Harvard Mandate Adds ID/OA to its FAQ

Excellent news from Harvard! It looks as if the Harvard Green OA Mandate has added an ID/OA Immediate Deposit Clause with no opt-out. 

This would make Harvard's mandate the optimal Green OA Mandate model, now ready for all universities worldwide to emulate: rights-retention (with optional opt-out) plus Immediate-Deposit (without opt-out).

And please remember that the three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving spontaneously are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to self-archive, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

The Harvard mandate now has all the requisite ingredients for performing this facilitating function: Deposit itself is required, but negotiating rights-retention and making the deposit OA can be waived if there are reasons to do so. One cannot ask for a better policy than this: Its worldwide adoption will bring us OA as surely as nightfall is followed by day. -- Stevan Harnad

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From Peter Suber's Open Access News

At Harvard, waivers apply to OA, not to deposits

The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication has updated two of the FAQs on the university's OA mandates.  I'm not posting all the new language, just the new answers to two existing questions:

From the Policy FAQ:

What do I have to do to comply with this policy? 

Here is the one-line answer: ADDENDUM or WAIVER but in any case DEPOSIT....

Whether or not you included the addendum or the publisher accepted it, you should always deposit the author's final version of your article in the DASH repository....

From the Procedural FAQ:

Should I include my article in the Harvard repository even if I have gotten a waiver for it?  [PS:  Formerly:  May I be able to include...?]

Yes. The repository accepts not only articles covered by the license granted to Harvard under the FAS policy, but also articles not covered by the license but for which the publisher grants, or the author has otherwise secured, sufficient rights. Even if you take a waiver, the publisher's agreement may provide, or you may be able to negotiate, sufficient rights to allow copies of your article to be made publicly available in the Harvard repository. The publisher may ask that certain conditions be met, some of which the repository can accommodate (for example, an embargo period during which the article will not be made publicly available)....

Comment.  The new language makes clear that the Harvard policies expect deposit even when faculty members obtain waivers and do not or cannot authorize OA.  This is an excellent policy and welcome clarification.