Re: What Can and Should Be Mandated

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 13:09:48 +0000

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
    
> I retain from all this that mandating [self-archiving] works, but "it
> takes several years"... for each mandating policy. This does not look
> all than much easier than converting journals to OA.
    
(As we are now repeating ourselves, this will be my last, summary
response, and I leave it to Jean-Claude to say the last word.)
    
    (1) Self-archiving mandates cover 100% of the OA target literature.
    (2) They take a few years to approach that target, but the point
    is that once adopted, they have been demonstrated to work.
    (3) Subsidised journal conversion to OA is desirable and welcome,
    in parallel with self-archiving mandates, but it cannot cover 100%
    or even 50% of the OA target literature and it should not be conflated
    with self-archiving mandates.
    (4) The FRPAA mandate and the EC mandate alone, if adopted, will
    already generate most of the top half of the OA target literature.
    (5) Supplemented by institutional mandates, the rest of the dominoes
    would soon fall, mooting the urgency of OA journal conversion (though
    probably accelerating it!).
    (6) The reverse is definitely not true (that mandating subsidised
    journal conversion would moot the urgency of OA self-archiving
    mandates).
    (7) Hence there is no symmetry between self-archiving or
    self-archiving mandates and journal conversion or subsidised journal
    conversion mandates, or their respective urgency and priority.
    
Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Nov 06 2006 - 18:15:14 GMT