[GOAL] Constraints on authors' journal choice

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-09-14, at 3:00 AM, SUGITA Shigeki wrote:

> Congratulations on BOAI's new reccomendations!
> 
> The Digital Repository Federation (DRF) in Japan
> is now translating it into Japanese and will soon privide it.
> 
> I am a member of the translation staff.
> 
>> 1.1. Every institution of higher education should have
>> a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all
>> future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited
>> in the institution’s designated repository. (See
>> recommendation 3.1 on institutional repositories.)
> 
>>    University policies should respect faculty freedom to
>> submit new work to the journals of their choice.
> 
>> 1.3. Every research funding agency, public or private,
>> should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions
>> of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research
>> are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as
>> soon as practicable.
> 
>>    When publishers will not allow OA on the funder’s terms,
>> funder policies should require grantees to seek another publisher.
> 
> Feeling a mismatch between these clauses, I am at a loss
> for word selection. I am not so good at English. My misunderstanding?

You are right to point out this difference in the recommendations 
for (1) institutions and for (2) funders.

Please note that I am replying as one individual co-drafter and
 co-signatory. I am not speaking for all of us, nor for the Soros 
Foundation.

The rationale was that there are some factors over which 
institutions have more prerogatives than funders, and there 
are some factors over which funders have more prerogatives  
than institutions.

(1) Institutions, because they employ researchers to do the 
highest quality research can require researchers to publish 
their findings in the journals with the highest quality standards. 
This can be reflected in how institutions evaluate the research 
performance of their researchers, assigning higher weight to
work that has met the standards of journals that have higher 
quality standards. 

(Often in practice the quality of a journal is inferred in part 
from its average citation count ["impact factor"], which is a 
metric that has been much criticized. This is a complicated 
and controversial issue. The computation and use of metrics 
is currently evolving, partly under the influence of open access 
itself.)

(2) Funders, because they pay for and dictate the conditions 
for the grants they award, have slightly different criteria and 
prerogatives. They too want research to be of high quality, 
but they are also in a position to make public access to 
publicly funded research a condition of the funding. And the 
larger funding agencies (such as NIH) fund so much research 
that they have a sizeable potential influence on journal policy 
(e.g., embargo lengths) -- an influence that most individual 
institutions do not have.

Hence funders can, in principle, stipulate that the research 
must be made open access, as a contractual obligation 
preceding its having been submitted to any journal. As a 
consequence, journals would either have to honor this prior 
contractual obligation or not accept the work for publication.

Note that some institutions with a particularly heavy weight 
have taken a route somewhat similar to this, notably Harvard 
and MIT. Their (Green) open access mandates stipulate that 
their authors are contractually bound to make their published 
articles open access unless the authors explicitly seek a 
waiver from the policy. The Harvard/MIT-style copyright 
retention mandate, however, is just one of several differenct 
kinds of mandate models or mandate condtions that an 
institution might adopt. And, as noted, in general, individual 
institutions do not have the weight of research funders in 
influencing journal policy.

So -- and here, although what I've said so far is largely generic, 
I am speaking as an individual interpreter of the BOAI10 
recommendations -- the feeling was that BOAI should not 
single out which Green OA mandate conditions an institution 
should adopt, beyond recommending that deposit should be 
immediate, embargoes should be as short as possible, and 
re-use rights should be as broad as possible, whereas funders 
could also adopt constraints on journal choice other than just 
journal importance and quality.

The unknowns here are researchers themselves, whose needs 
vary from discipline to discipline. Some authors, in some fields, 
may be happy to exercise their choice of journal in such a way 
as to comply with institutional open access policy -- others may 
prefer a waiver, in order to publish in the journal they find most 
appropriate. 

It is, quite frankly, a conjecture whether a constraint on authors' 
journal choice, in the interests of open access, will prove successful 
for funder mandates.

It should accordingly be born in mind that the BOAI 
recommendations are just recommendations; that they 
vary in their importance, generality and urgency, as 
well as in the degree to which they are supported by 
prior evidence and experience.

Recommended constraints by funders on authors' 
journal choice fall in this more provisional category. 
Not all the co-drafters and co-signatories were equally 
sanguine about them.

Stevan Harnad