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RE: the Double-Meaning of (Open Access) "Mandate"
Are we talking about "double meaning" here or "double talk"?
Corrupting the language doesn't make for a better world.
Joe Esposito
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:09 PM
To: SPARC Open Access Forum
Subject: the Double-Meaning of (Open Access) "Mandate"
*Re:* Shieber, Stuart (2009) University open-access policies as
mandates
<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2009/06/30/university-open-access-policies-as-mandates/>
*The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication*.
Although there is a hint of the hermeneutic in his reflections
<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2009/06/30/university-open-access-policies-as-mandates/>
on the uses of the word "mandate," I think Stuart Shieber, the
architect of Harvard's historic Open Access (OA) policy
<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Harvard%20University%3A%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences>
is quite right in spirit. The word "mandate" is only useful to
the extent that it helps get a deposit policy officially adopted
-- and one that most faculty will actually comply with.
First, note that it has never been suggested that there need to
be penalties for noncompliance. OA, after all, is based solely
on benefits <http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html> to
the researcher; the idea is not to coerce researchers into doing
something that is not in their interest, or something they would
really prefer not to do.
Indeed, the author surveys
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/> and outcome
studies<http://fcms.its.utas.edu.au/scieng/comp/project.asp?lProjectId=1830>
that I have so often cited provide evidence that -- far from
being opposed to deposit mandates -- authors welcome them, and
comply with them, over 80% of them willingly.
It is hence natural to ask: if researchers welcome and willingly
comply with deposit mandates, *why don't they deposit without a
mandate?*
I think this is a fundamental question; that it has an answer;
and that its answer is very revealing and especially relevant
here, because it is related to the double meaning of "mandate",
which means both to "legislate" and to "legitimize":
There are many worries (at least 34
<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32-worries> of them,
all groundless and easily answered) keeping most authors from
self-archiving on their own, unmandated. But the principle three
are worries (1) that self-archiving is illegal, (2) that
self-archiving may put acceptance for publication by their
preferred journals at risk and (3) that self-archiving is a
time-consuming, low-priority task for already overloaded
academics.
Formal institutional mandates to self-archive alleviate
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/> worries (1) - (3) (and
the 31 lesser worries as well) by making it clear to all that
self-archiving is now an official institutional policy of high
priority.
Harvard's mandate alleviates the three worries (although not, in
my opinion, in the optimal
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html>
way) by (1) mandating rights-retention, but (2) allowing a waiver
or opt-out if the author has any reason not to comply. This
covers legal worries about copyright and practical worries about
publisher prejudice. The ergonomic worry is mooted by (3) having
a proxy service (from the provost's office, not the dean's!) do
the deposit on the author's behalf.
The reason I say the Harvard mandate is not optimal is that -- as
Stuart notes -- the crucial condition for the success and
universality of OA self-archiving mandates is *to ensure that the
deposit itself gets done, under all conditions*, even if the
author opts out because of worries about legality or publisher
prejudice.
This distinction is clearly made in the FAQ
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/545-guid.html>
accompanying the Harvard mandate, informing authors that they
should deposit their final refereed drafts upon acceptance for
publication *whether or not they opt out of making access to
their deposits immediately OA*.
Harvard's mandate itself (not just the accompanying FAQ) should
have required immediate deposit, and the opt-out clause should
only have pertained to whether or not access to that deposit is
immediately made OA
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/364-guid.html>.
The reason is that Closed Access
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html>
deposit moots both the worry about legality and the worry about
journal prejudice. It is merely an institution-internal
record-keeping matter, not an OA or publication issue.
But even though the Harvard mandate is suboptimal in this regard,
this probably does not matter greatly, because the combination of
Harvard's official mandate and Harvard's accompanying FAQ have
almost the same effect as including the deposit requirement in
the official mandate would have had. The mandate is in any case
noncoercive. There are no penalties for noncompliance. It merely
provides Harvard's official institutional sanction for
self-archiving and it officially enjoins all faculty to do so.
(Note that both "injunction" and "sanction" likewise have the
double-meaning of "mandate": each can mean either officially
legislating something or officially legitimizing something, or
both.)
Now to something closer to ordinary English: There is definitely
a difference between an official *request* and an
official*requirement*; and the total failure
<http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/nih/2007housecalltoaction.html> of
the first version of the NIH policy (merely a request) -- as well
as the failure of the current request-policies of most of the
planet's current institutional repositories -- has shown that
only an official requirement can successfully generate deposits
and fill repositories -- as the subsequent NIH policy upgrade to
a mandate
<http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6581624.html#news1> and the
90 other institutional and funder
mandates<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/>
worldwide are demonstrating.
So whereas the word "mandate" (or "requirement") may sometimes be
a handicap at the stage where an institution is still debating
about whether or not to adopt a deposit policy at all, it is
definitely an advantage, indeed a necessity, if the policy, once
adopted, is to succeed in generating compliance: Requirements
work, requests don't.
All experience to date has also shown that whereas adding various
positiveincentives (rewards
<http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind06&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&F=l&P=13736>forfirst
depositors, "cream of science
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/waaijers/>" showcasing,
librarian assistance and proxy-depositing
<http://www.eprints.org/documentation/handbook/libraries.php>) to
a mandate can help accelerate compliance, no penalties for
noncompliance are needed. Mandates work if they are officially
requirements and not requests, if compliance monitoring and
implementation procedures are in place, and if the researcher
population is well informed of both the mandate requirements and
the benefits of OA.
Having said all that, I would like to close by pointing out one
sanction/incentive (depending on how you look at it) that is
already implicitly built into the academic reward system: Is
"publish-or-perish" a mandate, or merely an admonition?
Academics are not "required" to publish, but they are
well-advised to do so, for success in getting a job, a grant, or
a promotion. Nor are publications merely counted any more, in
performance review, like beans. Their research impact is taken
into account too. And it is precisely research impact that OA
enhances <http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html>.
So making one's research output OA is already connected causally
to the existing "publish-or-perish" reward system of academia,
whether or not OA is mandated. An OA mandate simply closes the
causal loop and makes the causal connection explicit. Indeed, a
number of the mandating institutions have procedurally linked
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/502-guid.html>
their deposit mandates to their performance review system:
Faculty already have to submit their refereed publication lists
for performance review today. Several of the universities that
mandate deposit have simply indicated that *henceforth the
official mode of submission of publications for performance
review will be via deposit in the Institutional Repository*.
This simple, natural procedural update -- not unlike the
transition from submitting paper CVs to submitting digital CVs --
is at the same time all the sanction/incentive that academics
need: To borrow the title of Steve Lawrence's seminal 2001 Nature
paper<http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/> on the OA
impact advantage: "*Online or Invisible*."
Hence an OA "mandate" is in essence just another bureaucratic
requirement to do a few extra keystrokes per paper
<http://blogsearch.google.ca/blogsearch?hl=en&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active&ie=UTF8&q=%22keystroke+mandate%22+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&filter=0&sa=N>,
to deposit a digital copy in one's institution's IR. This
amounts to no more than a trivial extension
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/> to the existing mandate
to do the keystrokes to write and publish the paper in the first
place: Publisher or Perish, Deposit to Flourish
<http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw64/harnad.html>.
*Stevan Harnad <http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/>*
American Scientist Open Access Forum
<http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html>