Peer Review and the Target Content of Institutional and Funder Open Access Deposit Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:48:53 -0500

Unfortunately I have not been able to follow the peer-review
discussion now ongoing on JISC-REPOSITORIES so I am not sure this
comment addresses the point of interest there, but it looks as if the
discussion is partly about (1) what counts as "peer-reviewed" and (2)
what should be allowed to be deposited in an Institutional Repository
(IR).

(1) "Peer-review" is a fuzzy, approximate criterion (qualified
experts evaluating and improving the work of their fellow-experts,
answerable to a meta-expert -- the editor -- and to the quality
standards and track-record of a journal or other serial publication).
However, the scientific and scholarly community has a good enough
idea about this to manage with this fuzzy criterion in preparing, for
example, their CVs, and separating peer-reviewed from unrefereed
publications or nonpublications.

(2) All research output -- peer-reviewed or not -- might in principle
be welcome in an IR, as long as its status is clearly tagged as
refereed or unrefereed. (Usually the journal-name is sufficient to
demarcate this for the scientific and scholarly community.)

But there is another reason for which it is extremely important to
distinguish refereed from unrefereed research: Deposit mandates from
funders and institutions.

The deposit mandates are essential in order to ensure that an IR
captures its Open Access (OA) target content (and that is the
refereed literature -- about 25,000 refereed journals and
proceedings, about 2.5 million articles per year). Without a deposit
mandate, only about 15% of this target content is captured. With a
mandate, the institutional deposit rate approaches 100% within about
2 years of adoption and implementation of the deposit mandate.

But OA Deposit mandates only make sense, and are only enforceable and
are only taken seriously if their target is clear: refereed serial
publications. If book deposit is required, authors will revolt and
not comply. If unrefereed preprint deposit is required, many authors
will likewise object that their unrefereed drafts are intended
neither for the public eye nor for permanent archiving. If unrefereed
newsmagazine or newsletter puff-pieces are required, it blunts the
force of the OA deposit mandate, which derives from the importance of
maximising the accessibility of reliable, validated research findings
to all would-be users.

So I would suggest making as clear a distinction as possible between
what kinds of content must be deposited, as required by institutional
and funder OA mandates, and what kinds of content may be deposited,
according to the judgment of the author and the policy of the
author's institution.

Finally, if RCUK Outputs and Outcomes Collection Project (OOCP)
wishes to impose some deposit conditions over and above its OA
deposit requirement, it could either stipulate that the deposit if
peer-reviewed articles is required and the deposit of other kinds of
outcomes and outputs (such as books, unrefereed preprints, unrefereed
publications, blog postings, software, multimedia, and, especially,
research data) is either (a) encouraged (but not required), or (b)
required (but not necessarily to be made OA -- just for funding
council record-keeping, assessment, fulfillment scorecards, and the
monitoring of outputs and outcomes).

Instead blurring the target of OA mandates to include contents that
the author may not wish to deposit or make public would create a
slippery slope that compromises the prospects of capturing the
mandatory OA target content -- which is exclusively peer-reviewed
articles.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Feb 11 2009 - 12:49:35 GMT