I am glad that Isabel Bernal has sent this message about the excellent OA
developments in Spain. I was becoming concerned that comments on the MELIBEA
service - whether justified or unjustified - were giving the impression that
our Spanish colleagues are adopting a faulty approach to OA (can any way of
bringing OA be faulty?). I have looked at both the Digital.CSIC and
Revistas.CSIC sites, and I found them attractive and very easy to use (which
unfortunately cannot be said about all repositories). The policies
underpinning the dual approach make a lot of sense as national policies. OA
supporters in every country have to encourage OA in whatever way suits their
political and cultural environment, and it seems to me that this is what our
Spanish colleagues are doing very effectively.
Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Isabel Bernal" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 5:27 PM
Subject: Re: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
Good afternoon everybody,
Following the ongoing discussion in which the CSIC (Spanish National
Research Council) and its open access efforts have been mentioned, we would
like to clarify the following:
The CSIC Presidency signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in January
2006, and as a result of it the Spanish National Research Council is driving
and implementing open access principles through 2 institutional initiatives:
-Digital.CSIC (https://digital.csic.es/) is the institutional repository
that provides open access to, organises and preserves the scientific output
resulting from the research activities by CSIC 147 institutes and centers.
The repository is a project by CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit.
-Revistas-CSIC (http://revistas.csic.es/) provides open access to the 35
scientific Journals published by the institution, covering a wide variety of
scientific disciplines. To date, 14 Journals provide immediate open access,
while 22 apply an embargo period of six months. Before the end of this year,
at least 4 more Journals are planned to move to full OA. Revistas-CSIC is a
project run by the CSIC Publication Department, and is a member of OASPA
under the category of OA Professional Publishing Organization.
These 2 initiatives fall within the CSIC Vice-presidency of Organization and
Institutional Relations.
To date, CSIC does not have an open access institutional mandate. In the
absence of a nation-wide open access related law yet, there are regional
laws in favour of open access that have a direct effect on CSIC, such as
that of the Government of the Community of Madrid.
Thus, MELIBEA should not be considered a CSIC institutional project.
Best wishes,
Agnès Ponsati, Director of CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit
Ramón Rodríguez, Coordinator of Revistas-CSIC
-----Mensaje original-----
De: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] En nombre de Stevan Harnad
Enviado el: lunes, 19 de julio de 2010 15:56
Para: [log in to unmask]
CC: SPARC Open Access Forum; [log in to unmask];
[log in to unmask]
Asunto: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve
Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be
potentially useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that
makes it all the more important to get it right, rather than releasing
MELIBEA prematurely, when it still risks increasing confusion rather than
providing clarity and direction.
You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking and
the Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. But
you have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a
ranking just the same.
You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for institutions
and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the MELIBEA
coding as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central
to institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA
algorithm.
You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the "green" OA
coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread use of green to
designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both overt and
covert.
I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA
-- it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of OA
policies.
But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points
and conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce
confusion and would not help in bringing the all-important focus and
direction to OA policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks to
help bring about.
Here are just a few prima facie points:
(1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA
policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder
policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and
unless the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, to
make sure it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress and
guides policy-makers in the right direction.
(2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate
separate flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy
criteria, considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis of
a prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
(3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then 200
institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands.
Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a
disproportionate effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting;
all the more reason NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning
untested initial weights without carefully thinking through and weighing the
consequences.
(4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be a
reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to
estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of
OA's target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for
institution size and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as
request/require or immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against
these outcome measures (such as percentage and growth rate of annual target
output).
(5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if
there is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the
display of single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both
unnecessary and confusing. The objective should be to order and focus
clearly and intuitively. Whatever is correlated with more green OA output
(such as a higher level or faster growth rate in OA's target content) should
be coded as darker or bigger shades of green. The same should be true for
the policy criteria, separately and jointly: in each case, request/require,
delayed/immediate, etc., the greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive.
This should be reflected in the graphics as well as in any comparative
rankings.
(6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a
repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is
duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA,
is to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the
very few) repositories that DO have policies.
(7) The sign-up data --
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- are
also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or
applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the
generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are far
more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than funders.
There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and for
funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus on
gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the
end, as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with green
OA policy.
(8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of "waivers": There are
two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether or not deposit is required
(and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) and the other concerns
whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if so, whether that
requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent
requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of
MELIBEA.
I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign of
these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for serious
consideration and use.
Stevan Harnad
On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
> Dear Steve,
>
> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some
explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my
comments are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>
>
>
> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA
policies are vitally important to the development of institutional
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this
development can be valuable.
>>
>> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA
service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do
you expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a
couple of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each
scored about 50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of
OA policies, so this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>>
>> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation
to institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is
an IR with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA
publication policy, libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if
Yes), incentives (score if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might
specify but which might not apply to an IR
>> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>> . However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the
overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately
handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand the
scores.
>>
>>
>>
> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA BUT
TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE INCLUDED
IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF DIFFERENTE
NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ABOUT THE
REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND
UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS AND
WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON AS POSSIBLE" (this
could be a month after publication or years after publication, depending on
one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ("Gold
(Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED BY SAME
ECONOMIC MODEL.
>
>
>> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the validator,
and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold
refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it
would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are
achieving almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I
suspect this cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions
must have a green AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument
could be put for that).
>>
>>
> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT WERE
A SPECTRA.
>
>> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA
policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of
OA.
>>
>>
> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. AND
RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE
QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION
ABOUT DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, WHICH COULD
DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF THERE
ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point but
to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>
> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any improvement to
make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data in
graphical form.
> Best wishes
> Reme
>
>>
>>> R. Melero
>>> IATA, CSIC
>>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>>> E-mail
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>
>
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