What can universities do to promote open access?

Harvard UniversityMarch 17, 2008

Peter SuberVisiting Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law SchoolResearch Professor of Philosophy, Earlham CollegeSenior Researcher, SPARCpeter.suber@yale.edu

Delivering OA

• Repositories or archives (“green” OA)– No peer review– Institutional or disciplinary– Preprints and postprints

• Journals (“gold” OA)– Peer review– OA from birth or OA by conversion

Delivering OA

• None of the above– personal web sites– blogs– wikis– ebooks– email lists– audio, podcasts– video, webcasts– RSS feeds– P2P networks ...

What can universities do?

1. OA repositories2. OA journals3. OA monographs4. Promotion and tenure criteria5. Educate faculty about copyright and

OA

Premise 1: Authors are primary

Authors control:1. Whether to submit their work to an

OA journal2. Whether to deposit their work in an

OA repository3. Whether to transfer copyright

Premise 2: Authors are busy

• Often too busy – to learn much about OA– to act on what they know

Premises 1 + 2 = Awkward impasse

• Faculty have an interest in OA both as authors and as readers...

• and they control the solution...• but they are not focused on OA...

Faculty sluggishness:Submitting to OA journals

• When “presented with a list of reasons why they have not chosen to publish in an OA journal and asked to say which were important...[t]he reason that scored highest (70%) was that authors were not familiar enough with OA journals in their field.”– Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown– http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11003/

Faculty sluggishness: Self-archiving

• “Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option.”– Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, Open

access self-archiving: An author study – http://cogprints.org/4385/

What can universities do?

1. OA repositories2. OA journals3. OA monographs4. Promotion and tenure criteria5. Educate faculty about copyright and

OA

Launch an institutional repository (IR)

• Committed to– Open access– Interoperability– Long-term preservation

Harvard’s IR

• Harvard repository coming…• Harvard College Thesis Repository

– First anywhere for undergrad theses, launched 2/07

– http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/thesis/repo/

• Harvard’s Legal Electronic Document Archive (LEDA)– http://leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/

Fill the IR

• The difficult step• Harvard’s trailblazing policy

– First university mandate in the US– First to be adopted by faculty

Policies to fill the IR

• Mandates work, requests do not• Two kinds of mandate

– Deposit mandates (e.g. QUT, 2004)– Permission mandates (e.g. Harvard

2008)

University mandates• Now 13 university mandates in 10 countries

– Many more if we count ETD mandates• No punishments, no coercion

– Rely on expectations, education, assistance, and incentives• May include exceptions

– Royalty-producing literature– Unpublished research (e.g. to seek patent)– Accommodation of certain publishers

• Survey: 81% of authors would willingly comply with an OA mandate from their university or funding agency– 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply– Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, http://cogprints.org/4385/

Digression on NIH policy

• Similarities to Harvard policy– First in US (January 2008)– Timing – Size and influence of institution– Require researchers to retain key rights

• University policies still necessary– Not all researchers are funded by NIH– Not all funders have similar policies– Not all researchers are funded

Permission for OA

• Dual deposit/release approach– No permission needed for initial deposit, only for

later OA

Permission for OA

• Dual deposit/release approach– No permission needed for initial deposit, only for

later OA• CIC approach

– Ask authors to retain key rights, endorse author addendum

Permission for OA

• Dual deposit/release approach– No permission needed for initial deposit, only for

later OA• CIC approach

– Ask authors to retain key rights, endorse author addendum

• Harvard/California approach– Require authors to retain key rights (or opt out)

Permission for OA

• Dual deposit/release approach– No permission needed for initial deposit, only for later OA

• CIC approach– Ask authors to retain key rights, endorse author

addendum• Harvard/California approach

– Require authors to retain key rights (or opt out) • OhioLink approach

– Endorse author addendum plus: use license negotiations to get publishers to accept its terms

– “OhioLINK will seek to add a clause to its licenses with publishers….This clause will seek to automatically provide the recommended self archiving and access rights to all personnel of Ohio higher education institutions.”

Fill the IR: assistance

• Help with deposits and metadata– Librarians or student workers– MIT: wandering FTE’s– St. Andrews University: email and be done

• Help with digitization • Help with permissions

– Retroactively, with letters and phone calls– Prospectively, with author addendum

• IUPUI, MIT, U of North Carolina, Tufts, Washington U…• Committee on Institutional Cooperation (12 institutions);

at least U’s of Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin• Harvard/California

What can universities do?

1. OA repositories2. OA journals3. OA monographs4. Promotion and tenure criteria5. Educate faculty about copyright and

OA

Fund them

• Buy institutional memberships– For example at PLoS and BMC

• Create fund to pay publication fees for faculty, when funders won’t– University OA funds at U of Amsterdam, U

California at Berkeley, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U of Nottingham, Texas A&M, U of Wisconsin at Madison

• Start or join redirection campaigns– Like CERN’s Sponsoring Consortium for

Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3)

Fund them

• Buy institutional memberships– For example at PLoS and BMC

• Create fund to pay publication fees for faculty, when funders won’t– University OA funds at U of Amsterdam, U

California at Berkeley, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U of Nottingham, Texas A&M, U of Wisconsin at Madison

• Start or join redirection campaigns– Like CERN’s Sponsoring Consortium for

Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3)

Fund them

• Buy institutional memberships– For example at PLoS and BMC

• Create fund to pay publication fees for faculty, when funders won’t– University OA funds at U of Amsterdam, U

California at Berkeley, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U of Nottingham, Texas A&M, U of Wisconsin at Madison

• Start or join redirection campaigns– Like CERN’s Sponsoring Consortium for

Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3)

Publish them

• Philosophers’ Imprint – U of Michigan Library

• J of Insect Science – U Wisconsin Library

• J of Digital Information– Texas A&M University Library

• Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies – National Library of Australia

• Overlay journal series – U of California, Boston College…

Recognize them

• Put OA journal records in the library catalogue

• Support faculty in editing and launching them

• Give them due weight in hiring, promotion, and tenure

What can universities do?

1. OA repositories2. OA journals3. OA monographs4. Promotion and tenure criteria5. Educate faculty about copyright and

OA

Through the library

• Join a book-scanning program– Google Library Project

• Harvard one of the original five

– Open Content Alliance– Microsoft– Kirtas-BookSurge-Amazon

Through the university press

• Dual editions: OA + POD• Selected titles

– Australian National UP, Ohio State UP, Yale UP

• All OP titles– Université Libre de Bruxelles

• All new titles– Hamburg UP, Ilmenau Technical UP, Rice UP – OAPEN (consortium of 6 European institutions)

• At least one series– U of California, U of Helsinki, U of Michigan, MIT

• An OA imprint– U of Tennessee (Newfound Press), U of Wisconsin (Parallel

Press)

Through the university press

• ACLS report (December 2006)– UPs should move toward OA, join the OCA

• AAUP report (February 2007)– UPs should experiment with OA

monographs• Ithaka report (July 2007)

– UPs should do more online publishing– Should collaborate for economies of scale

What can universities do?

1. OA repositories2. OA journals3. OA monographs4. Promotion and tenure criteria5. Educate faculty about copyright and

OA

Promotion and tenure (1)

• Give due weight to all worthy, peer-reviewed work– Regardless of medium or price– Not just a subset– Don’t use IF’s as a surrogate for quality– Don’t deter publication in new journals – (Don’t lower your standard!)

Promotion and tenure (2)

• Journal articles for consideration should be in the IR– Charles Sturt University: deposit is a

condition for internal funding and promotion– Labortoire de Psychologie et Neurosciences

Cognitives: deposit is a condition for internal funding

– Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: publication lists for promotion must include live links to repository papers

– National Research Council Canada: publication lists for promotion generated from repository

What can universities do?

1. OA repositories2. OA journals3. OA monographs4. Promotion and tenure criteria5. Educate faculty about copyright and

OA

On copyright: Faculty may not know...

1. Authors are the copyright holders until they transfer away their rights.

2. Transferring full copyright to a publisher gives the OA decision to the publisher.

3. Many journals will alter the standard contract when asked.

4. There’s no harm in asking.5. Experts can help (e.g. author addenda).

Educate faculty about OA

• Harvard FAS unanimous vote is a model

• OA increases visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citation impact

• It’s about career-building• Convert real benefits into felt needs• Faculty education about OA:

– Must be viral or peer-to-peer– Must appeal to self-interest

On OA: Faculty may not know...

1. Which OA journals exist in their field...2. Some OA journals charge fees and some don’t.3. There are OA archives, not just OA journals.4. Deposit in an OA archive takes just a few

minutes.5. OA archiving is compatible with non-OA

publication.6. Most non-OA journals allow postprint archiving.7. Journals using the Ingelfinger Rule are a

shrinking minority.8. OA significantly increases citation impact.

Thank you

Peter Suberwww.earlham.edu/~peters