreover, an institutional repository could have an important function in regional development. It allows firms, public bodies and civil society organisations to immediately understand what kind of expertise is available locally."

Yes, all true. These are further rationales for institutions mandating institutional deposit -- and for funder mandates to reinforce institutional deposit mandates rather than compete with them.

CA: "These four ideal types have been derived partly from the history of repositories, partly through logical reasoning. This includes an appreciation of the relevant literature on scholarly communication, open access and repositories, though the [paper] is not a literature review but an argument that moves back and forth between abstract ideal types and specific cases. Ideal types should not be misunderstood as a classification, in which each and every repository may be identified as belonging unambiguously to a category. Rather, the purpose of creating ideal types is to aid our understanding of repositories and provide a tool for analysing repository development."

The "argument" does not seem to be grounded in a grasp either of what (OA) repositories are for, or of the practical problem of filling them. The distinctions among central repositories are largely arbitrary and spurious; they are more about services and functionality than about locus of deposit or repository type. The fundamental and sole substantive point is completely missed: Deposit needs to be mandated (by the universal providers of the target OA content -- institutions -- reinforced by funders) and the locus of deposit needs to be institutional.

The rest is just counting abstract chickens before their concrete eggs are fertilized, let alone laid or hatched.

CA: "Some publication repositories may be identified easily as resembling very much one ideal type rather than another. Some of the classic repositories conventionally identified as subject-based, such as arXiv and RePEc, exhibit few features of another type. Yet, one of the more interesting questions to ask is in how far other elements are present and what this means. ArXiv, for example, is also a research repository, with institutions sponsoring research in high-energy physics being important to its development and success. RePEc, by comparison, has a strong institutional component because the repository is a federated system that relies on input and service from a variety of departments and institutes."

Arxiv is based on direct central deposit of preprints (and postprints) in physics; Repec amalgamates distributed institutional deposits of preprints in economics; Citeseer harvests distributed institutional deposits of preprints and postprints in computer science. There is nothing to be learned here except that the spontaneous preprint (and postprint) deposit practices in these three research subject communities have failed to generalise to other research subject communities and therefore postprint deposit mandates from institutions and funders are needed, with one convergent locus of deposit: the repositories of the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all subjects and nations: the world's universities and research institutes.

CA: "To continue with another example, PubMed Central (PMC), at first glance, is a subject-based repository. Acquisition of content, however, only took off once it was declared a research repository capturing the output of publicly funded research (by the NIH). Notably, US Congress passed the deposit mandate, transforming PMC into a national repository. That a parallel, though integrated, repository should emerge in the UK (UK PMC) and Canada (PMC Canada) is thus not surprising. Utilisation of the ideal types outlined above would thus be fruitful in analysing the development of PMC and, presumably, be equally valuable in discussing the future potential of PMC, for example the possible creation of a Europe PMC."

This just repeats the very same incorrect analysis made earlier: PMC is and always was a US central research subject repository for refereed biomedical research publications (so are its emulators, for their own "national" output). What changed was not that NIH rebaptized PMC by "declaring" it a "research repository." What changed was that NIH mandated deposit (after two years wasted in the hope that a mere "invitation" would do).

The rest is just monkey-see, monkey-do. What those aping the US missed, however, was all the rest of OA's target content, funded and unfunded -- across all nations, subjects and institutions -- and how not only mandating deposit, but mandating convergent institutional deposit is essential in order to have universal OA to refereed research in all subjects, worldwide.

(The various national PMCs are a joke, and will be quietly rebaptized as harvested archival national collections -- if those are desired at all -- once worldwide OA content picks up, as institutional deposit mandates become universal. The global search functionality will not be at the level of all these absurd and superfluous national PMC clones, but at the level of global harvesting/search services. Why would any user -- peer or public -- want to search the world's biomedical literature by country (or institution, for that matter) -- other than for parochial actuarial purposes?)

CA: "National solutions are increasingly common (and principally may also be regional in form), but vary especially with regard to privileging either research outputs or the institutions. The French HAL system is powered by the CNRS, the most prestigious national research organisation, and thus is strong on making available research results."

Strong on making them available if/when deposited, but no stronger than the default 15% on getting them deposited at all. (The denominator fallacy again...)

CA: "In Japan, the National Institute of Informatics has supported the Digital Repository Federation, which covers eighty-seven institutions, with mainly librarians working to make the system operational."

Unless librarians in Japan have executive privileges over authors' writings that librarians elsewhere in the world lack, they will not be able to raise the deposit rate without mandating deposit either...

CA: "In Spain, an aggregator and search portal, Recolecta, sits atop a multitude of institutional repositories, with a large variety of items."

A large variety of "items": But what percentage of Spanish annual refereed article output is being deposited? My guess is that -- apart from Spain's 4 institutional mandates and 1 funder mandate -- that percentage will be the usual baseline 15% (looking spuriously bigger because aggregated centrally across multiple institutions: the denominator fallacy yet again...).

CA: "In Australia, institutional repositories are prominently tied to the national research assessment exercise, with due emphasis on peer reviewed publications."

That's promising, because being required to submit for research assessment via institutional repositories is effectively a deposit mandate. Moreover, with 1 funder mandate and 5 institutional mandates -- including the world's first institution-wide mandate at QUT -- Australia is neck-and-neck, proportionately, with the UK, in the worldwide national OA sweepstakes: The UK has 13 funder mandates, 11 institutional mandates, and 3 departmental mandates, including the world's very first OA mandate (U Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science); the UK too is moving toward linking deposit to the new national research assessment scheme.

CA: "Any Internet 101 course will include plenty of examples where deposit, content and service are assembled within a single site (by one provider, company etc.) - the list is really very long, from ArXiv to Amazon, SSRN to Flickr, RePEc to Facebook and so on. Internet 101 theory will then elucidate why this is so an (e.g. network effects, economies of scale and so on). Creating thousands of little repositories was probably never a good idea..."

Umm, I guess Internet 101 will also tell us that creating billions of little sites was never a good idea and we should all be depositing directly in Google...

CA: "More here:"
Armbruster, Chris and Romary, Laurent, Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication (November 23, 2009). Available at SSRN

Let the reader be prepared for a rather confused and practically unproductive mashup of OA repository-content, deposit-locus, and central-service issues in the Armbruster & Romary paper.

Yet the resolution is a simple one-liner: All research institutions and funders worldwide need to mandate institutional deposit, and then reap the harvest centrally, with search services, subject collections, national collections, language collections, and any other "ideal" on which hearts are set.

(But don't let the function-tail wag the content-dog now, when it's only at 15% body weight and needs to settle down and eat.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There is no realistic or coherent transition scenario from subscription-based publication to universal Open Access (OA) via the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a commitment by universities to pay for whatever Gold OA publishing fees they have the funds to pay today. Green OA self-archiving first needs to be mandated by universities. That will generate universal (Green) OA for sure, and universal Green OA may in turn eventually generate the subscription cancellations that will fund a transition to universal Gold OA.

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On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 Heather Morrison wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

HM: "the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) is a key initiative in the transition to open access."

In my last two postings -- "Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing To Pay For Gold OA" and "Fund Gold OA Only AFTER Mandating Green OA, Not INSTEAD" -- I have been at pains to make it as clear as possible precisely why and how COPE, far from being "a key initiative in the transition to open access," is at best a waste of a university's scarce funds today and at worst a distraction from and retardant to a university's taking the substantive initiative that actually needs to be taken today to ensure a transition to open access (OA).

OA means free online access to published journal articles. A transition to OA on the part of a university means a transition to making all of its own published journal article output OA.

Committing to COPE makes only a fraction of university article output OA today -- that fraction for which the university has the extra cash today to pay "equitable" Gold OA publishing fees -- while the lion's share of the university's potential funds to pay for publication are still tied up in journal subscriptions. Hence, at best, this token pre-emptive payment for Gold OA is a waste of scarce funds.

But if -- because a university imagines that committing to COPE is the "key initiative" for providing OA today -- the university does not first take the initiative to make its own article output OA by mandating that it must be self-archived in the university's OA repository (Green OA), then committing to COPE is not just wasteful, but a diversion from and retardant to doing what universities urgently need to do to provide OA today.

HM: "Signatories are asked to make a commitment to provide support for open access publishing that is equitable to the support currently provided to journals through subscriptions."

Universities currently "provide support" for whatever journals they are currently subscribing to. That is what is what is paying the cost of most peer-reviewed publication today.

Universities committing to spend whatever extra funds they might have available to pay for Gold OA publishing fees today provides as much OA as the university can currently afford to buy, at "equitable" prices, over and above what it subscribes to.

One need only go ahead and do the arithmetic -- calculating the number of articles a university publishes every year, multiplied by the "equitable" Gold OA price per article -- to see that a university can only afford to pay for Gold OA today for a small fraction of its annual article output as long as it is still subscribing to non-OA journals. (Most journals -- especially the top journals that most universities want and need to subscribe to and most authors want and need to publish in -- are non-OA today, let alone "equitably" priced Gold OA.)

The notion that a commitment to paying pre-emptively for "equitably" priced Gold OA today only creates the illusion of being "a key initiative in the transition to open access" if one equates OA with Gold OA. Otherwise it is clear that COPE is just a very expensive way of generating some OA for a small fraction of a university's research output.

Meanwhile, as I have also pointed out, three out of the five signatories of COPE to date (60%) have not mandated Green OA self-archiving for their research output.

That means that those signatories have failed to take the "initiative in the transition to open access" that really is "key" (if the meaning of "OA" is indeed open access, rather than just "the Gold OA publishing cost-recovery model"), namely, the initiative to mandate that all of their own research output must be made OA through author self-archiving.

Instead, the majority of the COPE signatories so far have indeed assumed that signing the commitment to pay for whatever Gold OA is available and affordable really is the "key initiative in the transition to open access."

If all universities who commit to paying for whatever "equitable" Gold OA they can afford today by signing COPE would first commit to making all their research output OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving today, then there would be nothing to object to in promoting and signing COPE. COPE would simply be universities spending their spare cash to try to steer publishing toward their preferred cost-recovery model, at their preferred asking price, having already ensured that all their research output is made OA (by mandating Green OA self-archiving).

But if universities commit to paying for whatever "equitable" Gold OA they can afford today instead of committing to make all their research output OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving today, then COPE is a highly counterproductive red herring, giving universities the false illusion of having adopted a "key initiative in the transition to open access" while in reality diverting and dissipating the initiative for the transition to open access from a substantive step (mandating Green OA) toward a superficial and superfluous step (funding Gold OA).

(Heather Morrison seems to be missing this substantive strategic point completely.)

HM: "One of the reasons COPE is key is simply the recognition that universities (largely through libraries) are the support system for scholarly communication."

It is hard to see the substance or purpose of this formal statement of the obvious. Everyone who already knows that it is university library subscriptions that both pay the publication costs of and provide access to most journals already "recognizes" that "universities (largely through their library budgets) are the support system for scholarly communication."

Did universities have to go on to commit whatever spare cash they had, over and above what they are already spending for journal subscriptions, in order to earn "recognition" for this obvious fact?

And what has all this formal recognition of the obvious to do with providing OA?

No, the incoherent, Escherian notion behind all of this formalism is obvious: COPE is about the hope that instead of paying to subscribe to their incoming non-OA journals, as they do now, universities will one day be able instead to pay "equitable" fees to publish their outgoing articles in Gold OA journals. (The COPE initiative has even been called HOPE.)

But hope alone cannot resolve a geometrically self-contradictory Escher Drawing: Universities subscribe by the incoming journal but they publish by the individual outgoing article. There are 25,000 journals, most of them not Gold OA, let alone equitably priced Gold OA, publishing 2.5 million articles a year from 10,000 universities worldwide. The tacit hope of COPE is to persuade all journals to abandon subscriptions and convert to equitably priced Gold OA by committing to pay them pre-emptively for equitably priced Gold OA publication today.

Now here is the crux of it: There is no incentive for journals to renounce subscription fees and convert to equitably priced Gold OA today just because some universities offer a commitment to pay for it. To induce publishers to abandon subscriptions, we would not only have to wait until most or all universities committed to pay for Gold OA, but until they also backed up that commitment by collectively committing to cancel their subscriptions (in order to release the subscription funds that each can then redirect to pay instead for Gold OA).

Without that cancellation pressure, the inelastic market for university subscriptions remains, so the best that can be hoped for is the publishers' hedged option of "Hybrid Gold OA" -- the option either to leave an individual article in a subscription-based journal non-OA or to pay that same journal a Gold-OA fee to make that individual article Gold OA.

This Trojan Horse (which really amounts to publishers being double-paid for publication) is (some) publishers' "hope" -- their counterpart for universities' COPE/HOPE -- to the effect that universities will buy into this double-pay/Hybrid Gold model in exchange for the promise that publishers will faithfully reduce their subscription and Gold OA fees in such a way as to keep their revenues constant, as and when the demand for the paid Gold-OA option grows.

Such an equitable deal between 10,000 universities and 25,000 journals for 2.5 million individual articles -- each university subscribing to different subsets of the journals annually, and publishing in a still different subset of journals, depending on author, and varying from year to year -- is just the publishers' self-serving variant of the incoherent Escherian transition scenario that the signatories of COPE (and SCOAP) are likewise hoping for.

What is clear is that this imaginary transition is not only speculative, untested, remote and far-fetched, but it does not depend on the university community: It is a transition that depends on the publishing community, journal by journal.

In contrast, open access to all of OA's target content -- the 2.5 million articles published annually in the 25,000 journals, virtually all of them originating from the planet's 10,000 universities -- is already within immediate reach: The only thing universities have to do to grasp it is to mandate Green OA self-archiving, as Harvard and MIT have already done, before signing COPE. (Then the availability of universal Green OA itself may eventually generate the subscription cancellation pressure that frees the funds that will pay for a transition to Gold OA.)

Hence my only point -- but the crucial one, if our goal is OA, now, and not something else -- is that universities should on no account commit to funding Gold OA before or instead of mandating Green OA. Mandate Green OA now.

HM: "Scholarly publishing is not a straightforward business transaction where one side produces goods and the other purchases them. -- Rather, it is university faculty who do the research, writing, reviewing, and often the editing, often on time and in space provided by the universities. -- Scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good."

This is again stating the obvious in a formalistic way that sheds no light at all on what makes peer-reviewed research publication such a special case, let alone how to resolve the Escher drawing:

"Scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good": What does this actually mean? What is the service? And who is performing it for whom? And who is charging whom for what?

Assuming we are talking about journals (and not books), is the publisher's printed copy of a journal not a good? Is that good not to be bought and sold? Individually and by subscription?

Same question about the publisher's digital edition: Is that not a good, bought and sold, individually and by subscription?

Should publishers be giving away print journals and online PDFs, as a public service?

To be sure, scholars do research as a profession, and because they are funded to do so. Perhaps we can call this a "service." They also write up their research, submit it for peer review, revise it, and finally allow it to be published, without asking for any revenue in exchange, because that too is part of their profession and what they are employed and funded to do; and because the impact of their publications -- how much they are used and cited -- is beneficial both to research progress and to their careers. So let's say that's a service too.

It is also a fact that scholars do peer review for publishers for free. So let's say that's a service too.

But how is this complicated, intertwined and interdependent picture of what researchers -- as authors and referees -- their institutions and funders, and their publishers, do, jointly, captured by saying that "scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good"?

Is the devil not in the details of who is doing what for whom, why, and how?

HM: "Once we understand that academic library budgets are the support for scholarly communication, it is much easier to see that we should be prioritizing supports that make sense for scholarly communication into the future, and equity for open access publishing is a great beginning."

OA is not about academic library budgets. It is about access to research articles. Universities are the research providers. They now need to also become the access providers for their own (peer-reviewed) research output (through their OA repositories). That leaves only the peer review itself to be implemented by independent honest brokers (journals), the results certified by each journal's name and track-record for quality standards.

But these vague generalities about scholarly publishing being a "service rather than a good" do not give even a hint about how to get there from here -- i.e., how to generate a coherent transition that resolves the Escher drawing.

And neither does COPE.

Yet the answer is ever so simple, and has nothing to do with COPE, nor with academic library budgets: Universities need to provide OA for their own research output by mandating Green OA self-archiving, today.

That done, universities can, if they wish, commit to whatever they like if they think it will speed a transition to a publication funding model that they find more congenial.

But committing to a more congenial funding model without first committing to providing OA itself is certainly not "a key initiative in the transition to open access."

HM: "Best wishes to COPE. =A0I encourage every library and university to join. =A0There is no immediate financial commitment required, rather a commitment to develop models for equity."

Would it not be more timely and useful (for OA) to encourage every university to provide OA for its own research output, by mandating Green OA self-archiving, rather than making formal or financial commitments before or instead of doing so?

HM: "Supporting transition to gold OA, in my opinion, in no way diminishes the importance of green OA. =A0There are good reasons for pursuing both strategies, both in the short and the long term."

This again blurs the point at issue completely, and turns priorities upside down: The issue is not short- or long-term pursuits but immediate and urgent priorities. Mandate Green OA today, and go ahead and pursue Gold OA in any way you think will help. But pursue Gold OA only if you have first mandated Green OA.

(Stuart Shieber, by the way, has proposed another rationale for COPE, based on his experience with having successfully forged a consensus on adopting Green OA mandates at Harvard: COPE assuages authors' prima facie worries about the viability of peer-reviewed journal publication should subscriptions eventually be made unsustainable by Green OA mandates. But this rationale for COPE is only justifiable if committing to COPE is indeed coupled with mandating Green OA. The actual evidence to date includes not only COPE, which has more non-mandating signatories than mandating ones, but also the very similar SCOAP3 commitment in physics, which includes incomparably more non-mandating universities than mandating ones. To support Stuart's hypothesis, universities committing to COPE or SCOAP3 should also be committing to Green OA mandates. The effect instead looks more like the reverse.)

Stevan Harnad

What follows is a critique of the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." The Compact states:

"We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

"Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature."

/signed/

My critique is based on points that I have already made many times before, unheeded. All I can do is echo them yet again (and hope!):

Regardless of the size of the current asking price ("reasonable" or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of Open Access (OA) journal ("Gold OA") publishing fees today -- until and unless the university or funder has first mandated OA self-archiving ("Green OA") for all of its own published journal article output (irrespective of whether the article happens to be published in an OA or a non-OA journal).

There are so far five signatories to the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive SCOAP3 consortium.

If Harvard's and MIT's example of first mandating Green OA is followed, and hence Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold OA commitments, then there's no harm done.

But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in the foot insofar as universal OA -- so long within its reach, so urgent, and yet still not grasped -- is concerned.

The fundamental problem is not that of needlessly overpaying for Gold OA by paying prematurely and pre-emptively and at an arbitrarily inflated asking price (although that is indeed a problem too).

The fundamental problem is that focussing on a commitment to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA today gives institutions the false sense that they are thereby doing what needs to be done in order to provide OA for their own research output, whereas this is very far from the truth:

No institution can or will pay for Gold OA publication of all (or even most) its research output because

(1) not all (or even most) journals offer Gold OA today,

(2) not all (or even most) Gold OA journals' asking price is reasonable or affordable today, and

(3) most of the money to pay for Gold OA is still tied up in institutional journal subscriptions today.

But most important of all is the fact that

(4) OA can be provided for all of an institution's research output today by mandating Green OA self-archiving, which moots (1) - (3).

(1) - (4) jointly comprise the reason pre-emptive Gold OA payment is not at all what is needed today. What is needed is OA itself, and that is what Green OA provides, regardless of journal funding model (subscription or Gold OA).

Once Green OA has been mandated universally and is being universally provided by institutions, journals will eventually adapt, under subscription cancellation pressure, downsizing to provide peer review alone and converting to Gold OA to cover costs. Meanwhile, institutions' own windfall subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay journals for Gold OA publication at this much-reduced price.

But none of that can happen today, through pre-emptive payment for Gold OA. And meanwhile research progress and impact keep being lost, needlessly, because institutions are focusing on funding Gold OA when what they urgently need to do is mandate Green OA.

Once an institution has mandated Green OA, it no longer matters (for OA) what it elects to do with its spare cash. It is only if an institution elects to focus on spending its cash to pay for Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA that an institution does both its research and its pocketbook a double disservice, needlessly.

The creation of high-quality, self-sustaining Gold OA journals such as the PLoS and BMC journals was historically important and timely as a proof-of-principle that peer-reviewed journal publication is viable even if universal Green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. But what is urgently needed now is not more money to pay for Gold OA but more mandates to provide Green OA, hence OA itself.

Finding money to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions still prevail and OA itself does not is an extremely counterproductive strategy, if access to refereed research -- rather than publishing reform -- is the real raison d'être of the Open Access movement (as it certainly is and always has been for me).

Gold OA is not the end, but merely one of the means (and by far not the fastest or surest means) of providing universal OA. Full speed ahead with (mandating) Green OA; publishing will adapt naturally as the time comes.

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Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

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.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

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SUMMARY:    Stuart Shieber is right in his reflections on the word "mandate," which is only useful if it helps get a deposit policy adopted and complied with. Author surveys and outcome studies show that most authors comply with self-archiving mandates willingly, so why do they need a mandate at all? Authors worry that self-archiving (1) is illegal, (2) puts acceptance for publication at risk and (3) and is time-consuming. Because it means both "legislate" and "legitimize," a "mandate" alleviates (1) - (3) by making self-archiving an official institutional requirement. Mandates need to ensure that authors deposit their final refereed drafts upon acceptance for publication whether or not they opt out of making access to their deposits immediately Open Access. The option of Closed Access deposit moots worries about legality or journal prejudice, making deposit merely an institution-internal record-keeping matter. But there is still a big difference between a request and a requirement. The failure of the first version of the NIH policy (merely a request) has shown that only an official requirement can generate deposits and fill repositories. There need be no penalties for noncompliance. Citations count, and OA enhances citations. Hence making one's research output OA is already connected causally to the existing "publish-or-perish" reward system of academia. A number of mandating institutions have accordingly coupled their deposit mandates procedurally to their performance review system: Faculty already have to submit their refereed publication lists for performance review today, so the only other thing needed is an administrative notice that henceforth the official mode of submission of publications for performance review will be via deposit in the Institutional Repository.

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What's in a word? Although there is a hint of the hermeneutic in his reflections on the uses of the word "mandate," I think Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's historic Open Access (OA) policy is quite right in spirit. The word "mandate" is only useful to the extent that it helps get a deposit policy officially adopted -- and one that most faculty will actually comply with.

Carrots not sticks. First, note that it has never been suggested that there need to be penalties for noncompliance. OA, after all, is based solely on benefits to the researcher; the idea is not to coerce researchers into doing something that is not in their interest, or something they would really prefer not to do.

Authors are willing. Indeed, the author surveys and outcome studies that I have so often cited provide evidence that -- far from being opposed to deposit mandates -- authors welcome them, and comply with them, over 80% of them willingly.

So why bother mandating? It is hence natural to ask: if researchers welcome and willingly comply with deposit mandates, why don't they deposit without a mandate?

To legitimize by legislating. I think this is a fundamental question; that it has an answer; and that its answer is very revealing and especially relevant here, because it is related to the double meaning of "mandate", which means both to "legislate" and to "legitimize":

Alleviating worries. There are many worries (at least 34 of them, all groundless and easily answered) keeping most authors from self-archiving on their own, unmandated. But the principle three are worries (1) that self-archiving is illegal, (2) that self-archiving may put acceptance for publication by their preferred journals at risk and (3) that self-archiving is a time-consuming, low-priority task for already overloaded academics. Formal institutional mandates to self-archive alleviate worries (1) - (3) (and the 31 lesser worries as well) by making it clear to all that self-archiving is now an official institutional policy of high priority.

Opt-outs. Harvard's mandate alleviates the three worries (although not, in my opinion, in the optimal way) by (1) mandating rights-retention, but (2) allowing a waiver or opt-out if the author has any reason not to comply. This covers legal worries about copyright and practical worries about publisher prejudice. The ergonomic worry is mooted by (3) having a proxy service (from the provost's office, not the dean's!) do the deposit on the author's behalf.

Optimality. The reason I say the Harvard mandate is not optimal is that -- as Stuart notes -- the crucial condition for the success and universality of OA self-archiving mandates is to ensure that the deposit itself gets done, under all conditions, even if the author opts out because of worries about legality or publisher prejudice.

Deposit in any case. This distinction is clearly made in the FAQ accompanying the Harvard mandate, informing authors that they should deposit their final refereed drafts upon acceptance for publication whether or not they opt out of making access to their deposits immediately OA.

Institutional record-keeping. Hence it is Harvard's mandate itself (not just the accompanying FAQ) that should require immediate deposit; and the opt-out clause should only pertain to whether or not access to that mandatory deposit is immediately made OA. The reason is that Closed Access deposit moots both the worry about legality and the worry about journal prejudice. It is merely an institution-internal record-keeping matter, not an OA or publication issue.

After the FAQ. But even though the Harvard mandate in its current form is suboptimal in this regard, this probably does not matter greatly, because the combination of Harvard's official mandate and Harvard's accompanying FAQ have almost the same effect as including the deposit requirement in the official mandate would have had. The mandate is in any case noncoercive. There are no penalties for noncompliance. It merely provides Harvard's official institutional sanction for self-archiving and it officially enjoins all faculty to do so. (Note that both "injunction" and "sanction" likewise have the double-meaning of "mandate": each can mean either officially legislating something or officially legitimizing something, or both.)

Lesson from NIH. Now to something closer to ordinary English: There is definitely a difference between an official request and an official requirement; and the total failure of the first version of the NIH policy (merely a request) -- as well as the persistent failure of the current request-policies of all the nonmandatory institutional repositories to date -- has confirmed that only an official requirement can successfully generate deposits and fill repositories -- as the subsequent NIH policy upgrade to a mandate and the 90 other institutional and funder mandates worldwide are demonstrating.

Requirements work, requests don't. So whereas the word "mandate" (or "requirement") may sometimes be a handicap at the stage where an institution is still debating about whether or not to adopt a deposit policy at all, it is definitely an advantage, indeed a necessity, if the policy, once adopted, is to succeed in generating compliance: Requirements work, requests don't.

No penalties for noncompliance. All experience to date has also shown that whereas adding various positive incentives (rewards for first depositors, "cream of science" showcasing, librarian assistance and proxy-depositing) to a mandate can help accelerate compliance, no penalties for noncompliance are needed. Mandates work if they are officially requirements and not requests, if compliance monitoring and implementation procedures are in place, and if the researcher population is well informed of both the mandate requirements and the benefits of OA.

"Publish-or-perish." Having said all that, I would like to close by pointing out one sanction/incentive (depending on how you look at it) that is already implicitly built into the academic reward system: Is "publish-or-perish" a mandate, or merely an admonition?

Research impact. Academics are not "required" to publish, but they are well-advised to do so, for success in getting a job, a grant, or a promotion. Nor are publications merely counted any more, in performance review, like beans. Their research impact is taken into account too. And it is precisely research impact that OA enhances.

Performance review. So making one's research output OA is already connected causally to the existing "publish-or-perish" reward system of academia, whether or not OA is mandated. An OA mandate simply closes the causal loop and makes the causal connection explicit. Indeed, a number of the mandating institutions have procedurally linked their deposit mandates to their performance review system as follows:

Submission format. Faculty just about everywhere already have to submit their refereed publication lists for performance review today. Several of the universities that mandate deposit have simply updated their submission procedure such that henceforth the official mode of submission of publications for performance review will be via deposit in the Institutional Repository.

"Online or invisible." This simple, natural procedural update -- not unlike the transition from submitting paper CVs to submitting digital CVs -- is at the same time all the sanction/incentive that academics need: To borrow the title of Steve Lawrence's seminal 2001 Nature paper on the OA impact advantage: "Online or Invisible."

Keystroke mandate. Hence an OA "mandate" is in essence just another bureaucratic requirement to do a few extra keystrokes per paper, to deposit a digital copy in one's institution's IR. This amounts to no more than a trivial extension to academia's existing "mandate" to do the keystrokes to write and publish the paper in the first place: Publish or Perish, Deposit to Flourish.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of a publisher's policy on author self-archiving, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

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On 22-May-09, at 5:10 AM, C.J.Smith wrote (regarding my "Definitive Answer: I"):

Stevan,

The John Wiley & Sons entry on SHERPA RoMEO describes the policy of John Wiley & Sons before they merged with Blackwell. Even so, one of the conditions of their ‘green’ status is ‘not allowed on institutional repository’. They only permit the use of the ‘post-print’ on the author’s own website.

Dear Colin, and all:

In the blogged version of the conclusions I drew from all of this, and the advice I gave on its basis, I added a fifth point that I should have added to my posting too. See (5) below:

(1) Under all circumstances,  deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft of your journal article (postprint) in your Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication. There is no need whatsoever to make a single exception. 

(2) Unless you are certain that you have reason not to, set access to that deposited draft as Open Access (OA) immediately upon deposit. (Otherwise, you can set access as Closed Access, for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.) 

(3) The only thing even remotely at issue is whether or not, if you deposit a document in your IR and make it OA, you ever receive a take-down notice from the publisher. 

(4) If and when you ever receive a take-down notice and you wish to honor it, set access as Closed Access for the duration of any publisher embargo you wish to honor.

(5) Meanwhile, if there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive on and don't give it another thought until and unless you ever receive a take-down notice.

I also added:

And above all, reflect that if the millions of articles that have been made OA (by computer scientists, physicists, economists, and all other disciplines) since the 1980's had waited (or asked) for a clear, unambiguous green light in advance from each publisher, we would have virtually none of those millions of articles accessed, used and built-upon across those decades by the many users worldwide whose institutions could not afford access to the publisher's subscription edition. 

In other words, I think it is both unnecessary and counterproductive for individual authors (or Institutional Repository managers) to assume the pre-emptive burden of trying to sort out the double-talk that the publisher posts, or that their individual permissions grunts pronounce in response to individual permissions queries.

For the specific question of the distinction between the "institutional repository" and the "author's own website": that distinction is such utter, unmitigated nonsense that I find it difficult to believe that anyone (other than a wishful-thinking publisher's permissions grunt or permissions double-talk text-drafter) would give it a nanosecond of thought. There is no difference between an "institutional repository" and an "author's own website"! They are just names for disk sectors on the author's institutional webserver:

If there are multiple, self-contradictory statements of the publisher's policy, act on the most positive one and don't give it another thought.

That includes contradictory statements from the same publisher, posted at different URLs, and under slightly different names! (A number of IRs have since explicitly, and wearily, declared that their authors' sector on the IR server is now officially baptized their "website".)

Your quote from the Wiley-Blackwell Author Services page is interesting. It does indeed say the following:

“Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways, including in publications of their own work and course packs in their institution. An electronic copy of the article (with a link to the online version) can be posted on their own website, employer's website/repository and on free public servers in the subject area. For full details see authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/faqs_copyright.asp.”

However, when you click through to the ‘full details’ link, there is no further mention of what authors can do with their accepted manuscripts.

My advice: don't click through to the 'full details' link! This is all just double-talk and FUD. Pick the most favorable version, screen-grab it for your records, and then go ahead and post your accepted article on your employer's website/repository and forget about it.

By the way, I am fully aware of what illusion this self-serving double-talk is striving to create in this instance: to make the publisher appear to be Green on immediate OA self-archiving -- but, if you click-through, you realize that it is only at the price of paying them for hybrid Gold OA! This is shameful, misleading nonsense -- but you need not "click through": just take

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

at face value and do not give it another thought until and unless someone from "Wiley-Blackwell" ever ventures to send you a take-down notice.

And let the "you" be the author, to whom this message about how "Wiley-Blackkwell journal authors can use their accepted article" is addressed. Please don't get any 3rd-party intermediaries involved in it -- except in the form of a blanket institutional Green OA self-archiving mandate for its employees.

I asked the Wiley-Blackwell person with whom I have been in touch to update their policy on SHERPA RoMEO. Part of his response to me was as follows:“

We have no connection with the SHERPA/RoMEO site and we do not sanction the service or verify the information held there. The SHERPA/RoMEO site should therefore not be taken as an accurate reflection of our policies.”

I made no particular mention of the SHERPA/ROMEO site in my posting and advice. I simply quoted three published online excerpts of each "Wiley's" public words to their authors. Consider the Romeos to just be short-cuts to publishers' own expressed policies, and summaries of them.

(And I can only repeat, yet again, that it is an enormous strategic error to ask when there already exists a suitable public green light from the publisher -- and even worse to have a 3rd party ask: The only thing the author's institution should do is require immediate deposit, without exception, in all cases, and also to strongly recommend immediately setting access to that deposit as Open Access. But no chasing after permissions on the author's behalf, and especially not in advance, and in the absence of any take-down notice.)

I will now challenge him based on the quote you found above, but his answer to me in writing still seems very clear:

“The submission version is the only version we allow to be placed into institutional repositories. We do not allow the post-peer review article, the author’s final draft, or any other version to be deposited.”

Based on this, and on your “sensible practical advice to authors and Repository Managers alike”, I can see no other choice than to deposit Wiley-Blackwell post-prints under permanent closed access.

I see a very clear and far better choice, with publicly documented support for it from "Wiley-Blackwell":  

"Wiley-Blackwell journal authors can use their accepted article in a number of ways... An electronic copy... can be posted on their... employer's website/repository..."

Let the author "post" his accepted draft to his IR immediately upon acceptance, set access immediately as OA, and then forget about it, as millions of authors have been doing since the 1980's, followed by virtually no take-down challenges from their publishers.

Most journals, on the contrary, have since officially given immediate OA self-archiving their green light. If and when the author ever does get a take-down notice, he can decide whether or not to honor it at that time. But pre-emptive obstacles should not be needlessly created, in advance, by having 3rd parties contact publishers' permission grunts -- even if their portfolio is "W/B Associate Permissions Manager."

(It is the author who is doing the depositing and the access-setting, not a 3rd party. Except where an exception has been negotiated by the author (as recommended, for example, by the Harvard policy), the copyright transfer agreement is between the author and the publisher, not a 3rd party.)

The Open University (OU) should adopt an ID/OA mandate. OU should not doom you, Colin, to having to contact a publisher's permissions grunt for every new OU article written, nor to have to do the hermeneutics to sort out incoherent versions of publishers' official policy. Let authors pick a grammatical English sentence, posted publicly by the publisher, to the effect that authors can post their final drafts on their websites, and take that to be a green light, regardless of whether the publisher goes on to contradict it elsewhere. It's publishers' copy-editors who are supposed to vet incoherent author prose, not authors (or Repository Managers) vetting incoherent publisher prose...

A second word to the wise,

Stevan

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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      Deutsche Übersetzung von Ben Kaden

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Professor Eberhard Hilf has noted that the drafter of the Heidelberg Appeal (a double-barrelled petition directed indifferently both against google book-scanning and against providing Open Access to research journal articles in Germany), Professor Roland Reuss, himself provides open access to his own journal articles:

EH: "Just to add: Mr. Reuss, in his role as Professor of history, has of course posted digital copies of all his scholarly articles on his institutional server (with a link to the publisher for ordering a printed copy if wished).

"This is Kafkaesque: Lying on one's back, one says, just as the lobbyists do, that OA is the "devils' gift," whereas standing on one's feet as a scholar, one provides OA!

"By the way, Reuss's research field is Kafka."

What has happened, is that Professor Reiss has made two fundamental confusions: He has confused (1) Open Access (which concerns journal articles) with google book-scanning, and he has confused (2) author-intended give-aways with author-unintended rip-offs.

It is quite astonishing that a scholar rushes to draft a petition rather than first gathering a clear understanding of what he is petitioning about.

To paraphrase Professor Hilf (who puts it in his own colorful way), this is the downside of the internet (if not also of the scholarly intellect), which can do so much good when used in a rational, rigorous way, and so much harm when used wrecklessly and unreflectively.

Below is a clause by clause critique of Professor Reuss's Heidelberg Appeal.

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THE FREEDOM TO PUBLISH AND THE PROTECTION OF COPYRIGHT

(a petition launched in Germany by Roland Reuss, U. Heidelberg)

"Currently the fundamental right of authors vouched for in the constitution to publish freely and of their own volition is under considerable attack and sustained threat."

This blanket statement about “authors” in general completely conflates (1) legitimate worries about consumer piracy of authors’ non-giveaway writings (such as books written for royalty) with (2) the author give-away of peer-reviewed research journal articles, which is what the Open Access movement is about.

Nor are authors’ rights to publish whatever they wish, wherever they wish, in any way under attack, or at issue.

"At the international level, intellectual property is being stolen from its producers to an unimagined degree and without criminalisation through the illegal publication of works protected by German copyright law on platforms such as GoogleBooks and YouTube. "

This refers to consumer piracy of authors’ non-give-away writings, a subject of legitimate concern, but completely unrelated to the movement for Open Access to researchers’ give-away journal articles”

"At national level, the so-called “Alliance of German Scientific Organisations” (members: Wissenschaftsrat, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Leibniz-Gesellschaft, Max Planck-Institute etc.) is propagandising for wide-ranging interference with the freedom of the press and the freedom to publish, the consequences of which are contrary to the basic law."

This refers to the efforts by these institutions to make peer-reviewed research journal articles Open Access – freely accessible online -- so that they can be read, used, applied and cited by all would-be users and not just by those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published. This is all author give-away writing, for which the author does not seek or get (and never has sought or gotten) a penny of royalty from sales revenue; the author seeks only maximal uptake and impact. Freedom of the press and freedom to publish are in no respect at issue here.

"Authors and publishers reject all attempts to, and practices that, undermine copyright. That copyright is fundamental for literature, art and science, for the basic right to freedom of research and teaching, as well as for press freedom and the freedom to publish. In the future too, it must be writers, artists, scientists, in brief, all creative people themselves, who decide if and where their works should be published. Any constraint or coercion to publish in a certain form is as unacceptable as the political toleration of pirate copies, currently being produced in huge numbers by Google."

Authors are free to publish whatever they wish, wherever they wish. And no one is undermining copyright, particularly for non-give-away, royalty-seeking work (such as most books, and journalists’ fee-based articles), where the author’s copyright penalizes piracy.

But not all authors seek to sell their writing for royalty or fees. The 2.5 million articles a year published in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals (in all disciplines, countries and languages) are all creator give-aways, written solely for uptake and usage in further research. Their authors want copyright to protect their authorship and the integrity of their texts (e.g., from plagiarism or alteration), but they want to give away their texts free online so that all would-be users can access and use them.

There is no constraint whatsoever on these give-away authors: They are not royalty-seeking book-authors, fee-based journalists, or other creators of digital works for sale.

The funders of the research (including the tax-paying public whose money is being used to pay for the conduct of the research) and the employers of the researchers (universities and research institutions, who pay their salaries) also share these give-away authors' interest in maximizing the access and usage of their joint research output. “Publish or Perish” reflects the longstanding academic mandate (long predating the digital era) for scholars and scientists to conduct research and make public their findings, so they can be used and built upon, by other scholars and scientists, to the benefit of all, in the collective, cumulative growth of learned inquiry. These authors are already being rewarded, in their careers and their research support, for their research productivity as well as for the uptake and impact of their research findings. Open Access maximizes these.

It is for this reason that in the online era research funders and universities the world over – but not yet in Germany – are beginning to adopt policies that mandate that researchers provide Open Access to their (give-away) peer-reviewed research articles (not their [non-give-away] books!) by self-archiving them, free for all, on the web.

These Open Access mandates are needed not to force authors to give away their articles (they do that already, more than willingly) but to reinforce their inclination to make their give-away (published) articles freely accessible to all on the web.

This inclination needs reinforcement because some authors imagine that it is illegal for them to make their articles freely accessible online, others imagine that their journals will not allow it, and still others imagine that self-archiving entails a lot of work. The mandates formalize the fact that providing Open Access is legal, that at least 63% of journals already formally endorse authors making their articles Open Access immediately upon publication, and another 34% endorse it after a temporary embargo period (during which automatized email eprint requests can take care of immediate research usage needs) and that it takes only a few minutes to self-archive an article.

Dr. Reuss presumably knows all this, because he already self-archives his give-away articles to make them Open Access on the web too. He simply has not put two and two together, because he has conflated Open Access policies with google book-scanning and has not taken the trouble to do the research that would have made him realize that they are completely different things. Instead, he drafts this incoherent petition to treat both Open Access and google copyright issues as if they were the same sort of thing.

In contrast, international surveys of authors in all disciplines (humanities included) have repeatedly confirmed that 95% of authors would make their give-away journal articles OA (over 80% of them willingly) if their universities and/or funders were to mandate it. They need the mandates to give them the confidence and initiative to do it. And an appeal to the EC vastly larger than the Heidelberg Appeal has been signed by tens of thousands of researchers and their institutions petitioning the EC to mandate OA!

"Never in history has the number of publications, books, magazines and electronic publications been as large as it is today, and never has the freedom of decision of authors been guaranteed to such a high degree. The “Alliance of German Scientific Organisations” wants to obligate authors to use a specified mode of publication. This is not conducive to the improvement of scientific information."

The “mode of publication” is simply the mode of publication authors already use – publishing in the peer-reviewed journal of their choice – augmented by making the published article Open Access.

(In fairness, it must also be noted that there is some confusion among Open Access proponents too, about how they are advocating that articles be made Open Access. The “Green Road” to Open Access is for authors to publish their articles in the traditional journals of their choice, and then to make their peer-reviewed, accepted final drafts freely accessible online, by self-archiving them in their institution’s Open Access repository. The “Gold Road” to Open Access is for authors to publish their articles in an “Open Access journal,” which is a journal that makes all of its articles freely accessible online. The choice of journal, however, remains entirely up to the author. So what is being advocated is not a “mode of publication,” but a mode of access-provision – having published the article when and where the author chooses.)

Hence no one is proposing to constrain in any way authors’ choice in what to publish, when, where or how. Open Access mandates are concerned only with modes of maximizing access to the chosen mode of publication (and only for give-away peer-reviewed research articles).

"The undersigned appeal emphatically to the Federal Government and to the governments of the federal states for a resolute defence, with all the means at their disposal, of existing copyright and of the freedom to publish, to research and to teach. Politicians have the obligation to enforce, at national and international level, the individual rights and aspirations linked with the production of artistic and scientific works. The freedom of literature, art and science is a major constitutional asset. If we loose it, we loose our future."

Open Access is completely compatible with existing copyright. All it requires is that publishers should not try to deprive give-away authors of the right to make their give-away articles accessible online free for all, by self-archiving them, as Herr Reuss does. Why, then, is Herr Reuss petitioning against this author’s right under the confused banner of defending authors’ rights and freedom?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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Update Jan 1, 2010: See Gargouri, Y; C Hajjem, V Larivière, Y Gingras, L Carr,T Brody & S Harnad (2010) “Open Access, Whether Self-Selected or Mandated, Increases Citation Impact, Especially for Higher Quality Research”
Update Feb 8, 2010: See also "Open Access: Self-Selected, Mandated & Random; Answers & Questions"

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In response to my critique of his Chronicle of Higher Education posting on Evans and Reimer's (2009) Science article (which I likewise critiqued, though much more mildly), I got an email from Paul Basken asking me to explain what, if anything, he had got wrong, since his posting was based entirely on a press release from NSF (which turns out to be a relay of a press release from the University of Chicago, E & R's home institution). Sure enough, the silly spin originated from the NSF/Chicago Press release (though the buck stops with E & R's own vague and somewhat tendentious description and interpretation of some of their findings). Here is the NSF/Chicago Press Release, enhanced with my comments, for your delectation and verdict:

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NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"If you offer something of value to people for free while someone else charges a hefty sum of money for the same type of product, one would logically assume that most people would choose the free option. According to new research in today's edition of the journal Science, if the product in question is access to scholarly papers and research, that logic might just be wrong. These findings provide new insight into the nature of scholarly discourse and the future of the open source publication movement [sic, emphasis added]."

(1) If you offer something valuable for free, people will choose the free option unless they've already paid for the paid option (especially if they needed -- and could afford -- it earlier).

(2) Free access after an embargo of a year or more is not the same "something" as immediate free access. Its "value" for a potential user is lower. (That's one of the reasons institutions keep paying for subscription/license access to journals.)

(3) Hence it is not in the least surprising that immediate (paid) print-on-paper access + online access (IP + IO) generates more citations than immediate (paid) print-on-paper access (IP) alone.

(4) Nor is it surprising that immediate (paid) print-on-paper access + online access + delayed free online access (IP +IO + DF) generates more citations than just immediate (paid) print-on-paper + online access (IP + IO) alone -- even if the free access is provided a year or longer after the paid access.

(5) Why on earth would anyone conclude that the fact that the increase in citations from IP to IP + IO is 12% and the increase in citations from IP + IO to IP + IO + DF is a further 8% implies anything whatsoever about people's preference for paid access over free access? Especially when the free access is not even immediate (IF) but delayed (DF) and the 8% is an underestimate based on averaging in ancient articles: see E & R's supplemental Figure S1(c), right [with thanks to Mike Eisen for spotting this one!].

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"Most research is published in scientific journals and reviews, and subscriptions to these outlets have traditionally cost money--in some cases a great deal of money. Publishers must cover the costs of producing peer-reviewed publications and in most cases also try to turn a profit. To access these publications, other scholars and researchers must either be able to afford subscriptions or work at institutions that can provide access.

"In recent years, as the Internet has helped lower the cost of publishing, more and more scientists have begun publishing their research in open source [sic] outlets online. Since these publications are free to anyone with an Internet connection, the belief has been that more interested readers will find them and potentially cite them. Earlier studies had postulated that being in an open source [sic] format could more than double the number of times a journal article is used by other researchers."

What on earth is an "open source outlet"? ("Open source" is a software matter.) Let's assume what's meant is "open access"; but then is this referring to (i) publishing in an open access journal, to (ii) publishing in a subscription journal but also self-archiving the published article to make it open access, or to (iii) self-archiving an unpublished paper?

What (many) previous studies had measured (not "postulated") was that authors (ii) publishing in a subscription journal (IP + IO) and also self-archiving their published article to make it Open Access (IP + IO + OA) could more than double their citations, compared to IP + IO alone.

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"To test this theory, James A. Evans, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and Jacob Reimer, a student of neurobiology also at the University of Chicago, analyzed millions of articles available online, including those from open source publications [sic] and those that required payment to access."

No, Evans & Reimer (E & R) did nothing of the sort; and no "theory" was tested (nor was there any theory).

E & R only analyzed articles from subscription access journals before and after the journals made them accessible online (to paid subscribers only) (i.e., IP vs IP + IO) as well as before and after the journals made the online version accessible free for all (after a paid-access-only embargo of up to a year or more: i.e., IP +IO vs IP + IO + DF). E & R's methodology was based on comparing citation counts for articles within the same journals before and after being made free online (by the journal) following delays of various lengths.

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"The results were surprising. On average, when a given publication was made available online after being in print for a year, being published in an open source format [sic] increased the use of that article by about 8 percent. When articles are made available online in a commercial format a year after publication, however, usage increases by about 12 percent."

In other words, the citation count increase from just (paid) IP to (paid) IP + IO was 12% and the citation count increase from just (paid) IP + IO to (paid) IP + IO + DF was a further 8%. Not in the least surprising: Making paid-access articles accessible online increases their citations, and making them free online (even if only after a delay of a year or longer) increases their citations still more.

What is surprising is the rather absurd spin that this press release appears to be trying to put on this decidedly unsurprising finding.

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"'Across the scientific community,' Evans said in an interview, 'it turns out that open access does have a positive impact on the attention that's given to the journal articles, but it's a small impact.'"

We already knew that OA increased citations, as the many prior published studies have shown.  Most of those studies, however, were based on immediate OA (i.e., IF), not embargoed OA. What E & R do show, interestingly, is that even delaying OA for a year or more still increases citations, though (unsurprisingly) not as much as immediate OA (IF) does.

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"Yet Evans and Reimer's research also points to one very positive impact of the open source movement [sic] that is sometimes overlooked in the debate about scholarly publications. Researchers in the developing world, where research funding and libraries are not as robust as they are in wealthier countries, were far more likely to read and cite open source articles."

A large portion of the citation increase from (delayed) OA turns out to come from Developing Countries (refuting Frandsen's recent report to the contrary). This is a new and useful finding (though hardly a surprising one, if one does the arithmetic). (A similar analysis, within the US, comparing citations from America's own "Have-Not" Universities (with the smaller journal subscription budgets) with its Harvards might well reveal the same effect closer to home, though probably at a smaller scale.)

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"The University of Chicago team concludes that outside the developed world, the open source movement [sic] 'widens the global circle of those who can participate in science and benefit from it.'"

And it will be interesting to test for the same effect comparing the Harvards and the Have-Nots in the US -- but a more realistic estimate might come from looking at immediate OA (IF) rather than just embargoed OA (DF).

NSF/U.CHICAGO:
"So while some scientists and scholars may chose to pay for scientific publications even when free publications are available, their colleagues in other parts of the world may find that going with open source works [sic] is the only choice they have."

It would be interesting to hear the authors of this NSF/Chicago press release -- or E & R, for that matter -- explain how this paradoxical "preference" for paid access over free access was tested during the access embargo period...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: What France -- exactly like every other country -- needs is both funder and institutional Open Access (OA) mandates, requiring the self-archiving of all refereed research output immediately upon acceptance for publication, and all converging on single-locus deposit in the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR). (It is completely irrelevant to this whether or not the IR happens to be hosted by HAL, France's national Central Repository [CR], which is designed so as to be able in principle to give every university or institution in France its own "virtual IR" if the institution so wishes.) But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, then OA's slumbering giant -- the universities and institutions that are the providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, in all fields, virtually none of which yet mandate the deposit of their institutional research output in their IRs -- will just keep hibernating: Institutional (and departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, most researchers (85%) will not self-archive anywhere (in either an IR or a CR), and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow. Apart from the funder-mandated research -- and the few fields (such as computer science, economics and physics) where researchers have already been self-archiving spontaneously for years worldwide -- the CRs will of course be in exactly the same state as the IRs.

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Thierry Chanier wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

TC: The question of tools for central repositories (CRs) is central. It is preferable to avoid opposing CRs and IRs.

They are not opposed. Both are welcome and useful. What is under discussion is locus of deposit. (The deposited document itself, once deposited, may be exported, imported, harvested to/from as many repositories as desired. The crucial question is where it is actually deposited, and especially where deposit mandates from funders stipulate that it should be deposited.)

The issues for locus-of-deposit are:

(1) Single or multiple deposit? 

I think everyone would agree that at a time when most authors (85% ) are not yet depositing at all, this is not the time to talk about depositing the same paper more than once.

(2) If single deposit: where, institution-internally or institution-externally? 

The author's institutional repository (IR) might be his university's IR, or his research institute's IR, or the IR of some subset of his institution, such as his department's IR or his laboratory's IR. The point is that the locus of production of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines and worldwide -- is the author's institution. The author's institution also has a shared stake and interest with its authors in hosting and showcasing their joint research output.

All other links to the author's research are fragmented: Some of it will be funded by some funders, some by others, and some will be unfunded. Some will be in some discipline or subdiscipline, some in another, some in several. There is much scope for collecting it together in various combinations into such institution-external collections, but it makes no sense at all to deposit directly in some or all of them: One deposit is enough, and the rest can be harvested automatically. The natural and optimal locus for that one deposit is at the universal source: the author's own institution.

(3) Import/Export/Harvest from where to where?

The natural and optimal procedure is: deposit institution-internally and then, where desired, import/export/harvest institution-externally. This one-to-many procedure makes sense from every standpoint: Single convergent deposit, convergent mandates, maximal flexibility and efficiency, minimal effort and complication (hence maximal willingness and compliance from authors). The alternative, of many-to-one importation, or many-to-many import/export means multiple, divergent deposit, divergent mandates, reduced flexibility and efficiency, increased effort and complications (and hence reduced willingness and compliance from authors).

TC: In some countries, CRs may be prominent (particularly because local institutions have a low status, so IRs may not mean much to researchers ... when they exist), because centralized procedures for evaluating research may offer opportunity to researchers to start depositing - see below about France.

Institutional status-level is irrelevant, because research is not searched at the individual IR level but at the harvester (CR) level. We are discussing here what is the optimal locus of deposit, so as to capture (and mandate the capture of) all of OA's target content, worldwide, and as quickly and efficiently as possible. What matters for this is to find a procedure for systematically capturing all research output, and the natural and exhaustive locus for that is at the source: the institution (university, research institute, department, laboratory) that hosts the researcher, pays his salary, and provides his institutional affiliation.

There is of course research evaluation at the institution-internal as well as the institution-external (funder and national) level. But even for national research assessment exercises, such as the RAE in the UK, the institution and department are the "unit of assessment"; they are local, and distributed. And the natural locus for their research output is their own IRs. And that is exactly how it is that many UK universities provided their submissions to RAE 2008. See the IRRA .

TC: Researchers should be free to choose where they deposit but with requirements to deposit. They may do it in different repositories (I mean one document is only in one place, but depending on the nature of the document/data, one may choose various repositories)

I am afraid that it is here that we reach the gist of the matter (and the height of the misunderstanding and equivocation):

First, the only kind of deposit under discussion here is OA's primary target content: refereed journal articles. That is also the only deposit requirement (mandate) under discussion here, because although there are many other things an author might choose to deposit too -- books, software, multimedia, courseware, research data -- those are optional contents insofar as OA deposit mandates are concerned. And it is specifically the locus of deposit of the required contents (refereed journal articles) that matters so much, particularly in funder mandate policies.

It might sound optimal for a funder to simply require deposit in some OA repository or other, leaving it up to the author to choose which (and such a funder mandate is certainly preferable to a mandate that specifies deposit in a CR, or to no mandate at all). But this is in fact far from being the optimal mandate, for the reasons discussed by Prof. Rentier: 

Most researchers (85%) do not deposit unless they are required to. Funders can only mandate the deposit of the research that they fund. If they require that it must be deposited in a specific CR, they are in direct competition with institutional mandates (necessitating double or divergent deposit). If funder mandates simply leave it open where authors deposit, then they are not in competition with IR mandates, but they are not helping them either. As noted, institutions are the producers of all research output -- funded and unfunded, in all disciplines, worldwide. Only 30 institutions mandate deposit so far, worldwide (out of tens of thousands). If a funder mandates deposit, but is open-ended about locus of deposit, it leaves institutions in their current state of inertia. But if funders specifically stipulate IR deposit, they thereby immediately increase the probability and the motivation for creating an IR as well as adopting an institutional deposit mandate for the rest of the research output of every one of the institutions that have a researcher funded by that funder.

TC: It is a tactical decision for OA supporters, knowing the local habits, to advertise ways of deposit to colleagues

But we already know that advertisement, encouragement, exhortation, evidence of benefits, assistance -- none of these is sufficient to get most researchers to deposit. Only requirements (mandates) work (and you seem to agree).

Now institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, because they are the universal providers of all of OA's target content. So to induce the "slumbering giant" to wake up and mandate OA for all of his research output, there has to be something in it for him (or rather them, because the "slumbering giant" is in fact a global network of universities and research institutions). What is in it for each of them? A collection of its own institutional research output that it can host, manage, audit, assess and showcase. What use is it to each of them if their research output is scattered globally willy-nilly, in diverse CRs? It increases the research impact of the institution's research output, to be sure, but how to measure, credit, showcase and benefit from that, institutionally, when it is scattered willy-nilly? 

Now, as noted, importation/exportation/harvesting can in principle work both ways. But if a university that might wish to host its own research assets has to go out and find and harvest them back from all over the web, because they were deposited institution-externally, instead of being deposited institutionally in the first place, the time and effort involved is considerably greater than simply mandating direct institutional deposit would have been -- and that back-harvest does not even yield all of the university's output: only whatever institutional research output happened to be funded by funders that also mandate OA! Yet if those funders had mandated IR deposit, all that work would already be done, and the university would have a strong incentive to adopt a mandate requiring the rest of its research output to be deposited too.

Meanwhile, for a mandating funder, harvesting the distributed IR content of all of its fundees into a CR is far easier; part of the fulfillment conditions for the grant need only specify that the author should send the funder the URL for the IR deposit of all articles resulting from the grant. The rest can be done automatically by software.

TC:  We have to make sure that people in charge of funding research (EU, National) do not oblige researchers to deposit in one specific place (their CR or any other).

On the contrary, there is every reason that funders should specify the fundee's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, for the reasons just adduced. Open-ended mandates are better than competing CR mandates, but they are not nearly as good as convergent, synergistic IR mandates (to help awaken the slumbering giant).

(As I was writing this posting, two new funder mandates have been announced -- FRSQ in Canada and NRC in Norway: Both are welcome, but both are open-ended about deposit locus, and consequently both miss the opportunity to have a far greater positive effect on global OA growth, by stipulating IR deposit.)
 

TC:  But I understand funders, because when they ask researchers to provide access to their work and advertise the fact that they have been paid by them, there is currently no practical way of doing so (labels put on deposit with the name of the program which gave the money, and harvesters able to compute this information)

Yes, precisely. Funding metadata can easily be added as a field in the IR deposit software -- and institutions will be only too happy to help in monitoring grant fulfillment conditions in this way, in exchange for the jump-start it provides for the filling of their own IRs.

TC: I also understand funders because I feel that they want to add interesting tools (search, computation, meta-engine), tools which could be developed by central harvesters (CH). We are late on this issue and harvesters have not made much progress (see below).

To repeat: Locus of direct deposit has nothing whatever to do with harvester-level search. Search is not done at the IR level but at the harvester (e.g., CR)  level.

TC: 1. HAL and research evaluation: 3 years ago I tried to convince my former lab to open a sub-archive within HAL (same repository, but URL specific to the lab, with proper interface). I also tried to convince my university to have a general meeting with directors of local labs in order to invite them to do the same and, at another level, to manage the sub-archive in HAL for the university (a solution somewhere in between CR and IR). My lab colleague  agreed, started the work but gave up because of lack of time. My university never replied to my proposal.

HAL is a nationwide resource that can in principle be used (much the way the Web itself is used) to allow an institution to create and manage its own "virtual IR". As such, HAL is partly a platform for creating virtual IRs, rather than a CR.

So, essentially, what you and your colleague tried to do (and only partly succeeded) was to create and manage an IR. That's splendid, and welcome, but we already know that IRs alone are not enough. Without a mandate, they idle at the usual 15% baseline.

(Please note that a lab repository is an IR.)

TC:  Now, thanks to procedures for evaluating research in France, labs will have to choose the way they want to be evaluated (I mean the technical procedure to achieve it). Some software used by the national board will do the computation out of HAL. Consequently, my lab decided this week to urgently re-open and manage its sub-archive in HAL. Of course, the first thing they have to do is deposit metadata. The actual deposit of the corresponding full-text is not mandatory. But they will take the opportunity to suggest to researchers to deposit as well their full papers.

It won't work; it's been tried many times before. So this is a great opportunity lost. As you see, the IR clearly languishes neglected without a mandate. With a mandate -- particularly one in which evaluation is based on what is deposited, as in Prof. Rentier's mandate at Liège -- researchers perk up and deposit. But if all they have to deposit is metadata, that's all they will deposit (even though adding the full-text is just one more keystroke).

The reason is that the effect of mandates is mostly not coercive. Researchers don't jump to deposit just because they are required to deposit. They actually want to deposit, but they are held back by two main constraints, one small, the other big: 

(1) The small constraint is ergonomic. Researchers are overloaded, and they will not do something extra unless it really has a high priority. A deposit mandate, especially one tied to funding and/or evaluation, gives the few minutes-worth of keystrokes per paper (which is all that a deposit amounts to) the requisite priority that they otherwise lack.

(2) The big constraint is psychological: Researchers are (groundlessly) afraid to deposit their papers (even the 63% for which the journal already gives them its explicit blessing to do so) -- afraid until and unless their institutions and/or their funders tell them they must, because then they know it is officially okay to do so! The mandate unburdens their souls, and unlocks their fingers.

TC:  Last thing: I do not mean that in France, only HAL should be used. We should make sure we have the choice to deposit where we please.

What France needs, like every other country, is funder and institutional mandates converging on single-locus IR deposit (irrespective of whether the IR is hosted by HAL). But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, the giant will keep hibernating, institutional (departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow.

TC:  2. Harversters : advantages and current limits:  Just a personal experience. Till recently I used to advertise my list of publications by giving the URL of an open archive, Edutice (a thematic one, VERY USEFUL in our domain, a sub-part of HAL but with its local procedures, interface, etc.). Now I give colleagues the OAISTER URL (with the path to follow) to get all my publications (because some of them are in other archives). The problem is: deposits in Edutice appear twice in the OAISTER list (as deposits of Edutice and of HAL - but there is one only deposit). It is a concrete example of progress which should be made to avoid repetitions in harvesters (among many other new features).

If they had all been deposited in your own IR you would have had an automatic listing of all your works (without duplications) through a simple google IR site-search "chanier site:http-IR-etc." -- and your institutions would have it all too. And so would OAIster. And you could have exported to Edutice with SWORD if you wished.

De-duplication and version-comparator software is already being developed (though it's hardly worth it yet, when the problem is not the presence of duplicates but the absence of even a singleton for 85% global refereed research output) -- and that's what mandates in general -- and convergent IR mandates in particular, to awaken the slumbering giant -- are needed for.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: The publisher lobby is trying to undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public that funded it. Tendentiously misnamed the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" the Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" publicly funded research in exactly the same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, sold for author royalty income.
    It is time for OA advocates and the general public (US and worldwide, because US OA policy has vast global implications) to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright. Please consult the Alliance for Taxpayer Access on how you can help and also express your support for mandating more OA rather than less, to President Obama.
    This is also a good time to shore up the NIH Mandate with a small change that will not only increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide, but  strengthen it against attempts like the Conyers Bill to undermine it: Specify that the research is to be deposited in the fundee's own Institutional Repository. (From there it can be automatically harvested to central repositories like PubMed Central.) The majority of journals already formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR). Immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities in the world: This small change would also spread the adoption of institutional mandates to NIH's fundees' institutions, extending OA to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded, thus ushering in universal OA at long last.

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The publisher anti-Open-Access lobby is trying to use a time when the economy is down and the head of NIH is out to slip through a Bill that would undo one of the most positive things Congress has done for science: the NIH Public Access Act, which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible to the public that paid for it.

The Conyers Bill is now trying to overturn the Public Access Act on the basis of copyright double-talk that would be ludicrous if it were not so ominous:

The published reports of publicly funded research findings are given away by their researcher-authors free for all in order to maximize their usage and impact. The Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" their work in exactly the same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To bestsellers, produced and sold by their authors to maximize their royalty income: The tendentiously misnamed "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" would rescind NIH's requirement that the results of the research it funds with taxpayer money should be deposited, free for all, on the Web.

The Conyers Bill's copyright arguments -- almost transparently contrived and arbitrary -- have been decisively refuted point for point by Law Professor Michael Carroll and other experts, just as all the other far-fetched, self-serving arguments marshalled by the publisher anti-OA lobby have (despite the hiring of "pit-bull" Eric Dezenhall as public-relations consultant) been repeatedly rebutted each time they were unleashed.

It is time not only for OA advocates, but the general public -- both US and worldwide (because US OA policy has vast global implications) -- to make their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access Policy and against the Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright.The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is hard at work to save the NIH Mandate; please consult them on how you can help. You can also express your support for mandating more OA rather than less, to President Obama.

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This would also be an opportune time to shore up the NIH Mandate itself with a small but important change in implementational detail that will not only increase its reach and make it a far better model for emulation worldwide, but it will also strengthen it against mischievous attempts like the Conyers Bill to undermine it:

(1) Open Access is Open Access regardless of where on the Web a paper is freely accessible.

(2) Currently, the NIH mandate specifically stipulates deposit in a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR), PubMed Central.

(3) The majority of journals already formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most endorse it only in the author's own Institutional Repository (IR) rather than a Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR). (This is because they fear that endorsing deposit in 3rd party CRs would open the door to free-riding on their content by rival publishers.)

(4) Apart from being immune to the rival-publisher/free-rider objection, IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities and research institutions in the world: That makes it a much more diffuse, hence difficult target for the publisher anti-OA publisher lobby than PubMed Central, NIH or Congress.

(5) IRs also make it possible to deposit papers as "Closed Access" rather than Open Access during any publisher embargo period. The Closed-Access paper's metadata (authors, title, journal, date, abstract, etc.) are freely accessible and searchable webwide, and link to an IR Button that allows individual users to email the author an automatic request for an individual copy for research use with just one click, which the author can in turn fulfill with just one click, almost instantaneously. Over 60% of journals already endorse immediate OA for IR deposits. The Button provides "Almost OA" for the rest, to tide over researcher needs during any embargo.

(6) Hence if the NIH deposit mandate specifically stipulated deposit in the author's IR, rather than deposit in PubMed Central, it could harvest the deposit's metadata to PubMed Central, harvest the full-text after the allowable embargo, and moot most of the copyright issues, while indirectly providing "Almost OA" even during the embargo (via the Request-a-Copy Buttons of the global network of IRs distributed across the planet).

(7) This small change in implementational detail in NIH's funder mandate would also motivate and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates at all NIH's fundees' institutions, which would in turn help reinforce and protect the NIH mandate (from Conyers-like attacks) as well as extending it to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded.

(8) Stipulating IR deposit rather than CR deposit will also make the NIH funder mandate a model that can be emulated worldwide, globalizing the adoption of both funder and institutional mandates and helping to usher in universal OA at long last.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum