Integrating University and Funder Open Access Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2008 19:41:44 -0500

Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html

    SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and
    university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary.
    There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic
    and mutually reinforcing:
        Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the
    natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output:
    Universities are the research providers and have a direct interest
    in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing
    their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their
    uptake, usage and impact.
        Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit
    of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's
    own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication,
    for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to
    that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may
    be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow;
    otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright
    negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions
    described by universities and funders should accordingly apply
    only to the timing and copyright conditions for providing open
    access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its
    locus or its timing.
        As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all
    research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce
    and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates
    will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning
    open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied
    independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis,
    according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will
    apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself,
    nor its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then
    harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed
    conditions at the agreed time, if they wish.

There is a simple, natural, universal way to integrate (a) funder
open-access mandates and (b) university open-access mandates,
reconciling the NIH and Harvard OA mandates, as well as making the
two kinds of mandate synergistic and mutually reinforcing: 

      (i) Separate the deposit requirement from the open access
      requirement.

      (ii) Separate the issue of the locus and timing of the
      deposit from the issue of the locus and timing and
      copyright conditions for providing open access to the
      deposit.

Both universities and funders should mandate immediate deposit of the
peer-reviewed final draft (postprint), in the author's own
university's Institutional Repository (IR), immediately upon
acceptance for publication, without exceptions or opt-outs, for
institutional record-keeping purposes.

Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university
IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions
permit it; otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending
copyright negotiations or embargoes. (Only the metadata are visible
and accessible webwide, not the postprint full-texts.)

All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders
should accordingly apply only to (ii) the locus, timing and copyright
conditions for providing open access to the deposit, not to (i) the
depositing itself, its locus or its timing.

That way:
      (1) there will be a systematic (and natural) common locus
      of direct deposit for all research output worldwide; 
      (2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor
      compliance with funder mandates; 
      (3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; 
      (4) legal details concerning open-access provision,
      copyright and embargoes can be handled separately on a
      case by case basis, according to the conditions of the
      mandate (instead of needlessly making (1)-(3) contingent
      on each case); 
      (5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations,
      not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and 
      (6) central OA repositories (like PubMed Central) can
      then harvest the postprints from the authors' IRs under
      the agreed conditions at the agreed time.

Right now, the NIH mandate requires that the postprint must be
"submitted" immediately upon acceptance for publication (which is
excellent!), but it does not specify how or where to submit it! 

The obvious solution is that the postprint should be directly
deposited, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into the
researcher's own university's (or institution's) IR -- possibly as
Closed Access rather than Open Access, depending on copyright and
embargo conditions and negotiations. (NIH can then be sent the URL,
and given access privileges.)

The recommendations of the SPARC/Science Commons/ARL joint white
paper "Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright
Considerations and Options" by Michael Carroll are all excellent:
Their only flaw is in not separating those valid and helpful
considerations and options from the question of the locus and timing
of the deposit itself. That locus should always be the author's IR,
and the timing should always be immediately upon acceptance for
publication. None of the copyright considerations are pertinent to
the deposit itself: They apply only to the provision of open access
to the deposits.

In exactly the same way, the Harvard mandate is excellent in every
respect except that it too conflates the deposit itself with the
copyright and embargo considerations and options -- which should only
apply to to the time when open access to the deposit is provided, not
to the making or timing of the deposit itself. The Harvard mandate
offers the option of opting out option from the requirement to
negotiate copyright retention. That makes the Harvard mandate into a
non-mandate unless the copyright requirement, with opt-out, is
separated from a deposit requirement, without opt-out.

The solution proposed here is simple, natural, solves both the NIH
and Harvard problems at once, makes the funder and university
mandates complementary and convergent, and provides an integrated,
synergistic OA mandate model for both funders and universities that
will systematically scale to all worldwide research input.

I hope that funders and universities will give this integrative
proposal serious thought, rather than just pressing ahead with the
current NIH and Harvard models, both of them welcome and timely, but
both in need of this small yet crucial revision to ensure their
coherence and success. 

It is noteworthy that three recommendations were made to NIH three
years ago: (1) mandate immediate deposit, with no opt-out, (2)
specify direct deposit in the fundee's university IR, and (3) harvest
into PubMed Central.

Those recommendations were not followed, and after three years the
NIH policy was acknowledged to have failed. Because of that failure,
the policy has very recently been upgraded to an immediate-deposit
mandate (1). But there are already signs (from the very
similar Wellcome Trust mandate) that systematicmonitoring
mechanisms are needed to ensure compliance with funder mandates. 

University mandates are the obvious means of reinforcing and
monitoring compliance with funder mandates (as part of the
fulfillment conditions for receiving the grant overheads and indirect
costs allotments). Moreover, university IRs are also the natural,
convergent locus for direct deposit of all research output, the
universities being the providers of the research, both funded and
unfunded, with a direct institutional interest in archiving,
recording, assessing, showcasing their own research output as well as
in and maximizing its uptake, usage and impact.

Funder mandates like NIH's will naturally reinforce university
mandates, like Harvard's. The two mandating parties simply have to
agree on separating the universal issue of immediate deposit (and
locus of direct deposit) from the independent issue of copyright,
embargoes, the timing of the provision of Open Access to the deposit,
and whatever further central repositories may wish to harvest the OA
deposit or its metadata. 

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Mon Mar 03 2008 - 00:53:13 GMT

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