Stevan,
If you had stayed through the final presentation you would have heard one
other suggestion that directly addresses your highest priority:
immediately increasing the percentage of OA material in the repositories.
My suggestion was to place OA materials immediately in centralized
repositories rather than waiting for each researcher organization to
mount its own Institutional Repository (IR).
arXiv was a success because it had an immediate critical threshold of
materials in a discipline. This would not have happened if we had waited
for the majority of authors to have IRs. Many important research
organizations still do not have IRs, and will not have fully functional
ones for some time for many reasons which must be accepted as reality.
Yes, we can harvest the information centrally for those with IRs, but we
can quickly increase the possibility of mass contributions through
providing and emphasizing shared repositories for those without IRs.
We really don't need to do anything technical, as arXiv could immediately
add additional discipline archives. We only need to redirect authors to
existing infrastructures.
Might this be a proactive and significant change in policy resulting in
immediate positive impact?
David
At 06:22 PM 12/5/2005, Stevan Harnad wrote:
This is a summary (from my own viewpoint) of the Washington
meeting this
weekend sponsored by American Society for Information Science
& Technology
(ASIST), organized by Michael Leach (Harvard, President,
ASIS):
Digital Archives for Science and Engineering Resources
(DASER 2)
http://www.daser.org/program.html
(For some other slants on DASER 2, see these two blogs; but
beware, as
they do contain some notable garbles and omissions, having
been blogged in
real time: Dorothea Salo
http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/ and
Christina Pikas
http://asistdaser.tripod.com/daserblog/ )
DASER 2 rehearsed some familiar developments, highlighted
some of them,
and brought out one potentially important new one (re. the
NIH Public
Access Policy).
The familiar developments were the worldwide growth in
institutional
repositories (IRs), and in new services to help institutions
to create,
maintain or even host IRs: ProQuest (using Bepress software),
BioMed
Central (using Dspace software) and Eprints Services (using
Eprints
software).
Fedora software was also discussed, but it was quite apparent
(at least to
me!) that at this DASER meeting, whose specific focus was
digital
science/engineering resources -- hence Open Access (OA) IRs
in particular,
targeting the self-archiving of institutional peer-reviewed
science/engineering article output, in order to maximise its
visibility,
usage and impact, rather than digital curation in general --
Fedora's much
wider and more diffuse target (the collection and curation of
any and all
institutional digital content, incoming or outgoing, research
or
otherwise) was not the urgent priority. Indeed, there are
good reasons for
expecting that if the IR movement first puts its full weight
and energy
behind the focussed archiving of 100% of each institution's
own OA IR
target content, that will itself prove to be the most
effective way to
launch and advance the more general digital-curation agenda
too.
There was likewise considerable time devoted to the future of
publishing,
with much discussion of OA publishing and the possibility of
an eventual
transition to OA publishing. But here too, the lesson was
that the best
contribution that OA IRs in particular can make to this
possible/eventual
transition is to hasten their own transition to the
institutional
self-archiving of 100% of their own OA target content.
Present and contributing very constructively were the two
Learned Society
Publishers in whose discipline author self-archiving has been
going on the
longest, and has gone the farthest (having reached 100% years
ago in some
fields): The American Physical Society (the first publisher
to adopt [in
1994] an explicit "green" policy on author self-archiving
[today about 76%
of publishers and 93% of journals are green]) and the
Institute of Physics
(likewise green, along with some notable experiments in
"gold" OA
publishing).
The keynote speaker was Jan Velterop, formerly publisher of
"pure gold"
BioMed Central, and now director of OA for Springer's
"optional gold" Open
Choice. Jan's main concern was (understandably) to encourage
authors to
pick the gold option and to encourage their institutions and
research
councils to fund the author costs.
Jan applauded the growth in the IR movement but noted a
substantial
decrease in the number of postings on the American Scientist
Open Access
Forum (AmSci) in 2004-2005 compared to prior years, and
worried that this
might reflect a decrease in OA momentum.
On the contrary: the decreased AmSci volume was intentional.
In 2004, a
new policy for AmSci postings was announced, reserving the
Forum for
concrete, practical discussion of institutional and
research-funder OA
policy design and implementation. AmSci's former open-ended
(and unending)
philosophical and ideological debate about open access was
instead
redirected to the many other OA lists that have spawned since
the AmSci OA
Forum's inception in 1998:
"[T]his Forum, the first of what is now a half dozen
lists
devoted to OA matters, is -- as has been announced
several
times -- now reserved for the discussion of concrete,
practical means of accelerating OA growth." [December
2004]
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4226.html
The DASER conference also devoted time and thought to the
future of
librarians in the digital and OA era; again, insofar as IRs
are concerned,
a good investment of librarians' available time, energy and
resources is
in helping to create and fill IRs, first OA IRs, and then
eventually
expanding them to wider and wider digital content, thereby
again
facilitating the inevitable and desirable transition. (My own
personal
view, however, is that librarians should abstain from
speculation about
the future of peer review, which is not really their field of
expertise; I
also think retraining librarians to become institutional
in-house
publishers may not be the best use of their time and
talents.)
That librarians can be an enormous help in getting
institutional authors
to deposit their OA content in their IRs was illustrated in
my own talk,
using examples from around the world (CERN, Portugal,
Southampton) but
with especially striking data from Australia (with thanks to
Arthur Sale
and Paula Callan). I also reported on the growing evidence
for the
dramatic OA research impact advantage across all disciplines,
now
including the humanities and social sciences, and its
implications for
research and researcher funding and progress..
The OA impact advantage, IRs, and librarian-help are all
*necessary*
conditions for filling IRs with OA content, but to make them
into a
jointly *sufficient* condition, one further critical
component is needed,
and this has been demonstrated in case after case: The only
IRs that are
well along the road toward toward 100% OA are the ones that
also have an
institutional self-archiving requirement. Without that,
spontaneous OA
self-archiving is hovering at about 5% - 15% globally..
Which brings us to the last and newest development reported
at DASER: The
NIH public access policy is flawed and failing -- its deposit
rate is at
about 2%, which is even *below* the global average for
spontaneous
self-archiving. But the good news is that NIH has realized
this, and is
planning to do something about it. The question is: what?
There is a
committee to look at this question, but at a quick glance, it
does not
seem to include those who actually know what needs to be
done, and how, to
make the NIH policy work. Represented are librarians and
publishers, but
missing are the institutional OA policy-makers that can make
self-archiving work.
But the solution is simple, and NIH can do it, very easily.
First, it is
important to face the 3 flaws of the current NIH policy very
forthrightly.
Here they are, in order of severity:
(1) Deposit is *requested* rather than *required*.
(2) The request is not for immediate deposit but deposit
within one
year of publication.
(3) The request is for deposit in PubMed Central (PMC)
(rather than in the
author's IR, from which PMC could harvest it).
The reason the deposit is not required and not immediate is
related to the
reason the deposit is in PMC instead of the author's own IR:
NIH has cast
itself in the role of a 3rd-party access-provider. This is
fine, for its
own funded research. But then it must deal with its
publishers and their
conditions (which include access-embargoes of up to 12
months, in order to
protect against perceived risks to their revenues).
OA itself does not require a 3rd-party access-provider. All
it requires is
OA! And for that, any OAI-compliant archive, whether the
author's own
institutional IR or a central repository like PMC will do,
because they
are all equivalent and interoperable, in the OAI-compliant
age, and all
accessible to any user or harvester webwide.
So NIH can have what it wants -- 100% of its funded content
in PMC within
a year of publication -- while still requiring deposit
immediately upon
acceptance (preferably in the author's IR, harvestable by
PMC, but absent
that, direct deposited in PMC).
That leaves only the question of how to set the
access-privileges, and now
those can be merely the subject of a (strong) request to set
them to OA
immediately upon deposit -- but with the option left open
(sic) for the
author to set access instead as restricted to
institution-internal and
PMC-harvestable (or, for PMC, PMC-administrative-only) if the
author has
reason to prefer that (the reason presumably being that the
article is
published in one of the 7% of journals that are not yet
"green" on
immediate OA self-archiving).
Is this merely a way of tweaking the current NIH policy so as
to get
deposits up to 100% without getting immediate OA up to 100%?
The answer
is: Yes and No. Yes, this policy will immediately drive up
NIH deposits
from their current 2% level to 100%, because deposit will be
a fulfilment
condition on receiving the NIH grant. But no, it is not true
that it will
not generate immediate 100% OA. For it can generate that too,
with a far
smaller delay-loop than 12 months: something more of the
order of 12 hours
at most:
The solution is very simple (and we are already building it
into the
Eprints IR software): The metadata (author, title, journal,
date,
abstract) are of course all immediately OA for 100% of
deposited papers,
regardless of how the access-privileges for the full-text are
set. That
means that from the moment the text is deposited, the
metadata are visible
and accessible to all would-be users webwide, thanks to OAI
and the OAI
search engines, as well as to google scholar and the non-OAI
search
engines.
But what about the full-text? For about 7% of journal
articles (the ones
in the non-green journals), access will not be immediately
set to OA. What
the Eprints software will do when a would-be user encounters
this dead-end
is that the IR interface will provide a link that will pop up
a window
allowing the user to send an automatic email to the author
(whose email
address is part of the IR's internal metadata) requesting to
be emailed an
eprint of the full-text in question. The requester's email
will be sent by
the software -- automatically and immediately -- to the
author, with a
prepared URL that the author need merely click on, in order
to have the
eprint immediately emailed to the would-be user.
This author-mediated access-provision is not quite as
convenient,
instantaneous or sensible as immediately setting the
full-text to
unmediated OA, so the user can just click to down-load it,
but it is
effective 100% OA just the same. And NIH can (as now) harvest
the
full-text whenever it likes, and can go on to make it OA in
PMC whenever
it elects to. None of that will be holding back OA any
longer.
This immediate-deposit requirement is also the form that the
RCUK policy
is now taking; and it offers a general model for the rest of
the world to
adopt too.
Note that this slightly modified policy completely side-lines
all
publisher objections: It is merely a deposit requirement, not
an OA
access-setting requirement. It is left up to researchers and
the would-be
users of their research to sort out access-provision
according to the
needs of research -- exactly as it should be.
This is of course also the policy that institutions should
adopt, for
their own institutional research output, whether or not
funded by NIH or
RCUK. An immediate-deposit requirement will result in IRs
worldwide
filling virtually overnight (at long last).
(The other thing NIH should do is to couple its deposit
requirement with
an explicit statement of NIH's readiness to cover OA journal
publication
charges for those NIH fundees who choose to publish their
findings in an
OA journal.)
Stevan Harnad
David Stern
Director of Science Libraries and Information Services
Kline Science Library
219 Prospect Street
P.O. Box 208111
New Haven, CT 06520-8111
phone: 203 432-3447
fax: 203 432-3441
email: david.e.stern_at_yale.edu
Received on Tue Dec 06 2005 - 16:25:26 GMT