[Apologies for Cross-Posting]
Re: "Bill Would Block NIH Public Access Policy" (Science, 11
September)
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/911/1
Conyers Bill:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h6845:
Plan B for NIH Public Access Mandate (And It's Stronger Than Plan
A!):
A Deposit Mandate
I hope the Conyers Bill, resulting from the publisher lobby's attempt
to overturn the NIH Public Access Mandate, will not succeed.
But in case it does, I would like to recommend making a small but
far-reaching modification in the NIH mandate and its implementation
that will effectively immunize it against any further publisher
attempts to overturn it on legal grounds. And this Plan B will
actually help hasten universal OA more effectively than the current
mandate:
(1) NIH should mandate deposit of the refereed final
draft of all NIH-funded research, immediately upon
acceptance for publication.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
(2) But access to that deposited draft need only be made
Open Access when there is no publisher embargo on making
it Open Access; otherwise it may be made Closed Access.
(3) Open Access means that the full text of the deposited
draft is freely accessible to anyone, webwide,
immediately.
(4) Closed Access means that the full text of the
deposited draft is visible and accessible only to the
depositor and the depositor's employer and funder, for
internal record-keeping and grant-fulfillment purposes.
(Publishers have no say whatsoever in institutional and
funder internal record-keeping.)
(5) For all deposits, however, both Open Access and
Closed Access, the deposited article's metadata (author,
title, journal, date. etc.) are Open Access, hence
visible and accessible to anyone, webwide.
(6) Now the essence of this strategy: NIH should also
implement the "Email Eprint Request" Button, so that any
would-be user, webwide, who reaches a link to a Closed
Access article, can insert their email address in a box,
indicate that a single copy of the postprint is being
requested for research or health purposes, and click.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html
(7) The eprint request is then automatically transmitted
immediately by the repository software to the author of
the article, who receives an email with a URL that can
then be clicked if the author wishes to have the
repository software automatically email one individual
copy of that eprint to that individual requester.
(8) This is not Open Access (OA). But functionally, it is
almost-OA.
(9) Many journals (63%) already endorse immediate OA.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
(10) Closed Access plus the Button will provide almost-OA
for the remaining 37%.
(11) That means an NIH Deposit Mandate guarantees either
immediate OA (63%) or almost-OA (37%) for 100% of
NIH-funded research.
(12) In addition, an NIH Deposit Mandate will encourage
universities in the US and worldwide to adopt Deposit
Mandates too, for all of their research article output,
not just NIH-funded biomedical research output.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html
(13) The spread of such Deposit Mandates across
institutions and funders worldwide will inevitably lead
to universal OA for all research output eventually, once
the mandates ensure the universal practice of immediate
deposit.
(14) In addition, because it makes the almost-OA Button
even more powerful and easier to implement -- NIH should
stipulate that the preferred locus of deposit is the
author's own Institutional Repository, which can then
export the deposit to PubMed Central using the
automatized SWORD protocol.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD
The fact is (and everyone will see this clearly in hindsight) that,
all along, the online medium itself has made OA a foregone conclusion
for research publications. There is no way to stop it legally.
It is only technological short-sightedness that is making publishers
and OA advocates alike imagine that the outcome is a somehow a matter
of law and legislation. It is not, and never has been.
It is only because we have been taking an obsolete, paper-based view
of it all that we have not realized that when authors wish it to be
so, the Web itself has made it no longer possible to prevent
authors from freely distributing their own writings, one way or the
other. There is no law against an author giving away individual
copies of his own writing.
And NIH need only mandate that authors deposit their (published
research journal) writings: giving them away for free can be left to
the individual author. The eventual outcome is obvious, optimal and
inevitable.
I strongly urge OA advocates to united under this back-up strategy.
It will allow us to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
Received on Sat Sep 13 2008 - 14:53:28 BST