Please mandate me!
Talk about open-access mandates in institutions has tended to irk me rather. I’d love an institutional mandate. I can’t create one. (On twenty-six campuses? All by myself? With no support from above, no institutional power, not even so much as a line in my job description to back me up? Of course I can’t.)
I’m scoffing a bit less, though, after reading this short Surowiecki piece on the discrepancy between the fuel-efficiency standards Americans vote for and the fuel efficiency of the vehicles they actually buy.
Perhaps that’s what’s going on with open access. Faculty are nominally in favor of the idea, but putting their articles where their opinions are could (they believe) entail career difficulties. If everyone has to do it because of a mandate, the playing field levels and they can comply without worry.
This view of things is optimistic for national mandates and funder mandates, where the levelling of the playing field is immediate and obvious, but less optimistic for institutional and “patchwork” mandates. I am already hearing rumblings at MPOW about playing dog-in-the-manger with intellectual property—and yes, that’s mostly patents, but if those offices determine that research results are being flung to the four winds, they won’t hesitate to pry. Somehow I don’t think they’ll share librarian ideals, and there’s no question that they’ve more institutional pull than the library.
Overall, if there is a sense that mandating open access will put our institution at a disadvantage compared to others, it won’t happen. (One of the first questions I get when I discuss author addenda with faculty is, “Will the journal reject my article if I use this?” They are that concerned.) At this stage of the game, unfortunately, it’s impossible to provide clear and convincing evidence that OA won’t cause pain. Just telling faculty that they oughtn’t publish in their discipline’s top-ranked journal because it’s neither green nor gold will immediately end the conversation; worse, it will create a cadre of vocal OA detractors.
I admit that I have never tried to push for any sort of mandate, neither institutional nor patchwork. The time is not yet right. What I would suggest instead to my fellow repository-rats is close attention to funder mandates… and crafty service development in advance of them. “Need to send your paper to PubMed Central? Push this button, and we’ll handle it—oh, and we’ll keep a copy in our IR for proper safekeeping as well.” That, I suspect, will play very well indeed in the University of Peoria.