Self-Archiving Mandates

This is to commend and strongly endorse the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology's (IRCSET's) proposed Green Open Access self-Archiving Mandate. Other supporters are encourage to write to IRCSET before 28 September to provide their endorsement too.

[Thanks once again to the Peter Suber for alerting us all to this one too!]

IRCSET's proposed mandate is not only timely and welcome, but it is the optimal funder mandate, being based on the EURAB's proposed mandate, likewise the optimal one.

IRCSET proposes mandating immediate deposit, without exception, in an OA Repository (Institutional or Central) and it puts a maximum cap of 6 months on the length of the allowable access embargo, after which access to the deposit must be made Open Access rather than Closed Access.

Most other funder mandates to date are not quite as good as this IRCSET's. Most (1) peg the date of deposit to the end of the embargo, which is a huge mistake. And many (2) do not put any cap on on the permissible length of embargo, which, together with (1) essentially moots the mandate completely, making it the publisher who determines whether and when an article is deposited at all. Third, (3) many insist on central self-archiving, rather than institutional self-archiving.

So, bravo to IRCSET for requiring immediate deposit, for capping the permissible mandate at 6 months, and for specifying only that the repository must be an OAI-compliant OA repository, rather than insisting on or favouring central deposit.

(If there is one thing that could be brought out more explicitly, it is that institutional deposit is preferable to central: central repositories can always harvest from institutional ones. But it is institutional self-archiving that has all the local institutional incentives, that covers all research output, and that scales to cover all of research, whether funded or unfunded.)

But even exactly as it stands, IRCSET's is the best of the existing funder mandates (there are now 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-Archiving mandates adopted, and 8 more [including Ireland's] proposed, for a total of 40, worldwide). If the Irish mandate is adopted in its present form, it will immediately become the best of the adopted funder and national mandates, and the one for all subsequent funder and national mandates to model themselves upon. (Some of the already adopted institutional/departmental mandates, such as Southampton's, Minho's, QUT's and CERN's are already optimal, requiring immediate deposit, and of course institutional deposit.)

Comhghairdeas, Eire!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Thomas, Chuck & McDonald, Robert H. (2007) Measuring and Comparing Participation Patterns in Digital Repositories: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 1. D-lib Magazine 13 (9/10) doi:10.1045/september2007-mcdonald

Excerpt: "As for mandatory-deposit repositories, the limited available data indicate authors represented in such repositories tend to contribute more of their intellectual output. Sale (2006) predicted institutions establishing deposit mandates were likely to see such results within three years of implementing these policies. Harnad (2006) cited surveys showing 95% of scholars [would] comply if their university mandates depositing in an institutional repository. This study's findings only reinforce such predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior."