ERC OA Self-Archiving Mandate Pledge Upgraded

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

               ** Cross Posted **

This is an update on the European Research Council (ERC) Open Access
Self-Archiving Mandate.

     http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

It was registered this January as a "pledged" mandate (rather 
stronger than a "proposed" mandate) and it will soon take effect, 
so I've upgraded it in ROARMAP to a full funder mandate.

Here is what Professor Jeffrey has written about it (for 
posting):

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, Jeffery, KG (Keith) wrote:

Here's the base FP7 figures for the duration of the work 
programme http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/budget_en.html

>From this you see ERC is 7.5 bn of 50.5bn i.e. almost 15%

The key point here is the leveraging; the EC R&D funding is ~ 5% 
of total R&D funding in Europe and the interactions between the 
EC programme and national programmes are complex - basically 
politicians try to lever either negatively (if EC funds this area 
of research or researcher we won't) or positively (if EC funds 
this we'll fund it too).

The ERC is to fund individual researchers, not teams. It will 
thus give great prestige to the successful researchers.  With am 
OA self-archiving mandate it will give a leadership to all Europe 
research unachievable otherwise - i.e. it is a totem. If a 
(prestigious) researcher with ERC funding does parallel green 
deposit for ERC then she will also do it for her 
nationally-funded research - by force of habit if nothing else! 
The research team around will 'get the habit' too.

Significantly this leadership should also be extended to EIT 
(European Institute of Technology).  This will be ~75% industry 
funded according to the EC and will involve large numbers of 
researchers (15-20,000). Of course it is yet to be approved by 
the parliament but Barrosso (EC president) seems determined to 
push it through.

Prof Keith G Jeffery
Director Information Technology
and International Strategy
CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
President ERCIM & CCLRC Director:        http://www.ercim.org/
W3C Office at CLRC-RAL                      http://www.w3.org/
President euroCRIS                    http://www.eurocris.org/
VLDB Trustee Emeritus:                    http://www.vldb.org/
EDBT Board Member                         http://www.edbt.org/