SUMMARY: An Indiana University study (on the Institutional Repository of the University of Southampton) by Xia (2008) has tested the hypothesis that physicists who already habitually self-archive in an Open Access (OA) Central Repository (Arxiv) would be more likely to self-archive in their own institution’s OA Institutional Repository (IR). The outcome of the study was that the hypothesis is incorrect: If anything, veteran Arxiv self-archivers are more resistant to IR deposit than ordinary nonarchivers, because they neither wish to change their longstanding locus of deposit, nor do they wish to double-deposit.
   This outcome is quite natural and to be expected. The solution for this relatively small population of seasoned self-archivers is for their institution-external deposits to be automatically imported back into their IRs using the SWORD protocol (which can also be used to export automatically from IRs to central repositories). There is no need for veteran self-archivers to change their practices or to double-deposit.
   It is not the 15% of authors who already self-archive (whether institution-externally or on their own institutional websites) that are the problem for OA: The problem is the 85% who do not yet self-archive. It is in order to set the keystrokes of those nonarchivers in motion at long last — for their own benefit and that of their employing institutions as well as the tax-paying public that funds their research — that Green OA self-archiving mandates are now being adopted by their institutions and funders.
   When researchers have been polled (by Alma Swan & Sheridan Brown), the vast majority (95%), across all fields, have responded that they would comply with self-archiving mandates by their institutions and/or their funders (over 80% of them reporting that they would comply willingly). And actual outcome studies (by Arthur Sale) have confirmed that this is indeed what happens, with near-100% self-archiving rates reached within about two years once mandated — but continuing to languish at the baseline 15% self-archiving rate (30% with incentives ad assistance) if left unmandated.

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Xia, J. (2008) A Comparison of Subject and Institutional Repositories in Self-archiving Practices. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34 (6):489-495.

(1) The Xia (2008) study‘s finding is quite correct that many more Southampton physicists self-archive centrally in Arxiv rather than institutionally in Southamtpon University’s Institutional Repository (IR). If the same study had been conducted at any other university, the outcome would almost certainly have been identical. The reason is that physicists have been self-archiving centrally in Arxiv since 1991, and today, quite understandably, they have no desire either to switch to local IR self-archiving or to do double-depositing.

(2) This was already known at Southampton, and other institutions know it about their own physicists.

(3) Consequently, it is not at clear why anyone would have expected the opposite result, namely, that longstanding Arxiv self-archivers would be quite happy to switch to local IR self-archiving, or to do double-depositing!

(4) In reality, the problem — for both OA and for IRs — is not the physicists who are already self-archiving, regardless of where they are self-archiving. If all researchers were doing what the physicists have been doing since 1991 (and computer scientists have been doing since even earlier), 100% OA would be long behind us, and IRs could all be filled, if we wished, trivially, by simply importing back all their own institution-external deposits, automatically, using something like the SWORD protocol.

(5) The real problem is hence not the minority of spontaneous self-archivers of long standing (globally, spontaneous self-archiving overall hovers at about 15% overall); the problem is the vast majority, which consists of nonarchivers: Of OA’s target content — the annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines and institutions — 85% is not yet being self-archived. It is for that reason that self-archiving mandates have proved to be necessary.

(6) In choosing to analyze the data on Southampton — which is indeed a hotbed of OA, OA IRs, OA self-archiving, and OA self-archiving mandates — this study has unfortunately chosen to analyze the wrong IR and the wrong mandate! It is Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) that has the planet’s first and longest standing self-archiving mandate (since 2002-2003), and it is the ECS IR that has a full-text deposit rate near 100%. 

(7) The 2008 study analyzed the self-archiving rate for physicists, in the university-wide IR. But the University as a whole only has a university-wide mandate (and a rather vague one) since April 2008, and even that has not yet been publicized or implemented yet. (The university did have a longer standing requirement to enter metadata in the IR for the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), mostly by library proxy deposit, which is why the study found so many abstracts without full texts therein, for there was no requirement to deposit the full text.)

(8) As a consequence, the study’s findings — although quite accurate regarding the general resistance of veteran Arxiv self-archivers to self-archiving alternatively or additionally in their own institution’s IR — do not really have any bearing on mandates and mandated IR behavior in general.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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[The following is a posting to the American Scientist Open Access Forum by Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège.]

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Yesterday, Klaus Graf reacted rather strongly to the announcement of the Liège University repository mandate, stating [in theLiège mandate works, this message tells it all much better.

Bernard Rentier

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Madame, Monsieur, Cher(e) Collègue,

The increase in international visibility of the ULg [Université de Liège] and its researchers, mainly through their publications, as well as the support for the worldwide development of an open and free access to scientific works (Open Access) are two essential objectives at the heart of my action, as you probably know.

At my request, the Institutional Repository “ORBi” (Open Repository & Bibliography) has been set up at the ULg by the Libraries Network to meet these objectives.

[1] The experimental encoding phase based on volunteerism being now successfully completed, we can step forward and enter the “production phase” this Wednesday November 26th, 2008. I take this opportunity to thank all the professors and researchers who have already filed in ORBi hundreds of their references, 70% of them with the full text. Thanks to their patience, ORBi’s fine tuning could be achieved.

From today onward, it is incumbent upon each ULg member to feed ORBi with his/her own references. In this respect, the Administrative Board of the University has decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members:

– to deposit the bibliographic references of ALL their publications since 2002;

– to deposit the full text of ALL their articles published in periodicals since 2002.

Access to these full texts will only be granted with the author’s consent and according to the rules applicable to author’s rights and copyrights. The University is indeed very keen on respecting the rights of all stakeholders.

[2] For future publications, deposit in ORBi will be mandatory as soon as the article is accepted by the editor.

[3] I wish to remind you that, as announced a year ago in March 2007, starting October 1st, 2009, only those references introduced in ORBi will be taken into consideration as the official list of publications accompanying any curriculum vitæ in all evaluation procedures ‘in house’ (designations, promotions, grant applications, etc.).

Information seminars have been planned during the next months to allow every one of you to make the tool your own thing. Help is also accessible online, such as the simplified user’s guide (also available as a leaflet) and the Depositor’s Guide.

The development of ORBi offers multiple advantages not only to the Institution, but also to the researchers and their teams, such as:

– a considerable speeding up of the dissemination and visibility of the scientific works (as soon as publication approval is granted;

– a considerable increase in visibility for the published works through referencing in the main search engines (Googlescholar, OAI metaengines, etc.);

– centralised and perennial conservation of publications allowing multiple exploitation possibilities (integration in personal web pages, in institutional web pages, export of reference lists towards other applications and to funding organisations such as the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research); – etc.

I hope that, despite the time you are going to devote to this somewhat tedious task, you will soon realise the benefits of this institutional policy.

With many thanks,

Bernard Rentier
Rector
University of Liege
7, place du 20 Aout
4000 Liege, Belgium
Tel: +32-4-366 9700

ORBi, répertoire institutionnel de l’Université de Liège Vu sur la liste Biblio.fr

“Six mois après son démarrage, ORBi «Open Repository and Bibliography» dépasse déjà les 1200 références archivées dont près de 1000 avec texte intégral. Ces chiffres encourageants sont les résultats d’une politique ambitieuse mise en place à l’ULg (Université de Liège) en matière de dépôt en Open Access.”

Le Conseil d’Administration de l’Université a en effet décidé de rendre obligatoire :

– l’introduction des références de toutes les publications des membres de l’ULg depuis 2002 ;

– le dépôt de la version électronique intégrale de tous les articles de périodiques publiés par les membres de l’ULg depuis 2002.

ORBi
Annonce sur le blog du Recteur
BICTEL/e-ULg – Répertoire des thèses électroniques

An invaluable friend to Open Access, University of Southampton’s Professor Wendy Hall, as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007, not only presided over the adoption and implementation of the world’s first Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate, but she quietly went on to help get Green (ID/OA) Mandates adopted at the European level, as a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council as well as President of the British Computer Society (BCS) and member of the Prime Minister?s Council for Science and Technology. It is no small thanks to Wendy’s support that the UK in particular and Europe in general are leading the world in its inexorable progress toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for scientific and scholarly research, at long last.

And this is but one part of what Wendy has done for computer science, and science in general. (Dame Wendy was, among other things, the inventor of Microcosm, a harbinger of the Semantic Web, whose inventor — an obscure courtly figure by the name of Sir Tim Berners-Lee — has since likewise become one of Wendy’s Southampton departmental colleagues.)

Let us all celebrate her latest honour.

(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

Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (NORWAY* institutional-mandate)

Institution’s OA Eprint Archives

Institution’s OA Self-Archiving Mandate

Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (Nasjonalt kunnskapssenter for helsetjenesten, NoKC) adopted an Institutional Policy for Open Access to Scientific Publications, November 25, 2008.

All scientific publications by NoKC research staff “must” be deposited at the time of acceptance in Helsebiblioteket’s Research Archive (HeRA), the new institutional repository launched by the NoKC health library (Helsebiblioteket). For each deposit, HeRA will release as much as it can as soon as it can. For example, HeRA will respect publisher embargoes, but will release OA metadata during the period when the full-text may be embargoed.

[From Peter Suber’s Open Access News]

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SUMMARY: Free/Open Software (notably the first Free Software for creating OAI-compliant Open Access Institutional Repositories, EPrints, created in 2000, distributed under the GNU license, and now used worldwide) has been central to the growth of the Open Access Movement. However, there are also crucial distinctions that need to be made and understood, among the movements for (1) Free/Open source software, (2) Open Access (to peer-reviewed research), (3) Open Data, (4) Creative Commons licensing, and (5) Wikipedia-style collective writing. Open Access (OA) is focussed primarily on refereed research articles. The crucial distinctions revolve mostly around (a) the fundamental difference between author giveaway vs. non-giveaway work and (b) the functional differences between the re-use needs for peer-reviewed research article texts on the one hand, and data, software and other kinds of digital content on the other. (PPT)

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Richard Stallman (at the Free Sofware Free Society Conference today in Kerala, India) seems to have come to the mistaken conclusion (from my own talk, presumably) that I am somehow against Free Software! 

“Open Access, Free/Open Software, Open Data, Creative Commons and Wikipedia: Commonalities and Distinctions“
(Powerpoints)

But Richard (whom I admire very much) doesn’t seem to understand that what I am actually trying to do, for concrete, pragmatic, strategic reasons, is to very explicitly distinguish the special case of (“gratis” Green) OA from the other 4 “open” cases (free/open software, open data, creative commons licensing, and wikipedia) that resemble OA in some respects, but only partially. The purpose of pointing out this distinction is so that we can at long last reach universal Green (gratis) OA. Universal Green OA will then in turn help strengthen and accelerate reaching the goals of the other 4 “open” movements. Conflating all 5 goals today will not.

The reason Richard does not seem to grasp or accept this is also related to the reason he is so effective where he is indeed effective: He is on an ethical crusade (an ethical crusade in which he is just as right as if he were crusading for providing free health care for all, the curing of all diseases, the remedying of all injustices). But ethical rectitude in principle is alas insufficient to elicit ethical practice, or at least not on a scale that is anywhere near universal: To achieve that, you sometimes have to appeal to self-interest too, at least initially.

For OA, it is simply hopeless to try to get all or even most creators of digital content to provide OA to their creations today if they do not even want to make it freely available. They all ought to want to, perhaps; but telling them they ought to want to (or that it is more ethical to want to) is not enough. 

That is why it is essential to have a practical strategy that is aimed explicitly at the subset of creators that, without exception, already want to give away their creations (because it already happens to be in their own interest to do so). Those are the authors of the 2.5 million annual articles that are the target of OA and of Green OA mandates: OA’s target content. They publish their research only for the sake of uptake, usage, application and impact, not for revenues or fees. That simply cannot be said of the authors of most software (or other kinds of digital content) today.

What I was trying to explain at FSFS was just that this special case (of calling on authors to provide OA to their refereed research articles) has to be distinguished from the general case of calling on all authors of all kinds of digital content (whether it be books, data, software, music, movies, or “knowledge”) to make their content free or open. 

And the reason is that OA’s target content all consists of exception-free creator give-aways already: No ethical case for openness or give-away needs to be made in the special case of OA’s target content, because its authors already give it all away. Moreover, although most of them won’t go on to do so of their own accord (because they are too busy and/or worried about copyright), most of those authors, when surveyed, state that they would go on to make their give-away articles OA too, willingly, if their institutions or funders were to mandate it: And the evidence is that, when it is indeed mandated, these authors do indeed comply and do it.

So mandates work for author-give-away content. Authors say they will make it OA, willingly, and the actual mandate adoptions confirm that authors do as they said they would do. 

There is no reason, however, to expect mandates to work for non-give-away content, today. Authors certainly have not said they would willingly make their non-give-away products (books, software, music, video, data) OA if it were so mandated; nor are there any mandates that test whether they would comply, willingly or unwillingly. 

It is not even thinkable today to try to mandate providing OA to content for which its creators not only don’t provide OA spontaneously of their own accord, but don’t want to provide OA, because they don’t want to give it away in the first place (hoping instead to make money from it).

OA mandates have already been sluggish enough so far in just reaching consensus on adoption for just give-away content. What they need is to provide much better and clearer information for authors, their institutions and their public funders on what OA and OA mandates really entail — and what benefits they bring for authors, their research, their institutions, and the public that funds them — rather than an unrealistic and confusing raising of the existing hurdles to reaching consensus on mandate adoption by conflating giveaway content with content that its creators do not (yet) even wish to give away, and for which a credible case based on self-interest cannot yet be made.

Having said that, I of course agree completely with Richard Stallman that if software authors are publicly funded for developing their code, the funder can and should mandate that it be made FS/OS! That is a special case in which OA and FS/OS have far more in common than they do in general. But relative to all the software being written today, the portion that is being developed with public funding is, I suspect, quite small (which is not to say that it should not be mandated to make that portion FS/OS!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Napier University (UK* institutional-mandate)

Institution’s/Department’s OA Eprint Archives

Institution’s/Department’s OA Self-Archiving Policy

“The mandate will be enforced from Jan2009…

“Repository@Napier is the place where university research output will be held…

“Deposited items may include:
   - submitted versions (as sent to journals for peer-review),
   - accepted versions (author’s final peer-reviewed drafts),
   - published versions (publisher-created files)…”

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SUMMARY: Which Green OA Mandate should an institution adopt?     ID/OA The Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting (ID/OA) mandate immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author’s choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher. The alternative candidate mandates are:
    ID/IA There is the stronger Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don’t endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all — hence weaker than ID/OA. Not one of the existing 58 mandates is ID/IA.)
    ID/DA The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But such an Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access (ID/DA) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simplyidentical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that’s just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consenus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)
    DD/DA Then there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself is delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, that is in fact weaker than ID/OA, because it loses the 37% Almost-OA accessible via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses.
    Author Licensing Mandate Last, and almost as strong as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate (4a) is a negotiated author licensing mandate. But how can such a mandate reach consensus on adoption with authors who are concerned that it would put their papers at risk of not being accepted by their journal of choice whenever the licensing negotiation fails? As a consequence, there exist no ID/IA mandates either, only ID/IA with an optional author-opt-out (as in Harvard’s mandate) — which again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or opt-out, and is hence weaker than ID/OA (if a mandate with an opt-out is indeed a mandate at all!).
    It is because of this logic and these pragmatics that ID/OA is the default baseline mandate: Anything weaker than ID/OA is gratuitously weaker than necessary (and generates less OA than ID/OA). Anything stronger (such as ID/IA without opt-out, or mandatory licensing without opt-out) is more than welcome, if an institution can successfully reach consensus and compliance — but no institution (or funder) has yet managed that, hence holding out for an over-strong mandate leads to the adoption of no mandate at all.

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The following are replies to some queries I received about Elsevier’s Authors’ Rights Policy on Green OA Self-Archiving:

The Green OA author-rights policy of Elsevier (and of many other Green publishers) explicitly excludes posting to a 3rd-party repository (in order to avoid sanctioning free-riding from rival publishers). The author’s own institutional repository, in contrast, is of course simply an institutional website/server.

And that is just fine for OA — in fact, better than fine, for the following reasons:

All Open Access repositories — whether institutional or institution-external — are interoperable, because they comply with the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. So if you deposit your full-text in any one of them, it is functionally as if you had deposited it in any or all of them, because central harvesters (such as OAIster and Elsevier’s own Scirus) can and do harvest the metadata from all those repositories, and then provide a search interface that collects the links to all the distributed repository contents into one searchable global OA repository (or several, by subject, or nation, or funder, or what-have-you) — just as Google and Google Scholar likewise do.

So not only does Elsevier’s Green author-self-archiving policy acknowledge the right of every single Elsevier author to make (the author’s refereed final draft of) every single one of his Elsevier articles OA, but it helps correct an extremely counterproductive and ill-thought-out — though well-intentioned — bug in many of the current OA self-archiving funder-mandates, in which direct central deposit (in PubMed Central) is mandated, needlesly, instead of direct institutional deposit (which can be followed by central metadata-harvesting or automatic SWORD-based export to PubMed Central).

It is quite natural to ask: “If all repositories are interoperable, what difference does it make whether mandates specify central self-archiving or institutional self-archiving?”

To understand the reply, one must first clearly apprehend that:

— not all research is in one field
— not all research is funded by any given funder
— not all research is funded at all
— all research originates from institutions
— yet most institutions have not yet mandated self-archiving

As all research originates from a university or other research institution, institutions are the universal providers of all refereed research output. Hence, to systematically ensure that all refereed research — from all institutions, in all fields, whether funded or unfunded — is self-archived, it is essential that all self-archiving mandates — whether from institutions of funders — be convergent and mutually reinforcing, rather than divergent and competitive. 

In other words, both funders and institutions need to mandate self-archiving in the author’s own institutional repository. That way funder and institutional mandates reinforce one another: For example, NIH’s mandate, which technically applies only to NIH-funded biomedical research, would vastly increase its scope if it stipulated institutional deposit; that would immediately extend the reach of the NIH mandate to all institutions receiving NIH funding, thereby encouraging each of them to adopt institutional mandates of their own to cover all their research output, and not just the NIH-funded subset. And it would of course also encourage universities to create institutional repositories, if they have not done so already. (Institutions — already quite obsessively involved in preparing and vetting their research grant proposals, are also the natural ones to monitor and ensure compliance with the funder’s deposit mandate as part of the grant’s fulfillment conditions, and especially if they have a institutional deposit mandate of their own. And again, one convergent deposit and locus — institutional — is enough for an author; the rest can be handled by automatic harvesting or exportation.)

Nothing whatsoever is lost with convergent mandates: NIH can still harvest all of its funded research into PubMed Central; so can any other harvesters, into their own collections. (And import/export can also be done automatically, via the SWORD protocol.) There is absolutely no need for — and many reasons against — authors depositing directly in PubMed Central or any other central collection: Not only does that fail to encourage and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates for all the rest of each institution’s (non-NIH) research output, but, apart from creating needless confusion and ambiguity about locus of deposit, it even puts authors at (perceived) risk of having to do multiple deposits in order to fulfill both funder and institutional mandates. (Here too, the risk is perceived rather than real, because the SWORD protocol can of course transfer contents in both directions, whereas the real problem is inducing the adoption of mandates from both funders and institutions, and particularly from the universal providers, the institutions: It is precisely there that collaborative, convergent mandates from funders are a great help whereas divergent, competitive mandates are a gratuitous hindrance.)

So some of the funder mandates to date, welcome though they were and are, have failed to think things through (and failed to fully understand IRs, and OAI-interoperability and OA itself) in needlessly mandating direct central deposit. (That’s rather like requiring providers to deposit directly in google, instead of depositing on their own distributed websites, from which google can then harvest.)

This inadvertent error can and will still be corrected, of course, but the correction needs to happen sooner rather than later, because meanwhile divergent funder mandates are slowing the growth of the potential institutional mandates that represent the real lion’s share of global research output across all disciplines (and research access and impact continues to be needlessly lost).

NIH has so far been unresponsive about reconsidering its unnecessary and counterproductive requirement to deposit directly in PubMed Central (and a number of CopyCat funders elsewhere have been simply aping NIH, equally unreflectively). The work of those who are trying to create a systematic synergy that will result in the rapid global growth of OA mandates by the sleeping giant (the world’s universities and research institutions), is thereby made more difficult than necessary — but here, Green publishers’ restrictions on depositing in 3rd-party central repositories may prove to be a serendipitous aid in converging on convergent deposit mandates and practices.

    (1) I am not at all worried about the (37% of) articles that might, under the ID/OA mandate, be deposited as Closed Access (hence not OA but only “Almost-OA,” thanks to the repositories’ semi-automatic, almost-instantaneous, “email eprint request” button). I have been at this for over a decade and a half now, and for that decade and a half, we have not had the at-least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA that we could have had, if we had adopted ID/OA mandates. Instead, all we had is what we have now: the <15% of all articles that are being self-archived spontaneously (unmandated), plus the even smaller percentage of all articles that are being published in Gold OA journals.

    (2) So I am unworried about universal ID/OA mandates, but definitely not unworried about continuing to do without them, just waiting instead in the hope that (a) either spontaneous self-archiving will somehow increase to 100% on its own, without the need of any mandate at all, (b) or that agreement on even stronger OA mandates will somehow be reached, or (c) that all publishers will somehow agree to convert to Gold OA publishing!

    (3) Just continuing to advocate and wait for (a) or (c) is, I hope all will agree, not a sensible strategy after all these years.

    (4) As for stronger mandates, consider the options: In place of the ID/OA (Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting) mandate — which immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author’s choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher — we have the following alternative candidates:

(4a) There is the stronger Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don’t endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all — hence weaker than ID/OA. Not one of the existing 58 mandates is ID/IA.)

(4b) The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But such an ID/DA (Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simply identical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that’s just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consenus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)

(4c) Then there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself is delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, that is in fact weaker than ID/OA, because it loses the 37% Almost-OA accessible via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses.

(4d) Last, and almost as strong as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate (4a) is a negotiated author licensing mandate. But how can such a mandate reach consensus on adoption with authors who are concerned that it would put their papers at risk of not being accepted by their journal of choice whenever the licensing negotiation fails? As a consequence, there exist no ID/IA mandates either, only ID/IA with an optional author-opt-out (as in Harvard’s mandate) — which again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or opt-out, and is hence weaker than ID/OA (if a mandate with an opt-out is indeed a mandate at all!).

It is because of this logic and these pragmatics that ID/OA is the default baseline mandate: Anything weaker than ID/OA is gratuitously weaker than necessary (and generates less OA than ID/OA). Anything stronger (such as ID/IA without opt-out, or mandatory licensing without opt-out) is more than welcome, if an institution can successfully reach consensus and compliance — but no institution (or funder) has yet managed that, hence holding out for an over-strong mandate leads to the adoption of no mandate at all.

The most common mandates are DD/DA, with and without embargo caps, but those are all weaker than ID/OA, and hence should be upgraded to at least ID/DA, whether with or without an embargo cap.

Licensing mandates are rarer, but as they have opt-outs, they too are weaker than ID/OA. Again, however, they can easily be upgraded to add ID/OA (without opt-out) alongside the “mandatory” licensing (with opt-out), and then they are fine.

So the reason we can all be relaxed and satisfied with ID/OA is that it is the default baseline for all OA mandates. Where a stronger one can be agreed, it should of course be adopted. And it makes no sense to arbitrarily adopt a still weaker mandate — DD/DA or author-licensing with opt-out — since upgrading either of those to ID/OA is free of objections, either in institutional copyright worries or in author worries about journal choice. But on no account should no mandate at all be adopted, in favor of an unending quest for a mandate stronger than ID/OA: Adopt ID/OA now, and then try to agree on a stronger upgrade thereafter.

(Note that I did not list a universal conversion to Gold OA publishing on the part of publishers as being among the mandate options, because, on the one hand, institutions and funders can only impose mandates on their own employees and fundees; not on publishers. And, on the other hand, continuing to sit around trying to persuade publishers to convert to Gold OA of their own accord is likely to extend our waiting time even closer to the time of the heat death of the universe than continuing to sit around trying to reach agreement on stronger mandates, instead of just going ahead and adopting ID/OA right now.)

Because just about all Institutional Repositories today are OAI-compliant! OAI-interoperability was part of the rationale for the institutional repository movement — a movement that was itself set in motion by the OA movement (in 2000) but has alas since moved off in other directions of its own (often vague and aimless ones, not carefully thought through in advance).

I cannot second-guess the motivation. Elsevier is a commercial company. Unlike (some) Learned Society and University publishers, its primary allegiance is not to science but to the bottom line.

My guess is that Elsevier realized that OA is inevitable, and unstoppable. So they have settled on just trying to slow it down, if possible. At first, I think Elsevier’s Green policy on author self-archiving was based on three calculations: (1) that a Green policy on author self-archiving might quiet the growing clamour for OA, perhaps even (2) reducing the widespread hostility against Elsevier for their aggressive pricing policies, while (3) not many individual authors would be likely to actually go ahead and self-archive. If this was indeed Elsevier’s reasoning, then they were right on all three counts.

But what Elsevier did not reckon on was the emergence and growth of the movement for institutional and funder self-archiving mandates. (While it was adopting a Green Policy on author self-archiving, in order to satisfy the author demand for OA, Elsevier was also lobbying — vigorously, but in the end unsuccessfully — against Green OA self-archiving mandates. (Elsevier, along with the American Chemical Society [the non-Green publisher giving Learned Societies such a bad name] had been among the prime supporters of the notorious “prism”/pitbull anti-OA coalition that backfired so badly when exposed in Nature.] So I am quite ready to forgive and forget Elsevier’s failed attempt to lobby against Green OA self-archiving mandates; their Green policy on author self-archiving (though it too was not necessary for Green OA to prevail in the end) has nevertheless been more helpful than the lobbying has been harmful, and historians will make due note of that.

Finally, before anyone asks (again), my own view of the way things will go in the future for publishing (about which I no longer speculate publicly, because speculation and counterspeculation on this question has been for far too long yet another distraction from practical action toward providing immediate Green OA) is described here, here, and here. Speculations aside, all empirical evidence to date has been that conventional subscription-based publishing and Green OA self-archiving can co-exist peacefully, even in fields where Green OA self-archiving has already reached 100% years ago.
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American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: The reason the much stronger author licensing mandate has a far higher consensus/compliance hurdle to surmount is that it raises the problem of authors’ free choice of journals and author risk of journal non-acceptance.
    In contrast, the weaker author deposit mandate (ID/OA) faces only author inertia about doing the few extra keystrokes required. Author surveys and outcome studies on actual practice show that the vast majority of authors will comply with a deposit mandate, willingly.
    Hence it makes no sense at all to delay still further the certainty of immediately providing at least 63% OA + 37% almost-OA (by mandating immediate-deposit), to keep on waiting instead for a much stronger mandate (mandatory author licensing) for which achieving consensus on adoption is far more difficult and author willingness is far less certain. There can be (and are) stronger deposit mandates than ID/OA, but ID/OA is the default option, the mandate for which consensus on adoption is most easily achieved because — unlike the stronger mandates — it effectively moots all copyright concerns.
    If success can be achieved on adopting a stronger mandate, then by all means adopt the stronger mandate (such as Immediate-Deposit/Immediate-OA, or Immediate-Deposit plus a 6-month cap on embargoes, or Immediate-Deposit [without Opt-Out] plus Author Licensing with Opt-Out).
    But on no account delay the adoption of the weaker, certain mandate that is already within immediate reach, in order to hold out for a stronger, uncertain mandate that is not! It is fine to prefer to have a stronger benefit rather than a weaker one if both are within reach and you have a choice; but it is certainly not fine to fail to grasp a weaker benefit that is already fully within reach in order to hold out for a stronger but much less certain benefit that is not yet within reach. They are not mutually exclusive: Weaker will lead to Stronger.

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On 2-Dec-08, at 7:08 AM, Leo Waaijers [LW] wrote (in SPARC-OAForum):

LW: “this is about a comparison between a ?mandate to self-archive? and the usage of a ?licence to publish?.”

For comparability, it needs to be a comparison between a ‘mandate to self-archive’ and a ‘mandate to successfully adopt a license to publish’. Neither self-archiving nor licensing is being done spontaneously by authors, hence we are talking about mandates in both cases, and the question is (1) for which mandate is it more likely that consensus on adoption will be achieved at all, and (2) what is the likelihood of compliance, if mandated? 

Moreover, both questions have to be considered separately for (i) funder mandates and for (ii) institutional mandates, as funders and institutions have different prerogatives. 

(Institutional consortia on mandates are yet another category, though at a time when consensus on adopting even individual institutional mandates is still hard to achieve, reaching successful consortial consensus on mandates is all the more difficult; the analogy with consortial consensus on subscription licensing is, I think, highly misleading: Subscription licensing consortia are based on strong shared interests on the part of institutional libraries, and no countervailing interests on the part of institutional authors; author licensing mandates, in contrast, involve the problem of authors’ free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance.) 

Hence the reason an author licensing mandate has a much higher consensus/compliance hurdle to surmount is that it raises the problem of authors’ free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance, whereas author deposit mandates face only the inertia about doing the few extra author keystrokes required — and both surveys and outcome studies on actual practice show that most authors will comply with a deposit mandate, willingly.

LW: “Both tools only apply to the domain of toll-gated publishing where they try to improve the accessibility of publications. It is the copyright owner who decides about the conditions of access and reuse and the toll-gated domain is characterized by many access limitations and conditions that only may be lifted after payment. However, there is an important legal exception to that model; the fair use clause states that these access limitations do not apply for a personal copy.”

Digital documents that are made freely accessible on the web can be accessed, read on-screen, downloaded, stored, printed-off, and data-crunched by any individual user. (They can also be harvested by harvesters like google.) That is the use that access-denied researchers urgently need most today, and that is all the use that (“Gratis”) OA need provide today. (Moreover, the best chance of eventually fulfilling the stronger demands of “Libre” OA, and even an eventual transition to universal Gold OA publishing, is first to mandate and provide universal Green Gratis OA.)

LW: “In the self-archiving approach the author assigns the full copyrights to a publisher and subsequently utilises the fair use clause to facilitate access to the publication. The licence to publish leaves the copyrights with the author, gives the publisher the right of first publishing and adopts an embargo period for other publishing modes.”

This is incorrect, I am afraid. In the self-archiving approach, the author makes the article freely accessible online, and the rest comes with the territory. As I said, this is done with the official blessing of the journal for 63% of journals, providing full OA for all those articles. For the remaining 37%, the author has the option of intially depositing them in Closed Access rather than Open Access (but depositing them immediately in nonetheless) and letting users rely on the “email eprint request” button during any publisher embargo. This is “Almost OA” — and once immediate-deposit mandates are universally adopted, the resultant universal deposit itself will — over and above immediately providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA — soon usher in 100% OA as a matter of natural course. All along, the only real hurdle has been keystrokes; hence all we really need to surmount that hurdle is universal keystroke mandates.

It makes no sense at all to keep delaying still further the certainty of immediately providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA (by mandating immediate-deposit) — in order to keep trying instead for a much stronger mandate (mandatory author licensing) on which a consensus for adoption is much harder to achieve (because of the problem of authors’ free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance) and author compliance much more uncertain — just because of the interim possibility of 37% almost-OA owing to publisher embargoes with an immediate-deposit mandate. Indeed, even the successful universal adoption of a “licence to publish [that] leaves the copyrights with the author, gives the publisher the right of first publishing and adopts an embargo period for other publishing modes” would leave users worse off during the embargo than universal ID/OA.

Providing 63% OA + 37% almost-OA immediately is already fully within reach and long overdue. We should not delay grasping it for one minute longer, in quest of something stronger yet not now within rich and far less certain.

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

Note that there can be — and are — stronger self-archiving mandates than ID/OA, but that ID/OA is the default option, the mandate for which consensus on adoption is most easily achieved and all legal concerns are completely mooted. If success can be achieved on adopting a stronger mandate — such as Immediate-Deposit/Immediate-OA, or Immediate-Deposit plus a 6-month cap on embargoes, or Immediate-Deposit [without Opt-Out] plus Author Licensing with Opt-Out — then by all means adopt the stronger mandate. But on no account delay the adoption of the weaker, certain mandate that is already within immediate reach, in order to hold out for a stronger, uncertain mandate that is not!

LW: “For a fair comparison of the two tools, let?s assume that in both cases an institutional mandate applies.”

I am afraid that that is not at all a realistic comparison, because it simply assumes (a) that the probability of success in achieving consensus on adopting the mandate in the first place is equally probable for both mandates, the weaker and the stronger one, and that (b) compliance is equally probable in both cases, weaker and stronger. Neither of these assumptions is correct because of the problem of authors’ free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance. Neither handicap is shared by the weakest, easiest and surest ID/OA mandate, which is only about keystrokes, and already fully within all institutions’ immediate rich.

LW: “When it comes to mandating self-archiving, the only party involved is the author. That makes such a mandate relatively easy of course. But it also has a high price. Open Access remains to the publisher?s discretion.”

The weakest mandate is always relatively the “easiest” (to agree on, adopt, and comply with) but it is also infinitely preferable to no mandate at all, with continued delay and debate, instead, about stronger mandates. Let the weaker mandates be adopted universally, now, and then let’s debate about strengthening them!

What the ID/OA guarantees, immediately, is 63% OA + 37% almost-OA. Every day we keep delaying and speculating about stronger mandates, less certain of consensus and compliance, we are simply losing yet another day of 63% OA + 37% almost-OA, needlessly, after already having allowed years and years of needless delay, and needlessly lost research access, progress and impact.

LW: “Currently that?s a complete mess. Publishers? policies vary widely when it comes to permitting access to different versions (pre-print, post-print, pdf) for different uses (author?s web site, institutional window, educational usage, commercial usage) after different embargo periods. In the meantime for personal copies an end user may use the request button in the same way as she uses the SFX button of her library. (Why not combine the two buttons?). Under the circumstances the request button is a smart invention. Kudos for you!”

    (1) The variation in publisher policy is completely described and covered by 63% OA + 37% almost-OA for OA’s target content: the peer-reviewed postprint. (For the preprint, the figure is even higher; and the publisher’s proprietary PDF is completely irrelevant.)

    (2) The SFX button is largely for licensed (i.e., toll-gated) content for institution-internal users. The “email eprint request” (“Almost-OA”) Button, in contrast, is for all IR-deposited content, worldwide, for any user. There is a world of difference there (and again, the institutional-library subscription-licensing perspective is profoundly misleading, just as it is with the analogy of multi-institution subscription-licensing consortia.)

Nevertheless, yes, it would be fine to add to SFX all links to Closed Access IR deposits and their “email eprint request” buttons (if Ex Libris is interested). The objective, after all, is to interlink all citations. But to make the exercise worthwhile, we must first mandate deposit…

LW: “When an institution considers mandating the usage of the licence to publish they should involve the publishers as well. It would be unfair just to issue such a mandate and leave the authors to the mercy of the publishers.”

    (a) Institutions’ employees, and funders’ fundees can be mandated, but publishers cannot: They are not within employers’ and funders remits.

    (b) A big funding agency like NIH might be in a position to summon publishers to the table, and to apply their clout for the research they fund, but individual universities certainly cannot.

    (c) Institutional library consortia have clout on subscription licensing agreements, but author licensing is another matter, and involves another party: authors.

    (d) Meanwhile, authors would indeed be left “to the mercy of their publishers”  (because of the problem of authors’ free choice of journals and author risk of journal nonacceptance) if individual institutions adopted the stronger author licensing mandates without prior successful consortial negotiations.

    (e) So let’s go ahead and adopt the weaker ID/OA mandate that is already within universal reach, at no risk to the author; and let’s pursue stronger mandates thereafter, rather than needlessly continuing to delay OA still longer, this late in the day, in order to keep holding out for a possible future stronger-mandate.

LW: “It?s my guess that negotiations with publishers may not be prospectless. A common interest, not only for authors and their institutions but also for (some) publishers is to raise their social and academic profile and clear the operational situation. In order to have a stronger position institutions should combine their efforts in (national) consortiums. By the way, I allready know of several occasions where a publisher (including Elsevier and even Wiley) has published articles without the copyrights being transferred to them.” 

    (i) It is not at all evident that the interests in and benefits from OA to authors, institutions and funders are matched by corresponding interests and benefits to publishers!

    (ii) Yes, by all means, if such consortial negotiations are “not prospectless,” pursue them: But not at the price of failing to grasp what is already immediately within reach, which is individual institutional (and funder) Green OA self-archiving mandates.

    (iii) (The occasional individual exception to copyright transfer that has been accommodated for decades by publishers is not the same as a blanket acceptance of universal copyright retention.)

LW: “To conclude. Indeed, in the toll gated domain I prefer mandating the usage of the licence to publish over mandating of self-archiving. The first option involves a higher commitment of the institutions which makes it tougher of course. But the operational result is much clearer and better sustainable.”

It is fine to prefer to have a stronger benefit rather than a weaker one if both are within reach and you have a choice; but it is certainly not fine to fail to grasp a weaker benefit that is already fully within reach in order to keep holding out for a stronger but much less certain benefit that is not yet within reach — especially when they are not mutually exclusive: Weaker will lead to Stronger.

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Leo Waaijers recommends (1) that authors should retain copyright, (2) that institutions should use metrics richer than just the journal impact factor to assess their researchers, and (3) and that “supra-institutional organisations” (such as the European University Association) should “take the necessary initiative” for “[s]witching to Open Access” [OA] from the “traditional subscription model.”
    It is good for authors to retain copyright whenever they can, but it is not necessary — and hence gratuitously raises the bar — if stipulated as a precondition for providing or mandating OA: The only thing necessary for providing or mandating OA is that authors should deposit in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) (and that their institutions and funders should mandate that they deposit) the final drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles, which 63% of journals already formally endorse making OA immediately upon acceptance. (The remaining 37% can be provisionally deposited in Closed Access, likewise immediately upon acceptance, with the IR’s semi-automatic “email eprint request” button tiding over all user needs during any publisher embargo, during which the author can also try to negotiate copyright retention with the publisher, if he wishes. But on no account should copyright retention be required as a precondition, either for depositing or for adopting an institutional mandate to deposit.)
    It is good to use richer metrics, but these will not generate OA; rather, OA will generate richer metrics.
    Institutions can mandate deposit in IRs, and deposits can be made OA, but this is Green OA self-archiving of articles published in “traditional subscription model” journals; it is not Gold OA journal publishing. Institutions and funders cannot mandate that publishers switch to Gold OA publishing, nor should they try to mandate that authors switch to Gold OA journals just for the sake of providing OA, since OA can already be provided by mandating Green OA self-archiving, without constraining authors’ choice of journal.

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In Ariadne 57, October 2008, Leo Waaijers has written an article on “What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access.”

Since Open Access (OA) itself needs no “easing,” I assume that what Leo meant was something more like: “What Institutions Can Do to Facilitate a Transition to Open Access.”

In his article, Leo made three recommendations, which I discuss in an exchange below:

On 1-Dec-08 Leo Waaijers wrote in SPARC-OAForum:

LW:
Dear Stevan,

Most authors do not self-archive their publications spontaneously. So they must be mandated. But, apart from a few, the mandators do not mandate the authors. In a world according to you they themselves must be supermandated. And so on. This approach only works if somewhere in the mandating hierarchy there is an enlightened echelon that is able and willing to start the mandating cascade.

Leo, you are quite right that in order to induce authors to provide Green OA, their institutions and funders must be induced to mandate that they provide Green OA, as far too few authors will otherwise do the few requisite keystrokes. Authors can be mandated by their institutions and funders to do the keystrokes, but institutions and funders cannot be mandated to mandate (except possibly by their governments and tax-payers) — so how to persuade them to mandate the keystrokes?

The means that I (and others) have been using to persuade institutions and funders to mandate that their authors provide OA have been these:

(1) Benefits of Providing OA: Gather empirical evidence to demonstrate the benefits of OA to the author, institution, and funder, as well as to research progress and to tax-paying society (increased accessibility, downloads, uptake, citations, hence increased research impact, productivity, and progress, increased visibility and showcasing for institutions, richer and more valid research performance evaluation for research assessors, enhanced and more visible metrics of research impact — and its rewards — for authors, etc.).

(2) Means of Providing OA: Provide free software for making deposit quick, easy, reliable, functional, and cheap, for authors as well as their institutions. Provide OA metrics to monitor, measure and reward OA and OA-generated research impact.

(3) Evidence that Mandating (and Only Mandating) Works: Gather empirical data to demonstrate that (a) the vast majority of authors (> 80%) say, when surveyed, that they would deposit willingly if it were mandated by their institutions and/or funders, but that they will not deposit if it is not mandated (< 15%) (Alma Swan’s surveys); and that (b) most authors (> 80%) actually do what they said in surveys they would do (deposit if it is mandated [> 80%] and not deposit if it is not mandated [< 15%] even if they are given incentives and assistance [< 30%] (Arthur Sale’s Studies).

(4) Information about OA: Information and evidence about the means and the benefits of providing OA has to be widely and relentlessly provided, in conferences, publications, emails, discussion lists, and blogs. At the same time, misunderstanding and misinformation have to be unflaggingly corrected (over and over and over!)

There are already 58 institutional and funder Green OA mandates adopted and at least 11 proposed and under consideration. So these efforts are not entirely falling on deaf ears (although I agree that 58 out of perhaps 10,000 research institutions [plus funders] worldwide — or even the top 4000 — is still a sign of some hearing impairment! But the signs are that audition is improving…)

LW:
To create such a cascade one needs water (i.e. arguments) and a steep rocky slope (i.e. good conditions). The pro OA arguments do not seem to be the problem. In all my discussions over the last decade authors, managers and librarians alike agreed that the future should be OA also thanks to you, our driving OA archivangelist.

But alas it is not agreement that we need, but mandates (and keystrokes)! And now — not in some indeterminate future.

LW:
So, it must be the conditions that are lacking. This awareness brought me to the writing of an article about these failing conditions. Only if we are able to create better conditions mandates will emerge and be successful on a broad scale. A fortiori, this will make mandates superfluous.

I am one of the many admirers of your splendid efforts and successes in the Netherlands, with SURF/DARE, “Cream of Science,” and much else.

But I am afraid I don’t see how the three recommendations made in the Ariadne article will make mandates emerge (nor how they make mandates superfluous). On the contrary, I see the challenge of making the three recommendations prevail to be far, far greater than the challenge of getting Green OA self-archiving mandates to be adopted. Let me explain:

LW Recommendation 1: Transferring the copyright in a publication has become a relic of the past; nowadays a ?licence to publish? is sufficient. The author retains the copyrights. Institutions should make the use of such a licence part of their institutional policy.

Persuading authors to retain copyright is a far bigger task than just persuading them to deposit (keystrokes): It makes them worry about what happens if their publisher does not agree to copyright retention, and then their article fails to be published in their journal of choice.

Doing the c. 6-minutes-worth of keystrokes that it takes to deposit an article — even if authors can’t be bothered to do those keystrokes until/unless it is mandated — is at least a sure thing, and that’s the end of it.

In contrast, it is not at all clear how long copyright retention negotiations will take in each case, nor whether they will succeed in each case.

Moreover, just as most authors are not doing the deposit keystrokes spontaneously, but only if mandated, they are not doing the copyright retention negotiations either: Do you really think it would be easier to mandate doing copyright retention than to mandate a few keystrokes?

(Harvard has adopted a kind of a copyright-retention mandate, though it has an opt-out, so it is not clear whether it is quite a mandate — nor is it clear how well it will succeed, either in terms of compliance or in terms of negotiation [nor whether it is even thinkable for universities with authors that have less clout with their publishers than Harvard’s]. But there is a simple way to have the best of both worlds by upgrading the Harvard copyright-retention mandate with opt-out into a deposit mandate without opt-out that is certain to succeed, and generalizable to all universities — the Harvards as well as the Have-Nots. To instead require successful copyright renegotiation as a precondition for providing OA and for mandating OA, however, would be needlessly and arbitrarily to raise the bar far higher than it need be — and already is — for persuading institutions and funders to mandate deposit at all: “Upgrade Harvard’s Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause.”)

LW Recommendation 2: The classic impact factor for a journal is not a good yardstick for the prestige of an author. Modern digital technology makes it possible to tailor the measurement system to the author. Institutions should, when assessing scientists and scholars, switch to this type of measurement and should also promote its further development.

This is certainly true, but how does using these potential new impact metrics generate OA or OA mandates, or make OA mandates superfluous? On the contrary, it is OA (and whatever successfully generates OA) that will generate these new metrics (which will, among other things, in turn serve to increase research impact, as well as making it more readily measurable and rewardable)!

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).

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. h

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

Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

LW Recommendation 3: The traditional subscription model for circulating publications is needlessly complex and expensive. Switching to Open Access, however, requires co-ordination that goes beyond the level of individual institutions. Supra-institutional organisations, for example the European University Association, should take the necessary initiative.

The European University Association has already taken the initiative to recommend that its 791 member universities in 46 countries should all mandate Green OA self-archiving! Now the individual universities need to be persuaded to follow that recommendation. The European Heads of Research Councils have made the same recommendation to their member research councils. (I am optimistic, because, for example, 6 of the 7 RCUK research funding councils have so far already followed the very first of these recommendations to mandate — from the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology.) And the 28 universities that have already adopted Green OA self-archiving mandates show that institutional mandates are at last gathering momentum too.

But if it is already considerably harder to mandate author copyright-retention than it is to mandate author self-archiving in their institutional repositories (Green OA), it is surely yet another order of magnitude harder to mandate “Switching to Open Access” from the “traditional subscription model”:

If authors are likely to resist having to renegotiate copyright with their journal of choice at the risk of not getting published in their journal of choice, just in order to provide OA, they are even more likely to resist having to publish in a Gold OA journal instead of in their journal of choice, just in order to provide OA — especially as they need do neither: They need merely self-archive.

And journal publishers are likely to resist anyone trying to dictate their economic model to them. (Moreover, publishers’ economic policies are beyond the bounds of what is within the university community’s mandate to mandate!)

So mandating Green OA is still the fastest, surest, and simplest way to reach universal OA. Let us hope that the “enlightened echelon” of the institutional hierarchy will now set in motion the long overdue “mandating cascade.”

Best wishes,

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: A publisher that has a Green policy on OA self-archiving (by the author) is removing the single biggest obstacle to Green OA (hence to OA), as well as to Green OA Mandates by authors’ institutions and funders, namely, the author’s worry that to self-archive would be to violate copyright and/or to risk not being published by his journal of choice. No one is asking non-OA publishers to support OA — just not to oppose it. What will ensure that not only a small fraction of authors but all authors provide Green OA is Green OA mandates. Green OA mandates are facilitated by publishers with Green policies on OA self-archiving. That does not, however, require that publishers agree to allow 3rd parties to download their proprietary files automatically (simply because authors themselves cannot be bothered to do the requisite keystrokes), for that would be tantamount to asking publishers to become Gold OA publishers.

On 26 November 2008, Colin Smith [CS], Research Repository Manager of the Open University’s Open Research Online (ORO), sent the following posting to UKCORR-DISCUSSION (which I reposted on the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

CS: “A short while ago I mentioned on this list that Elsevier are producing PDFs of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript and publishing them online as part of their ‘Articles in Press’ system (see attached example). The ‘Accepted Manuscript’ will stay online until the ‘Uncorrected Proof’ replaces it.

“Everyone knows that Elsevier‘s [author self-archiving] policy (like [that of] most other publishers) allows the use of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in repositories, but I wondered whether they would be happy about us making us of the ‘Accepted Manuscript’ version they are producing and publishing online.

“The answer (officially ? from Daviess Menefee, Director of Library Relations at Elsevier) is ‘yes’.

“This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) a window of opportunity to always get hold of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript for Elsevier items (assuming your institution subscribes to the journal in question). The ‘window of
opportunity’ is that time between which the ‘Accepted Manuscript’ appears online and is replaced by the ‘Uncorrected Proof’.”

Elsevier’s Senior Vice President Karen Hunter [KH] followed up with this clarification:

KH: “As much as Elsevier appreciates praise for its policies, we also want to prevent misunderstanding.

“We are grateful that Colin Smith, Research Repository Manager of the Open University, approached us with a question on our author posting policy. Mr. Smith had noticed that for some journals an early “accepted manuscript” version of an author’s paper was available on ScienceDirect and he wanted to know if authors could download it and deposit it to their institutional repositories. As our longstanding policy permits authors to voluntarily post their own author manuscripts to their personal website or institutional repository, we responded that we would not object to an author downloading this version.

“However, our broader policy prohibits systematic downloading or posting. Therefore, it is not permitted for IR managers or any other third party to download articles or any other version such as articles-in-press or accepted manuscripts from ScienceDirect and post them. To the extent that Colin Smith’s message could be read as encouraging IR managers to download, it is a misinterpretation of our position.”

I [SH] , in turn, followed up with this AmSci posting:

SH: Karen Hunter’s response is very fair, and Elsevier’s policy on author self-archiving is both very fair and very progressive — indeed a model for all Publishers that wish to adopt a Green OA policy.

I know there will be extremists who will jump on me for having said this, and I am sure nothing I say will be able to make them realize how unreasonable they are being — and how their extremism works against OA.

Green OA self-archiving provides the opportunity for achieving universal OA precisely because it is author self-archiving. Thus is it is perfectly reasonable for Green publishers to endorse only self-archiving, not 3rd-party archiving; to endorse self-archiving in the author’s own institutional repository, but not in a 3rd-party repository; and to endorse depositing the author’s own final draft, not the publisher’s draft.

The fact that we do not yet have universal Green OA is not publishers’ fault, and certainly not Green publishers’ fault. The only thing standing between us and universal Green OA is keystrokes — authors’ keystrokes. And the way to persuade authors to perform those keystrokes — for their own benefit, as well as for the benefit of the institutions that pay their salaries, the agencies that fund their research, and the tax-paying public that funds their institutions and their funders — is for their institutions and funders to mandate that those keystrokes are performed.

It would not only be unjust, but it would border on the grotesque, if the punishment for publishers who had been progressive enough to give their official green light to their authors to perform those keystrokes — yet their authors couldn’t be bothered to perform the keystrokes, and their institutions and funders could not be bothered to mandate the keystrokes — were that their green light was construed as permission to automatically harvest from the publisher’s website the drafts that their own authors could not be bothered or persuaded to deposit in their own institutional repository.

No. Open Access is a benefit that the research community needs to provide for itself. The only reasonable thing to ask of publishers is that they should not try to prevent the keystrokes from being performed. It would be both unreasonable and unfair to demand that publishers also perform the keystrokes on the authors’ behalf, through automated downloads, for that would be tantamount to demanding that they become Gold OA publishers, rather than just endorsing Green OA.

What is needed is more keystroke mandates from institutions and funders, not more pressure on Green publishers who have already done for Green OA all that can be reasonable asked of them.

Mike Eisen’s [MBE], of Public Library of Science, then responded on AmSci. His response is excerpted here and interwoven with my replies:

MBE: “…I will proudly claim the mantle of an OA extremist if it means calling [them] on Elsevier’s policy. I am very happy to see Karen Hunter’s message, because it confirms what I and many others have been saying for years – that Elsevier only supports Green OA publishing because they know it will be adopted by a small fraction of their authors.”

SH: (1) There is no Green OA publishing, there is only Green OA self-archiving (by the author).

(2) A publisher that is Green on OA self-archiving (by the author) is removing the single biggest obstacle to Green OA (hence to OA), as well as to Green OA Mandates by authors’ institutions and funders: The author’s concern that to self-archive would be to violate copyright and to risk not being published by his journal of choice.

(3) No one is asking non-OA publishers to support OA — just not to oppose it.

(4) What will ensure that not only a small fraction of authors but all authors provide Green OA is Green OA mandates.

(5) Green OA mandates are facilitated by publishers with Green policies on OA self-archiving.

(6) None of this requires that publishers agree to allow 3rd parties to download their proprietary files automatically.

MBE: “What more evidence do you need that Elsevier is not actually committed to OA than this explicit statement that they prohibit the clearest and easiest path towards achieving Green OA to their published articles?”

SH: The clearest and easiest path to achieving Green OA to all published articles is for their authors to deposit them in their institutional repositories and for their institutions and funders to mandate that they deposit them in their institutional repositories. It is not Elsevier that is holding up that process. It is authors, in failing to self-archive of their own accord, and their institutions and funders, in failing to mandate that they self-archive.

The only relevant evidence from Elsevier here is that Elsevier has removed the obstacles to immediate author self-archiving, as well as to institutional and funder immediate self-archiving mandates. There is nothing more that needs to be asked of Elsevier on this score, nor anything more that Elsevier need do.

(I make no mention here about something else on which Elsevier can indeed be faulted, namely, that they are an active part of the publisher lobbying against Green OA mandates! But I think that on balance their Green policy and example on immediate OA self-archiving is far more of a help to progress on Green OA and Green OA mandates than the publisher lobbying against Green OA mandates is a hindrance; indeed the lobbying is failing, globally, and especially failing against individual institutional mandates, which are far less vulnerable to industry lobbying than governmental funding agencies, although those too are successfully resisting the industry lobbying.)

MBE: “Why should Elsevier care whether authors download the articles themselves or if someone else does it for them other than the expectation that in the former case, the practical obstacles will prevent most authors from doing so.”

SH: Because construing a Green Light for authors to self-archive as a Green Light for 3rd-party “self”-archiving, and 3rd-party archives would be a carte blanche to 3rd-party rival publishers to free-ride on Elsevier content.

(Again, the distinction is completely mooted, in practical terms, by the nature of the Web and of Open Access: Once content is free for all in one place, it is free for all in any place, and there is scarcely any scope for “free-riding” on free content. But these are alas still early days, and while authors and their institutions and funders are still dragging their feet on self-archiving and self-archiving mandates, there is plenty of scope for free-riders to have a little field day with an Elsevier policy that allows anyone to download and re-use their proprietary files today.)

MBE: “Unless and until Elsevier radically restructures its business model for scientific publishing, they will only permit Green OA so long as it is largely unsuccessful – the moment it becomes possible to get most Elsevier articles in IRs they will have to end this practice, as their current policy against IR downloads makes abundantly clear.”

SH: On this point, Mike, I am afraid we will have to continue to disagree, profoundly. You are an advocate of a direct transition to Gold OA publishing; I am not, because I see so clearly that universal Green OA is within reach, awaiting only universal Green OA mandates by authors’ institutions and funders. Those universal Green OA mandates by authors’ institutions and funders (which Elsevier’s Green policy greatly facilitates) — along with time itself — make it increasingly difficult for publishers even to contemplate back-tracking on their Green policies.

So I think you are simply wrong about this back-tracking bugaboo, which is about as valid as the publisher lobby’s repeated bugaboo that OA will destroy peer review.

You continue to be impatient for Gold OA, whereas my overtaxed patience is just for OA itself — which, unlike Gold OA, is already within sight and reach. All it takes is universal Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. Elsevier’s Green policy is such a great help in that (even though even that help is not essential) that I think it far outweighs their lobbying against Green OA mandates. And it certainly outweighs their unwillingness to allow 3rd-party downloading of their proprietary files.

The discussion reached closure with Colin Smith’s reply to Karen Hunter:

CS: “Karen, I very much appreciate you pointing out that my posting could have been interpreted as a rallying call to IR Managers and Administrators to systematically download Elsevier items on behalf of authors. This is not what I meant – my apologies.

“Where I originally said:

‘This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) a window of opportunity to always get hold of the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript for Elsevier items (assuming your institution subscribes to the journal in question).’

“I should have said:

‘This is really good news because it gives us (Repository Managers and Administrators) the opportunity to inform our academics that there may well be an online version of their accepted manuscript that they can retrieve, should they have failed to retain it themselves.’

“I have to say that, while I am not averse to occasional third-party depositing, on the whole I believe Green OA can only be sustainable if the academics themselves are choosing to do it. If IR Managers and Administrators are busying around in the background, mass-uploading items without the knowledge of authors, yes your repository may grow substantially in size and it may look to the outside world that Green OA is taking off, but have you actually embedded OA into the culture of your institution? I suspect not. We have to encourage self-archiving because only by doing it themselves, engaging with their IR on a regular basis, will our academics become aware of how much there is to gain for what is actually very little pain.

“On that note, just to reiterate (and again I thank Karen for pulling me up on this), I am certainly not advocating that we in any way trawl Science Direct for accepted manuscripts. That would, in my opinion, be a non-sustainable approach and detrimental to the coexistence of IRs and academic publishing.”

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Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Comment on EU Green Paper:
“Copyright in the Knowledge Economy“
(Send your own comments here — till Nov 30)

I am commenting only on the bearing of EC policy on one specific body of content: The 2.5 million articles per year published in the world’s 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals in all fields of science and scholarship.

The authors of all these articles neither receive nor seek royalty or fees from access-tolls to their users or their users’ institutions. These authors only seek that these research findings should be accessed and used as fully and widely and possible, to the benefit of research progress and applications, and hence to the benefit of the society that funds their research and their institutions.

Making this specific body of research accessible free for all on the Web (“Open Access”) will maximise its usage and impact. It does not require a major or even minor reform in copyright law. All it requires is that the authors of these 2.5 million annual peer-reviewed research articles make them open access by depositing them in their own institution’s/university’s Repository. Sixty-three percent of journals already formally endorse depositing the author’s final, revised, peer-reviewed draft in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, and immediately making that deposited draft accessible free for all.

For that 63% of articles, it should be evident that no copyright reform whatsoever is needed. What is needed is that the authors’ institutions and funders mandate (require) that they deposit and make them Open Access immediately upon acceptance by those journals.

The remaining 37% of articles can also be deposited in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, but unless their publisher endorses making them immediately Open Access, the deposit has to be set initially as Closed Access (accessible only institution-internally, to the author and his employer).

It is here that legislation can help, although it is not certain that even that is necessary: A Europe-wide law requiring that publicly-funded research and research produced by employees of publicly funded universities must be made openly accessible will exert the requisite pressure on the remaining 37% journals so that they too should endorse that the deposited articles are immediately made Open Access rather than Closed Access.

Note that peer-reviewed research is fundamentally unlike books, textbooks, software, music, and videos. It is in its very essence author give-away content, written only to be used, applied and built-upon. Unlike the creators of the other kinds of content, all the authors of the annual 2.5 million peer-reviewed journal articles want them to be free to all would-be users.

Hence, whatever rationale there may be for changing copyright law for all the other kinds of digital content, in the case of the target content of the Open Access movement, no change is necessary other than a formal publisher endorsement of making the author’s final draft freely accessible online.

Free online access provides for the following forms of usage: Being able to find online, link, view online, download, store, print-off (for individual use) and data-mine. These uses all come automatically all come automatically with free online access. Open Access content is also harvested by search engines like google.

But there are further uses, over and above these, that some fields of research feel they need, including modification and republication. It is likely that free online access will moot the need for copyright modification to guarantee these further uses, but there is no harm in trying to stipulate them formally in advance, as long as it is not treated as a prerequisite for Open Access, of for Open Access Mandates.

COPYRIGHT REFORM SHOULD NOT BE MADE A PRECONDITION FOR MANDATING OPEN ACCESS

Stevan Harnad

ABSTRACT: Free online access (“Open Access,” OA) to all the articles published annually in the world’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals , in all disciplines and all languages, is optimal and inevitable. It has, however, been delayed by misunderstandings about copyright. It has been wrongly thought that universities and research funding councils cannot mandate the immediate deposit of all their research article output in their OA repositories unless they can somehow change authors’ copyright transfer contracts first. Unless institutional consensus can be quickly and successfully reached on adopting an OA deposit mandate that requires the author to contractually reserve the right to make the article OA immediately, the adoption of OA mandates should not be weakened by copyright reservation clauses from which authors can opt out (as in the Harvard University mandate) or by allowing deposit itself to be delayed for an embargo period (as in the EU mandate). Deposit should in all cases be mandated to take place immediately upon acceptance for publication. Over 60% of journals already endorse making the deposit immediately Open Access. For the rest, the deposit can be Closed Access for the time being, disclosing only its bibliographic metadata. The repository’s semi-automatic “email eprint request” button can then allow users webwide to request, and authors to provide, an email eprint with just a few extra keystrokes for the Closed Access articles. This 60% OA and 40% “almost-OA” will fulfill worldwide research needs for now, faciilitate universal OA mandates, and usher in 100% OA soon thereafter, on the strength of OA itself and its manifest benefits alone. Copyright and publishing reform can then follow. Trying to make those reforms precede instead, as a contractual precondition, is both unnecessary and a great strategic mistake, delaying consensus on mandates or allowing delays or opt-outs, at a great continuing loss in research access, usage and impact.

Copyright Regulation in Europe

Optimizing Harvard’s Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

Open Access and Open Data

Copyright retention is not a prerequisite for self-archiving

Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Two articles [with which I could hardly agree more!] by France’s OA pioneer, Hélène Bosc: — SH

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Bosc, H, (2008) [in French]
L?auto-archivage en France : deux exemples de politiques différentes et leurs résultats 
[Self-Archiving in France: Two Different Policies and Their Results]
Liinc em Revista, 4 (2): 196-217 
   
ABSTRACT (in English: French abstract below): In France, the first Institutional Repositories (IRs) were set up in 2002, using the E-Prints software. At the same time, a centralized repository was organized by CNRS, a French multidisciplinary research institute, for the deposit of all French research output. In 2006, most of the French scientific and scholarly research organisations signed a ?Protocol of Agreement? to collaborate in the development of this national archive, HAL. Independently, the Ifremer Research Institute launched its own IR (Archimer) in 2005. We have compared the development of HAL and Archimer. Our results show that Ifremer?s policy of self-archiving has resulted in 80% of its research output being made Open Access (OA). In the same time interval, HAL, lacking a self-archiving mandate, had only 10% of its target research output deposited. Ifremer?s specific implementation of its mandate (a staff dedicated to self-archiving) is probably not affordable for most French research institutions but its self-archiving mandate itself is, and Arthur Sale?s comparative studies in Australia have shown that the essential element is the mandate itself. The European Universities Association, mindful of the benefits of mandating OA, has recommended self-archiving mandates for its 791 universities. Self-archiving mandates have already been adopted by 22 universities and research institutions worldwide (including Harvard, Southampton, CERN, and one CNRS research laboratory) as well as 22 research funding agencies (including NIH, ERC, & RCUK). OA maximizes research usage and impact. It is time for each of the universities and research institutions of France to adopt their own OA self-archiving mandates.

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Bosc, H. (2008) (preprint; in French)
Le droit des chercheurs à mettre leurs résultats de recherche en libre accès : appropriation des archives ouvertes par différentes communautés dans le monde
[Researchers’ Right to Self-Archive Their Articles In Open Access Repositories: Evolving Policy Worldwide]

ABSTRACT (in English: French abstract below): In 2002, a group of researchers, librarians and publishers, launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), formulating the concept of Open Access (OA) as well as the two strategies for achieving it ? OA self-archiving (BOAI-1, ?Green OA?) and OA publishing (BOAI-2, ?Gold OA?). The concept of OA spread rapidly among researchers and research policy-makers, but was at first equated almost completely with Gold OA publishing alone, neglecting Green OA self-archiving, despite the fact that it is Green OA that has the greatest immediate scope for growth. After considerable countervailing effort in the form of strategic analysis, research impact and outcome studies, and the development of technical tools for creating OA archives (or  ?Institutional Repositories? IRs) and measuring their impact, the importance and power of Green OA has been demonstrated and recognised, and with it has come a growing number of IRs and the adoption of mandatory OA self-archiving policies by universities, research institutions and research funders. In some countries OA self-archiving policies have even been debated and proposed at the governmental level. This strong engagement in Green OA by policy makers has begun to alarm journal publishers, who are now lobbying vigorously against OA, successfully slowing or halting legislation in some cases. It is for this reason that the research community itself ? not vulnerable to publisher lobbying as politicians are ? is now taking the initiative in OA policy-making, mandating self-archiving at the university level.

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L?auto-archivage en France: deux exemples de politiques différentes et leurs résultats
      Résumé: Les premières archives ouvertes se sont développées en France, en 2002 avec le logiciel E-Prints. Dans ce même temps une archive centralisée, à vocation nationale (HAL)1 a été mise en place par le CNRS. En 2006, la plupart des institutions de recherche française ont adhéré au projet HAL et se sont engagées à participer au développement de cette archive en signant un « protocole d?accord ». Presque au même moment, en 2005, un organisme de recherche l’Ifremer a mis en place une archive institutionnelle (Archimer)2 indépendamment de HAL. Nous avons comparé le développement de HAL et celui d?Archimer. Les résultats montrent que la politique de l?Ifremer permet de mettre en Libre Accès (LA) 80% la production « majeure » de l?organisme. HAL qui n?a pas été accompagnée de mesures fortes ne met en LA qu?environ 10% de la production française. Les moyens mis par l?Ifremer (financement de postes dédiés à l?autoarchivage) ne peuvent sans doute pas être pris par toutes les institutions de recherche françaises mais celles-ci peuvent exiger que leurs chercheurs déposent eux-mêmes leurs documents dans une archive -les études d?Arthur Sale ayant montré que l?obligation de dépôt est l?élément essentiel de la réussite d?une archive. L?Association des Universités Européennes (UEA) qui a vu tout l?intérêt de cette obligation pour le chercheur et pour son organisme, soutient cette démarche. Cette obligation a déjà été adoptée par plusieurs institutions de recherche dans le monde (entre autres Harvard, Southampton, le CERN et un laboratoire du CNRS) tout comme 27 fondations qui subventionnent la recherche (parmi lesquelles les NIH, l?ECR, les RCUK, et l’ANR en France). Le Libre Accès permet une meilleure utilisation de la recherche et augmente son impact. Les universités françaises et les organismes de recherche pour tirer profit de tous ces avantages, doivent maintenant obliger le dépôt de leur production.

Le droit des chercheurs à mettre leurs résultats de recherche en libre accès : appropriation des archives ouvertes par différentes communautés dans le monde
      Résumé: Le développement d’Internet a permis à la communauté scientifique de prendre conscience de son droit : celui de mettre en libre accès ses propres résultats de recherche. En 2002, un groupe de chercheurs et éditeurs a lancé la Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Il a formulé le concept du libre accès (LA) et les deux stratégies pour y parvenir : déposer dans une archive ouverte le double d’un article publié dans un périodique payé par souscription (« LA Vert »), et/ou publier dans une revue en libre accès (« LA Doré »). Le concept du libre accès s’est rapidement étendu mais il a d’abord été presque complètement assimilé au seul « LA Doré ». L’auto-archivage a été négligé en dépit du fait que cette voie verte représente la possibilité de croissance du LA la plus immédiate et la plus rapide. Les efforts déployés alors (analyses stratégiques, études, développement d’outils techniques pour créer des archives institutionnelles et mesurer leur impact) ont permis de démontrer l’importance et les avantages de l’auto-archivage. De ce fait le nombre d’archives a augmenté, tout comme l’obligation d’auto-archiver dans les universités, les institutions et les fondations de recherche. Dans quelques pays, une politique d’auto-archivage a été proposée au niveau gouvernemental. Cet engagement des hommes politiques commence à inquiéter certains éditeurs scientifiques, qui s’organisent en lobby anti-LA et réussissent dans certains cas à ralentir ou arrêter la législation. C’est pour cette raison que la communauté scientifique, moins vulnérable au lobby des éditeurs – que peuvent l’être les politiciens – prend l’initiative d’organiser une politique de LA avec l’obligation d’auto-archivage au niveau de l’université.