RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

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

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> > Stevan Harnad: We must think beyond just the NIH mandate to 
> > all university research output, funded and unfunded, in all 
> > disciplines.
> You don't really mean "all," do you, Stevan? Repeatedly in the 
> past you have excluded research that appears in book form. 
> This, of course, doesn't make sense from the standpoint of 
> achieving comprehensive coverage of all research output of 
> universities and imposes artificial barriers between research 
> appearing in different formats. There can ultimately be no 
> intellectual justification for this separation.
You are quite right, Sandy. I don't mean all research output, I 
mean all peer-reviewed journal/conference output (the c. 2.5 
million papers per year).

(I keep ritually reiterating the same portmanteau phrases so 
often that I sometimes truncate them to give those who have heard 
them too often a bit of a break!)

And you are also right that a distinction between a research 
paper and a research monograph is not a principled distinction 
insofar as content is concerned. It is just a practical 
distinction, insofar as (current) author motivation is concerned. 
But as a current, practical distinction, it is pertinent, 
accurate, and needs to be taken into account:

*All* peer-reviewed research paper authors, without a single 
exception, give away their articles, having written them 
*exclusively* for research impact, not for royalty income (actual 
or potential). Let us call them "give-away authors." 
http://cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#1.1

This is simply not true of all scholarly/scientific book and 
monograph authors (often the same authors, but wearing different 
hats): Not all (probably not even most) such book authors are 
give-away authors.

Hence it follows that even if most do not do it spontaneously of 
their own accord (for paradoxical reasons I've dubbed "Zeno's 
Paralysis -- consisting mostly of overwork inertia, copyright 
paranoia, and simple ignorance, lately diminishing), give-away 
authors can be induced by a mandate from their institutions and 
funders to go ahead and give away their give-away work by 
self-archiving it free for all online (preferably in their 
Institutional Repository), *willingly* (as Alma Swan's surveys 
have shown). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/

But non-give-away authors cannot and should not be mandated to 
give away their non-give-away work, so we should not even think 
of trying it. That would only complicate the already needlessly 
complicated road to Green OA self-archiving mandates for the 
give-away work (already complicated by premature and unnecessary 
over-reaching on copyright retention and by completely 
unnecessary insistence on direct central deposit instead of 
institutional deposit and central harvesting). 
</ritual-repetition> 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/374-guid.html

Counter-productively insisting on the OA self-archiving of books 
that authors do not currently wish to give away would be very 
much like insisting on copyright retention by authors who are 
paranoid about not putting their chances of publication in their 
preferred journals at any perceived risk. And it would be just as 
unnecessary -- since, for both of these desirable outcomes, their 
time will come in due course (as it will for Gold OA publishing 
too). But first things first. And it is Green OA self-archiving 
mandates for give-away research that will pave the way.

A symptom of the fact that OA book mandates would be a no-no 
comes from the recent kerfuffle about Iowa Theses: Even though 
most theses are probably author give-aways, and will be willingly 
self-archived, those held in reserve for future book publication 
will not, so OA should not be mandated for them. 
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/march/031708mfa.html

Here again, Green OA IRs offer a possible interim compromise: 
Like articles published in journals that have not yet endorsed 
immediate OA self-archiving, non-give-away theses can be 
deposited as Closed Access instead of Open Access. The authors 
need simply refuse all email eprint requests received via the 
Button. (They can even store their refused eprint requests and 
use them as evidence of demand for their work when they approach 
a publisher!) 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html

Stevan Harnad