From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2015 07:05:09 -0500

[SNIP]

Comments on: Richard Poynder (2015) Open Access, Almost-OA, OA
Policies, and Institutional Repositories. Open And Shut. December 01,
2015

A few little corrections and suggestions on Richard's paper:

(1) The right measure of repository and policy success is the
percentage of an institution's total yearly peer-reviewed research
article output that is deposited as full text immediately upon
acceptance for publication. (Whether the deposit is immediately made
OA is much less important, as long as the copy-request Button is
(properly!) implemented. Much less important too are late deposits,
author Button-request compliance rates, or other kinds of deposited
content. Once all refereed articles are being deposited immediately,
all the rest will take care of itself, sooner or later.)

(2) CRIS/Cerif research-asset-management tools are complements to
Institutional Repositories, not competitors.

(3) The Australian ERA policy was a (needless) flop for OA. The UK's
HEFCE/Ref2020 policy, in contrast, looks like it can become a success.
(None of this has anything to do with the pro's or con's of either
research evaluation, citations, or metrics in general.)

(4) No, "IDOA/PEM" (Deposit mandates requiring immediate deposits for
research evaluation or funding, with the Button) will not increase
"dark deposit," they will increase deposit -- and mandate adoption,
mandate compliance, OA, Button-Use, Almost-OA, access and citations.
They will also hasten the day when universal IDOA/PEM will make
subscriptions cancellable and unsustainable, inducing conversion to
fair-Gold OA (instead of today's over-priced, double-paid and
unnecessary Fool's-Gold OA. But don't ask me "how long?" I don't know,
and I no longer care!)

(5) The few anecdotes about unrefereed working papers are completely
irrelevant. OA is about peer-reviewed journal articles. Unrefereed
papers come and go. And eprints and dspace repositories clearly tag
papers as refereed/unrefereed and published/unpublished. (The rest is
just about scholarly practice and sloppiness, both from authors and
from users.)

(6) At some point in the discussion, Richard, you too fall into the
usual canard about impact-factor and brand, which concerns only Gold
OA, not OA.

RP: "Is the sleight of hand involved in using the Button to promote
the IDOA/PEM mandate justified by the end goal — which is to see a
proliferation of such mandates? Or to put it another way, how
successful are IDOA/PEM mandates likely to prove?"

No sleight of hand -- just sluggishness of hand, on the part of (some)
authors (both for Button compliance and mandate compliance) and on the
part of (most) institutions and funders (for the design and adoption
of successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button). And the evidence is all
extremely thin, one way or the other. Of course successful IDOA/PEM
mandates (with Button) are (by definition!) better than relying on
email links at publisher sites. "Successful" means near 100%
compliance rate for immediate full-text deposit. And universal
adoption of successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button) means universal
adoption of successful IDOA/PEM mandates (with Button). (Give me that
and worries about author Button-compliance will become a joke.)

The rest just depends on the speed of the horses -- and I am not a
betting man (when it comes to predicting how long it will take to
reach the optimal and inevitable). (Not to mention that I am
profoundly against horse-racing and the like -- for humanitarian
reasons that are infinitely more important than OA ever was or will
be.)



On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 8:28 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2015 13:08:26 +0000
>
> How many of the documents indexed in “open” repositories are in fact
> freely available, rather than on “dark deposit” or otherwise
> inaccessible.
>
> What is an Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (IDOA) mandate, and what
> is Almost-OA?
>
> How important is the so-called eprint request Button to the success of
> the IDOA mandate, and how efficacious is the Button in allowing
> readers to obtain copies of items held on dark deposit in
> repositories?
>
> I offer some thoughts on these and related matters in a document that
> can be accessed here:
>
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/open-access-almost-oa-oa-policies-and.html
>
> Richard Poynder