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Dear Stevan,
Thanks for your reply. You have a point that there are 58
self-archiving mandates and no licence-to-publish mandates so far. I
will allow for that in the future.
Best wishes,
Leo.
Stevan Harnad wrote:
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 Fri Dec 05 2008 - 09:56:25 GMT