This is to commend and strongly endorse the Irish Research Council for
Science, Engineering & Technology's (IRCSET's) proposed Green Open Access
self-Archiving Mandate. Other supporters are encourage to write to express
their endorsement too:
http://www.ircset.ie/consultation_070907.html
[Thanks once again to the Peter Suber for alerting us all to this one
too!
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/09/irish-research-council-drafts-oa.html
]
IRCSET's proposed mandate is not only timely and welcome, but it is
the optimal funder mandate, being based on the EURAB's proposed mandate,
likewise the optimal one.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/196-guid.html
IRCSET proposes mandating immediate deposit, without exception, in an
OA Repository (Institutional or Central) and it puts a maximum cap of
6 months on the length of the allowable access embargo, after which
access to the deposit must be made Open Access rather than Closed
Access.
Most other funder mandates to date are not quite as good as this
IRCSET's. Most (1) peg the date of deposit to the end of the embargo,
which is a huge mistake. And many (2) do not put any cap on on the
permissible length of embargo, which, together with (1) essentially
moots the mandate completely, making it the publisher who determines
whether and when an article is deposited at all. Third, (3) many insist
on central self-archiving, rather than institutional self-archiving.
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
So, bravo to IRCSET for requiring immediate deposit, for capping
the permissible mandate at 6 months, and for specifying only that the
repository must be an OAI-compliant OA repository, rather than insisting
on or favouring central deposit.
(If there is one thing that could be brought out more explicitly, it is
that institutional deposit is preferable to central: central
repositories can always harvest from institutional ones. But it is
institutional self-archiving that has all the local institutional
incentives, that covers all research output, and that scales to cover
all of research, whether funded or unfunded.)
But even exactly as it stands, IRCSET's is the best of the existing funder
mandates (there are now 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green
OA self-Archiving mandates adopted, and 8 more [including Ireland's]
proposed, for a total of 40, worldwide). If the Irish mandate is adopted
in its present form, it will immediately become the best of the adopted
funder and national mandates, and the one for all subsequent funder and
national mandates to model themselves upon. (Some of the already adopted
institutional/departmental mandates, such as Southampton's, Minho's,
QUT's and CERN's are already optimal, requiring immediate deposit,
and of course institutional deposit.)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
Comhghairdeas, Eire!
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
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