** Apologies for Cross-Posting **
Professor Steven Hyman, Provost of Harvard, the first US University
to mandate Open Access, has submitted such a spot-on, point for
point response to President Obama’s Request for Information on Public Access
Policy that if his words are heeded, the beneficiaries will not only be US
research progress and the US tax-paying public, by whom US research is funded
and for whose benefit it is conducted, but research progress and its public
benefits planet-wide, as US policy is globally reciprocated.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/01/22/373/
Reproduced below are just a few of the highlights of Professor Hyman’s response.
Every one of the highlights has a special salience, and attests to the minute
attention and keen insight into the subtle details of Open Access that went into
the preparation of this invaluable set of recommendations.
[Hash-marks (#) indicate three extremely minor points on which the response
could be ever so slightly clarified -- see end.]
“The public access policy should (1) be mandatory, not voluntary,
(2) use the shortest practical embargo period, no longer than six
months, (3) apply to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed
manuscript, as opposed to the published version, unless the
publisher consents to provide public access to the published
version, (4) [# require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open
repository #] immediately upon acceptance for publication, where it
would remain “dark” until the embargo period expired, and (5) avoid
copyright problems by [## requiring federal grantees, when
publishing articles based on federally funded research, to retain
the right to give the relevant agency a non-exclusive license to
distribute a public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed
manuscript ##]…
“If publishers believe they cannot afford to allow copies of their
articles to be released under a public-access policy, they need not
publish federally funded researchers. To date, however, it appears
that no publishers have made that decision in response to the NIH
policy. Hence, federally funded authors remain free to submit their
work to the journals of their choice. Moreover, public access gives
authors a much larger audience and much greater impact…
“If the United States extends a public-access mandate across the
federal government, then lay citizens with no interest in reading
this literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because
researchers will benefit directly…. That is the primary problem for
which public access is the solution…
“It doesn’t matter whether many lay readers, or few, are able to
read peer-reviewed research literature or have reason to do so. But
even if there are many, the primary beneficiaries of a public-access
policy will be professional researchers, who constitute the intended
audience for this literature and who depend on access to it for
their own work….
“Among the metrics for measuring success, I can propose these: the
compliance rate (how many articles that the policy intends to open
up have actually been opened up); the number of downloads from the
public-access repositories; and the number of citations to the
public-access articles. As we use different metrics, we must accept
that [### we will never have an adequate control group: a set of
articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is
no public access###]….
________________________________________________________________________________
Three suggestions for clarifying the minor points indicated by the hash-marks
(#):
[#”require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository”
#]
(add: “preferably the fundee’s own institutional repository”)
[##”requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on
federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant
agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of
his or her peer-reviewed manuscript” ##]
(add: “the rights retention and license are desirable and welcome, but not
necessary if the publisher already endorses making the deposit publicly
accessible immediately, or after the allowable embargo period”)
[### "we will never have an adequate control group [for measuring
the mandate's success]: a set of articles on similar topics, of
similar quality, for which there is no public access" ###]
(add: “but closed-access articles published in the same journal and year as
mandatorily open-access articles do provide an approximate matched control
baseline for comparison”)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Jan 26 2010 - 12:42:15 GMT