[GOAL] Re: Open Access Mandates: Q&A with the NIH

[Andrew A. Adams]

> 
> We think thatthe most important action right now is the national as well international coordination: 
> 
> a) A lot of Austrian research institutions and universities have notyet established an OA policy, repositories or publication funds for OA publishing. Therefore, together with other institutions wecurrently try to organise an Austrian network which implements and coordinates such activities.
> 
> b) UKPMC is working hard to extend the consortium to evolve towards PMC Europe.
> 
> c) For ScienceEurope (the new umbrella organisation of all major European research funders and research performing agencies) OA is one of the key topics.Therefore, a working group is established which will formulate recommendations for common actions (standards for funding APCs, incentives for high-level OA journals, OA for research data, e.g.)
> 
> The OA movement was characterized by institutional or country based examples and experiments so far, which was in the sense of trial and error very important. But to accelerate the development and to reach the tipping point, we think it now needs more international cooperation and common standards.

Falk,

As the previous two UK administrations (Blair and Brown) found to their 
(political and UK taxpayers financial) immense cost, large centralised 
databases are very hard to develop, maintain and populate. If we consider the 
UK's NHS IT systems we see that a decade of attempts to put in place a single 
overall system has been precisely worse than useless. The main project 
delivered nothing of significant value and impeded local efforts because 
either they weren't started (why do something local when one is promised that 
something national is on the way) or because they were done but tried to keep 
up with the ever-moving chimera of the NPfIT.

Institutional repositories are the natural scope for university-based 
research. The technology (eprint and dspace) is there, as is the 
interoperability (SWORD et al). The relatively smaller number of 
non-university researchers have options of the opendepot for non-affiliated 
researchers or the option of implementing the same technology as universities 
for other institutions (individually or as consortia). The side benefits to 
running one's own repository in terms of efficiency of promoting the 
institutions' research output, monitoring the output of staff (for promotion, 
funder mandate compliance and other purposes) should more than outweigh the 
costs of supporting a local repository, which are not large compared to the 
other systems that most universities operate (student registration databases, 
scientific computation services...).

The vast majority of papers produced by any government research-body-funded 
research have at least one co-author at a research university or similar 
academic institution.

The obvious move is to mandate local deposit, with compliance a requirement 
on the institution and the individual researcher (primarily the PI) who can 
be motivated by a requirement on future funding - as with the Liege model 
internally, only papers deposited full-text in the repository under an ID/OA 
setting can be considered as formal outputs and used to justify future 
funding applications.

Central deposit can be automated using SWORD and a simple set of keywords 
(UKPMC for anything that should be deposited in there, for example).

I find it strange that the simple logic of this escapes anyone considering 
how to move forward with OA from the funder side. Fund IRs instead of 
pre-emptive Gold/Hybrid fees and mandate local deposit (enforced by final 
report and future funding applications only being allowed to refer to IR 
deposited papers). Promote whatever central harvesting is useful for 
particular fields (medical research) automatically by simple keyword match.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/