[GOAL] Predictable Perverse Effects of Finch Folly -- and How to Immunize RCUK Against Them

[Stevan Harnad]

Thursday July 26
2012<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/oa-advocate-stevan-harnad-withdraws_26.html>

*SH*: …If you were a journal publisher… what would you do, when faced with
a policy like [Finch/RCUK]?

*RP:* What do you predict?

*SH:* The answer is obvious: You would offer to “allow” your authors to pay
you for hybrid Gold OA (while continuing to collect your usual subscription
revenues) and, for good measure, you would ratchet up the Green OA embargo
length (up to the date your grand-children finished their university
education!) to make sure your authors pay you for hybrid Gold rather than
picking the cost-free option that you fear might eventually pose a risk to
your subscription revenues!


Monday December 10
2012<http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access>


Institute of Historical Research *Statement on position in relation to open
access:*

*
*

"[IHR] fully support initiatives to make scholarship as widely and freely
available as possible, above all online...  The government wants all RCUK
funded and all QR funded scholarship to be published ‘gold’ insofar as
funding allows. This would mean that an author (through their university)
would pay an ‘article processing charge’ (APC) to the journal... The
government also envisages ‘green’ open access... This means that no fee is
paid by the author to a journal. Instead, the article must be made freely
available on line after an embargo period.If gold access is not offered by
the journal, that period could be as little as 6 to 12 months. In the case
of humanities, the government is prepared to accept a longer [embargo]
period, perhaps around 2 years, particularly if the journal concerned also
offers gold open access...  We want first to make it clear that we will
accept gold APCs... The period of embargo [IHR] will offer [for green] will
be 36 MONTHS..."


QED

All is far from lost, however. There is a simple way that funder mandates
can immunize themselves against such perverse consequences. They need only
include the following 8 essential conditions:


(1)  *immediate-deposit *(even if *access* to the deposit is allowed to be
embargoed: *no delayed deposit*)


(2) of the *final peer-reviewed draft *


(3) *on the date of acceptance* by the journal (which is marked by a
verifiable calendar date)


(4) and the immediate-deposit must be *directly in the author's own
institutional repository* (*not institution-external*)


(5) so that immediate-deposit can be *monitored and verified by the
author's institution* (regardless of whether the mandate is from a funder
or the institution)


(6) as a *funding compliance condition* and/or an* **institutional
employment condition*


(7) and the *institutional repository must be designated as the sole
mechanism *for submitting publications for institutional *performance
evaluation, research grant applications* and national *research assessment.*


(8) Repository deposits must be monitored so as to generate *rich and
visible metrics of usage and citation*, so as both to verify and reward
authors for deposit and to showcase and archive the institution's and
funder's research output and impact; for embargoed deposits, user needs can
be fulfilled via the repository's email-eprint-request
Button<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268511/>
.


An instance of such mutually reinforcing funder and institutional policies
is the FRS-FNRS
policy<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html> in
Belgium.


Such an integrated, maximized-strength mandate model immunizes against
publisher embargoes and should be adopted, complementarily and
convergently, by all institutions and funders, in Europe and worldwide.


Here is the fundamental point that needs to be grasped: The only thing that
is standing between the world and 100% OA is *author keystrokes* (for
depositing the full text in an online repository). Once those keystrokes
are done, even if some of those deposits are under an access embargo,
nature and human nature will take its course, under pressure from the
increasingly palpable benefits of OA, and embargoes will soon die their
inevitable and well-deserved deaths of natural causes -- and journals will
survive, and evolve, and adapt.


But it will take forever to happen if the keystrokes are not mandated.
Journals will try to filibuster and embargo OA for as long as possible:
it's a conflict of interest, between, on the one hand, research,
researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, and the
tax-payers who fund the research, and, on the other hand, the research
publishing industry.


Scholarly research is not funded and conducted as a service to the
scholarly publishing industry (regardless of whether the publishers are
commercial or "scholarly", and regardless of whether they are subscription
publishers or Gold OA publishers).


It is time to stop allowing the publishing tail wag the research dog.


Mandating the Green OA keystrokes (even where embargoed) is the fastest,
cheapest and surest way to get us to 100% Green OA -- and then all Gold OA,
Libre OA will not be far behind.


But trying ins tea to mandate Gold OA preemptively as the Finch Committee
have perversely proposed to do, under the influence of the publishing
industry lobby, will only serve leave the UK, the former leader of the
global OA movement, far behind.


*Stevan Harnad*
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