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

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

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:
>       http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/361-guid.html
>
> 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 does this risk enshrining unrefereed, unpublished results in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