On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Greg Tananbaum wrote:
> Atanu Garai poses an interesting question.
For replies, see the ongoing thread
"Central versus institutional
self-archiving"
on the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/arch
ives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> The bottom line, however, is that launching an IR is a
more
> straightforward and capturable task for most
institutions.
It is indeed. See:
"Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit
Institutionally, Harvest
Centrally"
http://eprints.
ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/
ABSTRACT: On December 26 2007 a mandate to
self-archive all NIH-funded
research articles became US law. However, the benefits
of Congress's
wise decision to mandate deposit immediately upon
acceptance for
publication are lost if that deposit is required to be
made directly
in PubMed Central, rather than in each author's own
Institutional
Repository (and thence harvested to PubMed Central):
With direct IR
deposit, authors can use their own IR's "email
eprint request" button
to fulfill would-be users' access needs during any
embargo. And,
most important of all, with direct IR deposit mandated
by NIH,
each of the world's universities and research
institutions can go
on to complement the NIH self-archiving mandate for
the NIH-funded
fraction of its research output with an institutional
mandate to
deposit the rest of its research output, likewise to
be deposited
in its own IR. This will systematically scale up to
100% OA.
and
"How To Integrate University and Funder Open
Access Mandates"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives
/369-guid.html
SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as
NIH's) and
university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's)
are complementary.
There is a simple way to integrate them to make them
synergistic
and mutually reinforcing:
Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs)
are the
natural locus for the direct deposit of their own
research output:
Universities are the research providers and have a
direct interest
in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and
showcasing
their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing
their uptake,
usage and impact.
Both universities and funders should accordingly
mandate deposit
of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in
each author's
own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for
publication,
for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes.
Access to
that immediate postprint deposit in the author's
university IR may
be set immediately as Open Access if copyright
conditions allow;
otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending
copyright
negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the
conditions described by
universities and funders should accordingly apply only
to the timing
and copyright conditions for setting open access to
those deposits,
not to the depositing itself, its locus or its
timing.
As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit
locus for all
research output worldwide; (2) university mandates
will reinforce
and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3)
funder mandates
will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details
concerning
open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be
applied
independently of deposit itself, on a case by case
basis, according
to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will
apply only to
copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its
timing; and
(6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the
postprints from
the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the
agreed time,
if they wish.
Stevan Harnad
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