Re: What Can and Should Be Mandated

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 18:28:32 +0000

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Jean-Claude Guedon wrote:

> If self-archiving mandates generalize sufficiently (including with an
> implementation policy with teeth), Stevan is right. But that is exactly
> the question. For the moment, they do not...

    Sale, Arthur (2006) The Acquisition of Open Access Research
    Articles. First Monday 11(10) October: Three repositories with
    variants of a mandatory deposit policy are analyzed to see when
    researchers deposit their articles. It takes several years for a
    mandatory policy to be institutionalized and routinized, but once
    it has been, authors overwhelmingly deposit well before six months
    after publication date. The OA mantra of "deposit now, set open access
    when feasible" is shown to be not only reasonable, but fitting what
    researchers actually do.
    http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/sale/index.html

    Sale, Arthur (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional
    repositories in Australia. First Monday 11(4) April: An analysis of
    seven Australian universities shows that a requirement to deposit
    research output into a repository coupled with effective author
    support policies works in Australia and delivers high levels of
    content. Voluntary deposit policies do not, regardless of any author
    support by the university. This is consistent with international data.
    http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/index.html

    Yeomans, J. (2006) CERN's Open Access E-print Coverage in 2006 :
    Three Quarters Full and Counting. Libraries Webzine 12 March:
    CERN's open access e-print repository, CERN Document Server
    (CDS), contains open access full-text copies of nearly
    three quarters of its own recently-authored documents....
    http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/12/papers/2/

> > SH:
> > The potential mandator of OA self-archiving is the research
> > community itself -- research funders and institutions -- not
> > the publishers who oppose OA.
>
> You forget one other group that may not go along as easily
> [with self-archiving mandates]: learned societies and scientific
> associations.

They are publishers. (And how could I forget?)

    Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005)
    Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence
    and Fruitful Collaboration.
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/

> The recent battles in anthropology about OA and mandating shows again
> the importance of these associations

    Harnad, S. (2006) Anthropomorphic Tail Wags Anthropological Dog.
    Open Access Archivangelism. November:
    The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has disbanded its
    "AnthroSource Steering Committee" because it had supported the Federal
    Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Hardly a surprising outcome:
    Like the Royal Society and many other learned societies, the AAA,
    has a strong publishing tail that manages to wag the AAA dog. And
    that tail does not wag the AAA in the interests of anthropological
    research or researchers. The resolution of this (undeniable) conflict
    of interest between researchers and their learned societies is very
    simple: It will not be their learned societies who ensure that Open
    Access is provided, free for all, but their institutions and funders,
    by mandating it, just as the FRPAA proposes to do (but with a few
    of the policy parameters fine-tuned to optimize them).
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/156-guid.html

Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Nov 06 2006 - 00:10:09 GMT

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