Posted in Open Access
Archivangelism, Wednesday, January 4, 2008.
Stevan Harnad
The January
issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter is superb, and
I recommend it highly as a historical record of the milestone reached
by the OA movement at this pivotal moment. There is no question but
that the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is the biggest OA
development to date, and heralds much more.
There remains, however, an important point that does need to be brought
out, because it's not over till we reach 100% OA, because mistakes have
been made before, because those mistakes took longer than necessary to
correct, and because a big mistake (concerning the locus of the
deposit) still continues to be made.
First, a slight correction on the chronometric facts:
Peter Suber wrote:"If
NIH had adopted an OA mandate in 2004 when Congress originally asked it
to do so, it would have been the first anywhere. Now it will be the
21st."
Actually, if the NIH OA mandate had been adopted when the House
Appropriations Committee originally recommended it in September 2004,
it would have been the world's third Green OA self-archiving
mandate, not the first. And Congress's recommendation in September 2004
was the second governmental recommendation to mandate Green OA
self-archiving: The first had been the UK Parliamentary Select
Committee's recommendation in July 2004.
(1) The Southampton
ECS departmental mandate was (as far as I know) the very first
Green OA self-archiving mandate of all; it was announced in January
2003 (but actually adopted even earlier). QUT's
was the second OA mandate, but the first university-wide one, and was
announced in February 2004. (See ROARMAP.)
(2) The UK Parliament's Science and Technology
Committee Recommendation to mandate Green OA self-archiving was made in
session 2003-04 and published in July
2004 (i.e., before September 2004, when the US House Appropriations
Committee made its recommendation).
Moreover, the recommendation to mandate self-archiving had not only
been part of the BOAI
Self-Archiving FAQ from its inception in 2002, but the FAQ's
contents had actually preceded
the existence of the BOAI by several years, with the
recommendation itself -- that departments, universities and funders
should mandate self-archiving -- already in circulation since about
1999. (The FAQ was also already quite specific at that time about
mandating the self-archiving of the author's final accepted draft,
rather than the publisher's PDF. Its one glaring error was to advocate central
self-archiving -- but that was corrected as soon as the OAI protocol was formulated,
making it possible to create the first OAI-compliant Institutional
Repository software in 2000, thereby returning to the original
distributed, institutional model of self-archiving of 1994.)
In contrast, to see where the precursor to the NIH mandate stood in
1999, one must re-read the original e-biomed
proposal of May 1999. There was still a bumpy and meandering road
ahead (via the PLoS
petition in 2001 and the Bethesda
Statement in 2003), with several false starts and dead ends (among
them the first NIH non-mandate itself!), before the realization that
what had been needed all along was self-archiving and a Green OA
self-archiving mandate.
"A
Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy" (Oct 2004)
Now NIH's has indeed instantly become by far the most important of the
Green OA self-archiving mandates to date in virtue of its size and
scope alone, but it still hasn't got it right!
The upgrade from a mere request to an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access
(ID/OA)
mandate was indeed an enormous improvement, but there still remains the
extremely counterproductive and unnecessary insistence on direct
deposit in PubMed
Central. This is still a big defect in the NIH mandate, effectively
preventing it from strengthening, building upon and complementing
direct deposit in Institutional
Repositories, and thereby losing the golden (or rather green!)
opportunity to scale up to cover all of research output, in all fields,
from all institutions, worldwide, rather than just NIH-funded
biomedical research in PubMed Central: an altogether unnecessary,
dysfunctional, self-imposed constraint (in much the same spirit as
having requested self-archiving instead of mandating it
for the past three lost years).
Even the benefits of Congress's wise decision to mandate deposit
immediately upon acceptance for publication -- thereby transferring the
allowable 12-month embargo to the date at which access to that deposit
is set to Open Access, rather than allowing any delay in the date on
which the deposit itself is done -- are lost if that deposit is
required to be made directly in PubMed Central, rather than in each
author's own Institutional Repository (and thence harvested to PubMed
Central: with direct IR deposit, authors can use their own IR's "email
eprint request" button to fulfill would-be users' access needs
during any embargo). And, most important of all, with direct IR
deposit mandated by NIH, each of the world's universities and research
institutions can go on to complement the NIH self-archiving mandate for
the NIH-funded fraction of its research output with an institutional
mandate to deposit the rest of its research output, likewise to be
deposited in its own IR. This will systematically scale up to 100%
OA.
The hope is that -- recognizing that similar mistakes have been made in
the past, and that that has cost dearly in years of lost OA, and
recognizing that the remedy is ever so simple, with no loss, only gain
("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally") -- the NIH will still
have the sound sense, in the euphoria over the successful passage of
the mandate itself, to optimize its mandate now, so it can do the
maximal good in the minimal time, across all fields and institutions,
worldwide.
"Optimizing
OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"
Stevan Harnad
American
Scientist Open Access Forum