Input
for the 'First DRIVER Summit', Panel Discussion, 2008-01-16
The EU Council's Conclusions show the tell-tale
signs of penetration by the publisher anti-OA
lobby; familiar slogans, decisively rebutted many, many times before, crop up
verbatim in the EU Council's language, although the Council does not appear to
realize that it has allowed itself to become the mouthpiece of these special
interests, which are not those of the research community.
"the
importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being
available on the Internet at no cost to the reader under economically
viable circumstances, including delayed open access"
(1) The descriptor 'at no cost to the
reader' flagrantly conflates paid site-licensing with Open Access (OA).
This wording was undoubtedly urged on the EC by the publisher lobby. The focus
should be on providing free online access webwide. That is OA, and that
is what makes the real objective clear and coherent.
(2) The descriptor 'delayed open access'
refers to publisher embargoes on author self-archiving. If embargoes are
to be accommodated, it should be made clear that they apply only to the date at
which the access to the embargoed document is made OA, not to the date at
which the document is deposited, which should be
immediately upon acceptance for publication. (The DRIVER network of
Institutional Repositories (IRs) can then adopt the 'email eprint request' button
that will allow individual users to request and receive individual copies of the
document semi-automatically. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html )
(3) What should be deposited in the
author's own institutional IR immediately upon acceptance for publication is the
author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft ('postprint'), not the
publisher's PDF (or XML). There are far more publisher embargoes on the PDF/XML than on the
postprint, and the postprint is all that is needed for research use and
progress. The postprint is a supplementary version of the official publication,
provided for OA purposes; it is not the version with the primary digital
preservation problem. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
(4) Digital preservation should not be
conflated with OA provision: There is a (separate) problem of the digital
preservation of the publisher's PDF/XML, but this is not the same as the problem
of providing OA to the author's postprint. The postprint, though it can and
should be preserved, is not the canonical copy of the publication, so the two
preservation tasks should not be conflated.
(5) Self-archiving research data is also a
different matter from self-archiving research publications.
Data-archiving is not subject to a publisher embargo, and it needs independent
preservation, but data-access and data-preservation should not be conflated
with OA provision.
(6) Deposit should be directly in each
author's own IR: Distributed institutional depositing and storage should not be
conflated with central harvesting and indexing: Deposit Institutionally,
Harvest Centrally.
(7) Direct central deposit should be
avoided except in cases where the author is institutionally unaffiliated or
the author's institution does not yet have an IR. For those cases, there should
be at least one provisional default repository such as DEPOT or EurOpenScholar.
(8) Research (publications and data)
should not be conflated with other forms of digital content. The problems of
cultural heritage archiving, for example, are not the same as those of research
publication archiving. Nor are the problems of archiving the same as the problem
of access-provision (OA).
"ensure the long term preservation of scientific information
-including publications and data"
This is an example of the complete conflation of
OA-provision with digital preservation, including a conflation of authors'
supplementary postprints with the publisher's original, as well as a conflation
of research publications with research data.
DRIVER will not have a coherent programme unless
it clearly and systematically de-conflates OA-provision from digital
preservation, primary publications from authors' supplementary postprints, and
publication-archiving from data-archiving, treating each of these separately, on
its own respective terms.
"experiments on and wide deployment of scientific data infrastructures
with cross-border, cross-institution and cross-discipline added-value for
open access to and preservation of scientific
information"
This again conflates OA provision with digital
preservation and conflates publications with data. It also conflates both of
these with IR interoperability, which is yet another matter. (And webwide OA is,
by definition, cross-institution, cross-border and cross-discipline, so that is
a non-issue.)
What is an issue, however, is institutional
versus central depositing, and it is crucial that DRIVER have a clear,
coherent policy (insofar as research archiving is concerned -- this does not
necessarily apply to other forms of digital content): Deposit
Institutionally: Harvest/Index/Search Centrally.
The emphasis of DRIVER should accordingly be on
ensuring that the distributed IRs have the requisite interoperability for
whatever central harvesting, indexing, search and analysis are needed and
desired.
"promoting, through these policies, access through the internet to the
results of publicly financed research, at no cost to the reader, taking into
consideration economically sustainable ways of doing this, including delayed
open access"
Economic sustainability is again a red herring
introduced by the publishing lobby into language that should only concern the
research community and research access. The economic sustainability of
publishing is not DRIVER's concern.
DRIVER's concern should be interoperable
OA-provision (plus whatever cultural-heritage and other forms of archiving
DRIVER wishes to provide the infrastructure for).
Nor are publisher access-embargoes DRIVER's
concern: DRIVER should merely help ensure immediate deposit in IRs, and it
should facilitate research usage needs through IR interoperability as well as
the IRs' email eprint request
button.
"2008 working towards the interoperability of national
repositories of scientific information in order to facilitate accessibility
and searchability of scientific information beyond national
borders"
Insofar as research is concerned, it is not the
interoperability of national repositories that is crucial but the
interoperability of all OA IRs.
"2009 contributing to an effective overview of progress at European
level, informing the Commission of results and experiences with alternative
models for the dissemination of scientific information."
This is again a red herring (for both the EU and
for DRIVER) introduced by the publishing lobby: Research archiving and
OA-provision are neither a matter of alternative publishing models nor a matter
of alternatives to the generic peer-reviewed publication model. Publishing
reform and peer review reform are not DRIVER matters. They can and will
evolve too, but DRIVER should focus on the deposit of current published research
as well as research data in IRs, and the interoperability of those IRs. That is
the immediate problem. The rest is merely speculative for now.
"B.
Invitation to the Commission to implement the measures announced in the
Communication on "scientific information in the digital age: access,
dissemination and preservation", and in particular to: 1. Experiment with
open access to scientific publications resulting from projects funded by the EU
Research Framework Programmes by: defining and implementing concrete
experiments with open access to scientific publications resulting from Community
funded research, including with open access."
This is a vague way of saying that the
publishing lobby has persuaded the EU not to do the obvious, but to keep on
'experimenting' as if what needed to be done were not already evident, already
tested, already demonstrated to work, and already being done, worldwide
(including by RCUK, ERC, NIH, and over a dozen
universities, and now recommended for all European universities by EUA):
The EU should mandate that all EU-funded
research articles (postprints) are deposited in the fundee's IR immediately upon
acceptance for publication. Access can be set in compliance with embargoes,
if desired. And data-archiving should be strongly encouraged. DRIVER's
concern should be with ensuring that the network of IRs has the requisite
interoperability to make it maximally useful and useable for further
research progress.