On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Klaus Graf
<klausgraf_at_googlemail.com> wrote:
Zurich is the only university in a German speaking
country with a OA
"mandate". I have checked the ZORA contents several times
to find out
the efficiency of that mandate and found several mail
buttons I tried.
Feel free to give me links to U Minho eprints with button
(I didn't
find some after a quick browsing there).
As I said, I cannot speak for Zurich, except to say that they adopted
a mandate early but were a bit late in implementing it. But they are
trying to make up for lost time with this explanatory video on OA:
https://play.switch.ch/PLAY/Channels/000750/Archive/2008_04_10-10_59_27/OnDe
mand/Player/en/Flash/VideoHigh400/000/Player.page/index.html
Perhaps they also need to explain the Button to their authors and
archivists...
Minho, in contrast, had both an early mandate and an early
implementation, and is doing very well. Perhaps the reason it is hard
to find Minho deposits that require the Button is that most Minho
authors set access to their deposits as Open Access rather than
Closed Access. (To inquire about Closed Access papers, you might
contact Eloy Rodrigues or the repository manager:
repositorium -AT- sdum.uminho.pt )
> He neglects to mention that he also clicked
> the Button for one of my own papers in UQAM's Archipel,
and was
> automatically
> emailed a copy within a few moments:
> http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/920/
I have clicked on this button AFTER I wrote my message to
this forum
thus I could'nt mention it. And you can believe it or
not:
I DID RECEIVE A CONFIRMATION FROM THE RESPOSITORY BUT NO
EPRINT UNTIL NOW.
(I have also checked my spam mail ...)
I believe Professor Harnad has allowed emailing it, but
may be there
is a delay from UQAM (some years?) or simply the button
doesn't work
(maybe nobody knows him).
I just did a test, requesting that eprint from Archipel from another
(academic) email address, and received both the request and then the
eprint within a matter of a few minutes. I cannot speak for what
happens with commercial email addresses with over-enthusiastic spam
filters, but I invite others to try it at either:
http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/930/
or
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16603/
or to test all three roles (authors, requester, moderator) for
themsleves at Demoprints:
http://demoprints.eprints.org/
As I have shown in German at
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5193609/
the "immediate deposit/optional open access" strategy
(Suber) isn't
possible in Germany. It is not allowed by German
Copyright law to
deposit the papers and to put a request button in the
repository. Only
if the publisher (having exclusive rights) accepts an
author
contractual addendum containing such a permission it is
possible. (If
the publisher doesn't have exclusive rights the button is
needless
because immediate OA is possible.)
Mailing reprints or photocopies of their own published articles to
reprint requesters has been practiced by scientists and scholars for
a half century. Perhaps there is a way to construe the wording of
German copyright law so as to conclude that that unchallenged
half-century practice (on which Eugene Garfield, ISI, and Current
Contents based their business, selling weekly subscriptions to the
contents of journals along with the addresses of the authors, to
request reprints) has all been illegal, all along. Perhaps in 1985,
Klaus might have written an article to say that German copyright law
must be reformed, because according to its current formal dictates,
all this reprint-mailing is illegal.
I don't think anyone would have paid much attention. Requesters would
keep requesting, authors would keep sending, and ISI would keep
providing the "Button."
We are now in the online era, where it is eprints, not reprints, that
researchers are requesting, and authors are providing, in Germany as
everywhere else in the research world. Maybe formal copyright law is
construable as being out of synch with this, maybe not. It makes no
difference, because it is the natural and optimal thing for
researchers to do, and hence they do it. And they are doing it with
their own articles, not someone else's, and doing it on an individual
basis, for individual requesters, for research purposes. (And they
are doing it with their own final drafts, not even the publisher's
PDF.)
The Button is exactly the same thing as an author putting the
bibliographic metadata for his articles on the web (unless Klaus
thinks that's illegal too!) with a note giving his email address so
researchers who need a copy can email him to request an eprint.
That's all there is to it.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Sep 16 2008 - 03:33:51 BST