Summary: The three recent RCUK self-archiving mandates (ESRC, BBSRC, MRC) are extremely timely and welcome, but they still have two serious -- though easily remedied -- flaws. They are vague about both (1) WHEN and (2) WHERE research should be self-archived: (1) WHEN: It should be specified that the author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. Any allowable delay should pertain only to the date at which access to the deposited text is set as Open Access, not to the date at which the text is deposited. It should be strongly recommended to set access as Open Access immediately, but for articles from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving, access can be set as Closed Access (for a maximum of 6 months). The semi-automatic EMAIL-EPRINT-REQUEST feature of the Institutional Repository software will allow the author to fulfill individual eprint requests from fellow-researchers during a Closed Access embargo interval. (2) WHERE: It should be specified that the deposit should be preferentially in the author's own institutional repository. Central repositories may harvest from the institutional repository if they wish, but the optimal practice, and the one that will scale to cover all researchers at all institutions, is to deposit locally; only if the institution does not yet have a repository should the author deposit directly in a central repository.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/01/2006 09:31:00 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.
