No subject

Professor Steven Hyman, Provost of Harvard, the first US University to
mandate=A0Open Access, has submitted such a spot-on, point for point
response=A0to President Obama=92s=A0Request for Information=A0on Public Acc=
ess
Policy that if his words are heeded, the beneficiaries will not only
be US research progress and the US tax-paying public, by whom US
research is funded and for whose benefit it is conducted, but research
progress and its public benefits planet-wide, as US policy is globally
reciprocated.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/01/22/373/

Reproduced below are just a few of the highlights of Professor Hyman=92s
response. Every one of the highlights has a special salience, and
attests to the minute attention and keen insight into the subtle
details of Open Access that went into the preparation of this
invaluable set of recommendations.

[Hash-marks (#) indicate three extremely minor points on which the
response could be ever so slightly clarified -- see end.]

=93The public access policy should (1) be mandatory, not voluntary, (2)
use the shortest practical embargo period, no longer than six months,
(3) apply to the final version of the author=92s peer-reviewed
manuscript, as opposed to the published version, unless the publisher
consents to provide public access to the published version, (4) [#
require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository=A0#]
immediately upon acceptance for publication, where it would remain
=93dark=94 until the embargo period expired, and (5) avoid copyright
problems by [##=A0requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles
based on federally funded research, to retain the right to give the
relevant agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access
copy of his or her peer-reviewed manuscript=A0##]=85

=93If publishers believe they cannot afford to allow copies of their
articles to be released under a public-access policy, they need not
publish federally funded researchers. To date, however, it appears
that no publishers have made that decision in response to the NIH
policy. Hence, federally funded authors remain free to submit their
work to the journals of their choice. Moreover, public access gives
authors a much larger audience and much greater impact=85

=93If the United States extends a public-access mandate across the
federal government, then lay citizens with no interest in reading this
literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because researchers
will benefit directly=85. That is the primary problem for which public
access is the solution=85

=93It doesn=92t matter whether many lay readers, or few, are able to read
peer-reviewed research literature or have reason to do so. But even if
there are many, the primary beneficiaries of a public-access policy
will be professional researchers, who constitute the intended audience
for this literature and who depend on access to it for their own
work=85.

=93Among the metrics for measuring success, I can propose these: the
compliance rate (how many articles that the policy intends to open up
have actually been opened up); the number of downloads from the
public-access repositories; and the number of citations to the
public-access articles. As we use different metrics, we must accept
that [###=A0we will never have an adequate control group: a set of
articles on similar topics, of similar quality, for which there is no
public access###]=85.

________________________________

Three suggestions for clarifying the minor points indicated by the
hash-marks (#):

[#=94require deposit of the manuscript in a suitable open repository=94 #]

(add: =93preferably the fundee=92s own institutional repository=94)

[##=94requiring federal grantees, when publishing articles based on
federally funded research, to retain the right to give the relevant
agency a non-exclusive license to distribute a public-access copy of
his or her peer-reviewed manuscript=94 ##]

(add: =93the rights retention and license are desirable and welcome, but
not necessary if the publisher already endorses making the deposit
publicly accessible immediately, or after the allowable embargo
period=94)

[### "we will never have an adequate control group [for measuring the
mandate's success]: a set of articles on similar topics, of similar
quality, for which there is no public access" ###]

(add: =93but closed-access articles published in the same journal and
year as mandatorily open-access articles do provide an approximate
matched control baseline for comparison=94)


Stevan Harnad

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