The Australian situation is interspersed - nothing to do with REF and HEFCE, but our equivalent research evaluation process. I provide this for comparison.
Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Saturday, 16 March 2013 1:15 PM To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Graham Triggs <grahamtri...@gmail.com> wrote: On 14 March 2013 22:14, Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote: Why is it an absurd requirement to deposit immediately in the author's IR, regardless of whether the journal is subscription or OA and of whether the deposit is embargoed or immediate OA? That simple, natural, uniform local deposit procedure is precisely what makes it easy for an institution to monitor compliance. [Arthur] But of course it is totally irrelevant. Compliance has no link with deposit in the case of already OA articles, and indeed is not even easy to determine. Any senior manager (I was one) would want much better compliance certification than a deposit! Some IRs have so low visibility on the Internet as to be below the radar. I don't want to publicise them, because they are incompetent. imho, there are some significant unanswered questions regarding the HEFCE/REF proposals, which ultimately boil down to a couple of points. The main one actually being covered by what you've said above. Sure, an institution can monitor compliance. In fact, as they run the repository, they are the only ones that can effectively monitor compliance. So how exactly are the requirements going to be audited and enforced? There is no requirement to make the metadata public. There is no requirement to have the metadata harvested (whether public or not). There isn't even a requirement to have a "request a copy" feature (without which, the usefulness of immediate deposit is rather lost). And nor can there be in any useful time period for the first post-2014 REF. These things will take time to build and/or implement. So there isn't any effective way to audit that deposits were made, much beyond actually being fully open access when the embargo ends at best, and possibly even only at the time of the return at worst. I think you are mistaken -- and that you are vastly under-estimating the reach of this simple REF/HEFCE policy: (1) It is institutions that have always shown intense eagerness and initiative in ensuring that their researchers comply with all RAE and REF conditions. [Arthur] Australian institutions have shown zero eagerness, but respond to compulsion. Otherwise they would not get grants. Strong incentive. Low initiative. (2) The proposed REF mandate makes it very explicit that REF submissions are ineligible if they are not deposited immediately upon publication. (No waiting till near the end of the 6-year REF cycle to deposit.) [Arthur] Australian universities have sent annual publication data to the Australian Government for well over 20 years. Not full-texts sure, but the reporting cycle is entrenched in HERDC. Compulsory. (3) Compliance is based on two objective, verifiable data-points: publication date and IR deposit date. [Arthur] No comment. A REF issue. Not relevant to Australia. In our case, publication in a freely chosen OA outlet = OA. An IR deposit date is not needed and indeed completely irrelevant. I have pointed out that IR deposit is equivalent to "double work" in such cases. (4) Institutions, in monitoring and ensuring compliance will simply require -- at least annually -- a list of articles published, together with publication date and deposit date. [Arthur] As I said we've done this for 20+ years, without the deposit. The returns are provided to Canberra each March or thereabouts. (5) If the publication date and the deposit date are not the same, the article is ineligible for REF. [Arthur] An arcane REF rubric. Clumsy and simplistic, like smoke from the Sistine Chapel. An author publishing in an OA journal (if ignored) might be able to sue REF/HEFCE as their article was OA immediately on publication, or otherwise if they deposited before publication or a day or two after. The author could even be temporarily on the other side of the world, and living in a different day! (It happens to me every day as I am currently 11h ahead of GMT.) (6) With deposit, the metadata are immediately accessible web wide (though the full-text might be embargoed for the allowable interval). [Arthur] Even without deposit, this could be true. Though I concede, unlikely to be actioned very often. However I routinely put drafts on OA even before publication, updating them later.
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