Open access, publisher embargoes, and the voluntary nature of scholarship

"This has been a banner year for open access, and the momentum shows no sign of letting up. College and university faculties, and the granting agencies that fund a significant amount of their research, are increasingly embracing open access to ensure research findings across disciplines are freely accessible to the public and the global research community. On the college and university level, several institutional open access policies have been passed this year by faculties at schools such as Amherst College, The College of Wooster, University of Rhode Island, and Oregon State University, as well as the entire University of California system.1 On the federal level, the White House Office of Science and Technology Planning (OSTP) issued a memorandum in February directing all agencies with research and development budgets over $100 million to develop plans for requiring public access to articles and data generated by the research they fund. This directive impacts most of the major granting agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and the Department of Agriculture. Earlier this year, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act was introduced in Congress, which would make provisions similar to the OSTP directive a part of federal law. State legislatures in California and New York also considered bills that would require public access to state-funded research. In August, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill that requires each of the state’s public universities to create an open access task force with the goal of making its research available to the public online and free of charge. Academic libraries are key contributors to the success of the open access movement. Their influence is manifested in a variety of ways, including advocating for institutional and funder open access policies, consulting with faculty on open access publishing and copyright issues, and managing institutional repositories that provide public access to faculty and student research. Institutional repositories are a primary vehicle through which 'green' open access occurs by virtue of scholars depositing the accepted manuscript versions of their published articles. This method contrasts with 'gold' open access in which a journal, or selected articles within a journal in the so-called hybrid model, is freely accessible on the Web, but authors are often charged publication fees instead of the publisher selling subscriptions. These article processing charges are typically found in for-profit journals but are not as common in journals published by nonprofit entities. Within the context of green open access, there are some troubling trends in the current dynamic among institutional repositories, institutional open access policies, and reactive publisher practices that seek to blunt their impact. Many of the open access policies passed by faculty members at colleges and universities follow the Harvard model that grants the school a nonexclusive license to faculty articles upon their creation. This license is used in conjunction with an institutional repository to make these works freely accessible online. The version of the article deposited is typically not the final published copy but rather the accepted manuscript, a post-refereed, pre-typeset copy in PDF. This model also provides automatic waivers on request to faculty who do not want a given article to be open access ... Events in recent months indicate a shift toward embargoes that are longer and more constraining. This change appears to be in reaction to more widespread institutional repository implementation and open access policy adoption. It illustrates how academic institutions and some publishers are increasingly at cross-purposes when it comes to green open access.  Two changes in publisher policies this year demonstrate different but related strategies employed to limit the impact of green open access. One strategy is based on a bias against deposit in institutional repositories versus authors’ personal Web sites. The other is based on an attempt to distinguish between voluntary manuscript deposit by authors and those that are 'mandated' by institutional or funder policies.  The first strategy is employed by Springer (Springer Science+Business Media), which recently altered the deposit policy for articles in its subscription-based journals. Springer previously required a 12-month embargo for accepted manuscripts placed in funder-supported repositories, such as PubMed Central, if the funder required deposit, but there was no embargo for article manuscripts in institutional repositories. Now Springer has applied the 12-month embargo to deposit in any repository, including institutional ones. Under both the current and previous versions of this policy, authors can make their accepted manuscripts freely available on their own Web sites without embargo ... A similar strategy can be seen in Emerald’s recent embargo policy change. In this case the target is institutional and f