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

[Stevan Harnad]

Dear Falk,

I profoundly hope that you are communicating with us on GOAL open-mindedly,
with a view to gaining information you perhaps did not have, and with a
readiness to revise policy if a valid case can be made for the fact that it
would help.

Because all too often, I have alas found, those who come to OA
policy-making tend to make some initial judgments and decisions, implement
them, and then when either practical experience itself, or those who have
more and longer experience in OA and OA policy, call into question those
initial judgments and decisions, the response is: "My mind's made up, don't
annoy me with facts!" and the initial policy simply becomes more and more
firmly entrenched, regardless of the consequences.

It is too early for such rigidity, Falk. And Andrew and I (and many others)
are trying to explain to you what is amiss with both the FWF policy and the
rationales that you are voicing here.

You wrote:

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Reckling, Falk, Dr. <
Falk.Reckling at fwf.ac.at> wrote:

Stevan,  Andrew,
>
> a) [1] an IR has to exist and that is often not the case. [2] And if an IR
> exists it is often not used, [3] mandate or not. [4] Here some central
> disciplinary respositories are much more successfull as PMC/UKPMC.
>

1. Many, many institutions have repositories, and those that do not yet
have one are merely a free piece of software and a server sector away form
having one.

2. Yes, almost all existing repositories are unused (at least 80% of annual
institutional refereed research output is not deposited). But *that is the
point*! That's precisely why deposit mandates are needed.

3. It is an enormous factual error, however, to say that institutional
repositories are unused whether or not they have a mandate. Again, that is
the whole point. There is abundant evidence that institutions that mandate
deposit are not near 80% empty but near 80% full! (And especially when they
have adopted the optimal ID/OA mandate of U. Liege.)

4. It is also an enormous factual error to state that central repositories
like PMC/UKPMC are exceptions to the 20/80 rule (i.e., that only 20% of
total research output is deposited un-mandated). The total research output
of an institution is all the refereed journal articles, in all disciplines,
that its authors publish each year. The total research output of a central
discipline-based repository is all the refereed journal articles published
each year *by all authors in that discipline, in all institutions
worldwide.* To imagine otherwise is to fall into the denominator fallacy --
http://bit.ly/oaDenFal :

The annual percentage use of a repository is the annual ratio of deposited
articles to all target articles within its ambit. For an institution, the
denominator is obvious, and easily estimated. For an entire discipline, it
is far from obvious, but it too can be estimated. And I can assure you that
the un-mandated Bio-Medical Research content of PMC/UKPMC is no higher than
the global 20% baseline for all other disciplines. What gives the illusion
that it is otherwise is two things, one trivial, one nontrivial:

The trivial reason for this profound error and misconception is the simple
fact that disciplines are much bigger than institutions. So the absolute
number of articles in a disciplinary repository is much bigger than those
in any institutional repository, even though their un-mandated content is
just 20% in both cases.

The nonrivial reason for this profound error is the fact that much of
PMC/UKPMC content is *mandated* (by NIH, MRC, Wellcome Trust), and for that
subset the percentage deposit is of course much higher -- *exactly as it is
with institutional mandated content*.

So the overall error is to conflate central repository content and mandated
content, and incorrectly (and misleadingly) deduce that central
repositories are doing better than institutional repositories because they
are bigger and have more deposits.

Reflection will show that it is *mandates* that generate deposits, not
centrality or disciplinarity (irrespective of whether the mandates are
institutional mandates or funder mandates).

(The Physics Arxiv is the sole exception, where un-mandated deposits are
close to 100%, and have been for two decades: But two decades is far too
long to keep waiting in the hope that the physicists' spontaneous,
un-mandated self-archiving practices would generalize to other disciplines:
they have not. That's why the OA movement has moved toward supporting
mandates.)

And as several of us have now stated, the functionality of a central
repository for navigation and search (which is certainly incomparably
better than the functionality of any single institutional repository, where
no one would ever dream of doing navigation and search) is fully preserved
if the central repository harvests the metadata and links to the full-text
from institutional repositories.

The point being made here about the importance of ensuring that both
institutional and funder mandates collaborate and converge on institutional
deposit instead of diverging and competing is that it makes a huge
practical difference -- both to the burden on authors and to the
probability of persuading institutions (who are the universal providers of
all refereed research, funded and funded, in all disciplines) to adopt
deposit mandates of their own -- whether funders mandate institutional
deposit or institution-external deposit: http://bit.ly/OAloc

But Falk, you do not seem to be hearing this in these exchanges so far: you
seem instead o return over and over to funding Gold OA fees rather than
mandating Green OA. Is there any hope of drawing your attention to this
much more fundamental and urgent question, on which the prospects of OA
growth in upcoming years hinges?

b) We believe that OA is better supported by the Gold road and therefore a
> change of the business model is needed. That means costs should be covered
> by APCs or institutions or mixed models.


It is a great pity if you are rigidly committed to this belief, which is
not only erroneous (for the many reasons we have been describing) but
costly, because of the premature, pre-emptive focus on getting OA by paying
Gold OA fees instead of by mandating Green OA -- and designating
institutional repositories as the locus for direct deposit.

If funders do that, institutions (the universal providers) will mandate
Green OA too, and we will have 100% OA (Green). That will already solve the
research accessibility problem, completely.

But it is also the fastest and surest way to eventually convert journals to
Gold OA (and liberate the subscription money to pay for it.)

Solving the research access problem does not immediately solve the journal
affordability problem too -- but does make it into a far less urgent,
life/death matter (since with 100% Green OA, all users have access, whether
or not journals are afforded or cancelled.)

I profoundly hope you will set a good example for other policy-makers, by
showing some open-mindedness, flexibility and reflection on these crucial
questions.

Best wishes,

Stevan


> ________________________________________
> Von: Andrew A. Adams [aaa at meiji.ac.jp]
> Gesendet: Sonntag, 20. Mai 2012 14:11
> An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Reckling, Falk, Dr.
> Betreff: Re: [GOAL] Re: Open Access Mandates: Q&A with the NIH
>
> >
> > 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/
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