Thanks.
I will try well-chosen wording for respect and require.
Shigeki
(2012/09/14 20:25), Stevan Harnad wrote:
On 2012-09-14, at 3:00 AM, SUGITA Shigeki wrote:
Congratulations on BOAI's new reccomendations!
The Digital Repository Federation (DRF) in Japan
is now translating it into Japanese and will soon privide it.
I am a member of the translation staff.
1.1. Every institution of higher education should have
a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all
future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited
in the institution’s designated repository. (See
recommendation 3.1 on institutional repositories.)
University policies should respect faculty freedom to
submit new work to the journals of their choice.
1.3. Every research funding agency, public or private,
should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions
of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research
are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as
soon as practicable.
When publishers will not allow OA on the funder’s terms,
funder policies should require grantees to seek another publisher.
Feeling a mismatch between these clauses, I am at a loss
for word selection. I am not so good at English. My misunderstanding?
You are right to point out this difference in the recommendations
for (1) institutions and for (2) funders.
Please note that I am replying as one individual co-drafter and
co-signatory. I am not speaking for all of us, nor for the Soros
Foundation.
The rationale was that there are some factors over which
institutions have more prerogatives than funders, and there
are some factors over which funders have more prerogatives
than institutions.
(1) Institutions, because they employ researchers to do the
highest quality research can require researchers to publish
their findings in the journals with the highest quality standards.
This can be reflected in how institutions evaluate the research
performance of their researchers, assigning higher weight to
work that has met the standards of journals that have higher
quality standards.
(Often in practice the quality of a journal is inferred in part
from its average citation count [impact factor], which is a
metric that has been much criticized. This is a complicated
and controversial issue. The computation and use of metrics
is currently evolving, partly under the influence of open access
itself.)
(2) Funders, because they pay for and dictate the conditions
for the grants they award, have slightly different criteria and
prerogatives. They too want research to be of high quality,
but they are also in a position to make public access to
publicly funded research a condition of the funding. And the
larger funding agencies (such as NIH) fund so much research
that they have a sizeable potential influence on journal policy
(e.g., embargo lengths) -- an influence that most individual
institutions do not have.
Hence funders can, in principle, stipulate that the research
must be made open access, as a contractual obligation
preceding its having been submitted to any journal. As a
consequence, journals would either have to honor this prior
contractual obligation or not accept the work for publication.
Note that some institutions with a particularly heavy weight
have taken a route somewhat similar to this, notably Harvard
and MIT. Their (Green) open access mandates stipulate that
their authors are contractually bound to make their published
articles open access unless the authors explicitly seek a
waiver from the policy. The Harvard/MIT-style copyright
retention mandate, however, is just one of several differenct
kinds of mandate models or mandate condtions that an
institution might adopt. And, as noted, in general, individual
institutions do not have the weight of research funders in
influencing journal policy.
So -- and here, although what I've said so far is largely generic,
I am speaking as an individual interpreter of the BOAI10
recommendations -- the feeling was that BOAI should not
single out which Green OA mandate conditions an institution
should adopt, beyond recommending that deposit should be
immediate, embargoes should be as short as possible, and
re-use rights should be as broad as possible, whereas funders
could also adopt constraints on journal choice other than just
journal importance and quality.
The unknowns here are researchers themselves, whose needs
vary from discipline to discipline. Some authors, in some fields,
may be happy to exercise their choice of journal in such a way
as to comply with institutional open access policy -- others may
prefer a waiver, in order to publish in the journal they find most
appropriate.
It is, quite frankly, a conjecture whether a constraint on authors'
journal choice, in the interests of open access, will prove successful
for funder mandates.
It should accordingly be born in mind that the BOAI
