Summary: Publishers are increasingly adapting to the growing number of Green OA self-archiving mandates now being adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide. Some of the conditions they impose are reasonable (such as endorsing the self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft but not the publisher's proprietary PDF, or endorsing institutional repository deposit but not institution-external, 3rd-party repository deposit) and pose no problem for authors, their institutions or their funders. Some conditions are less reasonable (such as 6-12-month embargoes on making access to the deposit Open Access), but these can be adapted to by authors, institutions and funders for the time being, with the help of the Institutional Repositories' "email eprint request" Button. Some of the conditions, however, are technically arbitrary or even incoherent (such as the distinction between the author's institutional website and the author's institutional repository, or conditions based on metadata or metadata harvestability, rather than the full-text). Technically arbitrary or incoherent conditions should accordingly be ignored by authors, institutions and funders. They are merely leftovers of paper-based thinking that simply do not make sense in the digital medium.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/18/2009 11:42:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
