Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How=

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

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         ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

         Hyperlinked version of this posting, with references:
         http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

We are close to the adoption of Open Access Self-Archiving
Mandates worldwide (with four of eight RCUK Research Councils
plus the Wellcome Trust having already adopted them in the UK,
the FRPAA proposing their adoption in the US, the EC
Recommendation A1 proposing their adoption in Europe, at least
125 US university provosts expressing their support, and a number
of individual universities and research institutions already
adopting institutional self-archiving mandates of their own).

This is hence the opportune time to think of optimizing the
formulation of these mandates, so that they systematically
interdigitate with one another to generate all of OA's target
content, across institutions, disciplines, and nations worldwide,
to confer the maximum of benefit in a minimum of time. A
seemingly small parametric or verbal variant can make a vast
difference in terms of the amount of OA a self-archiving mandate
produces, and how quickly and reliably:

     WHAT: The primary target content is the author's final, peer-reviewed
     draft ("postprint") of all journal articles accepted for publication.

         "The literature that should be freely accessible online is
         that which scholars give to the world without expectation of
         payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed
         journal articles..." [Budapest Open Access Initiative]

Other contents are more than welcome too -- pre-refereeing
preprints, research data, theses, book-chapters, etc. -- but let
us not forget that peer-reviewed research is the primary target
and raison d'etre of the OA movement.

     WHERE: The optimal locus for self-archiving is the author's
     own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR).

That is the locus which, once mandated, will systematically scale
up to cover all of research output space, worldwide. It is highly
inadvisable to mandate direct deposit in a Central Repository
(CR) -- whether discipline-based, funder-based, multidisciplinary
or national. The right way to get OA content into CRs is to
harvest it, via the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol, from the
distributed OAI-compliant IRs. Not only should research
institutions -- the primary research-providers -- mandate the
self-archiving of their own researchers' output in their own
institutional IRs, but research funders too should mandate that
their fundees self-archive in their own institutional IRs. That
is the most natural, universal and systematic way to reach 100%
OA worldwide, and also the fastest and surest.

     WHEN: The author's final, peer-reviewed draft (postprint) should
     be deposited in the author's IR immediately upon acceptance for
     publication.

Most journals now endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their
authors. But for the minority of journals that do not, the
deposit should be mandated to be immediate anyway, and any
allowable delay or embargo should apply only to the
access-setting (i.e., whether access to the deposited article is
immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed
Access, in which only the author can access the deposited text).
This is called the "Immediate Deposit / Optional Access" (ID/OA)
mandate and it is infinitely preferable to any delayed-deposit
policy: In the ID/OA, the article's metadata (author, title,
journal, date, etc.) are immediately accessible webwide in any
case, and would-be users can request individual email copies from
the author via the IR's semi-automated EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST
button during any embargoed access period.

The case for immediate access is exactly the same as the case for
Open Access itself: otherwise research uptake, usage, impact,
productivity and progress are needlessly delayed or lost. And in
many fast-moving fields the "growth tip" of research product is
within the first 6-12 months from the time the results are
available.

     WHY: The purpose of mandating OA self-archiving is to maximize
     research usage and impact by maximizing user access to it.

The motivation for the Open Access movement -- and hence for OA
self-archiving by researchers and OA Self-Archiving Mandates by
researchers' institutions and funders -- is to maximize research
access in order to maximize research uptake, usage, impact,
productivity and progress, for the benefit of research,
researchers, their institutions and funders, and the tax-paying
public that supports them and in whose interests the research is
being conducted and published.

     HOW: Depositing a postprint in an author's IR and keying in its
     metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) takes less than 10
     minutes per paper.

However, surveys show that only 15% of authors will self-archive
unless it is mandated. Just requesting or recommending deposit
does not work. Deposit analyses comparing mandated and unmandated
self-archiving rates have shown that mandates (and only mandates)
work, with self-archiving approaching 100% of annual
institutional research output within a few years. Without a
mandate, IR content just hovers for years at the spontaneous 15%
self-archiving rate.

         Hyperlinked version of this posting, with references:
         http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

Stevan Harnad
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.=
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