RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

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

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Ann Okerson wrote:

> Right now we have a kind of mess that needs time to sort out: 
> trying to achieve compliance for literally thousands of authors 
> and articles in a couple of months (since the mandate was 
> announced in January) is a herculean task, when the 
> institutional underpinnings (the list of these is substantial) 
> are mostly not yet present.  We have a situation in which 
> articles can be submitted by (1) authors, many of whom would 
> rather just have someone else do it, like the publishers -- 
> btw, the NIH instructions for authors are not as helpful as 
> they could be; (2) the research institutions, i.e., the ones 
> that already have everything in place to do so; or (3) the 
> publishers.  The potential for redundancy is huge and it is 
> wasteful.  The publishers, most of whom are willing to help if 
> given half a chance, are the ones with the redacted articles... 
> seem like the most logical funnel to the NIH, if this can be 
> worked out.
>
> Wouldn't it be good if the NIH, the publishers, and the 
> research institutions would get into a room together and thrash 
> this all out in an sensible way?
The institutions who "already have everything in place to do so" 
can sort this out in one simple, sensible swoop:

     Institutions mandate deposit in their own IRs and invite NIH to
     harvest from there (or hack up an export of NIH content to PubMed
     Central).

The institutions whose "institutional underpinnings [they are not 
substantial] are... not yet present" are only a piece of software 
and a few days of sysad time away from having the requisite 
institutional underpinnings present.

         http://www.eprints.org/software/

A hasty stopgap of relying on proxy deposit by publishers would 
be the very worst possible solution. It not only doesn't scale, 
but it positively obstructs the goal of systematically making all 
institutional research output OA (playing into the hands of those 
like-minded publishers who have that very goal).

We must think beyond just the NIH mandate to all university 
research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines.

Stevan Harnad