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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:

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:32:17 -0500
From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
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 à 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>,
Liège <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Universit%C3%A9%20de%20Li%C3%A8ge>,
Harvard <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Harvard%20University%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences>
and Stanford <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Stanford%20University%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%20Research%20Council%20%28ERC%29>and
the US National Institutes of Health <
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=National%20Institutes%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%20University%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%20Research%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/>*