On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Ann Okerson wrote:
> Right now we have a kind of mess that needs time to sort out: trying to
> achieve compliance for literally thousands of authors and articles in a
> couple of months (since the mandate was announced in January) is a
> herculean
> task, when the institutional underpinnings (the list of these is
> substantial)
> are mostly not yet present. We have a situation in which articles can be
> submitted by (1) authors, many of whom would rather just have someone else
> do
> it, like the publishers -- btw, the NIH instructions for authors are not
> as
> helpful as they could be; (2) the research institutions, i.e., the ones
> that
> already have everything in place to do so; or (3) the publishers. The
> potential for redundancy is huge and it is wasteful. The publishers, most
> of
> whom are willing to help if given half a chance, are the ones with the
> redacted articles... seem like the most logical funnel to the NIH, if this
> can be worked out.
>
> Wouldn't it be good if the NIH, the publishers, and the research
> institutions
> would get into a room together and thrash this all out in an sensible way?
The institutions who "already have everything in place to do so" can
sort this out in one simple, sensible swoop:
Institutions mandate deposit in their own IRs and invite NIH to
harvest from there (or hack up an export of NIH content to PubMed
Central).
The institutions whose "institutional underpinnings [they are not
substantial] are... not yet present" are only a piece of software and
a few days of sysad time away from having the requisite institutional
underpinnings present.
http://www.eprints.org/software/
A hasty stopgap of relying on proxy deposit by publishers would be
the very worst possible solution. It not only doesn't scale, but it
positively obstructs the goal of systematically making all institutional
research output OA (playing into the hands of those like-minded
publishers who have that very goal).
We must think beyond just the NIH mandate to all university research
output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Mar 20 2008 - 13:21:11 GMT