A new term - ID/OA, where OA does not stand for open access but provides a path towards it - has begun to appear more frequently in
list mails and
comments to blogs. This might be an opportune moment to restate what it stands for and why it is necessary.
Immediate Deposit/
Optional Access is a response to the
emerging funder mandates on open access. These mandates typically respect publishers' embargoes of six months or so before authors are required to provide open access to
their own versions of published papers in an IR. Unfortunate, but true, and apparently a balance that funders believed they had to strike with publishers.
According to the chief protagonist for ID/OA, Stevan Harnad: " Most journals now endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their authors. But for the minority of journals that do not, the deposit should be mandated to be immediate anyway, and any allowable delay or embargo should apply only to the access-setting (i.e., whether access to the deposited article is immediately set to Open Access or provisionally set to Closed Access, in which only the author can access the deposited text)."
The best time for an author to deposit content in an institutional repository is immediately after it is accepted for publication. When it's passed on to the publisher for completion of the publication process, the authors may move on to unrelated work. If authors have to wait until some months after publication before they can deposit the paper in an IR and provide open access, there is a greater chance of papers being forgotten, or 'lost' to the IR process, despite the mandate.
ID/OA counters this tendency, and research funders and institutions are urged to include the provison in their
policy mandates. ID/OA authorises immediate deposit in the IR of bibliographic data
and the full-text of the author version of a paper upon acceptance for publication. If an embargo applies before open access is allowed the depositor can set the embargo to expire automatically, after which the full paper becomes acessible to all from the IR.
In the meantime, a viewable record of the paper exists in the repository and displays the
"Request eprint" button, which allows readers to request the full text directly from the author (allowed under the embargo even if open access is not).
In this way you have a hook to get authors to provide the data at the point in the cycle when it is most important to them, and you get immediate access if not open access. According to Harnad: "The case for immediate access is exactly the same as the case for Open Access itself."
For a more complete description of how ID/OA fits into the general scheme of open access, see Stevan Harnad's
original blog.
