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Re: Harvard Faculty Vote on Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Today



Wonder of wonders, I actually agree with Stevan about Harvard's approach! :)

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


             ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

      Fully Hyperlinked Version of this Posting:
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Optimizing Harvard's Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

Harvard faculty are voting today on an Open Access (OA)
Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835

The Harvard proposal is to try the copyright-retention strategy:
Retain copyright so faculty can (among other things) deposit their
writings in Harvard's OA Institutional Repository.

Let me try to say why I think this is the wrong strategy, whereas
something not so different from it would not only have much greater
probability of success, but would serve as a model that would
generalize much more readily to the worldwide academic community.

(1) Articles vs. Books. The objective is to make peer-reviewed
research journal articles OA. That is OA's primary target content.
The policy has to make a clear distinction between journal articles
and books, otherwise it is doomed to fuzziness and failure. The time
is ripe for making journal articles -- which are all, without
exception, author give-aways, written only for scholarly usage and
impact, not for sales royalty income -- Open Access, but it is not
yet ripe for books in general (although there are already some
exceptions, ready to do the same). Hence it would be a great and
gratuitous handicap to try to apply OA policy today in a blanket way
to articles and books alike, covering exceptions with an "opt-out"
option instead of directly targeting the exception-free journal
article literature exclusively.

(2) Unrefereed Preprints vs. Peer-Reviewed Postprints. Again, the
objective is to make published, peer-reviewed research journal
articles ("postprints") OA. Papers are only peer-reviewed after they
have been submitted, refereed, revised, and accepted for
publication. Yet Harvard's proposed copyright retention policy
targets the draft that has not yet been accepted for publication
(the "preprint"): That means the unrefereed raw manuscript. Not only
does this risk enshrining unrefereed, unpublished results in
Harvard's OA IR, but it risks missing OA's target altogether, which
is refereed postprints, not unrefereed preprints.

(3) Copyright Retention is Unnecessary for OA and Needlessly
Handicaps Both the Probability of Adoption of the Policy and the
Probability of Success If Adopted. There is no need to require
retention of copyright in order to provide OA. 62% of journals
already officially endorse authors making their postprints OA
immediately upon acceptance for publication by depositing them in
their Institutional Repository, and a further 30% already endorse
making preprints OA. That already covers 92% of Harvard's intended
target. For the remaining 8% (and indeed for 38%, because OA's
primary target is postprints, not just preprints), they too can be
deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, with access
set as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access. To provide for
worldwide research usage needs for such embargoed papers, both the
EPrints and the DSpace IR software now have an "email eprint
request" button that allows any would-be user who reaches a Closed
Access postprint to paste in his email address and click, which
sends an immediate email to the author, containing URL on which the
author need merely click to have an eprint automatically emailed to
the requester. (Mailing article reprints to requesters has been
standard academic practice for decades and is merely made more
powerful and effective with the help of email, an IR, and the
semi-automatic button; it likewise does not require permission or
copyright retention.)

This means that it is already possible to adopt a universal,
exception-free mandate to deposit all postprints immediately upon
acceptance for publication, without the author's having to decide
whether or not to deposit the unrefereed preprint and whether or not
to retain copyright (hence whether or not to opt out).

This blanket mandate provides immediate OA to at least 62% of OA's
target content, and almost-immediate, almost-OA to the rest. This
not only provides for all immediate usage needs for 100% of research
output, worldwide, but it will soon usher in the natural and
well-deserved death of the remaining minority of access embargoes
under the growing global pressure from OA's and almost-OA's
increasingly palpable benefits to research and researchers. (With it
will come copyright retention too, as a matter of course.) It is
also a policy with no legal problems and no author risk.

Needlessly requiring authors instead to deposit their unrefereed
preprints and to commit themselves to retaining copyright today puts
both the consensus for adoption and, if adopted, the efficacy of the
Harvard policy itself at risk, because of author resistance either
to exposing unrefereed work publicly or to putting their work's
acceptance and publication by their journal of choice at risk. It
also opens up an opt-out loophole that is likely to reduce the
policy compliance rate to minority levels for years, just as did
NIH's initial, unsuccessful non-mandate (since upgraded to an
immediate deposit mandate), with the needless loss of 3 more years
of research usage and impact.

I strongly urge Harvard to reconsider, and to adopt the
Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access mandate (ID/OA) that is now being
adopted by a growing number of universities and research funders
worldwide, instead of the copyright-retention policy now being
contemplated.

Stevan Harnad