Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse

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

                   ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

     Hyperlinked version of this posting:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/373-guid.html

I suggest not colluding with publishers offering to "let us do 
the [mandated] deposit for you".

The reason is simple, if we take the moment to think it through:

(1) The OA movement's goal is to provide Open Access (OA) to 100% 
of the world's peer-reviewed research article output.

(2) The goal of [some] publishers is to preserve the status quo 
-- or the closest approximation to it -- for as long as possible, 
at all costs.

(3) The providers of both the research and the peer review, in 
all disciplines, are the employees of the universities (and 
research institutions) worldwide (and the fundees of the funded 
research).

(4) The only way to cover all of OA's target space is for all 
research output, from all universities worldwide, funded and 
unfunded, across all disciplines, to be made OA.

(5) OA self-archiving mandates from universities and funders (39 
so far, worldwide) can ensure that all research is made OA.

(6) Some funders (e.g. NIH) -- but *no universities* (e.g. 
Harvard) -- have mandated direct university-external 
self-archiving (in PubMed Central) instead of direct university 
self-archiving (and central harvesting). This was an unnecessary 
strategic mistake.

(7) University-external, subject-based self-archiving does not 
scale up to cover all of OA output space: it is divergent, 
divisive, arbitrary, incoherent and unnecessary.

(8) The way to scale up systematically to capture all of OA 
output is for both funders and universities to mandate that all 
research output, in all disciplines, from all universities 
worldwide, funded and unfunded, should be self-archived in each 
university's own Institutional Repository (IR). (The deposits, or 
their metadata, can then be externally harvested into whatever 
subject-based, disciplinary, or multidisciplinary central 
collections we may desire.)

(9) The universities are the research providers; the universities 
are the co-beneficiaries of showcasing, archiving, auditing, 
assessing and maximizing the visibility, usage and impact of 
(all) their own research output, funded and unfunded, across all 
disciplines.

(10) The universities are also in the natural and optimal 
position to monitor and reward their own employees' compliance 
with both university and funder self-archiving mandates.

(11) It would hence systematically undermine the scaling and 
convergence of OA self-archiving mandates onto university IRs to 
transfer responsibility for compliance to an external party -- 
the publisher as their employees' proxy self-archiver -- 
depositing in arbitrary and divergent external repositories.

(12) Universities and funders should universally mandate 
self-archiving directly in each author's own university's IR; 
they should say "no, thank you" to offers of proxy self-archiving 
on behalf of their employees from publishers. External 
collections can then be harvested, as desired, from the IRs that 
will then cover 100% of OA output.

[Similar considerations, but on a much lesser scale, militate 
against the strategy of universities out-sourcing the creation 
and management of their IRs and self-archiving policies to 
external contractors: accounting, archiving, record-keeping and 
asset management should surely be kept under direct local control 
by universities. There's nothing so complicated or daunting about 
self-archiving and IRs as to require resorting to an external 
service. (More tentatively, I am also sceptical that library 
proxy self-archiving rather than direct author self-archiving is 
a wise choice in the long run -- though it is definitely a useful 
option as a start-up supplement, if coupled with a mandate, and 
has been successfully implemented in several cases, including QUT 
and CERN.)]

Stevan Harnad

On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, T Scott Plutchak wrote:

> Thank you, Ann, for suggesting this!  I've been puzzling over the
> same thing.  Might I suggest that it would also be useful if you
> could get samples of the messages that the publisher will send to
> the investigator to alert them that they need to go in to approve
> the submission?  It'll be very helpful as we're preparing
> information pages for our folks if we can provide them with
> concrete examples of what to expect.
>
> Scott
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: owner-liblicense-l--lists.yale.edu on behalf of Ann Okerson
> Sent: Fri 3/14/2008 11:37 AM
> To: liblicense-l--lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services
>
> This message is aimed (primarily but not necessarily exclusively)
> at the STM publishers who are members of liblicense-l:
>
> If your publishing organization is providing for your authors the
> service of deposit of their articles according to various
> mandates, particularly NIH (beginning on 4/7) could you kindly
> describe the nature or extent of these services by sending *to
> me* (ann.okerson--yale.edu)  a descriptive note of what and how
> you do this? If you are in the planning stages, can you write to
> that effect?  It will be helpful, from the institutional end, to
> understand where such services are being or will be provided,
> outside of universities, as we continue to develop our own
> protocols.  If there is overlap or redundancy, it might be useful
> to sort that out.  If your response should be confidential at
> this time, please so note.
>
> If there is an interesting set of responses, I'll summarize here.
>
> Thank you, Ann Okerson/Yale Library
> ann.okerson--yale.edu