Open Access Archivangelism

University of Oregon (UO) has just registered (in ROARMAP) UO's second Green Open Access (OA) self-archiving mandate in a week -- the world's 80th Green OA mandate overall.

UO's first mandate was for the UO Library Faculty. UO's latest one is for the UO Department of Romance Languages. It's also the first departmental mandate in the humanities (confirming, along with the several humanities funder mandates already adopted, that OA isn't, and never was, just for the sciences!).

This is also the world's 9th departmental mandate, again confirming Arthur Sale's sage advice about the "patchwork mandate" strategy:

If your institution has not yet managed to reach consensus on adopting a university-wide OA mandate, don't wait! Go ahead and adopt departmental mandates, for which consensus can be reached more quickly and easily.

The very first Green OA self-archiving mandate of them all was likewise a "patchwork mandate," adopted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton. (A university-wide mandate has since been adopted as well.)

Also, if your institution does not yet have an Institutional Repository (IR), urge them to create one. (I recommend EPrints as by far the best, fastest, and simplest, of the free OS softwares, yet the one with the most powerful OA functionality.) But, as with mandates, don't wait for your institution to get 'round to it, if they're being sluggish: just download EPrints and create a departmental IR of your own: It can later be integrated with or upgraded into the university-wide IR.

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

Yet another declaration/petition/statement/manifesto concerning OA has been drafted, this time not one full of pro-OA platitudes (like the Berlin Declaration) but of anti-OA canards and nonsequiturs: The Heidelberg Appeal ("Heidelberger Appel"), launched by the German text critic, Roland Reuss.

(These misunderstandings are intentional when promulgated by publishers lobbying against OA [e.g., the "DC Principles," the "Prism Coalition" and the "Brussels Declaration"] but not in the case of scholars waxing righteously indignant about their rights without first coming to a clear understanding of what is really at issue, as in the case of Herr Reuss.)

An article in the 2 May 2009 Zuercher Zeitung seems to catch and correct a few of the ambiguities and absurdities of Reuss's singularly wrong-headed argument, but far from all of them.

Someone still has to state, loud and clear (and in German!), that Herr Reuss (and the signatories he has managed to inspire to follow him in his failure to grasp what is actually at issue) is:

(1) conflating consumer piracy of authors' non-give-away texts (largely books) with author give-aways of their own journal articles (which is what Open Access is about);

(2) conflating Open Access with Google book scanning;

(3) conflating "Gratis" Open Access (free online access), which is what all the Green Open Access Self-Archiving and self-archiving mandates are, with "Libre" (free online access PLUS re-use rights), which only some Gold OA journals are providing, and again, in accordance with the wishes and agreement of the author.

The Humanities are more book-intensive than other disciplines, but insofar as their journal articles are concerned, they are no different: their authors write them (and give them away) for usage and impact, not royalty income.

So insofar as OA is concerned, the "Heidelberger Appell" is largely misunderstanding, nonsense and mischief, and I still hope this will be clearly exposed and put-paid-to in the German Press, otherwise it will continue to retard the progress of OA in Germany.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Re-posting of announcement by Isidro Aguillo of Webometrics University Rankings to the American Scientist Open Access Forum.

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The January edition of the Ranking Web of Repositories has just been published

http://repositories.webometrics.info/

The number of repositories is growing fast worldwide but still many of them do not have their own domain or subdomain, and for this reason it is not possible to add them into our analysis. Some institutions maintain several databases with completely different URLs which penalize the global visibility they have.

We are still unable to add usage/download statics but there are many initiatives already working on standardization of the collecting methods, so we expect that global data should be available soon.

Following several requests we now show two global Rankings. One that covers all repositories as was shown in previous editions (Top 300), and a new one that focus only on Institutional Repositories (Top 300 Institutional).

There is a minor change regarding the calculation of the number of rich files as in this new edition we are again using formats other than pdf (doc, ppt, ps) to obtain the data. Contrary to the methodology we used to make the other Rankings, the figures for rich files are combined and not treated individually.

The French HAL central repository, and its subsets like INRIA, Social Sciences and Humanities (HAL-SHS) or IN2P3, are at the top of the institutional repository list.

Important repositories like PubMedCentral, CiteSeerX and Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System, do not use standard suffixes to design their contents (e.g. papers in acrobat format with file names which extension is not .pdf). This is a bad practice as it reduces the visibility of these documents to the search engines.

Our policy is not to include collectors or metarepositories, with one exception, which is DiVa, the interface that the Uppsala University provides to more than 20 Nordic repositories. Many of these institutions do not have their own systems but link their contents to the DiVa portal. Unfortunately, this means that many of the papers are under different domains and hence they do not contribute to the DiVa's rank.

Isidro F. Aguillo
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28, 3C1. 28037 Madrid. Spain
Ph. 91-602 2890. Fax: 91-602 2971
isidro.aguillo -- cchs.csic.es
http://www.webometrics.info

On 22-Jan-09, at 5:18 AM, Francis Jayakanth wrote on the eprints-tech list:

"Till recently, we used to include references for all the uploads that are happening into our repository. While copying and pasting metadata content from the PDFs, we don't directly paste the copied content onto the submission screen. Instead, we first copy the content onto an editor like notepad or wordpad and then copy the content from an editor on to the submission screen. This is specially true for the references.

"Our experience has been that when the references are copied and pasted on to an editor like notepad or wordpad from the PDF file, invariably non-ascii characters found in almost every reference. Correcting the non-ascii characters takes considerable amount of time. Also, as to be expected, the references from difference publishers are in different styles, which may not make reference linking straight forward. Both these factors forced us take a decision to do away with uploading of references, henceforth. I'll appreciate if you could share your experiences on the said matter."

The items in an article's reference list are among the most important of metadata, second only to the equivalent information about the article itself. Indeed they are the canonical metadata: authors, year, title, journal. If each Institutional Repository (IR) has those canonical metadata for every one of its deposited articles as well as for every article cited by every one of its deposited articles, that creates the glue for distributed reference interlinking and metric analysis of the entire distributed OA corpus webwide, as well as a means of triangulating institutional affiliations and even name disambiguation.

Yes, there are some technical problems to be solved in order to capture all references, such as they are, filtering out noise, but those technical problems are well worth solving (and sharing the solution) for the great benefits they will bestow.

The same is true for handling the numerous (but finite) variant formats that references may take: Yes, there are many, including different permutations in the order of the key components, abbreviations, incomplete components etc., but those too are finite, can be solved once and for all to a very good approximation, and the solution can be shared and pooled across the distributed IRs and their softwares. And again, it is eminently worthwhile to make the relatively small effort to do this, because the dividends are so vast.

I hope the IR community in general -- and the EPrints community in particular -- will make the relatively small, distributed, collaborative effort it takes to ensure that this all-important OA glue unites all the IRs in one of their most fundamental functions.

(Roman Chyla has replied to eprints-tech with one potential solution: "The technical solution has been there for quite some time, look at citeseer where all the references are extracted automatically (the code of the citeseer, the old version, was available upon request - I dont know if that is the case now, but it was in the past). That would be the right way to go, imo. I think to remember one citeseer-based library for economics existed, so not only the computer-science texts with predictable reference styles are possible to process. With humanities it is yet another story.")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

(1) Two Kinds of OA: Gratis and Libre: There are two kinds of Open Access (OA) -- "gratis" (free online access) and "libre" (free online access plus certain re-use rights) -- but Gideon Burton seems to be writing about OA as if there were only one kind ("libre"). (See: "Open Access: 'Gratis' and 'Libre'")

The gratis/libre distinction matters a lot, because it is critical to the strategy for successfully achieving OA (of either kind) at all. There is still very little OA today, but most of what OA there is is gratis, not libre. The fastest and surest way to achieve 100% OA is for universities and funders to mandate OA, and they are at last beginning to do so. But universities and funders can (and hence should) only mandate gratis OA, not libre OA. All peer-reviewed journal article authors are "give-away authors": They want their work to be freely accessible online. But most do not want their texts themselves (as opposed to just their findings) to be re-used and re-mixed as if they were data, software, or disney cartoons. Author-sanctioned re-use rights can come after we have reached 100% gratis OA; needlessly insisting on them pre-emptively only hampers progress toward reaching 100% OA itself. (See: "The Giveaway/NonGiveaway Distinction")".

(2) Two Ways to Reach 100% OA: The Golden Road and the Green Road: There are two roads to 100% OA, the "golden road" of authors publishing in OA journals and the "green road" of authors publishing in conventional journals but also self-archiving their articles in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) to make them OA. (See: "OA Publishing is OA, but OA is Not OA Publishing").

The green/gold distinction matters even more than the gratis/libre distinction, because Green OA can be mandated by universities and funders, whereas gold OA cannot. Moreover, most journals already have a green (63%) or pale-green (32%) policy on author OA self-archiving, whereas only about 15% of journals are gold OA journals, and the rest cannot be mandated by universities and funders to convert. Universal green OA self-archiving mandates may eventually induce publishers to convert to gold, but they cannot do so if we do not first adopt the green mandates. "Gold Fever" -- treating OA as if it just meant gold OA -- is the single most common error made by commentators on OA (whether proponents or opponents). (See: "Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA").

(3) Two Ways Not to Try to Mandate OA: Too Strong and Too Weak: Gideon Burton is a proponent of a green OA mandate at his own university (Brigham Young University, BYU), and this is very timely, valuable, and welcome. But in advocating the Harvard mandate model -- which is not just a mandate to provide green, gratis OA by depositing articles in the institutional repository, but a requirement for authors to successfully negotiate with their publishers the retention of certain re-use rights -- Gideon is advocating a mandate that is both stronger and weaker than necessary. Not only does such a nonoptimal mandate model make it less likely that a consensus will be successfully reached on adopting an OA mandate at all (has BYU adopted this OA mandate?) but it also makes full author compliance uncertain even if a consensus on adoption is successfully achieved. (See: "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?")

The reason the Harvard mandate model is too strong is that it requires more than just self-archiving in the university's IR: It requires successful rights renegotiation by each author, with each publisher. But since only Harvard authors are subject to the mandate, and not their publishers, the successful outcome of such a negotiation cannot be guaranteed. So the Harvard mandate allows authors to opt out -- which in turn weakens it into something less than a mandate, as authors need not comply. The mandate is too strong, in that it demands more than necessary, which in turn makes it necessary to allow opt-out, weakening it more than necessary. And the mandate is also needlesly weak in that it fails to require immediate deposit, without opt-out, irrespective of the success or failure of rights renegotiations. On the Harvard model, if any author elects to opt out of rights renegotiation, he need not deposit at all.

And yet a mandate to deposit the author's final, peer-reviewed draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, regardless of whether rights have or have not been successfully renegotiated, can provide immediate OA to at least 63% of deposits (as noted above, because 63% of journals are already green on author OA self-archiving) and immediate "Almost-OA" for the remaining 37% (thanks to the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button, whereby any user webwide who reaches any deposit to which access is closed rather than open -- because the publisher has vetoed or embargoed OA to the deposit -- can, with just one click, request a single copy for personal research use, and the author can in turn, likewise with just one click, authorize the immediate automatic emailing of that single copy to the requester by the IR software).

"Almost OA" can tide over research usage needs during any publisher embargo period -- but only if immediate deposit is mandated, without opt-out. The Harvard model does not mandate immediate deposit, without opt-out. Most Harvard authors may have the clout and the gumption to successfully negotiate rights retention anyway, but it is far from clear that all, most or even many authors at other universities worldwide would have Harvard-authors' clout or gumption. So not only are many likely to opt out of such an opt-out mandate, but they and their institutions are hence far less likely to opt for adopting such a needlessly strong (and weak) mandate in the first place.

So I suggest that BYU (and all other universities -- and funders too) opt for the optimal green gratis OA mandate -- Immediate Deposit (without Opt-Out) plus Optional Access-Setting (as OA or Closed Access plus the "Almost-OA" Button). (I call this mandate the IDOA mandate and Peter Suber calls it the DDR (Dual Deposit Release) mandate.) If a stronger mandate can successfully achieve consensus on adoption, then by all means adopt that! But on no account delay or imperil achieving successful consensus on adopting a mandate at all, by insisting on a needlessly stronger mandate -- and on no account needlessly weaken the mandate by allowing opt-out from deposit itself. The devil is indeed in these seemingly minor details. (See: "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The JISC/SIRIS "Report of the Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions Study" (November 2008) "was commissioned by JISC to produce a set of practical recommendations for steps that can be taken to improve the interactions between institutional and subject repositories in the UK" but it fails to make clear the single most important reason why Institutional Repositories' "desired ‘critical mass’ of content is far from having been achieved."

The following has been repeatedly demonstrated (1) in cross-national, cross-disciplinary surveys (by Alma Swan, uncited in the report) on what authors state that they will and won't do and (2) in outcome studies (by Arthur Sale, likewise uncited in the report) that confirm the survey findings, reporting what authors actually do:

Most authors will not deposit until and unless their universities and/or their funders make deposit mandatory. But if and when deposit is made mandatory, over 80% will deposit, and deposit willingly. (A further 15% will deposit reluctantly, and 5% will not comply with the mandate at all.) In contrast, the spontaneous (unmandated) deposit rate is and remains at about 15%, for years now (and adding incentives and assistance but no mandate only raises this deposit rate to about 30%).

The JISC/SIRIS report merely states: "Whether deposit of content is mandatory is a decision that will be made by each institution," but it does not even list the necessity of mandating deposit as one of its recommendations, even though it is the crucial determinant of whether or not the institutional repository ever manages to attract its target content.

Nor does the JISC/SIRIS report indicate how institutional and funder mandates reinforce one another, nor how to make both mandates and locus of deposit systematically convergent and complementary (deposit institutionally, harvest centrally) rather than divergent and competitive -- though surely that is the essence of "Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions."

There are now 58 deposit mandates already adopted worldwide (28 from universties/faculties, including Southampton, Glasgow, Liège, Harvard and Stanford, and 30 from funders, including 6/7 Research Councils UK, European Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health) plus at least 11 known mandate proposals pending (including a unanimous recommendation from the European Universities Association council, for its 791 member universities in 46 countries, plus a recommendation to the European Commission from the European Heads of Research Councils).

It is clear now that mandated OA self-archiving is the way that the world will reach universal OA at long last. Who will lead and who will follow will depend on who grasps this, at long last, and takes the initiative. Otherwise, there's not much point in giving or taking advice on the interactions of empty repositories...

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40.

Swan A, Needham P, Probets P, Muir A, O 'Brien A, Oppenheim C, Hardy R and Rowland F (2004). Delivery, management and access model for E-prints and open access journals within further and higher education Report of JISC study. pp 1-121.

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On 30-Nov-08, at 9:08 AM, Neil Jacobs (JISC) replied in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

"Thanks Stevan,

You're right, of course, the report does not cover policies. The brief for the work was to look for practical ways that subject/funder and institutional repositories can work together within the constraints of the current policies of their host organisations. There are discussions to be had at the policy level, but we felt that there were also practical things to be done now, without waiting for that."

Hi Neil,

I was referring to the JISC report's recommendations, which mention a number of things, but not how to get the repositories filled (despite noting the problem that they are empty).

It seems to me that the practical problems of what to do with -- and how to work together with -- empty repositories are trumped by the practical problem of how to get the repositories filled.

Moreover, the solution to the practical problem of how the repositories (both institutional and subject/funder) can work together is by no means independent of the practical problem of how to get them filled -- including the all-important question of the locus of direct deposit:

The crucial question (for both policy and practice) is whether direct deposit is to be divergent and competitive (as it is now, being sometimes institutional and sometimes central) or convergent and synergistic (as it can and ought to be), by systematically mandating convergent institutional deposit, mutually reinforced by both institutional and funder mandates, followed by central harvesting -- rather than divergent, competing mandates requiring deposits willy-nilly, resulting in confusion, understandable resistance to divergent or double deposit, and, most important, the failure to capitalize on funder mandates so as to reinforce institutional mandates.

Institutions, after all, are the producers of all refereed research output, in all subjects, and whether funded or unfunded. Get all those institutions to provide OA to all their own refereed research output, and you have 100% OA (and all the central harvests from it that you like).

As it stands, however, funder and institutional mandates are pulling researchers needlessly in divergent directions. And (many) funder mandates in particular, instead of adding their full weight behind the drive to get all refereed research to be made OA, are thinking, parochially, only of their own funded fiefdom, by arbitrarily insisting on direct deposit in central repositories that could easily harvest instead from the institutional repositories, if convergent institutional deposit were mandated by all -- with the bonus that all research, and all institutions, would be targeted by all mandates.

It is not too late to fix this. It is still early days. There is no need to take the status quo for granted, especially given that most repositories are still empty.

I hope the reply will not be the usual (1) "What about researchers whose institutions still don't have IRs?": Let those author's deposit provisionally in DEPOT for now, from which they can be automatically exported to their IRs as soon as they are created, using the SWORD protocol. With all mandates converging systematically on IRs, you can be sure that this will greatly facilitate and accelerate both IR creation and IR deposit mandate adoption. But with just unfocussed attempts to accommodate to the recent, random, and unreflecting status quo, all that is guaranteed is to perpetuate it.

Nor is the right reply (2) "Since all repositories, institutional and subject/funder, are OAI-interoperable, it doesn't matter where authors deposit!" Yes, they are interoperable, and yes, it would not matter where authors deposited -- if they were indeed all depositing in one or the other. But most authors are not depositing, and that is the point. Moreover, most institutions are not mandating deposit at all yet and that is the other point. Funder mandates can help induce institutions -- the universal research providers -- to create IRs and to adopt institutional deposit mandates if the funder mandates are convergent on IR deposit. But funder mandates have the opposite effect if they instead insist on central deposit. So the fact that both types of repository are interoperable is beside the point.

Une puce à l'oreille (not to be confused with a gadfly),

Stevan

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

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Ian Stuart (IS) and Charles Oppenheim (CO) added, in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

IS: "Is [it] strictly true [that 'Institutions, after all, are the producers of all refereed research output, in all subjects, and whether funded or unfunded.']? My understanding was that, particularly on the social sciences arena, a number of academics continue to write & publish, even though they have retired. No? (another example of research output that requires the like of the Depot for an OA deposit service...)"

CO: "Ian is correct, especdially in the humanities. Also, there is a large amount of STM scholarly output that comes from industry, especially the pharmaceutical industry."

Yes, both "problems" are trivially easily solved, and neither is an exception to the fact that both institutional and funder deposit mandates need to be systematically convergent -- on institutional repository (IR) deposit -- rather than arbitrarily divergent (on willy-nilly institutional and funder/subject repository deposit):

(1) The drivers of universal OA are institutional and funder mandates. So, by definition, a retired author, institutionally unaffiliated and unfunded, cannot be mandated to deposit! But if they are minded to deposit (as they certainly will be, as OA becomes universal thanks to OA mandates), they can deposit in back-up repositories like the UK's DEPOT. (So, yes, DEPOT and similar back-up repositories elsewhere are an excellent resource for tiding over authors who do not have institutions, or whose institutions do not yet have IRs.)

(2) Or retired academics can deposit in the IR of their former institution: Universities not only have a long tradition of providing facilities for their retired academics, but they have a special interest, now, in showcasing their past and present research output. Whether officially "emeritus" or not, the research output of their own retired staff certainly falls within that ambit. (At UQAM, for example, retired faculty officially retain the right to deposit their publications in UQAM's IR.)

(3) Universities also have a tradition of providing facilities, where possible, for unaffiliated academics. So, given that all IRs are interoperable, and given that we are talking about published, peer-reviewed research articles, a university tradition will quite naturally evolve for IRs to host the publications of unaffiliated scholars and scientists in need of a repository to make their published work OA.

(4) The pharmaceutical industry may well be secretive about its unpublished research, but it has exactly the same interest as all other research institutions in providing access to its own published research (that's why they publish it!) -- and in gaining access to the published research of other institutions. Hence it is likely that the R&D wing of pharmaceutical companies (and other industrial research producers) will have IRs and IR mandates of their own, as the movement toward universal OA grows. (And where not, other institutional hosts or DEPOT will provide the natural solution.)

Again, I have to remind us all that the glaring and pressing immediate problem today is gapingly empty IRs where they are fully available to all their institutional authors, who are simply not depositing of their own accord ("Zeno's Paralysis"). The problem is not a press of authors desperate to deposit, but having no place to do so!

And the solution is institutional and funder deposit mandates, converging on the IRs of the universal providers of all research, in all subjects, funded and unfunded: the institutions (mostly universities, partly independent research institutions, partly the R&D of commercial institutions).

We should not now be fretting about borderline cases and putative exceptions whilst we still have not yet taken the obvious and long overdue steps needed to take care of the mainstay.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

'the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is wholly impossible... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory.'

Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) Appearance and Reality

A critique of metrics and European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) by History of Science, Technology and Medicine journal editors has been posted on the Classicists list. ERIH looks like an attempt to set up a bigger, better alternative to the ISI Journal Impact Factor (JIF), tailored specifically for the Humanities. The protest from the journal editors looks as if it is partly anti-JIF, partly opposed to the ERIH approach and appointees, and partly anti-metrics.

Their vision seems rather narrow. In the Open Access era, metrics are becoming far richer, more diverse, more transparent and more answerable than just the ISI JIF: author/article citations, author/article downloads, book citations, growth/decay metrics, co-citation metrics, hub/authority metrics, endogamy/exogamy metrics, link metrics, tag metrics, comment metrics, semiometrics (text-mining) and much more. The days of the univariate JIF are already over. This is not the time to reject metrics; it is the time to test and validate, jointly, as full a battery of candidate metrics as possible, but validating the battery separately for each discipline, against peer ranking or other validated or face-valid standards (as in the UK's RAE 2008).

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220, Trondheim, Norway.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J. W., Champion, T. and Harnad, S. (2006) Extending journal-based research impact assessment to book-based disciplines. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

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

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.

Harnad, S. (2008) Self-Archiving, Metrics and Mandates. Science Editor 31(2) 57-59

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista.

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Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:56:22 +0100
Sender: Classicists
From: Nick Lowe
Subject: History of Science pulls out of ERIH

[As editorial boards and subject associations in other humanities subjects contemplate their options, this announcement by journals in History of Science seems worth passing on in full. Thanks to Stephen Clark for the forward.]

Journals under Threat: A Joint Response from History of Science, Technology and Medicine Editors

We live in an age of metrics. All around us, things are being standardized, quantified, measured. Scholars concerned with the work of science and technology must regard this as a fascinating and crucial practical, cultural and intellectual phenomenon. Analysis of the roots and meaning of metrics and metrology has been a preoccupation of much of the best work in our field for the past quarter century at least. As practitioners of the interconnected disciplines that make up the field of science studies we understand how significant, contingent and uncertain can be the process of rendering nature and society in grades, classes and numbers. We now confront a situation in which our own research work is being subjected to putatively precise accountancy by arbitrary and unaccountable agencies.

Some may already be aware of the proposed European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), an initiative originating with the European Science Foundation. The ERIH is an attempt to grade journals in the humanities - including "history and philosophy of science". The initiative proposes a league table of academic journals, with premier, second and third divisions. According to the European Science Foundation, ERIH "aims initially to identify, and gain more visibility for, top-quality European Humanities research published in academic journals in, potentially, all European languages". It is hoped "that ERIH will form the backbone of a fully-fledged research information system for the Humanities". What is meant, however, is that ERIH will provide funding bodies and other agencies in Europe and elsewhere with an allegedly exact measure of research quality. In short, if research is published in a premier league journal it will be recognized as first rate; if it appears somewhere in the lower divisions, it will be rated (and not funded) accordingly.

This initiative is entirely defective in conception and execution. Consider the major issues of accountability and transparency. The process of producing the graded list of journals in science studies was overseen by a committee of four (the membership is currently listed at ). This committee cannot be considered representative. It was not selected in consultation with any of the various disciplinary organizations that currently represent our field such as the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the British Society for the History of Science, the History of Science Society, the Philosophy of Science Association, the Society for the History of Technology or the Society for Social Studies of Science. Journal editors were only belatedly informed of the process and its relevant criteria or asked to provide any information regarding their publications.

No indication has been given of the means through which the list was compiled; nor how it might be maintained in the future. The ERIH depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of conduct and publication of research in our field, and in the humanities in general. Journals' quality cannot be separated from their contents and their review processes. Great research may be published anywhere and in any language. Truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream. Our journals are various, heterogeneous and distinct. Some are aimed at a broad, general and international readership, others are more specialized in their content and implied audience. Their scope and readership say nothing about the quality of their intellectual content. The ERIH, on the other hand, confuses internationality with quality in a way that is particularly prejudicial to specialist and non-English language journals.

In a recent report, the British Academy, with judicious understatement, concludes that "the European Reference Index for the Humanities as presently conceived does not represent a reliable way in which metrics of peer-reviewed publications can be constructed" (Peer Review: the Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences, September 2007: ). Such exercises as ERIH can become self- fulfilling prophecies. If such measures as ERIH are adopted as metrics by funding and other agencies, then many in our field will conclude that they have little choice other than to limit their publications to journals in the premier division. We will sustain fewer journals, much less diversity and impoverish our discipline. Along with many others in our field, this Journal has concluded that we want no part of this dangerous and misguided exercise. This joint Editorial is being published in journals across the fields of history of science and science studies as an expression of our collective dissent and our refusal to allow our field to be managed and appraised in this fashion. We have asked the compilers of the ERIH to remove our journals' titles from their lists.

Hanne Andersen (Centaurus)
Roger Ariew & Moti Feingold (Perspectives on Science)
A. K. Bag (Indian Journal of History of Science)
June Barrow-Green & Benno van Dalen (Historia mathematica)
Keith Benson (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences)
Marco Beretta (Nuncius)
Michel Blay (Revue d'Histoire des Sciences)
Cornelius Borck (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Science, Technology and Human Values)
Massimo Bucciantini & Michele Camerota (Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies)
Jed Buchwald and Jeremy Gray (Archive for History of Exact Sciences)
Vincenzo Cappelletti & Guido Cimino (Physis)
Roger Cline (International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology)
Stephen Clucas & Stephen Gaukroger (Intellectual History Review)
Hal Cook & Anne Hardy (Medical History)
Leo Corry, Alexandre Métraux & Jürgen Renn (Science in Context)
D. Diecks & J. Uffink (Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics)
Brian Dolan & Bill Luckin (Social History of Medicine)
Hilmar Duerbeck & Wayne Orchiston (Journal of Astronomical History & Heritage)
Moritz Epple, Mikael Hård, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Volker Roelcke (NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin)
Steven French (Metascience)
Willem Hackmann (Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society)
Bosse Holmqvist (Lychnos) Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology)
Mary Fissell & Randall Packard (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
Robert Fox (Notes & Records of the Royal Society)
Jim Good (History of the Human Sciences)
Michael Hoskin (Journal for the History of Astronomy)
Ian Inkster (History of Technology)
Marina Frasca Spada (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)
Nick Jardine (Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Trevor Levere (Annals of Science)
Bernard Lightman (Isis)
Christoph Lüthy (Early Science and Medicine)
Michael Lynch (Social Studies of Science)
Stephen McCluskey & Clive Ruggles (Archaeostronomy: the Journal of Astronomy in Culture)
Peter Morris (Ambix)
E. Charles Nelson (Archives of Natural History)
Ian Nicholson (Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences)
Iwan Rhys Morus (History of Science)
John Rigden & Roger H Stuewer (Physics in Perspective)
Simon Schaffer (British Journal for the History of Science)
Paul Unschuld (Sudhoffs Archiv)
Peter Weingart (Minerva)
Stefan Zamecki (Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki)
Viviane Quirke, RCUK Academic Fellow in twentieth-century Biomedicine, Secretary of the BSHS, Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Oxford Brookes University

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SUMMARY: Unlike with OA's primary target, journal articles, the deposit of the full-texts of books in Open Access Repositories cannot be mandated, only encouraged. However, the deposit of book metadata + plus + reference-lists can and should be mandated. That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need most: a book citation index. ISI's Web of Science only covers citations of books by (indexed) journal articles, but book-based disciplines' biggest need is book-to-book citations. Citebase could provide that, once the book reference metadata are being deposited in the IRs too, rather than just article postprints. (Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to book citation count.) Analogues of "download" metrics for books are also potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank. In the Humanities it also matters for credit and impact how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books ("Demotic Metrics"). IRs can not only (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book metadata deposits, to add to their IR stats. IRs can also already harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts today, as a first step toward constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index. The Dublin humanities metrics conference was also concerned about other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts. Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and  web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources. We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.

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The deposit of the full-texts of book-chapters and monographs in Open Access Repositories should of course be encouraged wherever possible, but, unlike with journal articles, full-text book deposit itself cannot be mandated.

The most important additional thing that the OA movement should be singling out and emphasizing -- over and above the Immediate Deposit (IR) Mandate plus the email-eprint-request Button and the use of metrics to motivate mandates -- is the author deposit of all book metadata+plus+reference+lists in the author's OA Institutional Repository (IR). That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need the most.

This has been mentioned before, as a possibility and a desideratum for institutional (and funder) OA policy, but it is now crystal clear why it is so important (and so easy to implement).

By systematically ensuring the IR deposit of each book's bibliographic metadata plus its cited-works bibliography, institutions (and funders) are actually creating a book citation index. 

This became apparent (again) at the Dublin humanities metrics conference, when ISI's VP Jim Pringle repeated ISI 's (rather weak) response to the Humanities' need for a book citation index, pointing out that "ISI does cover citations of books -- by journal articles."

But that of course is anything but sufficient for book-based disciplines, whose concern is mainly about book-to-book citations! 

Yet that is precisely what can be harvested out of IRs (by, for example, Citebase, or a Citebase-like scientometric engine) --  if only the book reference metadata, too, are deposited in the IRs, rather than only article postprints. That immediately begins making the IR network into a unique and much-needed book-citation (distributed) database. (Moreover, Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to this.)

And there's more: Obviously OA IRs will not be able to get book download counts -- analogous to article download counts -- when the only thing deposited is the book's metadata and reference list. However, in his paper at this Dublin conference, Janus Linmans -- in cleaving to his age-old bibliometric measure of library book-holdings lists as the surrogate for book citation counts in his analyses -- inadvertently gave me another obvious idea, over and above the deposit and harvesting of book reference metadata:

Library holdings are just one, weak, indirect metric of book usage (and Google Book Collections already collects some of those data). But far better analogues of "downloads" for books are potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank, but eventually including conventional book vendors too (metrics do not end with web-based data):

The researchers from the Humanities stressed in Dublin that the book-to-book (and journal-to-book and book-to-journal) citation counts would be most welcome and useful, but in the Humanities even those do not tell the whole story, because it also matters for the credit and impact of a Humanities' researcher how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books too. (Let us call these non-academic metrics "Demotic Metrics.")

Well, starting with a systematic Amazon book-sales count, per book deposited in the IR  (and eventually extended to many book-vendors, online and conventional), the ball can be set in motion very easily. IRs can not only formally (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) systematically harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book items to add to their IR stats for each deposit.

And there's more: IRs can also harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts, already today, as a first approximation to constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index, even before the practice of depositing book metadata/reference has progressed far enough to provide useful data on its own: Whenever book metadata are deposited in an IR, the IR automatically does (i) an Amazon query (number of sales of this book) plus (ii) a Google-Books/Google-Scholar query (number of citations of this book).

These obvious and immediately feasible additions to an institutional OA mandate and to its IR software configuration and functionality would not only yield immediate useful and desirable metrics and motivate Humanists to become even more supportive of OA and metrics, but it would help set in motion practices that (yet again) are so obviously optimal and feasible for science and scholarship as to be inevitable. 

We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.

One further spin-off of the Dublin Metrics Conference was other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts! Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and  web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources.

In "Appearance and Reality," Bradley (1897/2002) wrote (of Ayer) that 'the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is wholly impossible ... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory.

Well, one might say the same of those who are skeptical about metrics: There are only two ways to measure the quality, importance or impact of a piece of work: Subjectively, by asking experts for their judgment (peer review: and then you have a polling metric!) or objectively, by counting objective data of various kinds. But of course counting and then declaring those counts "metrics" for some criterion or other, by fiat, is not enough. Those candidate metrics have to be validated against that criterion, either by showing that they correlate highly with the criterion, or that they correlate highly with an already validated correlate of the criterion. One natural criterion is expert judgment itself: peer review. Objective metrics can then be validated against peer review. Book citation metrics need to be added to the rich and growing battery of candidate metrics, and so do "demotic metrics."

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003) Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220, Trondheim, Norway.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).

Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J. W., Champion, T. and Harnad, S. (2006) Extending journal-based research impact assessment to book-based disciplines. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16.

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

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.

Harnad, S. (2008) Self-Archiving, Metrics and Mandates. Science Editor 31(2) 57-59

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista.

The Brisbane Declaration on Open Access at last puts some real practical policy content and substance into the Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin series, along the lines of the UK Select Committee Recommendation and Berlin 3. Please read what the Archivangelist of the Antipodes, Arthur Sale, one if its main architects, has to say about the Brisbane Declaration. If this is implemented planet-wide, we have universal Open Access within a year.

Stevan Harnad

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From: Arthur Sale
Date: Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: Brisbane declaration on Open Access
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM

...May I tease out a few strands of the Brisbane Declaration for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference in Brisbane.

1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of the active members of the repository community in Australia.

2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what Australia should do about making its research accessible. It is not a policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are inevitably needed in a formal policy.

3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research.

4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data and knowledge (in the humanities and arts).

5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs ("Versions of Record") were not the preferred version of an article to hold in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear that it is the final draft ("Accepted Manuscript") which is preferred. The "Version of Record" remains the citable object.

6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA when possible).

While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a cusp.

What are the chances of a matching declaration in other countries?

Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania

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Following the conference on Open Access and Research held in September in Australia, and hosted by Queensland University of Technology, the following statement was developed and has the endorsement of over sixty participants.

Brisbane Declaration

Preamble: The participants recognise Open Access as a strategic enabling activity, on which research and inquiry will rely at international, national, university, group and individual levels.

Strategies: Therefore the participants resolve the following as a summary of the basic strategies that Australia must adopt:

1. Every citizen should have free open access to publicly funded research, data and knowledge.

2. Every Australian university should have access to a digital repository to store its research outputs for this purpose.

3. As a minimum, this repository should contain all materials reported in the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).

4. The deposit of materials should take place as soon as possible, and in the case of published research articles should be of the author's final draft at the time of acceptance so as to maximize open access to the material.

Brisbane, September, 2008