Deposit Mandates vs. Permission Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:52:52 -0400

In "Open Access - if you build it (for them) they will come…"
http://daryl.slis.ua.edu/slis/courses/ls566/spring2010/maccall/01/27/wordpress/
Jan R. writes:

    "Robert Darnton['s]... "The Case for Open Access"
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/2/12/the-case-for-open-access-the/
makes the useful point that Universities will probably be much more
effective in building their IRs if they mandate permission (i.e.
require faculty to secure and then give the university non-exclusive
permission to host their works on the institutional repository) as
opposed to mandating deposit (i.e. requiring faculty to do the work of
stocking the repository.)"

But what Professor Darnton actually wrote (in Feb 2008) was this:

"Many repositories already exist in other universities, but they have
failed to get a large proportion of faculty members to submit their
articles. The deposit rate at the University of California is 14
percent, and it is much lower in most other places. By mandating
copyright retention and by placing those rights in the hands of the
institution running the repository, the motion will create the
conditions for a high deposit rate."
In other words, Darnton was not comparing deposit mandates to
permission mandates: he was comparing (actual) repositories without
deposit mandates to (hypothetical) repositories with permission
mandates (not yet in existence at the time, the world's first being
Harvard FAS's, adopted in that month).

There was then (and there still is now, two years later), no evidence
at all that mandating permission would be more effective in generating
Open Access than mandating deposit. Quite the opposite. Deposit
mandates (of which there are more, and of longer standing than
permission mandates) have been extremely effective, and that evidence
was already there in 2008. In contrast, the effectiveness of
permission mandates, which are more recent (beginning in 2008) and
less numerous, is not yet known.

Moreover, permission mandates, because they in fact ask for more than
just deposit, all have to allow an opt-out clause (for those authors
who cannot or do not wish to negotiate permission with their
publishers). Hence not only is the effectiveness of permission
mandates not yet known: it is not even clear whether permission
mandates are indeed mandates at all.

[MIT, the university with the planet's first university-wide
permission mandate, had 850 deposits in March 2010, one year after
adoption. This needs to be considered as a percentage of MIT's annual
journal article output: the figure to beat is the current worldwide
baseline 20% rate for spontaneous, unmandated deposit. Most deposit
mandates are at about 60% within 2 years and well on the road toward
100%. -- But I've also heard recently that Harvard's longer-standing
FAS policy has more promising compliance rates, which I hope will be
reported publicly, by way of feedback and guidance on the
effectiveness of the Harvard model.]

The bottom line is that deposit mandates are necessary for OA, whereas
permission mandates are (desirable but) not necessary. The optimal
solution is hence to mandate deposit, without opt-out, plus
permission, with opt-out:

• "Upgrading Harvard's Opt-Out Copyright Retention Mandate: Add a
No-Opt-Out Deposit Clause"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/364-guid.html

• "Which Green OA Mandate Is Optimal?"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html

• "The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html

• "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

• "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html

• "On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/630-guid.html

Stevan Harnad

Hyperlinked version of this commentary:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/725-guid.html
Received on Tue Apr 27 2010 - 13:54:29 BST

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