[Open-access] HEFCE OA policy and the issue around date of acceptance

[Stevan Harnad]

(1) Acceptance date is a known, natural, explicit, precise, date-stamped
point in the work-flow of every author for every published paper; it is
also the natural point at which to deposit.

(2) Publication date is not known in advance to the author, and often has
little to do with the actual date of publication, which can diverge by as
much as 12 or more months from the official calendar date of the issue of
the journal (with the actual date of appearance almost always later than
the published calendar date). At a time when we are already struggling with
publishers' OA embargoes of 6-12 months or more, it would be a terribly bad
idea to peg compliance with the HEFCE/REF policy on the official
publication date.

(3) Moreover, the HEFCE/REF policy concerns date of *deposit*, not date of
OA, and this is the policy's most important feature, and the key to its
power to generate compliance as well as to monitor compliance.

(4) It is true that acceptance date cannot be known in advance (and the
university has no way of knowing it), but if the HEFCE policy is to deposit
immediately upon acceptance, the author knows when that date comes, and the
institution can (and should) require date-stamping to confirm that the
deposit is immediately upon acceptance (with a maximum grace period of 3
months).

(5) Once the publication appears officially, that triggers a retrospective
check by the software, *to confirm that it had been deposited upon
acceptance*, otherwise it is not eligible for REF 2020.

(6) The repository software tracks date of deposit; the institution can add
a metadata field for date of acceptance, and can even require that the
acceptance letter be deposited (in closed access) to verify the timing. (In
practice, apart from the first year or two of the policy, once researchers
have adopted the habit of immediate-deposit, the mature policies report
that everything goes smoothly with only the occasion spot-checking needed).

(7) *It would be the worst possible policy, to rely upon publishers in any
way in any of this*, especially in helping to ensure immediate deposit.
There is an immense conflict of interest, and the purpose of all of this is
to ensure that deposit is freed from the grip of publishers with their
embargoes and access denials. *Please do not turn to them in setting up the
compliance monitoring mechanism*.

Stevan Harnad

*Dr Torsten Reimer, Imperial College*:
> A potential issue with the HEFCE REF/OA policy's focus of "acceptance" as
> opposed to "publication" is that institutions have no way of knowing
> whether an academic is about to publish a paper unless they tell us. Had it
> been date of publication (+3 months) there would at least have been a
> chance that our CRIS could have picked up there is a new publication so
> that we could have checked whether it has been made open access in the way
> the policy outlines - or alternatively work with the author to make that
> happen.
> Now, it will be in the interest of the author to meet the requirements of
> the policy and we can certainly put effort into communicating the policy,
> but even assuming everyone is aware of it an plays along there is still the
> issue that at the point of publication we only have incomplete metadata. So
> the academic has to somehow share the accepted version of the paper with
> us, including what metadata they have. Once we know the publication date we
> then have to update that record and set the correct embargo period (where
> there is one) from the date of publication. Now, the latter step can be
> automated, the first one can't.
> ...unless: Wouldn't it be great if the publishers would, on the date of
> acceptance, alert us to the fact that there is an article, send us the
> metadata and ideally also the peer-reviewed manuscript - preferably in a
> way that can then go directly into the repository. That would ensure that
> no article is forgotten; it would not burden the author with extra effort;
> it would ensure we comply with the policy; and finally, the publisher and
> the university could be confident that the correct version ends up in the
> repository, so we can forget about takedown notices etc.
> Especially with more widespread use of ORCID I cannot see a reason why in
> principle this would not work. What are your thoughts?
> (While I am thinking naïve thoughts: Wouldn't it be great if articles
> would be submitted through a kind of shared system that did all of this
> work in the background, even the reporting and compliance? Automate the
> process for everyone? This may be unrealistic, but if I were still at Jisc
> this is what I would at least consider.)
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