[BOAI] Immediate-Deposit Mandates In No Way Constrain Authors' Publishing Options

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2013-11-26,  Rick Anderson <rick.anderson at utah.edu> wrote:

> Stevan Harnad:  "Independent and critical thinking" researchers

> will act according to the evidence: depend on it. They may be slow,

> but they are not stupid…"

> RA: Not only do I agree that they're not stupid, I wouldn't even say that
> they're slow. And as for acting according to the evidence, I couldn't
> agree with you more. In my experience talking about these issues with
> faculty researchers, their ambivalence about OA is based neither on
> stupidity nor on slowness, but on an insufficiency of evidence that OA
> is always and necessarily the answer. Researchers tend to see OA
> models as presenting a mixed bag of upsides and downsides (as any
> publishing model does). Researchers are generally smart and quick
> enough to immediately recognize, for example, that mandates constrain
> their publishing options, so they approach mandate proposals
> cautiously. One way they demonstrate caution is by insisting that such
> mandates include powerful escape clauses, thus turning them into
> "mandates" rather than mandates.

(1) That making one's articles accessible online to all potential users
is preferable to making them accessible only to subscribers is a no-brainer 
to figure out, with no further need of evidence, speed or sapience (though
plenty of evidence is available) The ones insisting that "further" evidence 
is needed to "prove" this are only the  ones with a vested interest in the 
subscriptions or the subscription income.

(2) What takes a bit more thought concerns what to do about 
publisher embargoes on authors providing (Green) OA. Researchers
have been much slower to realize that they can provide Green OA
without any constraint whatsoever on their publishing options:
by depositing their refereed final drafts in their institutional repositories
immediately upon acceptance for publication, whether or not the
publisher embargoes Green OA, and making access closed (only the
metadata are OA) if the author wishes to comply with a publisher
embargo on OA.

(3) During any OA embargo, the repository's automated copy-request
Button ("Almost-OA Button") allows any would-be user to request and 
any willing author to provide a copy with just one click each.

(4) Hence immediate institutional deposit can be mandated by all
institutions and all funders without any constraint on researchers'
publishing options. 

(5) The "escape clause" is only required for the "copyright
reservation" policies (like Harvard's and MIT's), which are
adopted by faculty consensus. Although the reported opt-out
rate is only 5%, such policies do notionally constrain researchers'
publishing options, if the publisher refuses to publish their papers
under those conditions, or the author does not wish to try.

(6) But Harvard and MIT also have an immediate-deposit clause,
which requires immediate-deposit even if the authors opt out
of the copyright-reservation clause.

The purpose of the immediate-deposit mandate (Liege/HEFCE model)
is to accelerate and motivate researchers in doing what is in their own 
best interests  anyway, once they have thought it through -- as you yourself 
have not yet done, Rick, in not knowing, or not having understood
the difference between the  copyright-reservation clause and the 
immediate-deposit clause, and their respective implications for
publishing options as well as for potential research uptake and
impact.

Stevan Harnad


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/boai-forum/attachments/20131128/ac3c44ce/attachment.html