On Thu, 18 Jan 2007, John Murtagh wrote:
> In fact I'm having to say to academics here at Brunel that the post
> prints of papers they published in August cannot be placed on Brunel
> University Research Archive (BURA) until January 2008!
Big mistake! The deposit should be immediate, upon acceptance of the
final draft for publication. For embargoes, the text can be set
temporarily as "Closed Access," with only the metadata visible and
accessible to all.
> Disappointing for the academics of course, who have gone through the
> process of signing up to self-archiving, finding that post print on
> their hard drive and then...a big fat nothing.
Indeed. So *all deposits should be immediate: no delays or embargoes
(on the date of deposit) allowed or imposed.
> One solution is the Email Request Button but there are some problems
> with this on DSpace - the non d-space code and implementing it (taking
> us 2 weeks of probing!)
Consult Eloy Rodrigues. He wrote a DSpace patch that is working just
fine (and has been, I hope, adopted by other DSpace repositories).
http://wiki.dspace.org/RequestCopy
For EPrints Repositories, use:
https://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/notices/publicnotices.php?notice=902
> the legality of the button:
> are we actually allowed to distribute copies,
> even if this has been academic practise in the
> days before repositories? It seems that we might be getting close to
> limits of fair-dealing. Any views Steven? ;)
As it has always been authors' practise, uncontested, it is absurd to
officially canonise abstinence now, of all times! On the contrary,
Brunel's policy should like most of the 20 adopted and 6 proposed mandates
to date, cap the allowable embargo on setting access as Open Access,
rather than collude in embargoing deposit itself!
Leave the access-setting to the authors. And deposit date is no one's
business but that of Brunel and its authors.
> The process we are instead using is inputting of the article's metadata
> and then uploading a .txt file describing the embargo period, what the
> publisher says (in all its restrictive glory!) and contact details of
> the authors. It takes a bit of time to do all of this and it's not the
> ideal way of dealing with it I'll admit.
It's a waste of time and close to the worst possible way of doing it.
> PS You may or may not have heard that Oxford University Press have
> recently announced they are not accepting the SPARC Addendum or
> JISC-SURF Copyright Document from authors wishing to maintain
> self-archiving rights.
Just deposit everything immediately and use the Button during the embargo,
if the author wants to observe embargoes. The rest will take care of
itself, as nature takes its inevitable (and optimal) course.
(Last suggestion: Please ask your IP specialists to focus their expertise
where it really belongs: on content bought in from elsewhere. Don't
treat Brunel's own authors' article output as if it fit in the same
Procrustean bed as bought-in content: It doesn't.)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Jan 18 2007 - 22:30:02 GMT