[BOAI] Re: 1st-Party Give-Aways vs. 3rd-Party Rip-Offs

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Joseph Greene <joseph.greene at ucd.ie> wrote:

*SH:*
      "If supplying eprints to requesters could be delegated to 3rd parties
like Repository
Managers<https://theconversation.com/neuroscientists-need-to-embrace-open-access-publishing-too-16736#comment_198916>
to
perform automatically, then they would become violations of copyright
contracts.
      "What makes the eprint-request
Button<https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy> legal
is the fact that it is the *author* who decides, in each individual
instance, whether or not to comply with an individual eprint request for
his own work; *it does not happen automatically*."

*JG:*
>
       For what it’s worth, we recently did some investigation into this to
> try and find a loop-hole. We looked at it from an ILL point of view,
> e-journal subscription licensing and legal deposit provision and came to
> the conclusion that there is no loop-hole to exploit in traditional library
> service provision; if we were to implement the button it would have to be
> author mediated, not librarian mediated. Guess it would have to be stated
> in the CTA.
>

Why even try to search for a "loophole" that would allow the fulfillment of
Button-press eprint-requests from users to be taken out of the hands of the
author and put into the hands of a 3rd party?

Not only would that have made the Button illegal, thereby defeating its
purpose in mooting publisher embargoes.

It would also have deprived the author of a useful metric of research
impact: number of eprint requests (not quite the same thing as number of
downloads).

(The eprint-request count is perhaps even a bit of a 2-edged sword, in that
some authors may actually come to *prefer* the Button to OA, because of the
feedback it provides as to who is requesting their work! We can be fairly
confident, though, that the growth of OA mandates worldwide -- and with
it the growth of immediate-OA as well as of Almost-OA from Button-generated
eprint-requests -- will in most cases increase the pressure for
immediate-OA, hasten the demise of OA embargoes, and with it the need for
the Button.)

So, please, leave well enough alone. Mandate deposit immediately upon
acceptance for publication, but otherwise, having mandated the N-1 of the
author keystrokes required for deposit, leave the Nth keystroke to the
author.

(I don't even think it's a good idea for the library to relieve the author
of the responsibility to make the first N-1 keystrokes, though this would
certainly not be illegal: We are talking about a few extra minutes worth of
keystrokes per paper. Authors can delegate those to secretaries, research
assistants or students, but they are left entirely to the library
immediate-deposit will not become the natural milestone in the author's
research cycle that it needs to become, in order to ensure that the deposit
is done at all: the dated acceptance letter from the journal is sent to the
author. That sets the date of immediate-deposit, and also determines which
version is the final, accepted one. The publication date is uncertain and
could be as much as a year or more after acceptance. In other words, the
indeterminacy of the publication date could be even longer than OA
embargoes.)

(One of the flaws in the Harvard-style mandate -- OA rights reservation by
default, with an author opt-out option -- is that instead of mandating that
authors deposit in the repository, it mandates that they provide refereed
draft to the Provost. But the Provosts have been sitting on those refereed
drafts, again even longer than the embargoes they were meant to circumvent,
instead of making them immediately OA, or at least Almost-OA.)

Mandate immediate-deposit and leave the rest in the hands of the author.

Put all administrative efforts instead into monitoring mandate compliance
-- by systematically collecting the dated acceptance letters instead of the
papers themselves, and ensuring that the repository deposit-date is within
a few days or weeks of the acceptance date.

*Stevan Harnad*


> ****
>
> ** Joseph Greene
>
> Research Repository and Systems Librarian****
>
> James Joyce Library****
>
> University College Dublin****
>
> (353 0)1 716 7398****
>
> (353 0)1 716 7686****
>
> joseph.greene at ucd.ie****
>
>
>
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