[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions

[Andrew A. Adams]

Here is a message I sent to the US White House about the OATP Presidential 
mandate.

First I would like to express my support and thanks for the announcement of 
the policy on open access to scientific literature announced by Dr John 
Holdren. This is an important expansion of themove towards open access 
globally and in all disciplines.
THis is in no way a criticism, but a push to help ensure that the 
implementation of this policy achieves the best effect. There are two 
problems with the existing NIH policy which impede its effectiveness and I 
would urge that you consider these in communications with the relevant heads 
of agencies.
The first is that the primary means of achieving Open Access should be by 
deposit in either an institutional repository (for those researchers with an 
institutiona such as a research lab or a university) or in a single nominated 
general repository (preferably the OpenDepot: www.opendepot.org). Please do 
not encourage agencies to make the mistake of following the NIH which 
mandated direct deposit in BioMedCentral. By all means encourage automatic 
harvesting for relevant papers to relevant central or subject repositories 
such as BMC or even an agencies own. However, mandating deposit in an 
institutional repository encourages and reinforces institutions to maintain 
their own repositories and to mandate deposit of all research into that 
repository (not just federal funded research). While the federal government 
cannot easily mandate the outputs of research it does not fund to be 
deposited, specifying institutional repositories as the locus of deposit of 
outputs from federally-funded projects helps to encourage institutional 
mandates, and reduces the complexity of complying with multiple funder 
mandates: researchers deposit in the institutional repository whichever 
funder or funders they work with (and by adding a "funder" field, any central 
harvesting can then be automatic, as can reports to the funder about 
compliance with the mandate - see next point).
The second problem with the NIH mandate which should be avoided is related 
and is the oversight of compliance with the mandate. By specifying that the 
institution and the author(s) have the responsibility for deposit in their 
institutional repository, this allows quite simple checking of compliance 
with the mandate. In particular, the submission of future funding 
applications and reports on current/recently completed projects can then 
admit papers as evidence of track record/project success only if they are 
accompanied by a pointer to the deposit.

-- 
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/