Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness

We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figure

On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates

The online age has made powerful new benefits for research possible, but these benefits entail a profound conflict of interest between (1) what is best for the research journal publishing industry and (2) what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. What is at stake is (1) a hypothetical risk of potential future losses in subscription revenue for publishers versus (2) actual, ongoing losses in current research impact for researchers. How this conflict of interest will have to be resolved is already clear: Research publishing is a service industry; it will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa. And what is best for research is Open Access (OA), provided through research funders and universities mandating the OA self-archiving of all their researchers' peer-reviewed research output. The conventional (non-OA) publishing industry's first commitment is of course to what is best for its own business interests, rather than to what is best for research and researchers; hence it is lobbying vigorously against the many OA self-archiving mandates that are currently being adopted, recommended and petitioned for by the research community worldwide. But what is especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when "OA" publishers take the very same stance against OA itself (by opposing OA self-archiving mandates) that non-OA publishers do. Conventional publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded) but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been self-deluded if not hypocritical. I close with a reply to Jan Velterop, of Springer's "Open Choice": Jan opposes Green OA self-archiving mandates, because they would provide OA without paying the publisher extra for it. But all publishing costs are currently being paid for already: via subscriptions. So opposition to Green OA self-archiving mandates by a hybrid Gold "Open Choice" Publisher sounds very much like wanting to have their cake and eat it too (even though that is precisely what they like to describe Green OA advocates as trying to do!)

Open access: what, where, when, how and why

The following are the eight most important features to ensure an effective, verifiable Open Access (OA) mandate: (1) All research funding agency OA Mandates need to specify clearly and explicitly that the deposit of each article must be in the author’s institutional repository (so the universities and research institutions can monitor their own output and ensure compliance as well as adopt mandates of their own for their unfunded research output). (2) All mandates should specify that the deposit (of the authors refereed, revised, accepted final draft) must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication (not on the date of publication, which is often much later, variable, not known to the author, and frequently does not even correspond to the journal issue’s published date of publication, if there is one). (3) All mandates should urge (but not require) authors to make their immediate-deposit immediately-OA. (4) All mandates should urge (but not require) authors to reserve the right to make their papers immediately-OA (and other re-use rights) in their contracts with their publishers (as in the Harvard-style mandates). (3) All mandates should shorten (or, better, not even mention) allowable OA embargoes (so as not to encourage publishers to adopt them). (6) All repositories should implement the automated "email eprint request" Button (for embargoed [non-OA] deposits). (7) All mandates should designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review, research assessment, grant application, or grant renewal. (8) All repositories should implement rich usage and citation metrics in the institutional repositories as incentive for compliance

Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score

MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, 40 references, 7761 word

OA mandates and the Nordic countries

To access full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink "View/Open" at the bottom of this pageIceland has no OA mandates yet in 2010. The first repository, Hirslan, the Landspitali University Hospital Library repository, started in 2006. The second started in 2008, Skemman, the repository of the University of Iceland, University of Akureyri, University of Bifröst and the Iceland Academy of the Arts. The lack of mandates in Iceland might have had the effect that only a low percentage of submitted research literature is deposited in the repositories. In this article the focus is on the open access repositories and the need for mandates for the two repositories in Iceland; Skemman and Hirslan.Bókasöfn sinna varðveislu og miðlun efnisins sem er í opnum aðgangi. Mörg bókasöfn hafa sett á fót varðveislusöfn (repository) sem hýsa vísindalegar greinar og miðla því efni í opnum aðgangi á Netinu. Tvö varðveislusöfn eru starfrækt á Íslandi, en þau eru Hirslan, varðveislusafn Landspítalans sem opnaði 2006 og Skemman sem opnaði 2008 og er varðveislusafn Háskóla Íslands, Háskólans á Akureyri, Háskólans á Bifröst og Listaháskóla Íslands. Höfundar hafa í takmörkuðum mæli nýtt sér að vista vísindagreinar í íslenskum varðveislusöfnunum. Víða erlendis hefur þess verið krafist af höfundum að þeir visti vísindagreinar sínar í slíkum söfnum og gera um leið vísindagreinar aðgengilegar á Netinu í opnum aðgangi. Hvorki íslenskir háskólar né RANNÍS hafa krafist þess. Talið er að árangur í vistun greina í varðveislusöfn náist aðeins sé þess krafist af höfundum

Strengthening OA practice: using intervention logic to support drives for change

The aim of the JISC Open Access (OA) Pathfinder programme is to “develop shareable models of good practice with regard to implementation of research funders’ OA requirements”. With the sector-wide shift to OA and with growing funders’ OA mandates, the Pathfinder scheme reflects a real need to enhance compliance with the agenda. Fundamental to this project is understanding how people approach OA, and how processes can be designed to address this. This brief paper summarises an approach to building stronger institutional approaches to Open Access using intervention logic. The process, drawn from a behaviour change intervention framework supports research management and library staff to explore the key areas of change needed and consider how best to address these. The intervention mapping tool which was first trialled at a workshop on Uncovering researcher behaviours at Oxford Brookes on 20 May 2015 is supplied at the end of this document to support this process

The Open Challenge: A Brief History

Milestones in the history of the Open Access (OA) Movement, especially the 1994 "Subversive Proposal" for authors to self-archive their peer-reviewed journal articles, the creation of the first OAI-compliant open source software for creating an Institutional Repository (EPrints, 2000), the evidence for the OA impact advantage (2001), the first OA Self-Archiving Mandate (U. Southampton ECS 2002), the OA Mandates Registry (ROARMAP, 2003), and the creation of the OA Policy Guidance organization for universities worldwide, EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS 2010)

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution

The Web is becoming humankind's Cognitive Commons, where knowledge is created and curated collaboratively. We trace its origins from the advent of language around 300,000 years ago to a recent series of milestones to which the University of Southampton has contributed, helping Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA IR contents, and OA mandates to grow through the posting of the Subversive Proposal in 1994, the creation of CogPrints in 1997, the OpCit citation-linking project in 1999, the creation of the Eprints IR software in 2000, the Citebase citation-linking engine in 2001, the ROAR repository in 2002, the adoption and promotion of OA mandates (beginning with the ECS Southampton mandate, the world's first, in 2002), the creation of the ROARMAP mandates registry in 2003, and the ongoing bibliography of the Open Access Impact Advantage since 2004

Across the pond: alternative ways of obtaining scholarly articles and the impact on traditional publishing models, from a UK/European perspective

This column examines the growth and impact of open access (OA) with emphasis on a UK/European perspective. It considers the various colors of OA, the impact on authors, institutions, and funders, and speculates on the future of traditional academic publishing. The author considers the pros and cons of a variety of OA methods--including the so-called ‘guerrilla OA’ services and sites-- and discusses the current mandates in place for the UK’s upcoming Research Excellence Framework exercise, which will report back on the research outputs produced in universities between 2014-2020