[BOAI] Harvard's Recommendations to President Obama on Public Access Policy

[Stevan Harnad]

    ** 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
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