Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?
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
(with no guarantee of a successful outcome). The other
alternative candidate mandates are:
ID/IA: The Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA)
mandate is stronger than ID/OA. 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
access embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal
allowable length. But 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 consensus 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: Next there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed
Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself may be
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, DD/DA is in fact
needlesslyweaker than ID/OA, because it arbitrarily loses
the 37% Almost-OA accessible via the button, until the
date at which each embargo elapses. (DD/DA further risks
needlessly losing a lot of the 63% OA as well, by not
requiring immediate deposit in any case.)
Author Licensing Mandate: Last, and almost as strong
as the (nonexistent) ID/IA mandate is a negotiated
author-licensing mandate. But how can such a mandate
reach consensus on adoption and compliance 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 inHarvard's mandate) -- which
again loses the 37% Almost-OA during any embargo or
opt-out, and is hence needlessly 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 on adoption 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 following are replies to some queries I received about Elsevier's
Authors' Rights Policy on Green OA Self-Archiving:
Q: "The Elsevier Authors' Rights policy states that
authors may...
'Post a personal manuscript version of the
article on the author's personal or
institutional website or server... This means
an author can update a personal manuscript
version (e.g., in Word or TeX format) of the
article to reflect changes made during the
peer-review process. Note [that] such posting
may not be for commercial purposes... and may
not be to any external, third-party website.'
"Does this not exclude posting to a repository? And if
so, can Elsevier still qualify for Green status given
such a restriction?"
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 sanctioningfree-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 extremelycounterproductive and
ill-thought-out -- though well-intentioned -- bug in many of the
current OA self-archiving funder-mandates, in which direct central
deposit (inPubMed 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 thatcollaborative, convergent
mandates from funders are a great help whereasMailScanner has
detected a possible fraud attempt from "openaccess.eprints.org"
claiming to be 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 (andresearch 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.
Q: "Having made the case for Immediate Deposit/Optional
Access-setting (ID/OA), it's not clear how you can be so
complacent about the Optional Access-setting part. Surely
in order to achieve the goal of genuine open access,
articles must not only be depositedimmediately, but also
made freely available. Now clearly, the weaker the
mandate, the more likely is its adoption; this is a
matter of tactics. But what if all institutions adopt
ID/OA, but then do not Open Access on the deposits? Has
anything been gained? (Perhaps you'd reply yes, because
one has to win the first battle before being free to
fight the second?)"
(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-outfor 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.)
Q: "How do you know that the university servers/websites
in which Elsevier allow authors will be OAI compliant?"
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).
Q: "Why do you think Elsevier has adopted a Green policy
on self-archiving?"
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.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Dec 08 2008 - 02:26:22 GMT
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