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On 1-Dec-08, at 5:55 AM, leo waaijers wrote (in SPARC-OAForum:
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 (keystrokes). Authors can be
mandated by their institutions and funders, but institutions and
funders cannot be mandated (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 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) most authors (> 80%)
will deposit willingly if it is mandated by their institutions and/or
funders, but they will not deposit if it is not mandated (< 15%)
(Alma Swan's studies); and that (b) most authors (> 80%) actually do
what they say they would do (deposit if it is mandated [> 80%] and
don't 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...)
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 archevangelist.
But alas it is not agreement that we need, but mandates (and
keystrokes)! And now, not in some indeterminate future.
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 success 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 mandates to be adopted. Let me explain:
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 authors are not doing the deposit keystrokes except
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 deposit?
(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 require successful copyright
renegotiation as a precondition for providing OA and for mandating
OA, however, would be needlessly and arbitrarily to raise the
goal-post 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
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/364-guid.html
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).
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14418/
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.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13804/
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
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15619/
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 first of these recommendations -- from the UK Parliamentary
Select Committee on Science and Technology. And the 28 universities
that have already 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 author's 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.
And journal publishers are likely to resist anyone trying to dictate
their economic model to them. (Moreover, this goes 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
Stevan Harnad wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:32:17 -0500
From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
To:
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: JISC/SIRIS "Subject and
Institutional Repositories Interactions
Study"
On 30-Nov-08, at 9:08 AM, Neil Jacobs (JISC)
wrote:
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, 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 the
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 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 ŕ l'oreille (not to be confused with
a gadfly),
Stevan Harnad
Neil
Stevan Harnad wrote:
The /JISC/SIRIS "Report of the Subject and
Institutional Repositories
Interactions Study"/ <
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/259/1/siris-report-nov-2008.pdf>(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 <
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/index.html>,
uncited in
the report) on what authors /state/ that they
will and won't do and (2) in
outcome studies (by Arthur Sale <
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/authors/Sale,_AHJ.html>,
likewise uncited in
the report) on what authors /actually do/,
confirming the survey findings:
*Most authors will not deposit until and
unless their universities
and/or their funders make deposit
mandatory
<
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/>.
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 <
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html>,
nor how to
make both mandates and locus of deposit
systematically convergent and
complementary (deposit institutionally,
harvest centrally <
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html>)
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
<
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University%
20of%20Southampton%20School%20of%20Electronics%20and%20Computer%20Science>,
Glasgow <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University%
20of%20Glasgow>,
Ličge <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Universit%C
3%A9%20de%20Li%C3%A8ge>,
Harvard <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Harvard%20U
niversity%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences>
and Stanford <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Stanford%20
University%20School%20of%20Education>,
and 30 from funders, including 6/7 Research
Councils UK <
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/outputs/access/default.htm>,
European
Research Council <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=European%20
Research%20Council%20%28ERC%29>and
the US National Institutes of Health <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=National%20
Institutes%20of%20Health%20%28NIH%29>)
plus at least 11 known mandate proposals
pending (including a unanimous
recommendation from the European Universities
Association <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=European%20
University%20Association%20%28EUA%29>
council, for its 791 member universities in
46 countries, plus a
recommendation to the European Commission
from the European Heads of
Research Councils <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=European%20
Research%20Advisory%20Board%20%28EURAB%29
).
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
<
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/>.
/Learned Publishing/, 18
(1). pp. 25-40.
*Stevan Harnad
<
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/>*
Received on Mon Dec 01 2008 - 14:58:06 GMT