<div dir="ltr">On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Rick Anderson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rick.anderson@utah.edu" target="_blank">rick.anderson@utah.edu</a>></span> wrote:<div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">
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<div><b>SH:</b> With the ID/OA mandate, <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=%22immediate+deposit%22+blogurl:http%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbm=blg" target="_blank">
immediate-deposi</a>t is mandatory, but access-setting (immediate OA or embargo, with the copy-request Button) is up to the author.</div></div></div></div></blockquote></span>
<div style="text-align:left"><b>RA:</b> In other words, a policy that actually makes deposit mandatory is a mandate. No argument here. But it appears that many of the institutional policies listed on the ROARMAP site—all of which are presented on that site as "mandates"—actually
require no deposit at all. A few examples would be those of MIT ("<span style="text-align:left">The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon
written notification by the author"), </span>the University of Oregon library ("<span style="text-align:left">The Dean of the Libraries will waive application of the policy for a particular article
upon written notification by the author")</span>, and the University of Glasgow ("<span style="text-align:left">Staff are asked to deposit a copy of peer-reviewed, published journal articles and conference proceedings
into Enlighten, where copyright allows, as soon as possible after publication.") To be clear, these are not offers of indefinite embargo upon request following mandatory deposit—they are policies that require no deposit.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align:left">So my question remains: why the insistence on calling such policies "mandates"? If they make no action mandatory, then why not simply call them policies? </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I agree that some of the "mandates" in ROARMAP are not really mandatory, although Merriam-Webster does give two senses of "mandate":</div><div><br></div></div></div>
<blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><span style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-weight:bold">1 </span><strong style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">:</strong><span style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"> </span><span style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">an authoritative command</span><span style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">...</span></div>
</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><div style="float:left;font-weight:bold">2</div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote"><div style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><div style="margin-bottom:10px;margin-left:20px"><span><strong>:</strong> an authorization to act...</span></div>
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<div style="line-height:20px;font-size:13px;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"></div></div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">
Academics do need both: an <i>official requirement</i> (similar to publish or perish) (<b>1</b>) and <i>official backing</i> from their institutions and funders (<b>2</b>), to empower them in deal with their publishers.</div>
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<div class="gmail_extra">But, as I said, many of the first wave of mandates are indeed weak, and some are not even mandates at all. </div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">They are, however, increasingly being upgraded to ID/OA:</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">In the UK, HEFCE/REF's new policy will effectively make all funded research in the UK ID/OA, and the institutions will have to be the ones to ensure that researchers comply. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The EC's new Horizon2020 is likewise an immediate-deposit mandate. </div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Many (including me) are working hard to try to ensure that the US OSTP mandate and the Canadian Tri-Agency mandate will be ID/OA too. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Both Minho and QUT have recently upgraded their institutional mandates to ID/OA. And several institutional mandate adoptions have lately been ID/OA.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The hope had originally been that the Harvard/MIT-style OA mandates, because they were (i) <i>self-imposed faculty consensus policies</i>, would be even more effective than administrative mandates, and that because they (ii) formally <i>pre-assigned certain rights by default to their institutions in advance of submission for publication</i>, they would strengthen authors' negotiating position with publishers. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div class="gmail_extra">"<i>Each Faculty member grants to (university name) permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles… Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author’s final version of each article no later than the date of its publication</i> [e.g., by depositing it in the institutional repository]<i>…"</i></div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><a href="https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/model-policy-annotated_01_2013.pdf">https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/model-policy-annotated_01_2013.pdf</a></div></blockquote>
<div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">But in practice the Harvard/MIT-model OA mandates (often just called OA "policies") seem to have turned out to be less effective than had been hoped: </div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br></div><div class="gmail_extra">First, the Harvard model had (a) <i>had to allow author waivers</i>, which in and of itself rendered the policy non-mandatory; but this in itself is not the problem, because only about 5% of authors formally request a waiver. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The problem is that (b) <i>most authors neither waive nor deposit</i>. </div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The exact proportion of compliance is not known, because the policy is not binding on all faculty (because at Harvard not all Faculties have adopted it, and because at MIT a lot of collaborative research is not bound by it) and (c) u<i>niversities in general currently have no way of knowing what their total published research output is</i>. (Enabling institutions to keep track of their own research output was in fact one of the secondary purposes of OA mandates and institutional repositories.)</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">So, as with other OA policies, implementation at Harvard and MIT has been reduced to librarians trying to chase after authors to provide their papers, or trying to retrieve their authors' published papers from the web (where they have sometimes been made OA on institution-external sites). I believe librarians even try to retrieve their institutional authors' papers from publishers' websites, when the library has licensed access -- but then they languish while the library or repository staff try to figure out whether or when they have the right to deposit them. (This, despite the fact that there are only 5% waivers of the default rights-retention clause!)</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">It is quite problematic that the Harvard OA policy model is being widely emulated in the US because of its distinguished source, even though it is now 5 years since it was first adopted in 2008 and yet <i>there are no data available on how well it works compared to other mandate models</i> (or no mandate at all).</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">In principle, if Harvard takes it seriously that 95% of faculty have not waived a default rights-assignment policy, then they can make papers OA in Harvard's institutional repository immediately. The question is: which version? If authors have not provided their final refereed drafts, it is unclear what can be done with the publisher's PDF.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The Glasgow policy -- I agree it's not really a mandate, and I have just downgraded it to a non-mandate in ROARMAP -- is the weakest kind of OA policy of all: "Deposit if and when your publisher says you can!"</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">This is why it's so important that institutional and funder mandates should be (I) upgraded to all require immediate deposit and (II) harmonized to all require institutional deposit, with (III) deposit designated as the sole official mechanism for submitting refereed journal articles for performance review, research assessment, grant applications and fulfillment, and official academic CVs. </div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">(If institutional rights assignment is waived, the publisher has an OA embargo, and the author wishes to comply with the embargo, access to the deposit can be set as Closed Access instead of OA, and the repository's automated request-a-copy Button can provide "Almost-OA" during the embargo with one click each from each requestor and the author.)</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">The UK's <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/834/">HEFCE REF2020</a> and the EU's <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/987/">EC Horizon2020</a> mandates should soon both be harmonizing institutional mandates in this direction. Let's hope the US, Canada, Latin America, Australia and the rest of the research world will soon follow suit. OA is already fully within reach and absurdly overdue. Let's this time have the good sense to grasp it.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><b>Stevan Harnad</b></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div></div>