July 15, 2008

Psychological Association Will Charge Authors for Open-Access Archiving

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

Researchers who have grants from the National Institutes of Health must deposit their published articles in the institutes’ online archive, PubMed Central. Last week the journal Nature and many of its offshoots announced that they would deposit their authors’ articles for them. Free.

Now the psychological association says that its authors “should NOT deposit” their own manuscripts, and instead should allow the group to do so. “The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university,” the policy says.

Because the NIH does not charge a fee, that money is apparently going to the psychological association.

Open-access advocates like Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, expressed outrage. “It’s as bad as it looks,” he told The Chronicle. “This is not a good use of anybody’s money.” Depositing an article in PubMed Central, he said, is a “clerical job that can be done by a machine.”

The psychological association did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle. —Lila Guterman

Comments

1. I think the Psychological Association needs their head examined. This is a regressive move.

   — Curt Madkson    Jul 15, 04:00 PM    #

2. Ms Guterman appears to be incorrect in stating that APA will “require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories”. Not all APA authors. Just the ones with mandatory repository requirements. That’s an important distinction that needs to be clarified.

   — TDR    Jul 15, 04:12 PM    #

3. To make things worse, APA is listed as a non-profit organization. Yeah, right. That’s why I dropped out of this money-making machine decades ago.

   — DBM    Jul 15, 04:14 PM    #

4. Isn’t it part of the mission of the American Psychological Association to have the scholarly products of its members and other researchers in the field accessible so that their important research will receive attention and access and be made available to other researchers? Doesn’t the $2500 assessment serve as an obstacle to this mission? And what if the institution doesn’t pay the $2500 invoice? Does that mean the article/research will not be published? And goodby to publishing the research of professionals in developing countries! Surely such a decision was not made by an editorial board. It must have been made by APA staff who are worried about their high salaries, their handsome building in Washington D.C., their first class travel to meetings which likely are not so very necessary for staff to attend, and paid lobbyiests who then advocate against open access as well as against the best professional interests of the membership. It is very sad when a professional organization does not act in the best interests of the member scholars and professionals in the field and works against the commitment of those dedicated members to the organization’s professed mission.

   — S    Jul 15, 04:24 PM    #

5. Someone’s a control freak, huh? Maybe the Pres of APA should get a little counseling for that. I think the going rate is $2,500 per session, but just for her.

   — Jon    Jul 15, 04:50 PM    #

6. ugh, this is so irritating. What if you don’t have that much money lying around in your grant and/or you work at a College?!

   — Kat    Jul 15, 05:01 PM    #

7. The Association should be paying the AUTHORS $2500 for the privilege of having their information in its database. I predict a VERY short lifetime for this policy.

   — Al    Jul 15, 05:42 PM    #

8. Simple solution for many of us – publish in Psychonomic Society journals and other outlets. If APA thinks that their journals are the only game in town, they are sorely mistaken. And in an era of tight funding with new researchers scrambling for money – and considering packing it in because of lack of grant funding – APA exacerbates the situation. Clueless…absolutely clueless.

   — Prof.Pete    Jul 15, 07:35 PM    #

9. An examination of APA’s webpage cited in the article above makes it clear that this is in response to an NIH requirement. Only articles funded by NIH are subject to this. I suppose we can just inflate NIH grant proposals to cover the consts.

   — Monte    Jul 15, 09:50 PM    #

10. This will certainly make me think twice before submitting a manuscript to an APA journal. It also confirms for me that I made the right decision dropping my APA membership last year.

    — PsiGuy    Jul 15, 11:08 PM    #

11. It’s hard to imagine that this isn’t somehow related to the fact that APA licenses it’s own article database (psycInfo) to universities and individuals. Do they somehow think this might offset their loss of revenues for people having another access to the articles? I have also let my membership expire.

    — curt    Jul 16, 04:33 AM    #

12. My favorite part of the policy is that the $2,500, “will be billed to the author’s university.” To whom will the bill go, the President, the Provost, the department chair? And why would whoever gets the bill even briefly consider paying it? It won’t happen. This policy will be luck to survive the week.

    — David    Jul 16, 07:15 AM    #

13. What was it that former APA president George Miller said some years ago, about “giving psychology away?” so that all people might benefit from what the field has learned. This policy doesn’t seem to be in that spirit!

    — M C Smith    Jul 16, 09:31 AM    #

14. IN DEFENSE OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION’S GREEN OA POLICY

    Stevan Harnad
    American Scientist Open Access Forum

    This is a misunderstanding. APA is not proposing to charge authors for Open-Access Archiving. APA is proposing to charge authors for archiving in a 3rd-party archive, PubMed Central. Since 2002 APA has had a Green OA policy of endorsing the self-archiving of the author’s final, refereed draft, in the author’s Institutional Repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication (see below). Today the publisher of APA, Gary Vandenbos assured me that that policy stands, and there are no plans whatsoever to change it.

    As noted, it is not APA but Nature, which offers to do proxy archiving on the authors behalf, but only with a 6-month access embargo, that is not on the side of the angels insofar as OA is concerned. APA had no access embargo on authors self-archiving in their own institutional repositories, and an OA item is OA no matter where on the Web it is deposited.

    The mistake lies with NIH. Its OA self-archiving mandate is important, welcome, and well-meaning, but it has not been sufficiently thought through. The specified locus of deposit should be the author’s own institutional repository, from which PubMed Central can then harvest the metadata, linking to the full-text.

    For NIH to insist instead on direct deposit in PubMed Central is not only to fail to join in a coherent, systematic policy of providing OA to all research output worldwide — all of it originating from institutions, which are hence the natural locus for hosting their own OA output — but it also invites publishers to treat this 3rd-party archiving as a rival publisher or free-rider, hence the recourse to demanding permission or payment.

    This would all be unnecessary if NIH simply mandated institutional deposit, and harvested the metadata to PubMed Central.

    From my blog:

    Although it looks bad on the face of it — the American Psychological Association charging the author’s institution and/or research grant $2500, not even for Gold OA publishing, but just for depositing the author’s refereed final draft in PubMed Central on the author’s behalf (proxy self-archiving), in order to fulfill the NIH mandate — things are not always as they seem.

    There is no culprit in this nonsense, but if I had to pinpoint its provenance, it would be the foolish form in which the NIH — despite relentlessly repeated advice and reasons to the contrary — insisted on drafting its policy:

    To cut to the quick, there is no earthly reason NIH should insist on direct deposit in PMC. The mandate should be (and should all along have been) to deposit in the author’s own Institutional Repository. PMC can then harvest the metadata and link to the IR-deposited full-text itself from there.

    Unlike the American Chemical Society journals, the American Psychological Association journals (and the majority of other journals) — for reasons they would have found it very hard to justify flouting — have long given their green light to immediate deposit (no delay, no embargo, and of course no fee) in the author’s own IR:

    APA Policy on Posting Articles on the Internet

    Update effective June 1, 2002

    Authors of articles published in APA journals may post a copy of the final manuscript, as a word processing, PDF, or other type file, on their Web site or their employer’s server after it is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail:

    — The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page.

    — Further, the posted article must include the following statement: “This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.”

    — APA does not permit archiving with any other non-APA repositories.

    — APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA published version.

    To repeat, a publisher that is Green on immediate OA self-archiving in the author’s own IR is squarely on the side of the angels. (If that publisher seeks to profit from NIH’s gratuitous insistence on institution-external deposit, by treating PMC as a 3rd-party free-loader or rival publisher, hence legally requiring permission or payment to re-publish, I would say that NIH drew that upon itself. As noted many times, that technicality does not work with an author’s own institution.)

    And it is remediable: Simply revise the NIH mandate to require institutional IR deposit of the accepted final draft, immediately upon acceptance (with a cap on the permissible embargo length, if any). That is the sensible policy — and nature will take care of the rest, with universal OA just around the corner.

    Links:

    A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy (Oct 2004)
    Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? (Sept 2006)
    THE FEEDER AND THE DRIVER: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)
    Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally (Jan 2008)
    How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates (Mar 2008)
    NIH Invites Recommendations on How to Implement and Monitor Compliance with Its OA Self-Archiving Mandate (Apr 2008)
    Institutional Repositories vs Subject/Central Repositories (Jun 2008)

    — Stevan Harnad    Jul 16, 10:02 AM    #

15. Please note that when you now visit the policy’s page (http://www.apa.org/journals/authors/pubmed-deposit.html), you receive the message, “This page is currently under review.” Apparently some rethinking has begun.

    — Karla Hahn    Jul 16, 11:08 AM    #

16. I understand Mr. Harnad’s points, but what about the research in institutions that have not yet set up institutional archives? This isn’t just small institutions, but many research I universities do not have an IR. To just link to an IR would not get all of the NIH funding into PubMed Central, which goes against the point in the first place. APA is just being difficult by expecting institutions with already strained budgets to pay.

    — E White    Jul 16, 11:17 AM    #

17. Don’t you just love the way Stevan Harnad gives the dickens to NIH because NIH didn’t do something just the way APA wanted it? Welcome to the real world, Mr. Harnad! Of course, criticizing the federal government is not unusual but really, to penalize an entire scholarly discipline because of the way the federal government implemented a much admired policy is a bit much. The American Psychological Association is a not-for-profit organization which uses its publications as a cash cow to pay for all of its activities and staff. APA is actually acting just like a commercial for-profit publisher which gouges libraries.

    — S    Jul 16, 11:35 AM    #

18. As a psychology librarian, I bridle at this comparison of APA to for-profit publishers. Most of APA’s journals aren’t anywhere near the cost of those commercial journals, so be fair. And, while APA may be very conservative in some of it’s publishing practices, it’s running scared like a lot of professional organizations that rely on publishing revenues to function and don’t know how the organization will operate without that income. It’s a big change for them and many other organizations like them. APA happens to be one of the big boys among professional organizations, but, even so, they are no where near the true bad boys, those commercial culprits.

    — Dee    Jul 16, 12:20 PM    #

19. The APA is run by cash flow hounds. No one will read my comment, though, as Mr. Harnad’s contribution is so long, most will navigate away from the page before they spend 30 minutes scrolling through his version of “War and Peace”. Thanks dude. For nothing.

    — Teddi    Jul 16, 12:26 PM    #

20. To use Mr. Harnad’s own phrasing in criticizing the NIH’s policy: To cut to the quick, there is no earthly reason the APA should charge $2500 for deposit, regardless of where that deposit goes. I too would prefer that the NIH mandated deposit to an institution’s own repository, but that’s not what they did. And as others have pointed out, not all institutions have, or will have any time soon, such services. So criticizing the NIH’s policy (which has a clear public good in mind) and implicitly exonerating the APA’s (which benefits nobody but the APA) seems a classic case of Mr. Harnad allowing the perfect to get in the way of the good. I’m glad the APA has already begun to reconsider.

    — Jim Ottaviani    Jul 16, 12:29 PM    #

21. A new policy is in the works. In an e-mail from Alan Kazdin, APA president,

    “A new document deposit policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) requiring a publication fee to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time. This policy had recently been announced on APA’s Web site. APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.

    APA will continue to deposit NIH-funded manuscripts on behalf of authors in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

    Gary R. VandenBos, PhD
    APA Publisher”

    — David    Jul 16, 01:26 PM    #

22. There are two serious problems with Mr. Harnad’s verbose commentary. First, the NIH Public Access Policy is a Congressional mandate directed at grantees who publish the results of their research. The author must assure that a copy of the final, peer-reviewed article is deposited. The policy does not specify who should convey it to PubMed Central, only that it is the obligation of the grantee to assure that it is done. Second, many research institutions, including academic health sciences institutions like my own, do not have an Institutional Repository. Even if they do, they differ in their accessibility, database structures, document storage formats, quality of metadata, etc. It is easy to say that NIH should just “harvest” the metadata and link to the full text that is residing in institutional repositories around the country. In practice, it would be a nightmare to try to implement, at a substantially greater cost than using the existing OA database that exists in PubMed Central, and would offer an incomplete solution. Mr. Harnad has been an important voice in the OA movement, but his alternative to the NIH implementation is not feasible and does not conform to the Congressional mandate.

    — David N. King, PhD    Jul 17, 09:19 AM    #

23. Mr. Hamad, if one has NIH funding, one must comply with the madate. Of course, those with NIH funding are free to publish in non-APA journals. Like those journals that submit to PubMed for free.
    In case you missed this point, Mr. Hamad, PubMed Central is the a service of the National Library of Medicine.

    — Beverly Barton    Jul 17, 12:43 PM    #

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