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<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Harnad
Comments on <a href="http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/policies-politiques/Tri-OA-Policy-Politique-LA-Trois_eng.asp#3">Canada’s
NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy</a></span></b></p>
<p class="" style="margin:0cm 0cm 13pt 72pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Executive Summary:</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana">
The Draft Canadian Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy is excellent in preserving
fundees’ free choice of journal, and afree choice about whether or not to use
the research funds to pay to publish in an OA journal. However, <i>deposit in the fundee’s institutional
repository immediately upon acceptance for publication</i> needs to be required,
whether or not the fundee chooses to publish in an OA journal and whether or
not access to the deposit is embargoed for 12 months. This makes it possible
for the fundee’s institution to monitor and ensure timely compliance with the
funder OA policy and it also facilitates providing individual eprints by the
fundee to individual eprint requestors for research purposes during any embargo.
Institutional repository deposits can then be automatically exported to any
institutional-external repositories the fundee, funding agency or institution
wishes<i>. On no account should compliance
with funding agency conditions be left to the publisher rather than the fundee
and the fundee’s institution</i>.</span></p>
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<p class="" style="margin:0cm 0cm 13pt 36pt"><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">“Grant recipients are
required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from
Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of
publication, either through the publisher's website (Option #1) or an online
repository (Option #2).”</span></i></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Monitoring
and Ensuring Compliance.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> A funding agency Open Access
(AO) Policy is binding on the <i>fundee</i>,
not on other parties. Hence it is a mistake to offer fundees the option either
to comply or to leave it to another party (the publisher) to comply. </span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Funder
Requirements Bind Fundees, Not Publishers.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> The fulfillment of
funding agency conditions for receiving a grant is the responsibility of the
fundee, and the funding agency needs a systematic and reliable means of
monitoring and ensuring that</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family:Verdana">
the fundee has indeed complied, and complied in time.</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family:Verdana">Institutional Monitoring of Compliance.</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family:Verdana"> To ensure compliance (and timely compliance)
with an AO requirement it is imperative that the responsibility rest fully
with the fundee. The funding
agency’s natural ally in ensuring compliance is the <i>institution of the fundee</i>, which is already very much involved and and
shares a strong interest with both the fundee and the funding agency in
ensuring the fulfillment of all funding agency conditions.</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family:Verdana">Immediate Institutional Repository Deposit.</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family:Verdana"> Hence <i>whether
or not</i> the fundee publishes with a publisher that makes the article OA
immediately, or after an embargo, the fundee should be required to deposit the final,
peer-reviewed draft in the funde</span><span style="font-family:Verdana">e’s institutional repository <i>immediately upon publication</i>. (Indeed,
the most natural, effective and verifiable date is the <i>date of acceptance</i>, since the date of publication varies greatly,
is often not predictable or known to the fundee, and often diverges from the
published calendar date of the journal – if it has a calendar date at all.)</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><span style="font-family:Verdana">The institution of the fundee can then
use the date-stamp of the deposit in the institutional repository and the date
of acceptance of the article as the means of monitoring and ensuring timely
compliance.</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Access
Delay and Research Impact Loss.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> The purpose of OA is to make
publicly funded research accessible to all potential users and not just to those
whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it
was published. This maximizes research uptake, impact and progress. Hence this
is why OA is so important and why access-denial is so damaging to the potential
usage and applications of research. Studies have also shown that delayed access
never attains the full usage and citations of immediate OA. Hence a mechanism
for ensuring timely compliance is essential for the success of an OA Policy,
and immediate institutional deposit, regardless of locus of publication, is the
optimal mechanism for ensuring timely compliance.</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Gentil-Beccot, A., Mele, S.,
& Brooks, T. C. (2010). Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy
physics. <i>Scientometrics</i> 84(2),
345-355. <a href="http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/13500/slac-pub-13693.pdf">http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/13500/slac-pub-13693.pdf</a>
</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Conflict
of Interest.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> It should also be noted that publisher interests
are in conflict with the research community’s interests regarding OA. Except
when they are receiving extra money for it, publisher interest is to embargo
and delay OA as long as possible. This means that, far from being a reliable
ally in ensuring that fundees comply with a funding agency OA requirement, publishers
are likely to delay making articles OA as long as they possibly can</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin:0cm 0cm 13pt 36pt"><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">“<u>Option #1</u>:<b> </b></span></i><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">Grant
recipients submit their manuscript to a journal that offers immediate open
access to published articles, or offers open access to published articles
within 12 months.”</span></i></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Fundee Freedom to Choose Journal.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> It is very good to leave the fundee’s choice of
journal completely free to the fundee. But it is also imperative that <i>no matter what journal the fundee chooses to
publish in</i>, the peer-reviewed final draft should always be deposited in the
fundee’s institutional repository – and deposited immediately, not after a
12-month delay.</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Fulfilling Eprint Requests During
Embargoes.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> Institutional
repositories have a Button with which users can request and authors can provide
a single electronic reprint for research purposes with one click each. This
Button facilitates uptake, access and usage immediately upon deposit, rather
than having to wait till the end of a publisher embargo. Hence this “Almost-OA,”
made possible by the Button, is another strong reason why all papers should be required
to be deposited in the institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for
publication.</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:Verdana">Sale, A., Couture, M.,
Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the
"Fair Dealing" Button. In: <i>Dynamic
Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online</i> (Rosemary J. Coombe &
Darren Wershler, Eds.) <a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/">http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/</a>
</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin:0cm 0cm 13pt 36pt"><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">“The Agencies consider
the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under
the <a href="http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/Professors-Professeurs/FinancialAdminGuide-GuideAdminFinancier/FundsUse-UtilisationSubventions_eng.asp"><span style="color:rgb(190,0,6);text-decoration:none">Use of Grant Funds</span></a></span></i><span style="font-family:Verdana">.”</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin-bottom:13pt"><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Fundee
Freedom to Choose Whether to Pay for OA.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> It is very good to
leave it entirely up to fundees to choose whether or not to use their grant
funds to pay publishers extra to make their work OA. As long as fundees retain
their free choice of which journal to publish in, and all are all required to
deposit in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for
publication (whether or not the deposit is embargoed, and whether or not they
publish in an OA journal) there is no harm in allowing grant funds to be used
to pay publishers for making their article OA, <i>if fundees wish</i>. (Given the options, and the scarcity of research
funds, it is unlikely that many fundees will choose to pay, rather than just
deposit.)</span></p>
<p class="" style="margin:0cm 0cm 13pt 36pt"><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">“<u>Option #</u>2:<b> </b></span></i><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">Grant
recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a digital
archive where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g.,
institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the
responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow
authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal
publications in accordance with funding agency policies.”</span></i></p>
<p class=""><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Institutional
Deposit and Institution-External Export. </span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana">It is fine to leave it
up to authors to sort out whether their final peer-reviewed manuscript is made
immediately OA or access to the deposit is embargoed for 12 months – <i>as long as the deposit is made immediately</i>,
and hence deposit is systematically verifiable and the institutional
repository’s eprint-request Button is immediately available to allow users to
request individual copies for research purposes. For this reason it is again
important to require immediate institutional deposit in all cases. The deposit
can be automatically exported by the reposository software, at designated
dates, to designated institution-external repositories, as the fundee or funder
or institution may wish. </span></p>
<p class=""><b><span style="font-family:Verdana">Facilitating
Verification of Compliance.</span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana"> But it is almost as great a
mistake to allow institution-external deposit instead of institutional deposit
(making it needlessly diffuse and complicated to systematically monitor and
ensure compliance for both the institution and the funder) as it is to allow
publisher fulfillment of funding agency requirements instead of fulfillment by
the fundee (and the fundee’s institution). </span></p>
<p class=""><i><span style="font-family:Verdana">The
only change that needs to be made to optimize the NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR Draft Tri-Agency
Open Access Policy is to require immediate deposit in the fundee’s
institutional repository, regardless of whether the fundee’s chooses option #1
or option #2.</span></i></p>
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