[GOAL] Re: Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories

[Stevan Harnad]

*On Horses, Water, and Life-Span*

*"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade of the
2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on our planet, it
may chuckle at us... I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as
to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The
[peer-reviewed journal| literature will be free at last online, in one
global, interlinked virtual library
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/citation.html>... and its [peer
review] expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the
[subscription-cancelation] savings. The only question is: When? This piece
is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face
by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the
waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!"* Free
at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html> (Harnad 1999)

I must admit I've lost interest in following the Open Access Derby. All the
evidence, all the means and all the stakes are by now on the table, and
have been for some time. Nothing new to be learned there. It's just a
matter of time till it gets sorted and acted upon; the only lingering
uncertainty is about how long that will take, and that is no longer an
interesting enough question to keep chewing on, now that all's been said,
if not done.

A few little corrections and suggestions on Richard's paper:

(1) The right measure of repository and policy success is *the percentage
of an institution's total yearly peer-reviewed research article output that
is deposited as full text immediately upon acceptance for publication*.
(Whether the deposit is immediately made OA is much less important, as long
as the copy-request Button is (properly!) implemented. Much less important
too are late deposits, author Button-request compliance rates, or other
kinds of deposited content. Once all refereed articles are being deposited
immediately, all the rest will take care of itself, sooner or later.)

(2) CRIS/Cerif research-asset-management tools are complements to
Institutional Repositories, not competitors.

(3) The Australian ERA policy was a (needless) flop for OA. The UK's
HEFCE/Ref2020 policy, in contrast, looks like it can become a success.
(None of this has anything to do with the pro's or con's of either research
evaluation, citations, or metrics in general.)

(4) No, "IDOA/PEM" (Deposit mandates requiring immediate deposits for
research evaluation or funding, with the Button) will not increase "dark
deposit," they will increase *deposit* -- and mandate adoption, mandate
compliance, OA, Button-Use, Almost-OA, access and citations. They will also
hasten the day when universal IDOA/PEM will make subscriptions cancellable
and unsustainable, inducing conversion to fair-Gold OA (instead of today's
over-priced, double-paid and unnecessary Fool's-Gold OA. But don't ask me
"how long?" I don't know, and I no longer care!)

(5) The few anecdotes about unrefereed working papers are completely
irrelevant. OA is about peer-reviewed journal articles. Unrefereed papers
come and go. And eprints and dspace repositories clearly tag papers as
refereed/unrefereed and published/unpublished. (The rest is just about
scholarly practice and sloppiness, both from authors and from users.)

(6) At some point in the discussion, Richard, you too fall into the usual
canard about impact-factor and brand, which concerns only Gold OA, not OA.

*RP:* *"Is the sleight of hand involved in using the Button to promote the
IDOA/PEM mandate justified by the end goal — which is to see a
proliferation of such mandates? Or to put it another way, how successful
are IDOA/PEM mandates likely to prove?"*

No sleight of hand -- just sluggishness of hand, on the part of (some)
authors (both for Button compliance and mandate compliance) and on the part
of (most) institutions and funders (for the design and adoption of
successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button). And the evidence is all
extremely thin, one way or the other. Of course *successful* IDOA/PEM
mandates (with Button) are (by definition!) better than relying on email
links at publisher sites. "Successful" means near 100% compliance rate for
immediate full-text deposit. And universal adoption of successful IDOA/PEM
mandates (with Button) means universal adoption of successful IDOA/PEM
mandates (with Button). (Give me that and worries about author
Button-compliance will become a joke.)

The rest just depends on the speed of the horses -- and I am not a betting
man (when it comes to predicting how long it will take to reach the optimal
and inevitable). (Not to mention that I am profoundly against horse-racing
and the like -- for humanitarian reasons that are infinitely more important
than OA ever was or will be.)

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 2:32 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net>
wrote:

> How many of the documents indexed in “open” repositories are in fact
> freely available, rather than on “dark deposit” or otherwise inaccessible.
>
>
>
> What is an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (IDOA) mandate, and what is
> Almost-OA?
>
>
>
> How important is the so-called eprint request Button to the success of the
> IDOA mandate, and how efficacious is the Button in allowing readers to
> obtain copies of items held on dark deposit in repositories?
>
>
>
> I offer some thoughts on these and related matters in a document that can
> be accessed here:
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/open-access-almost-oa-oa-policies-and.html
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
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