Open Access News

Richard Poynder, The world’s first Open Access Mandate?  Open and Shut?  June 12, 2009.  Excerpt:

In the process of writing something about the current state of Open Access (OA) mandates I became intrigued by the mandate introduced at Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN.

Officially, CERN introduced a self-archiving mandate in November 2003. Amongst other things, this requires CERN researchers to “deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository”.

This suggests that CERN’s mandate came some ten months after the world’s first mandate – introduced in the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the UK’s University of Southampton in January 2003.

When I began enquiring about the genesis of the CERN mandate, however, the picture began to seem less clear. I found it hard, for instance, to establish why CERN had introduced its mandate, and who had been responsible for pushing it through.

Amongst those I contacted for enlightenment was scholarly publishing consultant Alma Swan, who said her understanding was that there had always been a mandate at CERN. Originally this was an analogue mandate, with researchers expected to provide the library at CERN with print copies of all the papers they published, but that this was subsequently upgraded to a digital mandate (in November 2003).

Alma kindly emailed the head of the Scientific Information Service at CERN Jens Vigen for clarification. Vigen also found the question intriguing and began digging around in CERN's archives; and today he emailed me a copy of the original memo from CERN's Director General – officially known as CERN/DG/Memo/5, and dated 17th March 1955.

Vigen commented, “Times have obviously changed since then and I must admit I was smiling quite a lot while reading it. However, the mandate for deposit was, as you see, in place from the very first days of the organisation's life.”

Images of the two-page memo are attached below, and can be accessed as a PDF file here.

This still leaves me with a number of questions however:

1. Is it fair to call the CERN memo an OA mandate given, for instance, that the term OA was only coined in 2001, at the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)?

2. Similarly what do we make of the fact that the policy was combined with one on press statements? Could it be that this was not intended to refer to scholarly papers?

3. If it can be classified as an OA mandate, is it truly the world's first, or is there another dusty memo out there somewhere predating 17th March 1955?

4. If it is an OA mandate, why was it introduced at CERN at such an early date?

5. What was the process by which CERN’s analogue mandate was upgraded to a digital mandate. Specifically, who was responsible, and why was it upgraded?

All comments and further information gratefully received.

Comments.  Many thanks to Richard and Jens for digging this up.  I'm very much interested in the prehistory of OA myself, especially Richard's question #3.  Here are a couple of other early episodes from my files.

1. Here's an early (1944) example of what could be called a proposed OA deposit mandate.  It's from my 2004 article, Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access, footnote 26 in the OA draft, and footnote 27 in the slightly revised version published in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (eds.), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, MIT Press, 2006, pp. 201-202.  J.A.K. Thomson, a classicist at King’s College London, wrote the following in a letter to Gilbert Murray, a fellow classicist at Oxford, March 26, 1944 (p. 4). The original is in the MS. Gilbert Murray Box 174, Fols. 165-67, at Bodleian Library, Oxford.  I thank Barbara McManus, classicist emerita at the College of New Rochelle, for bringing it to my attention. 

   ...I am concerned at the amount of good work in scholarship which has no chance of being published --unless of course the Government should subsidise it. I am pessimistic about the immediate, though not the ultimate, prospect for the Classics. I think compulsory Latin will be abolished and when that happens the Classical Departments in other places than Oxford and Cambridge will dwindle to nothing. Even now it does not pay a publisher to put out a Latin, let alone a Greek, book, however excellent, and the University Presses cannot carry the burden unsupported. But would it be possible for the B.M. [British Museum] or Oxford or Cambridge to invite really good scholars to deposit with them a typed or manuscript copy of some magnum opus on which they had spent long time and labour? It would then become available to other scholars, even if it could not be published....

2. Here's an early (1974) example of the OA debate, focusing on the circulation of photocopies.  It's from my 2004 article, A glimpse of our history.  The article pulled together several contributions to the debate and added a few comments.  The bit I'm quoting here is from John Walsh, "Journals:  Photocopying Is Not the Only Problem," Science, March 29, 1974, pp. 1274-1275.  (Thanks to Christopher Kelty, Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, for bringing it to my attention.) 

   ...Attention has been focused on the photocopying issue by a suit brought by the Baltimore publisher of scientific and medical journals, Williams & Wilkins, charging the National Library of Medicine and the library of the National Institutes of Health with copyright infringement via photocopying.  The most recent round of court action favored the defendants, permitting them to continue photocopying....Reduced to its essentials, the dispute over photocopying casts scientific publishers and research libraries as the major antagonists.  The libraries want the right to continue to provide a single photocopy for a reader who requests it.  The limit on material is generally accepted to be a single article from a journal.  The publishers argue that the mass, mail-order photocopying by major research libraries deprives the journals of the revenue necessary to cover editorial and printing costs and, in the case of commercial publishers, return on investment.  They contend that if things go on this way there will be no journals to copy....Libraries, for their part, are experiencing severe strains on their general budgets from inflation and are beginning to rebel at soaring journal costs....

Update (6/29/09).  Here's another early (1965) example.  On July 28, 1965, the US Office of Education published the following policy statement in the Federal Register:

Material produced as a result of any research activity undertaken with any financial assistance through contract with or project grant from the Office of Education will be placed in the public domain. Materials so released will be available to conventional outlets of the private sector for their use. 

Thanks to Jonathan Miller for digging this up.  For more detail, see his article, “Publishers did not take the bait”: A Forgotten Precursor to the NIH Public Access Policy, a preprint forthcoming in the Spring 2009 issue of College & Research Libraries.

The US Office of Education was the predecessor to the current US Department of Education.  The USOE approach --putting publicly-funded research into the public domain-- was tried again in June 2003 by Martin Sabo in the Public Access to Science Act.  For more detail, and a critique of this approach, see my July 2003 article on the Sabo bill.