Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

Publishing embargoes seem a relatively new phenomenon, probably starting
in areas of science when the data produced for a scientific article was
considered more valuable than the narrative of that article. However,
the concept of the embargo seems to be spreading to cover other aspects
of publishing, and I came across one recently which appears to take such
embargoes into new and uncharted territory.

One example (there are many others) of embargoes continuing to operate
in the era of open science and open data relates to crystallographically
derived coordinates for macromolecules. Biomolecular structures are
allowed to be embargoed for a maximum of one year before becoming openly
available or
\"[released](http://deposit.rcsb.org/depoinfo/PDB_deposition_release_policies.html){target="_blank"}\"
(considered a friendlier term than embargo). A more recent phenomenon is
of embargoes on press releases which may be prepared by authors and or
publishers to accompany the appearance of any article considered
especially newsworthy. The publisher will then request that the press
release is only released to coincide with the actual publication time
and date of the article itself. Both of these types of embargo are more
or less accepted by both parties. But in the last five years or so, new
types of embargo have been introduced and it is these I want to discuss
here.

1.  The self-archive or \"green open access\" version of an article, in
    the form of the last author version of an accepted manuscript prior
    to copy-editing and other operations by a publisher. Such Green OA
    versions are now a mandatory requirement from funders (in the UK),
    arising from the need to conduct a \"REF\" or research excellence
    framework assessment of all (UK) universities every seven years or
    so. In order to allow assessors and funding councils unencumbered
    access to these research outputs, the authors must self-archive
    their publications in a suitable institutional repository. In
    general therefore, there should always exist two versions of any
    scientific paper authored within these guidelines, the AV (author
    version) and VoR (Version of Record, held by the publisher, and
    carrying the guarantee of peer review). Publishers now embargo
    author versions until the VoR version has been published, and
    sometimes even up to 18 months beyond this period.
2.  The \"supporting information\" or SI embargo. This is closely
    related to the crystallographic data embargo noted above, but it
    applies in general to most other data and information associated
    with an article. Until very recently, most SI was in fact handled by
    the publisher themselves, and so it was released at the same time as
    the article. Since it is becoming more common to deposit data and SI
    in a separate repository, some publishers mandate that the release
    dates of this material must not precede the article itself.
    Deposition of such data has also become a mandatory requirement from
    (UK) funders since May 2015, and I have blogged about such
    \"research data management\" often here. In effect, both the
    scientific article and the data supporting it achieve their own DOIs
    or persistent digital identifiers, allowing easy and independent
    access to either the article OR its data. In fact, assigning such a
    DOI has a more subtle effect; creating a DOI means that metadata
    describing the object is also created and then aggregated by the
    agency issuing the DOI such as CrossRef and DataCite. Importantly,
    one should note that SI which is handled purely by the publisher
    will not have its own separate DOI and it will not have its own
    metadata. The data metadata for example can include the DOI for the
    article, and vice versa. I have shown
    [examples](http://www.ch.imperial.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=15907){target="_blank"}
    of the utility of such metadata for data in an earlier post.
3.  So now we come to the most recent embargo, which has surfaced since
    around May 2015, as increasingly data has become a first class
    object in its own right with its own DOI and importantly its own
    metadata. There is now evidence that some publishers are requesting
    that this very **metadata about data** is also subjected to an
    embargo, not to be released before the article which makes use of
    that data is itself released. So data can be deposited in \"dark
    form\" prior to a publication, but the metadata (which carries the
    date stamp and provenance for the deposition) may have to be
    \"dark\" or embargoed. Actually, this is not yet very common; for
    example I asked the Royal Society of Chemistry what their policy
    was, with the reply \"the Royal Society of Chemistry wouldn't
    require metadata about the data files to be embargoed\".

We live in an era where the very careers of reseachers can be determined
by their claim to priority about scientific discoveries. The date stamps
for priority continue to be largely controlled and issued by publishers
and some may decide that it will be in their business interests to
extend their control to data. Perhaps they may even wish to control all
aspects of publication including the data **and** its metadata, acting
as self-proclaimed *research facilitators*.

At this moment, this has not happened; both data **and** its metadata
can remain open and
[FAIR](http://force11.org/datacitation){target="_blank"}. Which is where
I think we should go in the future in the interests of open science
itself.

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


Publishing embargoes seem a relatively new phenomenon, probably starting in areas of science when the data produced for a scientific article was considered more valuable than the narrative of that article. However, the concept of the embargo seems to be spreading to cover other aspects of publishing, and I came across one recently which appears to take such embargoes into new and uncharted territory.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Publishing embargoes.