RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Gherman, Paul wrote:

> At Vanderbilt, our Medical Library has been doing significant
> work contacting publishers to find out what their policy and
> procedures are. One discovery is that some of them intend to
> charge authors between $900 and $3,000 to submit articles to NIH.
> Some will allow for early posting, if the fee is paid.

Those are the wages of whim.

But they are easily fixed, free of charge:

      (1) NIH specifies the researcher's own IR as the locus for the
      mandated direct deposit. (PubMed Central can harvest the metadata
      or full-text.)

      (2) Universities mandate deposit in their IRs immediately upon
      acceptance for publication (for all their research output, not
      just NIH).

      (3) The deposit must be immediate; the access should be set as OA
      immediately, but it may optionally be set as Closed Access during
      a limited embargo period (during which all research user needs can
      be fulfilled with the help of the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint
      request" button.

      (4) Along with encouraging (but not mandating) setting access to the
      (mandated) immediate deposit as Open Access rather than Closed Access
      wherever possible, universities can also encourage (but not mandate
      -- because a mandate with an opt-out option is not a mandate anyway)
      Harvard-style copyright retention wherever possible.

The (outrageous) notion of being charged $900 - $3000 per paper for
complying with the NIH Green OA self-archiving mandate is something the
NIH has invited upon itself by not thinking through the details of the
mandate sufficiently, and mandating direct 3rd-party repository deposit
instead of integrating the NIH mandate with Harvard-style university
mandates, requiring immediate deposit in the university employee's own
IR, without exceptions or opt-outs, and with embargoed OA access-setting
the only (temporary) compromise.

I am confident that this will be the ultimate outcome in any case. The
only question is, how long will it take all the wise and well-intentioned
parties involved to take a deep breath, think it through, and do it,
instead of hurtling ahead with alternatives they have already committed
themselves to, without thinking them through sufficiently rigorously...

      "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html

Stevan Harnad