Optimizing the European Commission's Open Access Mandate

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SUMMARY: The European Commission (EC) Grant Agreement mandates that "an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission" but does not specify how to provide it.
   This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR).
   That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR.
   The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requests direct central deposit, should adopt exactly the same implementational detail. Institutional IR deposit and central harvesting would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates.

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N. Miradon wrote on the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

NM: Professor Harnad advises that "...It should be a part of the fulfillment condition on the recipients of all EC research funding -- both the funded researchers and their institutions -- that all refereed research publications resulting from the funding must be self-archived in the fundee's institutional repository. They (or their metadata) can then be harvested/collected/ imported/exported to the EC from the IRs..."[1]
      Diffidently, I would suggest that the advised "self-archiving in the fundees' institutional repositories" should be implemented in the Commission's next Framework Programme of Research and Development (FP8).
      This, because in the current Framework Programme (FP7) there is a general requirement that "...an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission..." (para II.30.4 of Annex II - General Conditions, FP7 Grant Agreement)[2].
      So the Commission already has its own institutional repository, containing every single publication produced under FP7.
      Tweaking that repository to make it harvestable is likely to be easier than making even a minor rewrite of the Grant Agreement.

Not even a minor rewrite of the Grant Agreement is needed (and a great deal is at stake):

The EC Grant Agreement does not specify how "...an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission..."

This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify (in form-letters or instructions to the FP7 grant recipients) that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR).

That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR.

It is infinitely more useful, sensible, and conducive to the growth of OA IRs, OA self-archiving mandates and OA itself for the Commission's collection to harvest from the recipients' IRs -- rather than just for EC-funded research to be back-harvestable by authors and institutions from the EC's central collection:

Authors and their institutions already have copies of their own research output. The objective is to get all that research output deposited, whether EC-funded or not. The power of the EC mandate can easily be extended far beyond merely the research that the EC funds, by simply specifying the recipient's own IR as the preferred locus of the direct deposit, with the EC simply harvesting the deposits for its central collection therefrom.

Exactly the same recommendation -- on how this minor detail in the implementation of its OA mandate would make a vast difference for the growth to OA -- has been made to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requested direct central deposit instead of the institutional IR deposit and central harvesting that would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates.

The OA mandates of:

European Research Council,
Australian Research Council
Austria's Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Belgium's Research Foundation Flanders
India's National Knowledge Commission
Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology,
Russian Academy of Science's Central Economics and Mathematics Institute
Swiss National Science Foundation
most of the Research Councils UK

have already specified institutional deposit either as the sole mode of direct deposit, or as one of the options.

How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates

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

NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy

NM: The proposal that the European Commission should "set up a web-based repository for published project results" was suggested by EURAB and subsequently supported by the Cour des Comptes [footnote 1 of page 17 of [0]).
      But Professor Harnad rejects this idea. He says that instead of running its own repository, the European Commission should harvest from the recipients' Institutional Repositories [1].

I did not say the EC should not run its own repository. I said they should not mandate direct deposit therein. They should mandate direct deposit in the author's IR and then harvest to the EC repository from there.

And EURAB did not insist on direct central deposit: "The repository may be a local institutional and/or a subject repository".

NM: This would be fine, if all 100% of those institutional repositories were up and running. But are they?

Each of the universities and research institutions of Europe is only a free piece of software and a couple of days of sysad time away from having its own IR. If the Commission specified the recipient's IR as the preferred locus of deposit, most of the institutions that don't yet have an IR would set one up.

(And for those institutions that don't yet have an IR, there are always interim IRs like DEPOT (and, I hope, soon, through Prof. Bernard Rentier's EurOpenScholar and U. Southampton, "EurOpenDepot") as well as consortial IRs, to tide them over.)

The problem is not and never has been getting an IR, but getting the IR filled with its intended OA content. That's why funder mandates need to complement institutional mandates, with both systematically converging on the IR as the locus of deposit.

NM: I just looked for ["Seventh Framework Programme" projects] in Google. The first hit was the "WELTEMP" project (Water Electrolysis at Elevated Temperatures) [2].
      I could not find any of the WELTEMP partners [3] listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories [4].
      The coordinator's university (DTU) is listed on Den Danske Forskningsdatabase // Danish Research Database [5]; but today (2008-04-28) this says "NB! The Danish Research Database is currently not being updated, we are working on a new solution planned to release in the 1st quarter of 2008". As regards Technical University of Denmark (DTU), it says "literature and projects available for 1996 - 1999 (2000 onwards will follow)".

The reason IRs are running fallow today is because neither their institutions nor their funders are mandating deposit in them. That is my point!

All research originates from institutions. If the Commission mandates deposit of its EC-funded research institution-externally, it is needlessly doing far less than it easily can, in order to generate 100% OA for all European research, from all disciplines and all institutions, whether EC-funded or not.

NM: I have nothing against WELTREMP or any of its partners. On the contrary, I suspect that they are representative of quite a lot of grant recipients, i.e. that somewhat less than 100% of Framework Programme 7 grantees have got a fully functional Institutional Repository. This may have changed by the time we get to the next Framework Programme - lets hope that it has. But for the moment, since the Commission already has a repository with 100% coverage, I cannot think that EURAB and the Cour des Comptes are wrong to suggest that this repository simply be put on the web.

The objective is not to get EC-funded research into a central EC repository (though that is welcome too). The objective is to get all EC-funded research OA (along with all EC-unfunded research). An extremely minor detail in the implementation of the EC's deposit mandate -- namely, depositing institutionally and then harvesting centrally -- would make a very major difference for OA growth in Europe.

The concern about institutions that do not yet have IRs can be accommodated by stipulating that direct deposit in the grant recipient's own IR (and sending the URL to the EC) is the EC's preferred means of submission, but direct submission is permissible too.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum