I agree with Simeon Warner that funding agencies should
seriously consider a requirement that all publications
resulting from research supported by such agencies must be
deposited in open-access repositories.
This raises a question that hasn't been discussed recently
by members of this Forum: Is there any funding agency, other
than, I believe, the Danish Research Centre for Organic
Farming (DARCOF), via it's Organic Eprints archive (see:
http://orgprints.org/ ), that has done both of these:
a) mandates open access to the results of research funded
by that agency, and, b) has established it's own
knowledge-transfer-oriented eprints archive?
For example, such an archive could be used (instead of, or
in addition to) the grantees' own preferred institutional
(or, discipline-based) open-access repository.
A reminder: Peter Suber has developed a draft version of an
open-access policy for foundation research grants, and has
discussed some of the issues that need to be considered:
Model Open-Access Policy for Foundation Research Grants
Draft 8. March 7, 2004.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/foundations.htm
An example of one of the issues that Peter has considered
(see: "Term 10. When the open-access condition is violated):
"If compelling recipients to repay the grant is too strong,
and compelling late open-access dissemination is too weak,
then foundations might consider some intermediate options.
For example, the foundation could reserve some additional
"incentive funds" to be released only when the recipient has
provided open access to works based on previous funds. Or
the foundation could simply make non-complying recipients
ineligible for future grants".
Jim Till
University of Toronto
Received on Fri Jul 09 2004 - 15:32:36 BST