** Cross-Posted **

     Yet Another Reason for Institutional OA Mandates:
     To Reinforce and Monitor Compliance With Funder OA Mandates
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/365-guid.html

     Commentary on:
     Zoe Corbyn "Low compliance with open-access rule criticised"
     Times Higher Education Supplement 21 February 2008
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=400678&c=1

A study of the compliance rate for the Wellcome Trust's Green Open 
Access Self Archiving Mandate presented at the 2008 Boston AAAS 
meeting reported a self-archiving rate of around 30% eight months 
after the policy came into effect. This is considerably higher than 
the NIH non-mandate's 4% rate (recently upgraded to a mandate), and it 
is above the 5-15% spontaneous self-archiving rate, but it is not 
clear whether it is as high as the compliance rate for institutional 
mandates. If it is not, then this is yet another reason for mandating 
institutional rather than central deposit, and deposit by the author 
rather than by the author or publisher. That way the institutions can 
add its own weight to the mandate, and can monitor compliance.

(1) The spontaneous baseline rate for unmandated OA self-archiving is 
between 5% and 15%, depending on field. Anything above that is an 
improvement.

(2) Arthur Sale's analyses comparing deposit rates for mandated and 
unmandated Institutional Repositories (IRs) show that (2a) unmandated 
deposits hover between 5-15%, (2b) encouraged and incentivized 
deposits climb toward 30% but not much higher, whereas (2c) mandated 
deposits approach 80-100% within about two years of adoption of the 
mandate.

(3) Arthur's data are for author self-archiving, in the author's own 
institutional repository (IR), mandated and monitored by the author's 
own institution.

(4) The funder mandates have not been in place long enough for a good 
estimate of their rate of success, but three things are already 
evident:

(4a) A researcher's funder is not in as good a position to monitor and 
enforce compliance with a self-archiving mandate as a researcher's 
institution is: Institutions conduct annual reviews of publication 
output and can easily determine whether or not articles are deposited 
in their own IR. Funders do not conduct such annual publication audits 
(though they could).

(4b) If the funder requires central deposit (as Wellcome does, in 
PubMed Central) this means funders cannot rely on the researcher's 
institution to monitor and enforce compliance with the terms of the 
grant, insofar as author self-archiving is concerned.

(4c) With the funder's deposit requirement fulfillable in two 
different ways -- through author self-archiving or through publisher 
deposit -- it makes it even more difficult to coordinate, monitor and 
verify compliance.

The solution is quite obvious: Funders should not be mandating deposit 
in central repositories, such as PubMed Central. They should be 
mandating deposit in the author's own Institution's Repository. And 
the depositing should be done by the author, not the publisher. That 
way the author's institution can systematically monitor and enforce 
compliance, feeding back to the funder; and the central repository 
need merely harvest the deposits from the distributed IRs, if it 
wishes.

It was absurd all along to insist on central self-archiving, in the 
age of OAI-compliant, interoperable IRs, designed specifically in 
order to facilitate central harvesting! It was also absurd to have 
institutional and funder mandates pulling in different directions, 
toward different repositories, instead of pooling resources and 
collaborating, as funders and institutions do in all other respects.

Perhaps most relevant to Wellcome's apparently slow rate of compliance 
are the exciting recent developments concerning the Sleeping Giant of 
Open Access: the Institutions (Universities, mostly), and their actual 
and future self-archiving mandates:

There are now 22 funder mandates (including, recently, NIH) and 16 
institutional and departmental mandates (including, even more 
recently, Harvard) plus the unanimous recommendation of the Council of 
the European Universities Association that its 791 universities in 46 
countries should adopt OA self-archiving mandates.

Institutions are the providers of all the research that funders fund 
(and don't fund) in all disciplines. It makes no sense for funders to 
mandate that the researchers they fund should deposit directly in 
arbitrary central repositories. The way to mandate OA is for both 
funders and institutions to mandate institutional deposit, and then 
for institutions to monitor compliance (as part of the conditions for 
receiving the funder's grant in the first place!).

In sum, Wellcome's mandate compliance may be coming along, it's too 
early to say; but they need to get compliance and fulfillment 
conditions in place, and the most efficient and practical way to do 
that is to collaborate with their own fundees' institutions (who are 
usually co-recipients of the Wellcome Grants anyway), to make sure 
they monitor compliance; deposit should be by the author, in the 
author's own institution's IR (PMC can then harvest from there).

This will create a systematic synergy between funder and institution 
mandates, and ensure that they facilitate one another and converge (on 
the IR) rather than diverging will-nilly in various CRs.

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
     http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
     BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
     http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
     BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
     a suitable one exists.
     http://www.doaj.org/
AND
     in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
     in your own institutional repository.
     http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
     http://archives.eprints.org/
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/