DASER 2 IR Meeting and NIH Public Access Policy

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

     ** Apologies for cross-posting **

This is a summary (from my own viewpoint) of the Washington meeting this 
weekend sponsored by American Society for Information Science & Technology 
(ASIST), organized by Michael Leach (Harvard, President, ASIS):

     Digital Archives for Science and Engineering Resources (DASER 2)
     http://www.daser.org/program.html

(For some other slants on DASER 2, see these two blogs; but beware, as 
they do contain some notable garbles and omissions, having been blogged in 
real time: Dorothea Salo http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/ and Christina Pikas 
http://asistdaser.tripod.com/daserblog/ )

DASER 2 rehearsed some familiar developments, highlighted some of them, 
and brought out one potentially important new one (re. the NIH Public 
Access Policy).

The familiar developments were the worldwide growth in institutional 
repositories (IRs), and in new services to help institutions to create, 
maintain or even host IRs: ProQuest (using Bepress software), BioMed 
Central (using Dspace software) and Eprints Services (using Eprints 
software).

Fedora software was also discussed, but it was quite apparent (at least to 
me!) that at this DASER meeting, whose specific focus was digital 
science/engineering resources -- hence Open Access (OA) IRs in particular, 
targeting the self-archiving of institutional peer-reviewed 
science/engineering article output, in order to maximise its visibility, 
usage and impact, rather than digital curation in general -- Fedora's much 
wider and more diffuse target (the collection and curation of any and all 
institutional digital content, incoming or outgoing, research or 
otherwise) was not the urgent priority. Indeed, there are good reasons for 
expecting that if the IR movement first puts its full weight and energy 
behind the focussed archiving of 100% of each institution's own OA IR 
target content, that will itself prove to be the most effective way to 
launch and advance the more general digital-curation agenda too.

There was likewise considerable time devoted to the future of publishing, 
with much discussion of OA publishing and the possibility of an eventual 
transition to OA publishing. But here too, the lesson was that the best 
contribution that OA IRs in particular can make to this possible/eventual 
transition is to hasten their own transition to the institutional 
self-archiving of 100% of their own OA target content.

Present and contributing very constructively were the two Learned Society 
Publishers in whose discipline author self-archiving has been going on the 
longest, and has gone the farthest (having reached 100% years ago in some 
fields): The American Physical Society (the first publisher to adopt [in 
1994] an explicit "green" policy on author self-archiving [today about 76% 
of publishers and 93% of journals are green]) and the Institute of Physics 
(likewise green, along with some notable experiments in "gold" OA 
publishing).

The keynote speaker was Jan Velterop, formerly publisher of "pure gold" 
BioMed Central, and now director of OA for Springer's "optional gold" Open 
Choice. Jan's main concern was (understandably) to encourage authors to 
pick the gold option and to encourage their institutions and research 
councils to fund the author costs.

Jan applauded the growth in the IR movement but noted a substantial 
decrease in the number of postings on the American Scientist Open Access 
Forum (AmSci) in 2004-2005 compared to prior years, and worried that this 
might reflect a decrease in OA momentum.

On the contrary: the decreased AmSci volume was intentional. In 2004, a 
new policy for AmSci postings was announced, reserving the Forum for 
concrete, practical discussion of institutional and research-funder OA 
policy design and implementation. AmSci's former open-ended (and unending) 
philosophical and ideological debate about open access was instead 
redirected to the many other OA lists that have spawned since the AmSci OA 
Forum's inception in 1998:

     "[T]his Forum, the first of what is now a half dozen lists
     devoted to OA matters, is -- as has been announced several
     times -- now reserved for the discussion of concrete,
     practical means of accelerating OA growth." [December 2004]
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4226.html

The DASER conference also devoted time and thought to the future of 
librarians in the digital and OA era; again, insofar as IRs are concerned, 
a good investment of librarians' available time, energy and resources is 
in helping to create and fill IRs, first OA IRs, and then eventually 
expanding them to wider and wider digital content, thereby again 
facilitating the inevitable and desirable transition. (My own personal 
view, however, is that librarians should abstain from speculation about 
the future of peer review, which is not really their field of expertise; I 
also think retraining librarians to become institutional in-house 
publishers may not be the best use of their time and talents.)

That librarians can be an enormous help in getting institutional authors 
to deposit their OA content in their IRs was illustrated in my own talk, 
using examples from around the world (CERN, Portugal, Southampton) but 
with especially striking data from Australia (with thanks to Arthur Sale 
and Paula Callan). I also reported on the growing evidence for the 
dramatic OA research impact advantage across all disciplines, now 
including the humanities and social sciences, and its implications for 
research and researcher funding and progress..

The OA impact advantage, IRs, and librarian-help are all *necessary* 
conditions for filling IRs with OA content, but to make them into a 
jointly *sufficient* condition, one further critical component is needed, 
and this has been demonstrated in case after case: The only IRs that are 
well along the road toward toward 100% OA are the ones that also have an 
institutional self-archiving requirement. Without that, spontaneous OA 
self-archiving is hovering at about 5% - 15% globally..

Which brings us to the last and newest development reported at DASER: The 
NIH public access policy is flawed and failing -- its deposit rate is at 
about 2%, which is even *below* the global average for spontaneous 
self-archiving. But the good news is that NIH has realized this, and is 
planning to do something about it. The question is: what? There is a 
committee to look at this question, but at a quick glance, it does not 
seem to include those who actually know what needs to be done, and how, to 
make the NIH policy work. Represented are librarians and publishers, but 
missing are the institutional OA policy-makers that can make 
self-archiving work.

But the solution is simple, and NIH can do it, very easily. First, it is 
important to face the 3 flaws of the current NIH policy very forthrightly. 
Here they are, in order of severity:

(1) Deposit is *requested* rather than *required*.

(2) The request is not for immediate deposit but deposit within one
     year of publication.

(3) The request is for deposit in PubMed Central (PMC) (rather than in the
     author's IR, from which PMC could harvest it).

The reason the deposit is not required and not immediate is related to the 
reason the deposit is in PMC instead of the author's own IR: NIH has cast 
itself in the role of a 3rd-party access-provider. This is fine, for its 
own funded research. But then it must deal with its publishers and their 
conditions (which include access-embargoes of up to 12 months, in order to 
protect against perceived risks to their revenues).

OA itself does not require a 3rd-party access-provider. All it requires is 
OA! And for that, any OAI-compliant archive, whether the author's own 
institutional IR or a central repository like PMC will do, because they 
are all equivalent and interoperable, in the OAI-compliant age, and all 
accessible to any user or harvester webwide.

So NIH can have what it wants -- 100% of its funded content in PMC within 
a year of publication -- while still requiring deposit immediately upon 
acceptance (preferably in the author's IR, harvestable by PMC, but absent 
that, direct deposited in PMC).

That leaves only the question of how to set the access-privileges, and now 
those can be merely the subject of a (strong) request to set them to OA 
immediately upon deposit -- but with the option left open (sic) for the 
author to set access instead as restricted to institution-internal and 
PMC-harvestable (or, for PMC, PMC-administrative-only) if the author has 
reason to prefer that (the reason presumably being that the article is 
published in one of the 7% of journals that are not yet "green" on 
immediate OA self-archiving).

Is this merely a way of tweaking the current NIH policy so as to get 
deposits up to 100% without getting immediate OA up to 100%? The answer 
is: Yes and No. Yes, this policy will immediately drive up NIH deposits 
from their current 2% level to 100%, because deposit will be a fulfilment 
condition on receiving the NIH grant. But no, it is not true that it will 
not generate immediate 100% OA. For it can generate that too, with a far 
smaller delay-loop than 12 months: something more of the order of 12 hours 
at most:

The solution is very simple (and we are already building it into the 
Eprints IR software): The metadata (author, title, journal, date, 
abstract) are of course all immediately OA for 100% of deposited papers, 
regardless of how the access-privileges for the full-text are set. That 
means that from the moment the text is deposited, the metadata are visible 
and accessible to all would-be users webwide, thanks to OAI and the OAI 
search engines, as well as to google scholar and the non-OAI search 
engines.

But what about the full-text? For about 7% of journal articles (the ones 
in the non-green journals), access will not be immediately set to OA. What 
the Eprints software will do when a would-be user encounters this dead-end 
is that the IR interface will provide a link that will pop up a window 
allowing the user to send an automatic email to the author (whose email 
address is part of the IR's internal metadata) requesting to be emailed an 
eprint of the full-text in question. The requester's email will be sent by 
the software -- automatically and immediately -- to the author, with a 
prepared URL that the author need merely click on, in order to have the 
eprint immediately emailed to the would-be user.

This author-mediated access-provision is not quite as convenient, 
instantaneous or sensible as immediately setting the full-text to 
unmediated OA, so the user can just click to down-load it, but it is 
effective 100% OA just the same. And NIH can (as now) harvest the 
full-text whenever it likes, and can go on to make it OA in PMC whenever 
it elects to. None of that will be holding back OA any longer.

This immediate-deposit requirement is also the form that the RCUK policy 
is now taking; and it offers a general model for the rest of the world to 
adopt too.

Note that this slightly modified policy completely side-lines all 
publisher objections: It is merely a deposit requirement, not an OA 
access-setting requirement. It is left up to researchers and the would-be 
users of their research to sort out access-provision according to the 
needs of research -- exactly as it should be.

This is of course also the policy that institutions should adopt, for 
their own institutional research output, whether or not funded by NIH or 
RCUK. An immediate-deposit requirement will result in IRs worldwide 
filling virtually overnight (at long last).

(The other thing NIH should do is to couple its deposit requirement with 
an explicit statement of NIH's readiness to cover OA journal publication 
charges for those NIH fundees who choose to publish their findings in an 
OA journal.)

Stevan Harnad