Forwarding some more wise words from the Antipodean Archivangelist,
Arthur Sale, about the Brisbane Declaration and why the OA IR deposit
draft should be the author's final refereed preprint rather than the
publisher's "version of record":
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:15:49 +1100
From: Arthur Sale <ahjs -- ozemail.com.au>
To: institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz -- googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [IRCommunity-ANZ] Re: Brisbane Declaration
Rebecca
Paula Callan has already replied to part of your letter, but the issue is so
important that I think it deserves further elaboration. The Brisbane
Declaration was worded as it was precisely to head off assumptions like
yours that repositories should be filled with publisher's pdfs. I apologise
to the list for the length of this reply, which stands in contrast to the
succinctness of the Brisbane Declaration.
Let me use the NISO terms in this post: roughly "Accepted Manuscript" (AM) =
author's final draft = postprint; "Version of Record" (VoR) = publisher's
pdf, however see NISO-RP-8-2008 for precise definitions. I prefer these
terms because sometimes a Version of Record is not a pdf - in most open
access journals that I publish in, the Version of Record is a collection of
html files and images. Sometimes it is in XML, and the Version of Record can
exist in multiple formats.
Now to the point. There are several reasons for the wording in the
Declaration.
1. The first is explained by Paula. The Version of Record is nearly always
prohibited by the publisher from being made open access in a university
repository. This is true even of some Open Access journals, who would prefer
that readers access their open access website rather than a secondary
repository's. Thus a repository that contains all or mostly Versions of
Record is likely to have no claim to being an Open Access Repository -
rather it is a record-keeping collection of little interest to the outside
world. In such a case it is pretty pointless activity, except that it will
absolve the University of keeping paper copies of its HERDC research outputs
for the Australian Government audits, which I suppose is some justification.
In contrast a far greater proportion of publishers are relaxed about the
Accepted Manuscript being made open access, sometimes after a brief embargo
period. I expect these embargos to disappear with time. A repository full of
Accepted Manuscripts is substantially an open access repository.
I might just hazard a comment on the "prettiness" of a version. It is hard
to imagine any researcher thinking that a blank screen with the text "Access
Denied" is prettier than their Accepted Manuscript. If this occurs it is the
result of misinformation or lack of awareness.
2. The second concerns the legal status of the two versions. The Accepted
Manuscript's copyright status rests solely with the author and/or his/her
employer (generally a university). Accordingly, it is quite feasible and
legally binding for the employer to make a prior claim on all Accepted
Manuscripts of its employees, such as a mandate to deposit the Accepted
Manuscript in its repository. Universities may also constrain their graduate
students (eg theses and degree-related articles) under Rules of Degrees. In
addition funders such as the ARC and NH&MRC may include a similar
stipulation into the funding contract offered to researchers and their
institutions. Accepting the grant carries with it a contractual obligation
on both the university and the researcher which over-rides any subsequent
contract.
All of these types of mandates are legally binding if worded appropriately.
The author is rendered legally incapable of signing a contract with a
publisher that purports to prevent deposit of the Accepted Manuscript, or if
they do so sign then the contract is unenforceable in this regard. The prior
contract takes precedence.
The situation with a Version of Record is different. However small (and
sometimes it is only page numbering), the publisher has put some content
into the Version of Record, and its copyright situation is joint in nature.
Universities and funding agencies have no authority over publishers, and
they therefore cannot mandate deposit of a Version of Record, except for
private record-keeping purposes (like HERDC).
3. Thirdly, I turn to what a Version of Record is (a fairly minor point,
but illustrative). Strictly, for paper journals, the primary VoR is the
printed pages; however most paper journals also have websites, from which a
page-numbered electronic version of the article is downloadable, perhaps
under licence. Such a file is of course a digital copy of the paper record,
even if it may even have preceded the paper copy in time and even if it has
a lower reproduction quality (eg dpi). The practice has arisen of calling
this "publisher's pdf" as the Version of Record in an electronic world
though the term is somewhat misleading.
However, not all Versions of Record are available as pdfs. A journal which
is published online only (and it may be a toll-access journal, an open
access journal or any other type) may have the Version of Record as one or
more html files accompanied by images. I have several articles of this sort.
It would be intensely irritating to have a repository manager insist on
having a pdf. Of course in the face of such insistence, one can simply
comply and create a fake paginated pdf from the unpaginated html Version of
Record. But it is stupid. Anyone who can access a pdf can surely access
html.
4. Finally, I turn to the other really important issue: pdfs are a dumb
(obsolete?) format to disseminate research in. Recall that a pdf (portable
document format) is a way of communicating the look of a printed page or
pages. It lives uneasily in a digital world. The contents of a pdf document
contain the text characters for sure. However, the non-text items (diagrams,
charts, tables, captions) have much of the useful information residing in
the original Accepted Manuscript thrown away. For example the numbers in
tables are reduced in accuracy to what you can see; images are auto-reduced
and compressed, charts are reduced to drawing instructions or images, and
captions are difficult to associate with images. A pdf is intended to
approximately reproduce a printed page, not to be electronically useful.
The reader gets to see what he or she would see if they saw the printed page
(and in many cases they print it if the paper sizes are compatible), but
further digging into the document is difficult, to know what the data were
that went into the chart, a full-res version of the CT-scan, or full
accuracy of the data in an important table. A robot (spider, crawler) is as
helpless as the human reader or more so.
The format of choice is an XML version of the Accepted Manuscript. XML does
not need to lose any information in conversion; it is preferred for
preservation; it is easily read by viewers; it is easily generated from
common document preparation programs (eg Word). Text-based search engines
can as readily parse XML as html and pdf formats, so the indexing capability
is not harmed. However, the embedded objects can also retain their full
quality from the draft: numbers to full precision, data in charts, big
images. A harvesting robot (or a researcher) can access these and extract
the real data that underlies paper, not a sanitized version. Such tools are
in their infant stages, but they are coming (eg Google Images and xx).
We also need to start looking beyond the current emphasis on collecting
documents, vitally important as it is to achieve 100% Open Access in that as
soon as possible. The Brisbane declaration also talks about open access to
research data. Some datasets (small ones) will find a home in an
institutional repository. Larger datasets may require dedicated
repositories. But in both cases pdfs are irrelevant and XML is the format of
choice.
May I then turn to your other argument - that you have to do what your
researchers want. This is a fallacy. You need to lead them, not follow them.
All methods of convincing a substantial number of researchers to voluntarily
self-deposit have failed, globally. No Australian university is going to
make a break-through unless it is a very tiny institution (say 100
academics). The only way forward is to make self-deposit a routine matter of
research activity. If it is routine, it gets done - there is nothing more
than that. That is how HERDC works. This is what mandates are designed to
do. The university, or the grant-giving body, simply says this is what you
have to do if you are using our resources to do research. And the
researchers do it. They don't even grumble (much!).
Returning to the Accepted Manuscript, this is the last point in time when
researchers have hold of the born-digital file that constitutes their
research output, and it makes a great deal of sense to capture it at that
time, before it gets lost in the mess of researcher offices or disks. It
also appears in the repository well before the VoR, and according to most
citation research has a greater chance of attracting citations by the Early
Advantage effect. Since the AM and the VoR differ in no essential respects
(otherwise authors would be in arms), the citation advantage should trump
prettiness. You might also note that the National Institute of Health (NIH)
mandate in the USA asks for the Accepted Manuscript for all the above
reasons.
Of course if you can get the rare permission to add a Version of Record to
your Accepted Manuscript, go for it. It certainly does no harm and could be
beneficial. But it should be an option only.
Arthur Sale
-----Original Message-----
From: institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz -- googlegroups.com
[mailto:institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz -- googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of Rebecca Parker
Sent: Thursday, 9 October 2008 4:28 PM
To: institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz -- googlegroups.com
Subject: [IRCommunity-ANZ] Re: Brisbane Declaration
Hi Arthur (and all)
I see that there is quite a lot of support for the Brisbane Declaration on
this and other lists and blogs around the world. As someone who didn't
attend the Open Access and Research Conference in Brisbane last month, I'd
like some further clarification on one of the points below.
I wonder why the architects of the Brisbane Declaration want the 'preferred'
version of the work to be the author's final draft?
At Swinburne, wherever possible we archive the published version of the
work. This is, after all, the definitive version---it looks more
professional, hence authors prefer it. Where we are not able to provide
access to the published version, we post the author's final draft instead.
However, we (and more particularly our authors) regard this as a poor man's
orange---a consolation prize. When we negotiate with publishers over
permissions, we state our preference for the published version; we will
accept the final manuscript only if there is no alternative.
The argument of the Declaration that the 'essence' of the work doesn't
change from final draft to published version seems irrational---if the
content doesn't alter between versions, then why not seek to present it in a
less amateurish and more visually appealing format? PDF can be read by
text-to-speech screen readers; if we're about opening up access to
knowledge, we need to prioritise the accessibility needs of all our users,
including the potential for use of repositories by visually-impaired
researchers.
In response to the claim that PDF harms the potential for harvesting data, I
would actively disagree. Swinburne (and other institutions) convert all
author final drafts from Word (and LaTeX, don't forget) to PDF anyway; it's
neater, platform independent, and currently best practice in the library
industry in terms of preservation. While I'd rather that this discussion
remains software independent, I do have to mention that the software
Swinburne and all ARROW members use for their repositories automatically
extracts a plain text version of every PDF uploaded to the repository. This
means that each PDF is searchable, and appears in Google free from the
proprietary, non-standard formatting contained in Microsoft Word documents.
I think it's excellent that Australian higher education stakeholders are
taking open access so seriously. I'm very pleased that the Declaration goes
against much of the established theory and makes provision for more than
just peer-reviewed journal articles. After all, these are such a
phenomenally small subset of the research output published at any
university.
However, I'm afraid I can't personally commit to this Declaration as it
stands.
As a repository manager, I act solely as an agent of my university's
authors' wishes. All the theory in the world can't overturn the fact that
without research content, there is no repository. And frankly, I think
mandating deposit of a manuscript version of a work in a repository
threatens to further reduce contribution rates nationally. Despite all the
rhetoric about the 'success' of institutional repositories, we all know the
truth is that most universities globally have woefully low self-deposit
rates. If authors from backgrounds that don't already utilise preprint
archives in their disciplines come to see their institutional repositories
as a space for non-definitive works only, they may choose not to use them.
Academics don't want what they regard as inferior versions of their work
hosted on university-endorsed websites. It can be difficult enough to build
a relationship of trust with researchers---I don't want to risk breaking
that for something that at my institution has proved to work well enough
already.
As long as I believe that the terms of the Declaration misrepresent the
needs of my researchers, I'm afraid I'm not able to promote this Declaration
to members of my university community. I absolutely respect the rights of
other repository managers and IR stakeholders to disagree---it saddens me to
have to take such a negative attitude to anything that furthers the course
of open access to knowledge. However, I'd be interested to see whether my
colleagues at other higher education institutions who manage and promote
active, successful and university-integrated repositories might endorse my
point of view on this.
___________________________________
Rebecca Parker
Assistant Content Management Librarian
Swinburne University of Technology
John Street, Hawthorn 3122
Australia
Phone: +61 3 9214 4806
Email: rparker -- swin.edu.au
___________________________________
From: "Arthur Sale" <ahjs -- ozemail.com.au>
To: <institutionalrepositoriescommunity-anz -- googlegroups.com>
Date: 09/10/2008 12:31 pm
Subject: [IRCommunity-ANZ] Brisbane Declaration
Maybe you have not seen the Brisbane Declaration yet? May I tease out a few
strands for readers of the list, as a person who was at the OAR Conference
in Brisbane.
1. The Declaration was adopted on the voices at the Conference, revised in
line with comments, and then participants were asked to put their names to
it post-conference. It represents an overwhelming consensus of active
members of the repository community in Australia.
2. The Conference wanted a succinct statement that could be used to explain
to senior university administrators, ministers, and the public as to what
Australia should do about making its research accessible to all. It is not a
policy, as it does not mention any of the exceptions and legalisms that are
inevitably needed in a formal policy.
3. The Conference wanted to support the two Australian Ministers with
responsibility for Innovation, Science and Health in their moves to make
open access mandatory for all Australian-funded research.
4. Note in passing that the Declaration is not restricted to peer-reviewed
articles, but looks forward to sharing of research data, and knowledge
(which description is preferred in the humanities and arts to research).
5. At the same time, it was widely recognized that publishers' pdfs
("Versions of Record") were not the preferred version of an article to hold
in a repository, primarily because a pdf is a print-based concept which
loses a lot of convenience and information for harvesting, but also in
recognition of the formatting work of journal editors (which should never
change the essence of an article). The Declaration explicitly make it clear
that it is the final draft ("Accepted Manuscript") which is preferred. The
"Version of Record" remains the citable object. I note that this is in line
with the NIH (USA) policy, and it seems likely to be stated in probable ARC
and NH&MRC mandate policies for grant recipients.
6. The Declaration also endorses author self-archiving of the final draft
at the time of acceptance, implying the ID/OA policy (Immediate Deposit, OA
when possible).
While the Brisbane Declaration is aimed squarely at Australian research, I
believe that it offers a model for other countries. It does not talk in
pieties, but in terms of action. It is capable of implementation in one year
throughout Australia. Point 1 is written so as to include citizens from
anywhere in the world, in the hope of reciprocity. The only important thing
missing is a timescale, and that's because we believe Australia stands at a
cusp.
May I suggest that each Australian repository manager should take the
Brisbane Declaration to his or her Steering Committee (or equivalent),
besides forwarding a copy to the Vice-Chancellor, the DVC(Research) and the
University Librarian, as a minimum. The local newspaper might also be
interested (through the proper protocol), if you are prepared to explain the
nuances. The public is actually really interested in seeing some university
research, not solely medical.
Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania
PS. The terms in quotes (eg "Accepted Manuscript") are the NISO preferred
terms.
Received on Fri Oct 10 2008 - 10:02:11 BST