[Irtalk] Fwd: [GOAL] More Skulduggery from SPP's Scholarly Scullery

[Hilton Gibson]

FYI.

*Hilton Gibson*
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com>
Date: 16 February 2014 04:04
Subject: [GOAL] More Skulduggery from SPP's Scholarly Scullery
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>


In the Society for Scholarly Publishing's Scholarly Kitchen, Rick
Anderson<http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/02/13/errors-and-misinformation-in-the-roarmap-open-access-registry/>
complains
of "errors and misinformation” in the ROARMAP registry of OA mandates and
calls for publishers to provide this service instead.

ROARMAP <http://roarmap.eprints.org/> is a registry for institutional and
funder OA policies:

X-Other (Non-Mandates) (86)
Proposed Institutional Mandates (6)
Proposed Sub-Institutional Mandate (4)
Proposed Multi-Institutional Mandates (5)
Proposed Funder Mandates (12)
Institutional Mandates (202)
Sub-Institutional Mandates (43)
Multi-Institutional Mandates (9)
Funder Mandates (87)
Thesis Mandates (109)

The distinction between a mandate and a non-mandate is fuzzy, because
mandates vary in strength.

For a classification of the ROARMAP policies in terms of WHERE and WHEN to
deposit, and whether the deposit is REQUIRED or REQUESTED, see El CSIC’s
(la Universitat de Barcelona, la Universitat de València & la Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya)
MELIBEA<http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/default.php?directorio=politicas&campo_1=INSTITUCION&texto_1=&campo_2=CATEGORIA&texto_2=&campo_3=POLITICA&texto_3=&campo_4=PAIS&texto_4=&formato=tabla>
.

For analyses of mandate strength and effectiveness, see:

Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L., & Harnad, S.
(2012). Testing the finch hypothesis on green OA mandate
ineffectiveness.<http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.8174> arXiv
preprint arXiv:1210.8174.

Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent & Harnad, Stevan (2013) Ten-year
Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving
Mandate<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/> (in
E Rodrigues, A Swan & AA Baptista, Eds. *Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na
UMinho no Mundo*).

Further analyses are underway. For those interested in analyzing the growth
of OA mandate types and how much OA they generate, ROARMAP and MELIBEA,
which index OA policies, can be used in conjunction with
ROAR<http://roar.eprints.org/>
 and BASE <http://www.base-search.net/about/en/>, which index repository
contents.

*"Leave providing the OA to us..."*

If there is any party whose interests it serves to debate the necessary and
sufficient conditions for calling an institutional or funder OA policy an
OA “mandate,” it’s not institutions, funders or OA advocates, whose only
concern is with making sure that their policies (whatever they are called)
are successful in that they generate as close to 100% OA as possible, as
soon as possible.

The boundary between a mandate and a non-mandate is most definitely fuzzy.
A REQUEST is certainly not a mandate, nor is it effective, as the history
of the NIH policy has shown. (The 2004 NIH policy was unsuccessful until
REQUEST was upgraded to
REQUIRE<http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/213/135> in
2007.)

But (as our analyses show), even requirements come in degrees of strength.
There can be a requirement with or without the monitoring of compliance,
with or without consequences for non-compliance, and with consequences of
varying degrees. Also, all of these can come with or without the
possibility of exceptions, waivers or opt-outs, which can be granted under
conditions varying in their exactingness and specificity.

All these combinations actually occur, and, as I said, they are being
analyzed in relation to their success in generating OA. It is in the
interests of institutions, funders and OA itself to ascertain which
mandates are optimal for generating as much OA as possible, as soon as
possible.

I am not sure whose interests it serves to ponder the semantics of the word
“mandate” or to portray as sources of “errors and misinformation” the
databases that are indexing in good faith the actual OA policies being
adopted by institutions and funders.

(It is charges of "error and misinformation" that sound a bit more like
propaganda to me, especially if they come from parties whose interests are
decidedly not in generating as much OA as possible, as soon as possible.)

But whatever those other interests may be, I rather doubt that they are the
ones to be entrusted with indexing the actual OA policies being adopted by
institutions and funders -- any more than they are to be entrusted with
providing the OA.

§ § § §
I think it is not only appropriate but essential that services like the
University of Southampton's ROAR, ROARMAP, the Universities of Barcelona,
Valencia and Catalunya's MELIBEA and University of Bielefeld's BASE are
hosted and provided by scholarly institutions rather than by publishers. I
also think the reasons for this are obvious.

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