How to Counter All Opposition to the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Self-Archiving Mandate

Abstract

Eight-point strategy for countering the publishing lobby's opposition to the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Self-Archiving Mandate: (1) empirical evidence of the positive effect of self-archiving on research impact; (2) absence of empirical evidence of negative effect of self-archiving on publisher subscription revenues; (3) mandate deposit of full text and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication and allow delay only for access-setting to the full text(Open Access vs. Closed Access); (4) 94% of journals already endorse immediate access-setting to OA; a semi-automatic email-eprint request feature of the archiving software can tide over any embargo period for the remaining 6%; (5) abstain from speculating or counterspeculating about subscription declines until/unless there is any evidence for them; (6) the mandate itself is the empirical test of whether there will be any effect on subscriptions; the outcome can be reviewed annually; (7) the primary purpose of Open Access is to provide access to researchers who are would-be users but cannot afford access, in order to maximise the benefits of the research to the public that funds it; public access to the research articles themselves is only a secondary benefit, for the minority of research articles that the general public might actually be interested in reading; (8) all evidence indicates that voluntary self-archiving policies fail, whereas mandatory ones are successful.

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ORCID for Stevan Harnad: orcid.org/0000-0001-6153-1129

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