[GOAL] Quis Custodiet?

Wed Sep 24 14:02:58 BST 2014

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 2:49 PM, Stacy Konkiel <stacy at impactstory.org>
wrote:

> +100 to what Richard said.
>
> >> they should not interfere with the process of self archiving on the
> basis of such considerations as scientific quality or any kind of personal
> judgement. <<
>
> Ah, but what about when the review step is put into place to ensure that
> copyright is not violated?
>

Do the review *after* the paper has been deposited and made OA by the
author, and switch it back from OA to RA when and if you have confirmed
that it is embargoed, instead of not making it OA until it is checked.

> IR Librarians have, unfortunately, become the enforcers of copyright
> restrictions at many universities. Somehow, we ended up with the
> responsibility of ensuring that we're not opening our uni's up to
> liabilities when paywall publishers come a-threatening with their pack of
> lawyers because a researcher has made the publisher's version of a paper
> available on the IR.
>

No publisher would or could prosecute if there had been good-faith research
and immediate take-down of the document once the embargo was discovered.

*<start irrelevant personal speculation: can be ignored>*

(*But in **solemnly **saying this I have to pretend that a publisher could
and would prosecute if the document were left up, even if it were the
publisher that discovered the criminal document and sent the take-down
notice and it was ignored. The best (worst) the publisher would or could do
would be to intiate a FUD procedure designed to create blanket worry (and
expense) for the institution on the possibility that it could have been
found grounds for a financial penalty had it actually gone to court and
reached a positive judgment — which it would of course not have been.)*

*This is the same reasoning that allows ISPs to transfer liability to
individual users, with the ISP’s responsibility being only to take down the
document if and when they receive a (valid) take-down notice from the
plainant. It is not the ISP that is liable until the moment they receive
the valid take-down notice. The liable one is the pedophile who posted the
document. *

*But as an author posting his own article, embargoed by the publisher, is
not even remotely like child-porn, the fact is that neither the institution
(the ISP) nor the author is going to be liable for anything at all, until
they receive the publisher’s take-down notice. *

*In other words, leave the burden of detecting and notifying about embargo
violations to the publisher, a posteriori, rather than burdening the
institution and its librarians with policing it a priori.*

*<end **irrelevant personal speculation: can be ignored**>*

But note that the above is *not* the commonsense procedure I am actually
recommending. I am only recommending that if an institution (foolishly)
elects to take on the policing burden for the publisher, let that policing
be done *after* an author makes the document OA, not *before*.

> Contrast that with the Terms of Service of websites like ResearchGate and
> Academia.edu, who put the onus on the researcher to understand and comply
> with copyrights for the papers they upload--and *trust* the researchers to
> do so. No wonder we're getting beat at our own game! But I digress.
>

ResearchGate and Academia.edu are sensibly invoking the role of ISP rather
than foolishly allowing themselves to be intimidated into becoming
publishers’ detectives and police. If institutions were sensible, they
would do so too. But with the publisher FUD and the craven counsel from
their rear-guarding IP “professionals,” institutions are allowing
themselves to be intimidated into doing the detective and police work for
the publishers. Fine. So be it. But *not before the document is made OA by
its author*: after. No rational person would argue that that interval was
legally actionable! (Yet it makes all the difference in the world for a
successful institutional OA policy, motivating and rewarding authors
instantly for their efforts, rather than frustrating and discouraging them.)

> I agree that library-based IR workflows need a lot of improvement.
> Librarians need to start pushing back against legal counsels and
> administrators who make us into the gatekeepers/copyright enforcers
>

Better still, sensible adinistrators need to push back against any bright
light who recommends foolish and gratuitous procedures...

> But I take exception to the assertion that we librarians need to step back
> and let the grownups figure out OA workflows. We often know just as much as
> researchers at our institutions about copyright, OA, IP, etc.
>

You are right: Inasmuch as librarians are forced by their institution's
administrators to do their legal vetting before the deposit is made OA
rather than after, they are beyond reproach.

But that’s not true if librarians explicitly support and rationalize that
forced a-priori vetting, legalistically. Nor if they justify it for reasons
other than legal (e,g, "scholarly" or metadata-based).

> What we need is a partnership to eradicate the barriers to OA that exist
> at the institutional/library policy and workflow levels. Oftentimes,
> library administrators take what groups of informed researchers have to say
> much more seriously than what their rank and file librarians say about
> things like OA. We could use your support in tearing down these barriers
> and getting rid of awful legacy workflows that restrict access, rather than
> this sort of divisive language that suggests we're just dopes who don't get
> OA and are making things harder for researchers.
>

It’s simpler and less grand than that: Publisher OA embargoes are the only
relevant “barrier.” Librarians can police them if they must, but they
should do it only after OA deposit, not before. And RA plus the Button
instead of OA is the solution, if need be.

The real barrier to OA is in fact not publishers (nor librarians), however!
It is authors --  in other words, the very *beneficiaries* of OA — as well
as their insttitutions and funders, until they mandate OA (and mandate it
correctly, which also means effectively: Require immediate deposit of the
final draft immediately upon acceptance -- with the option to make it OA
immediately, or RA plus the Button if they wish to comply with a publisher
OA embargo -- and designate immediate deposit as the sole mechanism for
submitting journal articles for institutional performance review, national
research assessment, research funding, and funding renewal.

No barriers to tear down other than those of incomprehension.

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

>
>
> Respectfully,
> Stacy Konkiel
>
>
> Stacy Konkiel
> Director of Marketing & Research at Impactstory <http://impactstory.org/>:
> share the full story of your research impact.
>   working from beautiful Albuquerque, NM, USA
> @skonkiel <http://www.twitter.com/skonkiel> and @Impactstory
> <https://twitter.com/ImpactStory>
>
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 9:09 AM, <brentier at ulg.ac.be> wrote:
>
>> I do not believe they are asking for anything contradictory.
>> We all agree on (1), but when (2) is asking (some) librarians to get out
>> of the way, it means just that they should not interfere with the process
>> of self archiving on the basis of such considerations as scientific quality
>> or any kind of personal judgement. They are welcome to help making the
>> deposit which should be done as fast as possible, in restricted access if
>> required.
>>
>>
>> Le 23 sept. 2014 à 16:27, "Richard Poynder" <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk>
>> a écrit :
>>
>> I suspect that Andrew Adams and Stevan Harnad may be asking for two
>> contradictory things here. If I understand correctly, they want 1) as near
>> 100% OA as soon as possible and 2) for librarians to get out of the way so
>> that researchers can get on and self-archive. Given that many researchers
>> have shown themselves to be generally uninterested in open access and, in
>> some cases, directly antagonistic towards it, and given that over half of
>> UK researchers appear to be unware of whether or not their future articles
>> will need to be published in accordance with the RCUK policy or not (
>> http://goo.gl/Y3Lyua) I cannot see how keeping librarians (who have done
>> so much to fill repositories and to educate researchers about OA) out of
>> the way (wish 2) is going to help achieve wish 1.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org
>> <goal-bounces at eprints.org>] *On Behalf Of *Stevan Harnad
>> *Sent:* 23 September 2014 14:33
>> *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
>> *Subject:* [GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska,
>> lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex
>>
>>
>>
>> Andrew is so right.
>>
>>
>>
>> We did the rounds of this at Southampton, where the library (for obscure
>> reasons of its own) wanted to do time-consuming and frustrating (for the
>> author) "checks" on the deposit (is it suitable? is it legal? are the
>> metadata in order?). In ECS we bagged that right away. And now ECS has
>> "fast lane" exception in the university repository (but alas other
>> departments do not). Similar needless roadblocks (unresolved) at UQAM.
>>
>>
>>
>> *Librarians*: I know your hearts are in the right place. But please,
>> please trust those who understand OA far, far better than you do, that this
>> library vetting -- if it needs to be done at all -- should be done
>> *after* the deposit has already been made (by the author) and has
>> already been made *immediately* OA (by the software). Please don't add
>> to publishers' embargoes and other roadblocks to OA by adding gratuitous
>> ones of your own.
>>
>>
>>
>> Let institutional authors deposit and make their deposits OA directly,
>> without intervention, mediation or interference. Then if you want to vet
>> their deposits, do so and communicate with them directly afterward.
>>
>>
>>
>> P.S. This is all *old*. We've been through this countless times before.
>>
>>
>>
>> Dixit
>>
>>
>>
>> Weary Archivangelist, still fighting the same needless, age-old battles,
>> on all sides...
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Andrew A. Adams <aaa at meiji.ac.jp> wrote:
>>
>>
>> The challenge now for UK Universities will be to keep librarians out of
>> the
>> way of reserachers, or their assistants, depositing the basic meta-data
>> and
>> full text in the repository. At the University of Reading, where I was
>> involved in early developments around the IR but left the University
>> before
>> the final deposit mandate (*) was adopted and the process decided on, they
>> have librarians acting as a roadblock in getting material
>> uploaded.Thisistotheextentthat a paper published in an electronic
>> proceedings
>> at a conference was refused permission to be placed in the repository, for
>> example, while there is a significant delay in deposited materials
>> becoming
>> visible, while librarians do a host of (mostly useful but just added value
>> and not necessary) checking. Sigh, empire building and other bureaucratic
>> nonsense getting in the way of the primary mission - scholarly
>> communications.
>>
>> (*) They have a deposit mandate but refuse to call it that. I'm not sure
>> why,
>> butthey insist on calling it a "policy". If one reads this policy, it's a
>> mandate (albeit not an ideal one). For a University with an overly strong
>> management team and a mangerialist approach, this unwillingness to call a
>> spade a spade and a mandate a mandate, seems odd. Perhaps it's that this
>> policy came from a bottom up development and not a senior management idea
>> so
>> they're unwilling to give it a strong name.
>>
>> --
>> 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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