Repositories
for Institutional Open Access:
Mandated Deposit Policies.
Les Carr, Alma
Swan, Arthur Sale, Charles
Oppenheim, Tim Brody, Steve Hitchcock, Chawki Hajjem
&
Stevan Harnad
About two and a half
million research articles are
published annually in some 24,000 peer-reviewed journals across all
disciplines
and around the world. Only about 15% of those articles are currently
being made
Open Access (OA) (freely accessible online) through spontaneous
self-archiving
efforts by their authors, despite increased awareness of the reported
benefits
and the growing acceptance of this practice by the publishing industry.
Studies
comparing citation counts report an advantage of 25%-250% for
self-archived articles over non-self-archived articles in the same
journal and
year in all 12 disciplines tested so far (Lawrence
2001, Hajjem
et al
2005).
Ninety-four percent of journals already endorse immediate OA
self-archiving
(69% for the peer-reviewed postprint, 24% for the preprint). With
key
advantages for scholarly communication and no obvious disincentives for
any
stakeholders (there is no evidence to date that self-archiving induces
subscription cancellations, even in fields that reached 100% OA years
ago) it
is difficult to explain the lack of apparent progress in 'self
induced self
archiving', given the enormous increase in the number of repositories
across
the world.
Attempts to
understand the so-called 'OA advantage'
show that it consists of at least 5 components: Early Advantage
(early
self-archiving produces both earlier and more citations), Usage
Advantage
(more downloads for OA articles, correlated with later citations), Competitive
Advantage (relative citation advantage of OA over non-OA articles:
disappears at 100% OA), Quality Advantage (OA advantage is
higher, the
higher the quality of the article) and Quality Bias (authors
selectively
self-archiving their higher quality articles -- a non-causal component:
disappears at 100% OA).
The limited
motivational effectiveness of the 'OA
advantage' has led to the adoption by some authorities of mandated
self-archiving policies (as listed in ROARMAP).
Studies are currently
underway comparing the OA advantage for mandated and spontaneous
(self-selected) self-archiving, to estimate the relative size of any
non-causal
component. Outcome studies comparing deposit rates for annual research
output
in Institutional Repositories (IRs) report that the deposit rate
remains at the
spontaneous 15% baseline if unmandated, whereas IRs with self-archiving
mandates climb toward 100% OA within a year or two (Sale 2006),
confirming
multinational, multidisciplinary author surveys that predicted 95%
compliance
(Swan 2006).
Hence institutions
(and funders) wishing to take a
pragmatic approach to filling their IRs with Open Access materials need
to
seriously consider mandating the practice of self-archiving. In the
United
Kingdom, four of the eight research funding councils (as well as the
Wellcome
Trust) have already taken such a path; a self-archiving mandate
recommendation
is being considered by the European Commission. US University Provosts
have
likewise recognized the potential benefits of OA to research, endorsing
the
proposed US federal FRPAA self-archiving mandate in large numbers. But
there is
no reason for universities to wait for the passage of legislation to
mandate
self-archiving.
Five universities and
two research institutions
(including CERN) have already done so, with documented success. An
Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate covers all cases and moots
all legal
issues: metadata are immediately visible webwide and, where needed,
access to
the postprint can be set as Closed Access instead of OA throughout any
embargo
period. Software to support this approach (that allows the author to
email
individual copies of non-Open Access papers to individual requesters)
has been
created for both EPrints and DSpace repository platforms.
Lawrence, S. (2001)
Online or Invisible? Nature
411
(6837): 521
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/
Hajjem, C., Harnad,
S. and Gingras, Y. (2005)
Ten-Year
Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth
of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact (pdf 8pp)
IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin,
Vol. 28 No. 4,
December 2005
http://sites.computer.org/debull/A05dec/hajjem.pdf
Sale, Arthur (2006)
Comparison of IR content policies
in Australia. First Monday
11(4).
http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000264/
Swan, A. (2006) The
culture of Open Access:
researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key
Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.