In SOAN yesterday I argued that waiver options in university OA policies can remove political obstacles to their adoption. Today on her blog, Dorothea Salo extends the argument to embargo options in policies to mandate OA for ETDs. From her post:
...I am particularly struck by the difficulty over the absence of obvious language about waivers [in the defeated U of Maryland policy]. Suber gets it spot-on: there wasn’t a need to have waiver language in the resolution because it wasn’t a mandate, but its absence justifiably made people worry that should it become a mandate it wouldn’t have appropriate wiggle-room.
Doesn’t this bear more than a passing resemblance to discussions about ETD embargoes? It sure does to me. The easiest conversations I’ve ever seen or heard about regarding ETDs involved everyone taking embargo capability for granted. The slightest doubt about whether embargoes will be available imperils an ETD program.
And then, of course, the funny thing is that almost nobody uses the embargoes once they’re available; there’s abundant evidence to this effect. To a technologist, this can seem like pointless creeping featurism: “why did I have to spend dev time on this so-called feature that less than half a percent of the end users actually take advantage of?” But socially, having that bolthole is absolutely crucial, even were it not true (and it is) that a few situations genuinely do require embargoes....
As I think I said before, I’m glad Maryland happened, despite how excruciating it must have been for the people involved. I’m even glad that the ETD wrangle in Iowa happened, for the same basic reason. Spelling out why these things happened so that this can be done right in more places will, in time, give us far more value than the individual roadblock removed....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/03/2009 12:25:00 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.
