Re: AAP/PSP Open letter to Dr. Zerhouni (NIH)

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

The 5 objections below from the letter to Dr. Zerhouni, Director of NIH,
by Drs. Brodsky, Crawford, and Frank of the American Institute of Physics,
Wiley, and the American Physiological Society are predictable and are
mostly the consequence of an unnecessary (and easily corrected)
stipulation in the otherwise very welcome and desirable recommendation to
mandate that fundees must provide Open Access (OA) to all articles
resulting from NIH-funded research by self-archiving them.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=o31

Mandating that articles resulting from NIH-funded research must be
self-archived in the fundee's own institutional archive would have been
quite enough to achieve the full objectives and benefits of OA. Further
specifying that they must be self-archived in NIH's own central archive,
PubMed Central (PMC), is unnecessary and in counterproductive conflict
with many publishers' objections to 3rd party self-archiving.

It is especially important to note that all three publishers represented
by the three authors of the letter (American Institute of Physics, John
Wiley & Sons, and American Physiological Society) have already given their
official green light to author self-archiving in their own institutional
archives:  http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#7
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#45 http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#11

So their objection cannot be to mandating the self-archiving per se. It is
the mandated *central* self-archiving that goes beyond both their official
policies and (even more important) the needs of OA. (See their objections
1-3 at the bottom of this message,)

The unnecessary and counterproductive stipulation to self-archive
centrally in PMC should be removed, not only in order to eliminate the
needless conflict with the existing policies of the many publishers that
have already demonstrated themselves to be progressive enough to give
their official green light to author self-archiving, but also in order to
make it far more likely that the self-archiving mandate will propagate
beyond just the NIH-funded research that is within its immediate remit:

Institutions house all disciplines, and if the NIH-funded research is
self-archived in the fundee's own institutional archives, the likelihood
is far greater that the same practise will carry over to the institutions'
other disciplines. Moreover, all OAI-compliant institutional archives are
interoperable. Hence it makes no difference where the full-text articles
themselves are self-archived: Their metadata can all be harvested into one
virtual meta-archive (as well as into PMC!) so that they can all be
searched and retrieved seamlessly.

The publishers' other two objections (after 1-3 concerning central
self-archiving in PMC) are groundless and can very easily be shown to be
so:

(4) The reason for mandating OA self-archiving is not only (or even
primarily) so that the lay public may have access to NIH research output.
Most NIH research output will be specialized and technical and of little
interest to the general public anyway. The main reason for mandating
self-archiving is to make that research accessible to all its would-be
users among *researchers*, so as to maximise its uptake, usage and impact.
That is the way to maximize the return on the tax-payer's investment in
funding the research in the first place: And maximizing that is not
something any publisher can raise any justifiable objection to.

(5) The self-archiving mandate is not a mandate to publish in OA journals;
it has nothing whatsoever to do with which cost-recovery model is used by
the journal in which an NIH author publishes. It is merely a mandate to do
the very same thing that the publishers themselves have already given
their official green light to their authors to do: The authors'
self-archived OA versions of their articles are not *substitutes* for the
publishers' toll-access versions: They are merely *supplements* to them,
intended for those would-be users whose uptake and contribution would
otherwise be lost merely because their institution happened to be unable
to afford the access-tolls for the journal in which the article was
published.

So the solution is simple: Drop the PMC stipulation; make it optional.
Then the NIH mandate becomes immune to any justifiable objections, and
becomes instead a very natural and justifiable condition on the receipt of
the tax-payer funding in the first place -- an obvious online-age update
of the basic and longstanding mandate to publish the findings resulting
from funded research at all!

    Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3905.html

Stevan Harnad