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Optimizing Harvard's Proposed Open Access Self-Archiving
Mandate
Harvard faculty are voting today on an Open Access (OA)
Self-Archiving Mandate Proposal.
htt
p://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only does this risk enshrining unrefereed, unpublished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
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