A clarification:
There are two kinds of Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates: (1)
institutional (i.e., mostly university) mandates and (2) research
funder mandates (some of them the result of governmental bills and
acts).
Some publishers -- e.g., the notorious "prism" lobby
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445347a.html --
try to persuade governments not to mandate OA.
But such publisher lobbying has no purchase in academia. (Moreover,
the majority of publishers have given institutional self-archiving
their green light.)
So the only ones to blame for the long time it is taking to get
academia to mandate Green OA are academics themselves: the researchers
who are too timid or sluggish to self-archive without a mandate; and
their institutions, who are taking so long to come round to the
inevitable realization that they can and should mandate
self-archiving.
(It would help if more librarians realized -- as Helene Bosc, Derek
Law, Eloy Rodrigues, Paula Callan, Heather Joseph and other OA
pioneers have done -- what a crucial role they can play to help hasten
the optimal and inevitable [universal Green OA] by relentlessly
lobbying for Green OA mandates at their institutions.)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Aug 25 2010 - 17:16:15 BST