SUMMARY: What France -- exactly like every other country -- needs is both funder and institutional Open Access (OA) mandates, requiring the self-archiving of all refereed research output immediately upon acceptance for publication, and all converging on single-locus deposit in the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR). (It is completely irrelevant to this whether or not the IR happens to be hosted by HAL, France's national Central Repository [CR], which is designed so as to be able in principle to give every university or institution in France its own "virtual IR" if the institution so wishes.) But if funder mandates leave locus-of-deposit open, or insist on generic deposit in some CR or other, then OA's slumbering giant -- the universities and institutions that are the providers of all research output, funded and unfunded, in all fields, virtually none of which yet mandate the deposit of their institutional research output in their IRs -- will just keep hibernating: Institutional (and departmental, laboratory) mandates will not be adopted, most researchers (85%) will not self-archive anywhere (in either an IR or a CR), and what IRs there are will continue to lie fallow. Apart from the funder-mandated research -- and the few fields (such as computer science, economics and physics) where researchers have already been self-archiving spontaneously for years worldwide -- the CRs will of course be in exactly the same state as the IRs.
Some authors are affiliated to more than one institution, so their articles are relevant to more than one repository. From an Open Access (OA) point of view, it only matters that they deposit once, to one repository, but from a University administrative point of view, the article might need to be duplicated in different institutional repositories.
In theory, the author ought to be able to choose which repository to deposit to, and the other(s) can harvest from there. ...
I wonder if, in the future, we might end up maintaining lists of our authors who have informed us that they deposit elsewhere, and then running yearly processes to harvest records and items from those repositories. ... (This is pretty much what our medical authors already expect us to do with their content that is available on OA in PubMed - yes, it would be better if the content went round the loop the other way, but in practice, we don't have the resources to format their work appropriately for PubMed anyway. I don't know of any IR that does this - yet.)
There are two other ways around such a process: 1) insist that authors deposit multiple times in multiple repositories; 2) all repositories enable authors to specify other repositories for their content to be sent to, upon deposit. ...
Asking for multiple deposits is nothing to do with OA and our authors will be aware of it and resistant to it. The best reason I can give to authors is that having lots of copies of their work available in OA repositories will help the chances of their work being preserved in the long term. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/11/2009 01:14:00 PM.
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.
