ROARMAP Now Registers Open Access Thesis/Dissertation Deposit Mandates Too

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:10:49 -0400

As announced at yesterday's (June 10) Electronic Thesis and
Dissertations meeting ETD 2009: Bridging the Knowledge Divide,
Universities are now invited to register their Open Access Thesis
Deposit mandates in ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository
Material Archiving Policies), alongside the existing 85 university
and funder mandates to deposit refereed research articles.

In preparation for the announcement, Professor Arthur Sale on June 9
registered all 17 of Australia's thesis deposits, and since the
announcement, University of Trieste and Cranfield University have
registered their thesis deposit mandates.

Actually, OA thesis deposit mandates have been growing for years.
(Please include the date of adoption, if possible. when registering.)
The reason ROARMAP had not been recording OA thesis mandates until
now was that refereed-research deposit mandates had not yet become
sufficiently widespread and well-known, so there was some risk that
OA mandates would be identified exclusively with thesis deposit
mandates. 

But now that there are already a respectable number of
refereed-research deposit mandates, adding the thesis mandates into
ROARMAP should help accelerate the adoption of both kinds of mandates
by universities. Indeed, each university should integrate the two
kinds of mandates into a unified policy on archiving, managing,
assessing and showcasing its own research output.

So please do register your own university's OA thesis mandates as
well as its OA refereed-research mandates in ROARMAP -- for the
record, for the continuously updated growth table, and for the growth
curves (which will soon be continuously updating too), as well as in
order to encourage further adoptions by other universities.

Open Access provision is a fundamentally reciprocal process. Provide
OA in order to maximize the impact of your own research output, and
also to encourage others to do likewise, maximizing your access to
their research output: "Self-archive unto others as you would have
them self-archive unto you"!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Thu Jun 11 2009 - 19:12:43 BST