Keystroke Mandates

("Re: RCUK fails to end ‘green’ embargo confusion" THE 14 March 2013)

What a mess! With publishers eagerly pawing at the Golden Door, and RCUK hopelessly waffling at Green embargo limits and their enforcement.

But relief is on the way! HEFCE has meanwhile quietly and gently proposed a solution that will moot all this relentless cupidity and stupidity.

HEFCE has proposed to mandate that in order to be eligible for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the final, peer-reviewed drafts of all papers published as of 2014 will have to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon publication: no delays, no embargoes, no exceptions -- irrespective of whether the paper is published in a Gold OA journal or a subscription journal, and irrespective of the allowable length of the embargo on making the deposit OA: The deposit itself must be immediate.

This has the immense benefit that while the haggling continues about how much will be paid for Gold OA and how long Green OA may be embargoed, all papers will be faithfully deposited -- and deposited in institutional repositories, which means that all UK universities will thereby be recruited, as of 2014, to monitor and ensure that the deposits are made, and made immediately. (Institutions have an excellent track record for making sure that everything necessary for REF is done, and done reliably, because a lot of money and prestige is at stake for them.)

And one of the ingenious features of the proposed HEFCE/REF Green OA mandate is the stipulation that deposit may not be delayed: Authors cannot wait till just before the next REF, six years later, to do it. If the deposit was not immediate, the paper is ineligible for REF.

And, most brilliant stroke of all, this ensures that it is not just the 4 papers that are ultimately chosen for submission to REF that are deposited immediately -- for that choice is always a retrospective one, made after looking over the past 6 years' work, to pick the four best papers. Rarely will this be known in advance. So the safest policy will be to deposit all papers immediately, just in case.

This is precisely the compliance assurance mechanism the RCUK mandate so desperately needs in order to succeed, but the RCUK policy-makers have not yet had the wit to conceive and adopt. Well, HEFCE/REF have done it for them, bless them.

But immediate-deposit is not immediate-OA you say? Indeed it is not. It does, however, overcome OA's most formidable hurdle, which is getting all those papers into the institutional repositories, and right away: keystrokes. It is just those keystrokes that have stood between the research world and OA for over over two decades now.

Once the institutional repositories are reliably being filled to 100%, does anyone with the slightest imagination doubt what will follow, as nature (and human nature) takes its course?

First, the repositories will facilitate sending reprints to those who request a single copy for research purposes, with one click each. Sending reprints is not OA; researchers have been doing it for a half century. But they used to have to do it by reading Current Contents or scanning journals' contents lists, mailing reprint requests, and then waiting and hoping that authors would take the time and trouble and expense to mail them a reprint, as requested (and many did). But now the whole transaction is just one click each, and almost immediate, if the papers have been deposited and both parties are at the wheel.

But that's still just Almost-OA. Once immediate-deposit is mandated, however, about 60% of those deposits can be made immediately OA, because about 60% of journals already endorse immediate, unembargoed Green OA. (RCUK has already succeeded is dragging down that figure to somewhat closer to 50/50 with its perverse preference for Gold, inspiring hybrid Gold publishers to offer Gold and increase Green embargo lengths to try to force UK authors to pick paid Gold over cost-free Green).

Now that's about half immediate-OA plus half Almost-OA to tide over researcher needs during the embargo. But does anyone have any doubt about what will happen next? As OA and Almost-OA grow, and the research community tastes more and more of what it's like to have half immediate-OA and half Almost-OA, all the disciplines that have not yet had the sense to do it will begin to do what almost 100% of physicists have already been doing for 20 years now without so much as a moment's hesitation or a "by your leave":

That last remaining keystroke, once a paper is written, revised, accepted and deposited -- the keystroke that makes the paper OA -- will be done sooner and sooner, more and more, until the embargoes with which publishers are trying to hold research hostage will all die their natural and well-deserved deaths as the research community learns to do the obvious, optimal and inevitable, in the online era.

(Nor will peer-reviewed journal publishing die, as publishers keep warning menacingly: It will simply convert to Gold OA -- but only after the pressure from Green OA has forced journals to phase out all obsolete products and services and their costs: that means phasing out the print version and the online version, and offloading all access-providing and archiving onto the global network of Green OA institutional repositories. Then, instead of double-paying for Gold OA, as Finch folly and RCUK recklessness would have us do -- subscriptions plus Gold OA fees -- post-Green Gold OA will just be a fee for the peer review service, at a fair, affordable and sustainable price, paid for out of a fraction of institutions' annual savings from subscription cancellations instead of out of scarce research funds, over and above subscriptions, as now. Pre-Green Gold is Fool's Gold: Post-Green Gold is Fair Gold.)