Sunday, March 2. 2008
SUMMARY: Research
funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's)
and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's)
are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them
synergistic and mutually reinforcing:
Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs)
are the natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research
output: Universities are the research providers and have a direct
interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and
showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their
uptake, usage and impact.
Both universities and
funders should accordingly mandate
deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in
each author's own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for
publication, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes.
Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university
IR may be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions
allow; otherwise access can be set as Closed
Access, pending copyright
negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described
by universities
and funders
should accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions
for setting open access to those deposits, not to the depositing
itself, its locus or its timing.
As a result, (1) there will be a
common deposit locus for all research output worldwide; (2) university
mandates will reinforce and monitor compliance with funder mandates;
(3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal
details concerning open-access provision, copyright and embargoes
will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case
basis, according to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs
will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor
its timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest
the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the
agreed time, if they wish.
There is a simple, natural, universal way to integrate (a)
funder open-access mandates and (b) university open-access mandates,
reconciling the NIH
and Harvard
OA mandates, as well as making the two kinds of mandate synergistic and
mutually reinforcing:
(i) Separate the deposit requirement
from the open access requirement.
(ii) Separate the issue of the locus and timing
of the deposit from the issue of the locus and timing and copyright
conditions for providing open access to the deposit.
Both universities and funders should mandate
immediate deposit of the peer-reviewed final draft (postprint),
in the author's own university's Institutional
Repository (IR), immediately upon acceptance for publication,
without exceptions or opt-outs, for institutional record-keeping
purposes.
Access to that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university
IR may be set immediately
as Open Access if copyright conditions permit it. Otherwise access
can be set as Closed
Access, pending copyright negotiations or embargoes (with only the
metadata visible and accessible webwide, not the postprint full-texts).
All the rest of the conditions described by universities and funders
should accordingly apply only to (ii) the timing and copyright
conditions for providing open access to the deposit, not to (i)
the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
That way:
(1) there will be a systematic (and natural)
common locus of direct deposit for all research output worldwide;
(2) university mandates will reinforce and monitor
compliance with funder mandates;
(3) funder mandates will reinforce university mandates;
(4) legal details concerning open-access provision,
copyright and embargoes can be applied independently of the deposit
itself, on a case by case basis, according to the conditions of the
mandate (instead of needlessly making (1)-(3) contingent on each case);
(5) opt-outs will apply only to copyright negotiations,
not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and
(6) central OA repositories (like PubMed
Central) can then harvest
the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the
agreed time, if they wish.
Right now, the NIH mandate requires that the postprint must be "submitted"
immediately upon acceptance for publication (which is excellent!), but
it does not specify how or where to submit it!
The obvious solution is that the postprint should be directly
deposited, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into the
researcher's own university's (or institution's) IR -- possibly as
Closed Access rather than Open Access, depending on copyright and
embargo conditions and negotiations. (NIH can then be sent the URL, and
given access privileges.)
The recommendations of the SPARC/Science Commons/ARL joint white paper "Complying
with the NIH Public Access Policy - Copyright Considerations and Options"
by Michael Carroll are all excellent: Their only flaw
is in not separating those valid and helpful considerations and options
from the question of the locus and timing of the deposit itself. That
locus should always be the author's IR, and the timing should always be
immediately upon acceptance for publication. None of the copyright
considerations are pertinent to the deposit itself: They apply only to
the provision of open access to the deposits.
In exactly the same way, the Harvard
mandate is excellent in every respect except that it too conflates
the deposit itself with the copyright and embargo considerations and
options: Those considerations and options should only apply to whether
and when open access to the deposit is provided, not whether and when
the deposit itself is done. The Harvard mandate offers the option of
opting out of the requirement to negotiate copyright retention. That
makes the Harvard mandate into a non-mandate unless the copyright
requirement, with opt-out, is separated from a deposit requirement,
without opt-out.
The solution proposed here is simple, natural, solves both the NIH and
Harvard problems at once, makes the funder and university mandates
complementary and convergent, and provides an integrated, synergistic
OA mandate model for both funders and universities that will
systematically scale to all worldwide research input.
I hope that funders and universities will give this integrative
proposal serious thought, rather than just pressing ahead with the
current NIH and Harvard models, both of them welcome and timely, but
both in need of this small yet crucial revision to ensure their
coherence and success.
It is noteworthy that three
recommendations were made to NIH three years ago: (1) mandate
immediate deposit, with no opt-out, (2) specify direct deposit in the
fundee's university IR, and (3) harvest into PubMed Central.
Those recommendations were not followed, and after three years the NIH
policy was acknowledged to have failed. Because of that failure, the
policy has very recently been upgraded
to an immediate-deposit mandate (1). But there are already signs (from
the very similar Wellcome
Trust mandate) that systematic monitoring mechanisms are
needed to ensure compliance with funder mandates.
University mandates are the obvious means of reinforcing and monitoring
compliance with funder mandates (as part of the fulfillment conditions
for receiving the grant overheads and indirect costs allotments).
Moreover, university IRs are also the natural, convergent locus for
direct deposit of all research output: The universities are the
providers of the research, both funded and unfunded, and they have a
direct institutional interest in archiving, recording, measuring,
evaluating, and showcasing their own research output as well as in maximizing its
uptake, usage and impact.
Funder mandates like NIH's will naturally reinforce university
mandates, like Harvard's. The two mandating parties simply have to
agree on separating the universal issue of deposit itself (and the
locus and timing of that direct deposit) from the independent,
item-specific issue of the timing of the provision of Open Access to
that deposit, its copyright conditions, embargo duration, and whatever central
repositories may wish to harvest that OA deposit or its metadata,
where and when.