Self-Archiving Mandates

Gold OA institutional "membership" is incoherent and does not scale. It only gives the illusion of making sense if you think of it locally, and myopically. Annual institutional subscriptions to journals containing the annual outgoing refereed research of all other institutions do not morph into annual institutional memberships for publishing each institution's own outgoing refereed research. There are 25,000 journals and 10,000 institutions! Is every single institution to commit and contract in advance to pay for its authors' (potential) fraction of annual submissions to every single journal? Is that a "membership" or a distributed dismemberment? And is every journal to commit and contract in advance to accept every institution's annual fraction of submissions? (Is that peer review?) This is a global oligopolistic illusion that would fit publishers just about as well as it would fit McDonalds, except there are at least 25,000 different journals to "join", and institutions each have thousands of author-consumers with diverse dietary needs, varying day to day and year to year.

Part of the illusion of coherence comes from thinking in terms of journal-fleet publishers instead of individual journal article submissions. But this is merely another variant of the "Big Deal" strategy that has done nothing to solve either the accessibility or the affordability problem. The reality is that (Gold) OA publishing is premature today, except as a proof of principle. What is needed first is for universal (Green) OA self-archiving mandates to be adopted by institutions and funders. That will provide universal (Green) OA, which may eventually generate cancellation pressure that will induce journals to cut obsolete costs and products/services by downsizing to just providing peer review, paid for by individual institutions on an individual outgoing article basis out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from their institutional subscription cancellations. To buy into "memberships" with fleet publishers now, pre-emptively, and at current prices, while the money is still tied up in subscriptions (which cannot, of course, be cancelled in advance, before OA) is both penny- and pound-foolish -- and downright absurd if a "member" institution has not even first mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of its own refereed research output...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Latest Green Open Access Mandates in ROARMAP:

Oberlin College (institutional)
University of Kansas (institutional total now 51)
Brigham Young University 1, 2 (departmental total now 16)

Institutional + Departmental + Funder: 109

University of Central Florida (thesis total now 37)

All mandates: 146 adopted (15 more proposed -- including the blockbuster US Federal Research Public Access Act [FRPAA] multi-funder mandate proposal, for which momentum is growing)

Soon after OA-week, the UK's Times Higher Education (THE) published two articles on OA plus an editorial on OA Mandates and Metrics. At the same time, Professor Eberhard Hilf announced that in Germany Lars Fischer had initiated a petition to the German Bundestag to mandate Green OA, supported by the Coalition for Action, and inviting signatories from around the world.

OA's chronicler and critic, Richard Poynder, lost no time in interviewing Lars Fischer about his petition:

"German petition takes Open Access movement by surprise"
Interview of Lars Fischer by Richard Poynder
Open and Shut 13 November 2009
Also recommended:

Times Higher Education (THE) Editorial:
"Put all the results out in the open"
By Ann Mroz
THE 12 November 2009
"Researchers, government and society benefit when research is made freely available, so the sooner it is mandated, the better"

"Learning to share "
By Zoë Corbyn
THE 12 November 2009
"Free, immediate and permanently available research results for all - that's what the open-access campaigners want. Unsurprisingly, the subscription publishers disagree. Zoe Corbyn weighs up the ramifications for journals, while Matthew Reisz asks how books will fare"

ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies)
as recommended by the Berlin Declaration
Please register your Institutional OA Policy in ROARMAP
and register your Institutional Repository in ROAR

50 INSTITUTIONAL MANDATES (+2 PROPOSED INSTITUTIONAL +5 PROPOSED MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL)
14 DEPARTMENTAL/FACULTY/SCHOOL MANDATES (+1 PROPOSED DEPARTMENTAL)
42 FUNDER MANDATES (+7 PROPOSED FUNDER)

106 TOTAL MANDATES (+36 THESIS MANDATES +15 TOTAL PROPOSED MANDATES)

---

Institution: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Institutional Repository: Upcommons


Institution's OA Self-Archiving Policy:

The University Government has recently established an open access policy requiring the deposit of the UPC research results in Upcommons, the university's open access repository. The relevant points are the following:

- The UPC promotes open online access to academic, scientific and technical publications authored by its faculty, research staff and students.

- The UPC recommends that its authors publish the results of their academic activity in open-access scientific journals (or that they permit authors to deposit copies of their works in open repositories) and/or in open information repositories recognised within the scientific community.

- The UPC requires that academic and research staff employed by the university deposit their academic publications—journal papers, texts published in conferences, and scientific and technical reports—in its own institutional repository: UPCommons

Registered by: Anna Rovira (Director of Library Services) Anna.Rovira AT upc.edu on 09 Nov 2009