Heard ’round the world
For the first time, a certain class of researchers must provide open access to their research results as a condition of their grant. The huge UK funder Wellcome Trust made deposit in PubMed obligatory as of yesterday.
We here in the States had a golden opportunity to fire the open-access shot heard ’round the world: the NIH chewed on policy for nearly a year. We backed down. Wellcome Trust didn’t. Good for Wellcome Trust, and I hope to see a troop of funders fall into line behind them.
That said—you’d think this would help me and the repository I manage, but it doesn’t. (Never mind that Wellcome Trust is UK, for the sake of this discussion. If they were US-based, the same issues would pertain.) The Wellcome Trust grant agreement mandates PubMed, not just open access. They don’t positively forbid grantees to deposit somewhere else, but they don’t consider that a substitute for PubMed deposit.
So I’m out in the cold, basically.
The deeper question is which repositories are trustworthy enough to be viable substitutes for PubMed. Wellcome Trust understandably and correctly doesn’t want researchers slapping their stuff on their own websites and calling that a repository. (Why not? Well, because real repositories make guarantees about bit preservation and URL non-breakage that ordinary websites don’t. 404s aren’t acceptable in this business.) Nor, sadly, are all actual repositories likely to make it, long-term, because not everyone who has opened a repository quite realizes what a commitment they should be making to it.
The answer may lie in repository certification. It’s terribly hard for an entity like Wellcome Trust to define just now which repositories are acceptable for deposit. (Mandate software platform? Sure, but the software platform is only one small part of the story.) Once repositories can be certified as trustworthy under a central definition, it becomes easy.
So as much as I disagree with parts of NARA-RLG’s recommendations, I’m very glad they exist. I want a piece of the mandated-OA action, I do, and certification seems likely to be my path to it.