US and EU Both Have Petitions for OA Mandates

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

                     ** Cross-Posted **

The US Alliance for Tax-Payer Access and other sponsors have just 
launched a US counterpart to the highly successful and 
still-growing EU Petition calling for Open Access to be mandated 
by research funders and institutions.

     US Petition: http://www.publicaccesstoresearch.org/
     EU Petition: http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The EU Petition already has over 23,000 signatories, including 
over 1000 organisations (universities, research funders, 
academies of sciences, scholarly societies, research and 
development industries, publishers).

If you are officially signing for an organisation, please don't 
just sign the petition! Do locally what you are petitioning for: 
Adopt an OA self-archiving mandate at your institution, as the 
Rector of the University of Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier has 
just done (see below) and register your mandate in ROARMAP (the 
Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies):

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

Liege's is the latest of 9 institutional mandates, 3 departmental 
mandates, and 11 research funder mandates already adopted 
worldwide, plus 5 funder mandates and 1 multi-institution mandate 
proposed.

Not only has Universite de Liege adopted a Green OA 
self-archiving mandate, but it has adopted the ID/OA 
(Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate recommended by EURAB 
and specifically designed to immunise the policy from all the 
permissions problems (imagined and real) and embargoes that have 
been delaying adoption of Green OA mandates or have led to the 
adoption of sub-optimal mandates (that allowed deposit to be 
delayed or not done at all, depending on publisher policy).

     Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving
     Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html

     EURAB's Proposed OA Mandate: Strongest of the 20 Adopted and 5
     Proposed So Far
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/196-guid.html

The key to the ID/OA mandate's success and power is that it 
separates the mandatory component (deposit of the final 
peer-reviewed draft immediately upon acceptance for publication 
-- no delays, no exceptions) from the access-setting component. 
(Immediate setting of access to the deposit as Open Access is 
strongly recommended, but not mandatory: provisionally setting 
access as Closed Access is an allowable option where judged 
necessary.)