Gavin Baker comments:
GB:"Every research funder should mandate OA to the
research it funds.
Every institution that produces research (college,
universities, research institutions) should mandate OA to
the research it produces.
Every researcher should ensure her research is OA."
Noble wishes. But alas not being fulfilled -- and it's been a long
wait. That's why specifying institutional locus-of-deposit for
existing funder-mandates matters: to help make these wishes come true
instead of just continuing to hope they will come true of their own
accord.
GB:"[P]ractice has shown that policy is significantly
more effective than unenforceable exhortations to authors
in general. So our question is not whether to mandate OA,
but how"
Indeed. But exhortations to mandate are not effective either! So this
is an exhortation to make a specific modification in existing
(funder) mandates to make them more effective in generating further
(institutional) mandates.
GB: "Where he's wrong: Dr. Harnad repeats..."Not All
Research Is Funded, But All Research Is Institutional"...
he weakens this statement to 'virtually all'..."
Not all researchers have fingers -- only "virtually all" do: That
does not mean it cannot be mandated that the deposit keystrokes need
to be done.
GB: "[N]ot all academic journal literature is written by
authors at colleges, universities, or research
institutions"
Fine. This changes nothing regarding the potential benefits of funder
mandates stipulating IRs as the default locus of deposit. As noted,
where the fundee has no IR, they can and should deposit in a back-up
CR such as DEPOT.
GB: "Institutional mandates won't touch these
[unaffiliated] authors (by definition). Funder mandates
may touch some, though I'd suspect that most such
research is unfunded"
That makes this case even more irrelevant. This is about
funder-mandates inducing fundees' institutions to adopt
institution-mandates. No IR? Or no Instiutution? Deposit in the DEPOT
-- and let's not let this minuscule number of exceptions obscure the
potential benefits of funder mandates stipulating institutional
deposit as a rule!
GB: "(Harnad notes that some funders do offer "back-up"
repositories for grantees without IRs, but without
endorsing this flexibility.)"
I did indeed endorse it, many, many times: And, in case of doubt, I
endorse it here too.
GB: "Harnad also deftly re-defines the traditional
meaning of "institution" in "IR", to mean "any
organization whose employees might ever produce
research"... As a result, he reduces further the number
of "unaffiliated" researchers"
Yes. And your point is...?
("Every institution is just (a) a piece of free software
http://www.eprints.org/software/, (b) a $1000 linux server plus (c) a
few days of sysad set-up time away from having its own IR. In the
meanwhile, there are interim alternatives like the DEPOT...")
GB:"Doesn't it make more sense to tell your employees to
deposit in a higher-visibility thematic repository?"
Most definitely not. It makes immeasurably more sense to mandate that
both fundees and institutional employees deposit in their own IR (or
DEPOT) and let high-visibility CRs harvest the deposits thereafter,
because that will generate more institutional mandates. That is in
fact the very essence of the point I am making.
GB: "My point about authors with multiple institutional
affiliations also goes unheeded. Harnad suggests that
this situation "only" requires one deposit, "followed by
export to the IRs of the rest of his institutions". Well,
now we're talking about export, which is exactly what I
call for between IRs, thematic, and funder repositories.
There's no difference between exporting from one IR to
another and between exporting from a thematic repository
to an IR."
That's the symmetry-fallacy again, which is exactly what I was
refuting: There's no point "calling for" ("exhorting") the export of
nonexistent (because undeposited) content. The point here is about
funder-mandates designating institutional deposit in order to
generate institutional-mandates (waking the "slumbering giant", "more
bang for the research buck," or whatever you want to call it) so as
to generate all that missing content!.
GB:"Harnad also understates the resource requirements for
adequately maintaining an IR. I'll let Dorothea Salo
answer this point."
Umm -- I'd rather this point was answered by the managers of the few
successful, well-stocked IRs that are actually doing what OA IRs are
for -- rather than doing anything but (and at high cost)...
GB: "Where I was wrong: Since more research comes out of
institutions (as a whole) than is funded (as a whole),
institutional mandates offer broader coverage."
No, institutional mandates would offer broader coverage (indeed,
universal coverage, if universally adopted). But only 30 have been
adopted so far; and so what we are talking about here is how
funder-mandates stipulating institutional deposit could induce more
institutions to mandate deposit for the rest of their total output,
funded and unfunded.
GB: "(But a given funder may sponsor significantly more
research than a given institution produces, and there are
fewer funders than institutions, so they give more "bang
for the buck" as initial targets.)"
Again, the point is not that a funder generates more research than a
single institution (though most do), but that a funder generates
research at many institutions. That's what will give them "more bang
for the buck" if they mandate IR rather than CR deposit. (And we are
talking about making this small but important change in existing
funder-mandates, not about just wishing for more funder-mandates.)
GB: "[D]o funders have any leverage to encourage
institutions to deploy IRs and mandate deposit? I am less
sanguine about this than Harnad, but flooding IRs with
deposits certainly could have the effect of building
institutional constituencies for IRs and thus for
institutional mandates."
Sounds like you are and are not sanguine, Gavin!
And funders do have enormous "leverage" with their fundee
institutions. But we are not talking about direct leverage to require
fundee institututions to create IRs or adopt deposit mandates -- just
the indirect leverage that would result from specifying IRs instead
of CRs as the funder-mandate's default locus of deposit.
GB: "Therefore: Is there some promise in using funder
mandates to prod universities toward institutional
mandates? Yes, there's some. Is it a sure thing? No. Do
funders still need to provide a "repository of last
resort" to deal with exceptions? Yes."
Agreed! So what are we arguing about?
(Yes, "repositories of last resort" do need to provided -- though
it's not clear why they have to be provided by the funder; nor how
many of them are really needed. There's plenty of room, for example,
in DEPOT, which currently has only 66 deposits after almost two years
of existence, simply because funders are mandating direct deposit in
their own CRs instead of the fundee's IR -- for which DEPOT was
specifically created to serve as the back-up.)
GB: "Is it still easier for funders to monitor compliance
and ensure adequate levels of service (including
preservation) by requiring grantees to get their work
into the funder's repository, one way or another? Yes."
Here's the way: import/export/harvest them from the IRs (and DEPOTs).
And the fundee institutions will be more than happy to collaborate in
monitoring and ensuring compliance with the funder's grant
fulfillment conditions.
GB: "Require grantees to deposit in their IR, if they
have one. Require also that grantees ensure their
publication ends up in your repository, wherever they
initially deposited it. If they are accustomed to
depositing in an institutional repository, they're
responsible for working with your repository manager to
ensure their work gets harvested. Better still if the
repository allows users to set up automatic harvesting
themselves, either for a single publication or for all
the author's future publications, if they don't want to
talk to the repository manager."
Yup, that's it! So what are we arguing about, Gavin?
GB: "[Or] Encourage grantees to deposit in their IR, if
they have one."
Now that, in contrast, would be useless, just as encouraging
("exhorting," "calling for," "wishing") authors to deposit -- or
funders or institutions to mandate -- is useless. What we are talking
about is a tiny but concrete and specific change in the
implementational details of actual, adopted funder mandates, so as to
require institutional (or, as last resort, DEPOT) deposit, in order
to generate more institutional mandates. Merely "encouraging" it will
generate nothing.
GB: "[T]he risk of backlash if IRs are poorly managed, a
factor over which the funder can have little control..."
Why are we speculating about the possibility of full, ill-managed IRs
when what we are actually faced with is virtually all IRs (whether
well-managed or ill) empty! Necessity is the mother of invention:
Fill those IRs with their valuable intended content, and institutions
will nurture them as the invaluable assets they will prove to be.
Keep fussing instead about the current or future management of idle
or nonexistent IRs and you will have years more of idle or
nonexistent IRs.
GB: "Funder repositories come with their own cost: the
increased potential for government interference in
science that comes with greater centralization"
Let's not get carried away! We're talking about published journal
articles, made openly accessible, free for all. If they are deposited
in each researcher's distributed IRs, they can thence be harvested
into multiple CRs. If there is government "interference" (whatever
that means) in governmental CRs, there will be plenty of other
harvested CRs (e.g. google scholar!) where those came from.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Wed Feb 11 2009 - 20:55:31 GMT