Re: Follow up of EC-commissioned "Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 03:41:56 +0100

On Sat, 7 Oct 2006, David Goodman wrote:

> CERN, with [a self-archiving mandate] can not get beyond 90%

90% is a hell of a lot better than the unmandated 15% baseline, so just
what is your point, David? (I'll let Jens Vigen or Joanne Yeomans CERN
answer about the last 10%.)

> even the strongest of the mandates, the Wellcome, accepts a six month embargo.

Wellcome's is neither the strongest of the actual mandates nor the
strongest possible one:

    http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

The strongest possible mandate is a mandate to provide OA immediately
upon acceptance for publication:

    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/stronger-OApolicy.htm

But the optimal mandate (because it moots all delays, embargoes and
legal worries) is a slightly weaker mandate (but still stronger than
Wellcome's): The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (IA/OA) Mandate,
and that's the one Peter Suber and I, and most of the others who have
carefully thought through all the contingencies are strongly advocating:

    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/weaker-OApolicy.htm

Note that both of the above were drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan,
Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and me by modifying
the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy to eliminate the 6-month embargo
and the central archiving requirement.

    http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/sign.php

> Authors will only publish OA if OA is the single possible way
> to publish. One way is 100% funding of OA journals,
> which will make the publishers very happy, for it guarantees the
> continuing survival of even the lowest-quality journal. The other
> is the replacement of the current journal publishing system altogether.

And the third way, and the fastest and surest, is the ID/OA Mandate.

Amen.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Oct 08 2006 - 03:58:49 BST

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