Re: OA in Europe suffers a setback

From: Talat Chaudhri [tac] <tac_at_ABER.AC.UK>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:26:24 -0000

Hi Arthur,

I am glad that you did not intend what came across as a slight to those
engaging in grass-roots advocacy where their institutions are still
relying on the voluntarist approach and have not yet achieved a mandate.
As I have said, even though I don't dispute that voluntarism fails to
fill repositories, it does form an important part of the initial
development of a repository - and it is important for yourselves as
advocates nearer to the political end of OA, with established
repositories youselves, to cast your minds back to how things used to be
when you were in this situation: the majority of repositories are not
yet so well established, as you know.

I take this approach because the case studies and content that have
already arisen from my engagement with academics volunteering to archive
their work form a major part of the resources that I can use to convince
the departments and management to support a mandate, as well as to raise
awareness amongst other academics before the event, essentially to get
them on side whether or not they are in practice too fundamentally lazy
to actually archive their papers without a prior mandate in place. I am
not, as you put it, fooling myself into thinking that I can get
compliance through voluntarism, but this is where we must start. I have
absolutely no choice in this matter, of course. I must lay the
groundwork on which a future mandate can work. Without such groundwork,
as I maintain, no mandate would be able to work in practice. In essence,
we need the first 15-20% before the rest is within our reach.

Thank you for the useful information about the Patchwork Mandate, which
I will look at with great interest. Another reason why it might be that
student theses are mandated sooner than staff research (apart from the
general fear of the employer about possible trade union action based on
copyright issues relating to academic research) is highlighted by the
experience of the average cataloguing librarian: the paper copies are
expensive and time-consuming to process, so it is an obvious cost
advantage to both students and libraries to work towards dispensing with
them.

With regard to your last point, that you seek to promote realism rather
than discourage repository managers on this list, this is very welcome
indeed to hear. I am very grateful for the information, as I have no
doubt other repository managers are too. If you bear in mind the needs
of those managing embryonic repositories, please consider more often the
path as well as the goal, then perhaps no more of these unnecessary
disagreements will arise between us.

With best wishes,


Talat
Received on Fri Nov 30 2007 - 13:19:37 GMT