Harvard's Recommendations to President Obama on Public Access Policy

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

  ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Professor Steven Hyman, Provost of Harvard, the first US 
University to mandate Open Access, has submitted such a spot-on, 
point for point response to President Obama's Request for 
Information on Public Access Policy that if his words are heeded, 
the beneficiaries will not only be US research progress and the 
US tax-paying public, by whom US research is funded and for whose 
benefit it is conducted, but research progress and its public 
benefits planet-wide, as US policy is globally reciprocated.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/01/22/373/

Reproduced below are just a few of the highlights of Professor 
Hyman's response. Every one of the highlights has a special 
salience, and attests to the minute attention and keen insight 
into the subtle details of Open Access that went into the 
preparation of this invaluable set of recommendations.

[Hash-marks (#) indicate three extremely minor points on which 
the response could be ever so slightly clarified -- see end.]

"The public access policy should (1) be mandatory, not voluntary, 
(2) use the shortest practical embargo period, no longer than six 
months, (3) apply to the final version of the author's 
peer-reviewed manuscript, as opposed to the published version, 
unless the publisher consents to provide public access to the 
published version, (4) [#* require deposit of the manuscript in a 
suitable open repository*#] immediately upon acceptance for 
publication, where it would remain "dark" until the embargo 
period expired, and (5) avoid copyright problems by [## 
*requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on 
federally funded research, to retain the right to give the 
relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a 
public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript* ##]"

"If publishers believe they cannot afford to allow copies of 
their articles to be released under a public-access policy, they 
need not publish federally funded researchers. To date, however, 
it appears that no publishers have made that decision in response 
to the NIH policy. Hence, federally funded authors remain free to 
submit their work to the journals of their choice.  Moreover, 
public access gives authors a much larger audience and much 
greater impact."

"If the United States extends a public-access mandate across the 
federal government, then lay citizens with no interest in reading 
this literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because 
researchers will benefit directly. That is the primary problem 
for which public access is the solution."

"It doesn't matter whether many lay readers, or few, are able to 
read peer-reviewed research literature or have reason to do so. 
But even if there are many, the primary beneficiaries of a 
public-access policy will be professional researchers, who 
constitute the intended audience for this literature and who 
depend on access to it for their own work."

"Among the metrics for measuring success, I can propose these: 
the compliance rate (how many articles that the policy intends to 
open up have actually been opened up); the number of downloads 
from the public-access repositories; and the number of citations 
to the public-access articles. As we use different metrics, we 
must accept that [### *we will never have an adequate control 
group: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar quality, 
for which there is no public access*###]"

------------------------------

Three suggestions for clarifying the minor points indicated by 
the hash-marks (#):

[#*require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open 
repository*#]

(*add*: preferably the fundee's own institutional repository)

[##*requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on 
federally funded research, to retain the right to give the 
relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a 
public-access copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript* ##]

(*add*: "the rights retention and license are desirable and 
welcome, but not necessary if the publisher already endorses 
making the deposit publicly accessible immediately, or after the 
allowable embargo period)

[### "*we will never have an adequate control group [for 
measuring the mandate's success]: a set of articles on similar 
topics, of similar quality, for which there is no public access*" 
###]

(*add*: "but closed-access articles published in the same journal 
and year as mandatorily open-access articles do provide an 
approximate matched control baseline for comparison)

Stevan Harnad