Caveat Lector

What’s an institutional repository for, anyway? That’s one of the charges set before a state-system-wide library working group I’m chairing. It’s a tough one, too. We made good headway on our other two charges (service definition and budget) at our last meeting. We didn’t get anywhere on this one.

Some IRs will claim that they’re there to collect and preserve the institution’s peer-reviewed research output. That’s the classic reason to have one at all. By that measure, I don’t know a single successful one. Not one. Not even Ohio State or Oregon. Certainly not either of the ones I’ve run.

Sometimes the above mission shades into a slightly different one: to range the institution’s faculty behind open access such that they self-archive their own work (and, it is implied, take over the scholarly publishing world, haha, mine is an evil laugh). This is the Les Carr view of IR success, in which mediated deposit is to be scoffed at because it’s a non-missionary solution. No winners there at this point, either. Not even Harvard, yet. Not even those institutions with mandates. Sure, faculty will do what they have to, but in their pointy heads they file the mandate under “one more intrusion of an out-of-control academic bureaucracy” and assign it the same dull resentment reserved for IRBs and grant progress reports. What’s more, they don’t hit the keys themselves. They delegate it to department secretaries, graduate students, librarians, and similar nonentities. Some commitment to open access that is.

The thing is, when you strip away the rhetoric, it’s quite clear that hardly any IR is set up to handle the workload either of the above missions generates. If you want all the peer-reviewed research without a mandate, you’re going to have to do mediated deposit, there’s no way around it. Number of IRs set up to do mediated deposit? A few. I do it, on a sadly small scale and without staff help. On a large scale? None. Not one. I heard Trisha Davis of Ohio State with my own two ears at NISO/PALINET, saying that she’s scared of the possibility of her small-scale mediated-deposit shop getting flooded.

As for the missionary workload involved in the second goal—look, that’s just funny, that is. Except in very small schools where the entire library (not just the repository rat) has a solid, unified commitment to open access, the kind of high-touch outreach needed to get faculty on board is not even remotely feasible. Worse still, IRs are really pathetic flags to rally anyone around, faculty or librarian. “Useless excrescences,” I called them in Roach Motel, and that’s harsh, but it’s not unfair.

And yet those are the standards against which libraries are judging repository rats. I wonder sometimes why I don’t have ulcers. I don’t wonder why my hair is graying.

Some IRs, self-aware enough to realize that both the above missions are pitifully out-of-reach (and believe you me, I resemble this remark quite strongly), redefine the IR as a service point. Come to us; we’ll take care of whatever you give us. This is the best of all possible worlds for a repository rat; at least good service is both definable and feasible. I certainly try to provide it. I’m certainly trying to move the working group in this direction (and the wording of our charges helps). The trouble here, once again, is that service isn’t a sufficient mission. Service in service of what, exactly? And round the wheel goes again, as university presses and librarians who have never been in the repository-rat trenches scoff at IRs for their meagre and non-peer-reviewed contents.

This is why I often think of IRs as preservation vehicles. Digital preservation I understand and can perform, at least as well as most and better than some. It’s also hard to argue with as a goal; it needs to be done, and who else is going to do it? It’s not as sexy as open access, but it’s unassailable. I’ll take unassailable. Everything else I do gets assailed all over the place.

A repo-rat’s life is not a simple one, not least because the tradeoffs I have just explained seem not to resonate with anyone who isn’t a repo-rat. I yell and scream and stamp my feet and make people upset at me and call myself and the service I run harsh names—because I don’t know how else to be heard, and conversations that don’t include my point of view invariably turn out to be empty and useless from where I’m sitting.

I heard a real howler today. Seems the scholarly-communication czar at a Certain Research Institution quoted Roach Motel in a presentation and then said (my paraphrase) “Isn’t it nice that we don’t have those problems?”

This is me. Rolling. On the. Floor. Laughing. My. Nether regions. Off.

I dropped by their institutional repository. I won’t repeat the numbers I found there because the institution could be identified by them. They do have what looks to be a flourishing ETD program, but aside from that—all I can say is that “denial” is more than a river in Egypt. If their mission is the standard open-access notion of capturing the institution’s peer-reviewed output, they’re no better off than any of the rest of us, take my word for it.

I can’t speak to their faculty-participation levels without looking behind the public façade, and I don’t know anything about what arrangements may or may not be in place for mediated deposit. That’s one of the odd things about this business: high numbers mean success on some level, but it’s not at all clear which, as it may mean either an engaged faculty or a really with-it library.

Low numbers are low numbers, though. Their numbers aren’t extraordinarily low, but they’re low compared to the institution’s peer-reviewed output, and as is typical of IRs, a glance down the collections list demonstrates that a hefty chunk of their content isn’t peer-reviewed.

There’s no shame in that. It’s the boat most of us are in. I wrote Roach Motel partly as a bit of an apologia for that boat. But I’m sorry, it’s plain old bloody stupid to deny it… unless the institution has some other mission for the IR that they’re not letting on about.

This is possible. It’s one of the directions MPOW is going in for our IR (with my active connivance, I may say); if it won’t work for the peer-reviewed-literature wonks’ purposes, let’s see what it is good for. If this is the case for that institution, however, their actual site doesn’t so much as whisper it.

Which makes me think Czar Scholcomm’s comments really are an amazing case of ostrich-headed denial. Lordy, when is the green open-access business going to grow up?

Forgive me a little TLA bingo: MIT made SAE back off DRM. Nicely played, MIT.

This is one stick libraries can wield to help solve the recalcitrant-publisher problem. Play nice with the NIH public-access policy or we drop our subscription to your journal like a hot potato. I think faculty would appreciate the gesture, truthfully.

It’d be a bigger stick if a critical mass of research libraries were to express this intention out loud and with a collective recalcitrant-publisher list to work from.

So let’s pretend that Achaea University’s Dr. Helen Troia has an NIH grant to work on some innovative use for baskets in the treatment of heart disease or diabetes. Understanding the importance of grant compliance, she duly informs her publisher that she needs to place the final manuscript of her latest article in PubMedCentral to comply with the terms of her NIH grant.

Her publisher says “No, you may not do that.” There are several ways the publisher may express such a negative: an all-rights transfer, a policy of not accepting any kind of alteration (such as an author addendum or the NIH’s suggested language) to their standard publishing agreement, or plain old static from the editor.

Dr. Troia says, “But I have to, or I could lose further NIH funding!” Publisher shrugs and says, “Not my problem. Sign the agreement or we don’t publish. And no sneaky depositing your manuscript in PubMedCentral while I’m away, all right?”

What are Dr. Troia’s options at this point?

Let’s be clear on one thing: Dr. Troia has no power whatsoever to compel the publisher to accede to NIH’s requirements. None. The NIH public-access policy lays absolutely no onus on publishers to allow PubMedCentral deposit to happen; compliance requirements and penalties are entirely on the researcher and her institution.

Dr. Troia may be able to seek assistance from Achaea’s research office or library. Let us imagine that she does so. What can they do? They can read the copyright-transfer agreement, and offer their considered opinion that it is not in compliance with NIH policy. Great. Dr. Troia knew that already. They can call up the publisher on Dr. Troia’s behalf. They, like Dr. Troia, have neither carrot nor stick to wield; the publisher blows them off.

Now what?

Well, the logical thing is for Dr. Troia and her institution to turn to the NIH for help. Only the NIH isn’t offering any. Their advice, boiled down to words of one syllable, is “work it out.”

This is not good, folks. This is faculty backlash waiting to happen—and in all honesty, it’s not going to wait very long. This needs to be fixed.

Sure, in an ideal world, Dr. Troia would strike a noble pose, shake her fist at the evil recalcitrant publisher, and deliver a lengthy and passionate oration about openness being a scholarly value. In a slightly-less-ideal world, she would shrug and find another publisher, though let us remember that the signing of the publication/copyright-transfer agreement comes after editorial and peer review, so Dr. Troia has sunk a lot of time and effort at this point and quite reasonably doesn’t want it to be for naught.

Over here in the real world, Dr. Troia can’t afford to throw away a publication under any circumstances. She is going to be thoroughly hacked off at the NIH and her institution for not supporting her, and then she is going to throw up her hands, publish anyway, refuse to deposit, and tell her institution and the NIH (bowdlerized), “Work it out.” When the NIH policy comes up for re-authorization, or when FRPAA hits the legislative scene again, Dr. Troia will strike noble poses, deliver lengthy and passionate orations, and shake her fist—at Washington and open access.

Why is the publisher being evil and recalcitrant? Well, why on earth not? Neither Congress nor the NIH has told them not to. Individual researchers, librarians, research offices, and institutions can be stonewalled until doomsday. Publishers won’t be called to account for that, because nobody’s compiling a public list of evil recalcitrant publishers. Nobody’s even saying “being a recalcitrant publisher is evil,” much less “NIH researchers should not publish with recalcitrant publishers; here, use these folks instead.”

I understand the public relations behind the NIH’s decision to highlight nice publishers (the list of those who submit to PMC on behalf of authors), but I’m afraid that’s not enough. The public list of evil recalcitrant publishers needs to exist. I believe the NIH should compile and publish it, because they’re the other titan in this arena and their word counts for a lot, but if they can’t or won’t, those of us on the front lines should band together and do it ourselves. It’s not like we won’t be compiling private lists anyway—and a public list will eliminate a lot of redundant effort as well as serving notice to publishers that they can’t bully researchers with impunity.

SPARC, if the NIH were going to touch this they’d have done so already, so I think the ball’s in your court. Pick it up, please.

So, y’all remember that thought leader thing at NISO I blogged about?

So yeah, that’s gone and happened. What came out of it? We need a streamlined protocol for deposit, they say.

Hello, NISO brain trust? This exists. It’s called SWORD. Rubber-stamp it and move on, plzkthx—preferably to browbeating people into implementing it. Your friends down the street at PubMedCentral? They’d be a great place to start.

I’d like to say “I snark because I love,” and usually it’s true, but this time I don’t. I snark because I’m appalled. I’m just a repository-rat. I can keep up with this stuff. The people on that committee, some of them, it’s their job to keep up with this stuff, and they sure don’t seem to be doing it. And the whole idea of spending gobs of time and money and martinis on a standards effort that will be obsolete when it comes out… I think I like my idea for what the NISO brain trust should have been doing a lot better.

The eminent Cataloging and Classification Quarterly is doing Yet Another Themed Issue, this one on metadata and institutional repositories.

I’ve got strong opinions on this subject (imagine that!) and would love to air them, but this issue is on a super-tight schedule. With Roach Motel revisions due in April, a Manakin tutorial (possibly) due in June, and a number of work-specific commitments, there is no way on this earth I can knock out a manuscript by mid-July, not at the dilatory speed I write.

Might be able to do half of one, though, so—anybody up for a coauthoring gig?

Haworth is more-or-less green, by the way.

Cassandra’s second problem that she thought Ulysses might help solve was the sad state of so many Basketology faculty’s home pages. Out-of-date, incomplete bibliographies (or none at all) litter her landscape, often on static pages designed sometime in the late ’90s, with all the design sense that implies.

The less work Cassandra and individual faculty have to put into keeping those pages up, the better. Cassandra doesn’t have time, and faculty don’t have inclination—faculty agree that their public face is very important, but that doesn’t mean they’ll do anything about it!

It’s no coincidence that “file-less items” are the most common newbie request to the DSpace technical lists. It’s no coincidence that Les Carr has got tens of thousands of records but only a few thousand actual files. People are trying to solve this problem, for any number of reasons!

So what to do?

There’s a pretty good argument that this is not a repository function. A repository archives documents, QED. Fine, but that doesn’t get the repository off the hook; the repository should be providing data for these pages and reports at the very least. RSS feeds are nice for updating this sort of information, and a lot of repositories offer feeds already, so that’s a start.

But one more time, RSS is not enough. For Cassandra and the Basketology faculty, it’s too hard and it doesn’t do enough. Cassandra and Dr. Troia want an up-to-date list generated on-the-fly whenever somebody hits one of the faculty websites. And they want that list to live in their webspace, not Ulysses’s. Dr. Troia would be thrilled to pieces if she could also come by a neatly-formatted word-processed list for her annual activity report.

In Achaea’s ideal world, I think, the repository (or, for repository purists, a service overlaid on it) would track faculty publication activity, including materials not deposited in the repository. If this service were BibApp-y, it would be able to derive at least some of this information from RSS search feeds from appropriate electronic article databases. There would then be a Javascript include gizmo (not unlike Feed2JS) that would kick back a nicely-formatted HTML listing, based on a RESTful API that more ambitious programmers could do more ambitious things with.

The respectful repository or overlay service also offers COinS to play nice with Zotero. (I’m working on this for Manakin; haven’t gotten it quite together yet. I still hate OpenURL with an all-consuming passion.) I don’t know offhand what is needed for repositories to play nicely with (*spit*) RefWorks, but whatever it is, it’s worth doing. Both of these are steps on the way to Dr. Troia’s nicely-formatted annual activity report, although the adventurous Achaean programmer should learn to write out RTF and ODF—yes, unfortunately both.

Most of this isn’t hard. Why haven’t we done it yet?

Michael W. Carroll’s whitepaper on the NIH policy is a useful document for all repository-rats, not just those who have NIH grantees to worry about. Lovely tidbits in there on various aspects of copyright vis-a-vis scholarly communication. Recommended.

DSpace finally, finally, finally has an up-to-date list of vendors. I can’t speak to how good any of them are (though I’d trust some of the named individuals implicitly based on what I’ve seen of them on the DSpace lists), but just having the list is a vast improvement over the previous situation. Good job, DSpace Foundation!

I’ve mentioned before the excellence of scholarly-publishing executive Mike Rossner, and he’s gone and done it again. Right or wrong, it takes a special sort of courage to break ranks and call out your own kind in an extremely fraught conflict. Rossner’s letter is useful as an anti-FUD device.

For those of us hoping for motion on an initiative similar to Harvard’s, this month’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter is a must-read. Amid the straightforward history and lucid analysis are tantalizing tidbits about how it was done. “Enlist Peter Suber” sounds like good strategy to this rat!

When the first NIH public-access policy was watered down to meaninglessness, I pointed out that while the publishers could count that a victory, it was a rather Pyrrhic one, because it proved that relying on voluntary action by researchers does not achieve open access in any measurable degree.

The NIH victory turns out to have been Pyrrhic in another way, too. While the AAP and certain of its members spent gobs of money in Washington futilely trying to stop the NIH policy from sprouting teeth, Harvard quietly flanked them. I didn’t know the Harvard permissions policy was even on the table until a few days before it passed. Judging from the lack of concerted response from scholarly publishing, they didn’t see it coming either.

I would be afraid, very afraid, right now if I were a journal publisher who believed my profits depended on preventing widespread self-archiving or playing dog-in-the-manger with copyright. The Harvard policy puts publishers in an extraordinarily weak position. They can’t denounce it; that’s tantamount to denouncing faculty, which would be utterly suicidal. (Publishers can and do slag librarians. They can and do slag government. They can’t slag faculty, and they know it.) I don’t think they can sue; even if they could win in court (which I rather doubt, though standard not-a-lawyer disclaimers apply), the hideous publicity from suing Harvard would stick like tar. They can’t prevent eager librarians at Harvard from setting up and filling a repository. Even their standard lines of FUD won’t work—they can’t seriously spin this as “a vote against peer review,” because really, is Harvard going to do anything that damages peer review? Of course not! All the publishers can realistically do is plead poverty, and a look at their lobbying budgets and profit margins scotches that argument.

At Harvard itself, publishers are impotent. The sly cleverness of Harvard’s strategy has me in awe. Since we know that arguments based on increased impact and altruism make no headway with faculty, Harvard went straight for the jugular: faculty’s sense of ownership over their work. As the trajectory of the CIC Addendum proves, that argument works. Another viciously clever move was the per-article, in-writing petition requirement for opting out. Suddenly a publisher who wants its articles out of the Harvard IR has to contact each and every Harvard faculty member who publishes with them, for every single article published. Can you imagine the backlash from faculty? And what can a big-pig publisher actually say to convince faculty to put in the effort? Society publishers, with their privileged position in faculty hearts and minds, may indeed be able to convince a few authors… for a time, until the incessant dunning becomes an annoyance.

If Harvard is smart, it will automate as much article-gathering as possible. The less faculty have to do, the less they even notice that this policy is in place, the more it will be able to accomplish. I look forward to finding out what the Harvard provost’s office has up its sleeve.

Stopping other institutions from following in Harvard’s footsteps is a completely different game from stopping legislation in Washington. There are no words for the fiasco that attempting to bribe faculty would create, as faculty are not lobbyists or legislators; the opprobrium the AAP faced over PRISM would be a wet firecracker by comparison. Whereas Washington is a single big fat noisy target, faculty governance bodies are legion, and they tend to do their work quietly and in private. Publishers would have to find one or more individuals at every research institution powerful enough to block policies in faculty senates and gung-ho enough about publishers to do so. It’s just not possible, not without advance warning of which institutions have policies on the table, and Harvard’s under-the-radar action proves that’s a tall order.

Exacerbating the problem are consortia such as the CIC, and state university systems with a unified voice on these matters such as California. Not only need publishers keep their eye on individual institutions, they need to block policy and advocacy efforts coming from collections of institutions. I’m sorry, they just can’t, not with the worst will in the world.

No, I have a feeling the deafening silence coming from publishers right now is deliberate. Their only realistic hope is that the Harvard policy sinks like a stone in a vast sea of institutional indifference, and the best way for them to create that outcome is to keep their mouths shut so that the initial flurry of coverage and interest fades quicker.

The ball is in our court now, we open-access advocates. We can’t let Harvard’s fusillade go quiet. Come on, Cornell. Come on, California. Come on, MIT and Yale and (dare I say it?) Wisconsin. Let’s do this thing.

A friend of mine, wholly unconnected with academia or libraries or scholarly publishing, IMed me last night about Harvard’s bold faculty-governance move. “This will make waves, won’t it?” he asked.

I hope so. I surely do hope so. This could change the Great Game in repository managers’ favor. I am in complete agreement with T. Scott Plutchak that this could turn out bigger than the NIH public-access policy. Peter Suber has good commentary as usual. I want to reproduce the text, because I know I have readers who don’t read Peter. (I have no idea why this is and it makes no sense to me, but there you are.)

On behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing, Professor S. Shieber will move:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

(As I was working on the above, Johnette Napolitano’s “You’re Amazing” came over the radio. I can dig it. Harvard is pretty amazing!)

I do see one small linguistic loophole, which perhaps Harvard could amend. The policy does not specify by whom “articles… sold for a profit” and therefore exempt from the policy need be sold. As I read that, theoretically a faculty member could claim exemption on behalf of the publisher selling the articles! I doubt that will happen, but the policy really ought to read “sold for a profit by the Faculty member.” (My misreading. The point here is that Harvard can’t turn around and sell the articles, which is perfectly fair and reasonable.)

Let me pretend for a moment that Achaea U followed Harvard’s example, so that I can work through some of the implications using Ulysses Acqua and the Basketology department.

Ulysses is dancing in his cubicle! He no longer need fret about approaching Dr. Troia or anyone else in Basketology for licensing. He can now canvass Basketology’s website for CVs, or ask for the results of yearly Basketology activity reviews, and just fetch-and-deposit from this day forward. No muss, no fuss, no hassle from Dr. Troia or anyone else. He need not try to teach Menelaus Fox to approach faculty about open access, nor play futile marketing games with his nonexistent budget. He need not pester unresponsive developers to fix the licensing process in his IR software; all he has to do is make the default license refer to the Harvard policy.

He may not be entirely out of the licensing woods. One use for Achaea’s IR is the archival of papers from small conferences held on campus. These conferences involve faculty from outside Achaea U, of course. Still, a simple Memorandum of Understanding with the conference organizers should suffice; that puts the onus on the conference to confer with its presenters.

All is not gravy for Ulysses; he’s a bit like Tom Thumb in the cow’s stomach. Achaea U produces vastly more output than Ulysses can possibly collect manually. Even should he enlist Menelaus and his colleagues to help, they will all drown in the flood of articles if the deposit process is not semi-automated. Fortunately, Achaea’s announcement has enough high-level weight behind it that Ulysses can point out this problem and land some IT time to deal with it. There are ways… the BibApp, RSS search feeds from various article aggregators, a SWORD-based deposit process, a front-end discovery-and-download environment based on RefWorks or Zotero for out-of-the-way disciplines like Basketology.

On the whole, though, Ulysses can only be thrilled at this turn of events. His relationship with Achaea faculty has been transformed; he had been little more than a nag and a pest, but now he is providing a service in clear alignment with expressed faculty wishes. He has new stature inside his library—everybody knows what he does and why he does it now, and library administrators are getting him student help to deal with the flood. He can even help Cassandra by bringing her situation to the IT folks working on his deposit processes; they readily agree to write him some output filters and Javascript includes, since they’re working on the repository anyway.

Ulysses is also aware that the balance of power between him, faculty, and publishers has undergone a subtle but significant shift. Previous to Achaea’s declaration, it was Ulysses who had to interrupt Dr. Troia’s day to ask her to license her work to the repository and perform keystroke labor. Dr. Troia is perfectly pleasant, but she isn’t fond of interruptions, much less extra work. Publishers, on the other hand, were a normal part of Dr. Troia’s work life. They didn’t have to bother her to acquire her work; she went to them.

Achaea’s blanket license changes the game. Ulysses can do his work without once bothering Dr. Troia. A publisher who objects to Achaea’s policy, however, has to interrupt Dr. Troia’s day to ask her to exempt her article from deposit, which involves extra work for Dr. Troia. (The extra work tidbit was very clever of Harvard. Well done!) Dr. Troia will not be pleased—and as I have noted before, publishers have consistently shied away from displeasing faculty.

I am suddenly bullish on IRs, for the first time in quite some time. Mind you, I will turn bearish again if Harvard turns out to stand alone, as is quite possible—I don’t see a mad rush to copy MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. However, the policy spadework done by SPARC and John Ober’s crew and others has specifically been in a research rather than teaching context, so perhaps Harvard’s example will prove easier to follow than MIT’s. If I were influential in the CIC (which I am emphatically not), I’d be pushing for this as a followup to the author-addendum work.

Interesting times. Interesting times. IRs are back in the game! Thanks to Harvard for making waves.