Re: European Research Council Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Does this apply to all "publications," including books? If so, 
one wonders how authors of these books will find any publishers 
for them. I certainly wouldn't invest our press's money in 
publishing a book that became available for free after six months 
from another source. And I would worry a great deal if agencies 
like the NEH made this a condition for all projects it funds in 
the humanities, both books and journals. A six-month embargo 
might work for science; I think it will destroy publishing in the 
humanities.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> As a historic matter: The European Research Council finalised 
> its Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (and it did so 19 days 
> before the NIH mandate!):
>
>  The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded
>  research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate
>  research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv
>  or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access
>  within 6 months of publication."
>
> http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC_Guidelines_Open_Access_revised_Dec07_FINAL.pdf
> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
>
> Like the NIH mandate, the ERC mandate is also an immediate-deposit
> mandate, with the allowable embargo applying only to the date that
> the deposit is made OA, not to the date it is deposited (which must
> be immediately upon publication). The ERC embargo is also shorter (6
> months, whereas NIH is 12 months). Better still, the deposit may be
> either institutional or central.
>
> The only way to improve on this nigh-optimal mandate is to require
> that the deposit be institutional ("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest
> Centrally") except if the grant recipient's institution does not yet
> have an institutional repository (in which case deposit should be in
> an interim generic repository such as the UK's DEPOT or Europe's
> EurOpenScholar).
>
>      Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
>
>      Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
> http://roar.eprints.org/
>
>      Depot
> http://depot.edina.ac.uk/FAQ/
>
>      EurOpenScholar
> http://recteur.blogs.ulg.ac.be/?p=151
>
> Bravo to both the US and Europe. Now it is time for the other US and
> EC funding agencies -- and, even more importantly, all the US and
> European universities -- to follow suit with Green OA Self-Archiving
> Mandates of their own.
>
> Stevan Harnad