Re: European Research Council Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving

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

No, neither the ERC Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate nor the NIH 
Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate applies to books. (Nor do the 
RCUK mandates, nor the university and departmental mandates, nor 
any of the 35 mandates adopted and the 8 proposed worldwide so 
far: http:// www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php.) They all apply 
only to peer- reviewed journal-articles.

Book self-archiving cannot and should not be mandated, for the 
contrary of much the same reasons peer-reviewed journal articles 
can and should be.

Stevan Harnad

On 16-Jan-08, at 7:20 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> 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).
> >
> > 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