Summary: The new Director General of France's large, distributed national research network, the CNRS, has reiterated his predecessor’s recommendation to all CNRS researchers to deposit their articles in HAL, the CNRS's nationwide institutional repository. Unfortunately, recommendations alone do not generate much more Open Access self-archiving than the spontaneous worldwide baseline of about 15%. To accelerate CNRS self-archiving toward 100%, the recommendation must be transformed into a requirement. The only obstacle to adopting an OA self-archiving requirement is the perception that it could contravene copyright agreements with publishers, so the simple, certain solution is to make it an immediate deposit requirement (no exceptions, no delays), with Open-Access-setting merely a recommendation rather than a requirement. (For the 31% of postprints that might have a Closed Access embargo interval, the semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT request feature of the institutional repository softwares can provide for all would-be users' access needs during the embargo.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/24/2006 07:45:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
