Open Access Archivangelism

The US Alliance for Tax-Payer Access and other sponsors have just launched a US counterpart to the highly successful and still-growing EU Petition calling for Open Access to be mandated by research funders and institutions.

US Petition
EU Petition

The EU Petition already has over 23,000 signatories, including over 1000 organisations (universities, research funders, academies of sciences, scholarly societies, research and development industries, publishers).

If you are officially signing for an organisation, please don't just sign the petition! Do locally what you are petitioning for: Adopt an OA self-archiving mandate at your institution, as the Rector of the University of Liege, Professor Bernard Rentier has just done (see below) and register your mandate in ROARMAP (the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies).

Liege's is the latest of 9 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, and 11 research funder mandates already adopted worldwide, plus 5 funder mandates and 1 multi-institution mandate proposed.

Not only has Universite de Liege adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate, but it has adopted the ID/OA (Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) mandate recommended by EURAB and specifically designed to immunise the policy from all the permissions problems (imagined and real) and embargoes that have been delaying adoption of Green OA mandates or have led to the adoption of sub-optimal mandates (that allowed deposit to be delayed or not done at all, depending on publisher policy).

Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)

EURAB's Proposed OA Mandate: Strongest of the 20 Adopted and 5 Proposed So Far

The key to the ID/OA mandate's success and power is that it separates the mandatory component (deposit of the final peer-reviewed draft immediately upon acceptance for publication -- no delays, no exceptions) from the access-setting component. (Immediate setting of access to the deposit as Open Access is strongly recommended, but not mandatory: provisionally setting access as Closed Access is an allowable option where judged necessary.)

Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:35:15 -0400
From: Bernard Rentier
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: The University of Liege (Belgium) adopts ID/OA mandate

The University of Liege (ULg), Belgium, has now adopted mandatory institutional deposit of all its publications.

1. Every publication (article in a journal) by a ULg member must now be posted in the Institutional Repository ("La Digitheque"). By publication it is meant the author's version of the article after peer review and acceptance for publication by the editor (either in a print journal or/and in an electronic version, either in a Gold or Green Open access journal or in a non-OA journal).

2. Access to the IR is closed by default, unless opening up is authorised by the publisher. If the access is closed, it remains available to the author(s) only.

3. Metadata of the article are immediately available and they constitute a showcase of the University productivity. The accepted version deposited in the IR can be delivered via the e-mail e-print request button of the IR.

4. As soon as conditions are fulfilled, the author will open access to his accepted version.

The mandate will start as soon as the technical set up will be ready.

B. Rentier
Rector, ULg

It is to be hoped now that the ULg policy will first spread to the other francophone universities of Belgium, then to the rest of Belgium, Europe, and worldwide. University OA self-archiving mandates are an essential complement to the researcher funder OA self-archiving mandates. University mandates cover unfunded as well as funded research, and provide the all-important locus for the deposit (whether mandated by the funder or the university): the researcher's own university's Institutional Repository.

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum