Harvard Faculty Vote on Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate Today

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

             ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

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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. 
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only does this risk enshrining unrefereed, unpublished results in 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