The European Research Council’s new Green Open Access Mandate has got it half right.

Yes, deposit should be immediate, whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed.

But, No, the deposit should not be institution-external but institutional. (External exports can than be done automatically by the institutional repository software.)

The reasons for this are strong, and many. Both the success of the ERC mandate, and its harmonization with other funder and institutional mandates are at stake.

See: BiorXiv: Deposit Institutionally, Export-Centrally

It’s not too late to fix this flaw in the ERC policy: I hope the drafters will have the motivation and sense to fix this.

Stevan Harnad

Commentary on “Open Access and Academic Freedom” in Inside Higher Ed 15 November 2013, by Cary Nelson, former national president of the American Association of University Professors

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If, in the print-on-paper era, it was not a constraint on academic freedom that universities and research funders required, as a condition of funding or employment, that researchers conduct and publish research — rather than put it in a desk drawer — so it could be read, used, applied and built upon by all users whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published (“publish or perish“), then it is not a constraint on academic freedom in the online era that universities and research funders require, as a condition of funding or employment, that researchers make their research accessible online to all its potential users rather than just those whose institutions could afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published (“self-archive to flourish“).

However, two kinds of Open Access (OA) mandates are indeed constraints on academic freedom:

1. any mandate that constrains the researcher’s choice of which journal to publish in — other than to require that it be of the highest quality whose peer-review standards the research can meet

2. any mandate that requires the researcher to pay to publish (if the author does not wish to, or does not have the funds)

The immediate-deposit/optional-access (ID/OA) mandate requires authors to deposit their final refereed draft in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, regardless of which journal they choose to publish in, and regardless of whether they choose to comply with an OA embargo (if any) on the part of the journal. (If so, the access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access rather than Open Access during the embargo, and the repository software has a facilitated copy-request Button, allowing would-be users to request a copy for research purposes with one click, and allowing the author the free choice to comply or not comply, likewise with one click.)

Since OA is beneficial to researchers — because it maximizes research downloads and citations, which universities and funders now count, along with publications, in evaluating and rewarding research output — why do researchers need mandates at all? Because they are afraid of publishers — afraid their publisher will not publish their research if they make it OA, or even afraid they will be prosecuted for copyright infringement.

So OA mandates are needed to embolden authors to provide OA, knowing they have the support of their institutions and funders. And the ID/OA mandate is immune to publisher embargoes. Over ten years of experience (of “performing a useful service by giving faculty a vehicle for voluntary self-archiving”) have by now shown definitively that most researchers will not self-archive unless it is mandatory. (The only exceptions are some fields of physics and computer science where researchers provide OA spontaneously, unmandated.) So what is needed is a no-option immediate-self-archiving mandate, but with leeway on when to make the deposit OA. This is indeed in a sense “optional Green OA,” but the crucial component is that the deposit itself is mandatory.

Funding is a red herring. Most universities have already invested in creating and maintaining institutional repositories, for multiple purposes, OA being only one of them, and the OA sectors are vastly under-utilized — except if mandated (at no extra cost).

The ID/OA mandate requires no change in copyright law, licensing or ownership of research output. Another red herring.

There are no relevant discipline differences for ID/OA either. Another red herring. And the need for and benefits of OA do not apply only to rare exceptions, but to all refereed research journal articles.

OA mandates apply only to refereed journal articles, not books. Another red herring (covering half of Cary Nelson’s article!).

As OA mandates are now growing globally, across all disciplines and institutions, it is nonsense to imagine that researchers will decide where to work on the basis of trying to escape an OA mandate — and with ID/OA there isn’t even anything for them to want to escape from.

The ID/OA mandate also moots the difference between journal articles and book chapters. And it applies to all disciplines, and publishers, whether commercial, learned-society, or university.

Refereed journal publishing will adapt, quite naturally to Green OA. For now, some publishers are trying to forestall having to adapt to the OA era, by embargoing OA. Let them try. ID/OA mandates are immune to publisher OA embargoes, but publishers are not immune to the rising demand for OA:

Paying for Gold OA today is paying for Fool’s Gold: Research funds are already scarce. Institutions cannot cancel must-have journal subscriptions. So Gold OA payment is double-payment, over and above subscriptions. And hybrid (subscription + Gold) publishers can even double-dip. If and when global Green OA makes journal subscriptions unsustainable, journals will downsize, jettisoning products and services (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving) rendered obsolete by the worldwide network of Green OA repositories) and they will convert to Fair Gold, paid for peer review alone, out of a fraction of the institutions windfall subscription cancellation savings.

It is not for the research community to continue depriving itself of OA while trying to 2nd-guess how publishers will adapt. That — and not OA mandates — would be a real constraint on academic freedom: The publishing tail must not be allowed to continue to wag the research dog.