Re: Emailing Eprints During Any OA Embargo Period

From: guedon <jean.claude.guedon_at_umontreal.ca>
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:33:26 -0500

    [ The following text is in the "utf-8" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "iso-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

In response to Stevan Harnad, it is important underscore the fact that
the difference between what is presently possible (as outlined by SH in
his text below) and what will become possible with the new arrangements
is the clear understanding by authors that they can indeed self-archive
without any possible harm to themselves. Academics, it must be
remembered, are an incredibly cautious lot. When Stevan Harnad announces
you can self-archive this way or that way, he is generally correct.
However, average academics do not read OA-focused lists and even if they
do, they probably wonder whether they can trust his legal expertise.

By embedding self-archiving agreements in the licences, things become
much clearer and it will work to the advantage of OA. As a result, we
should encourage other publishers to follow the lead provided by
Springer, Blackwell and Oxford.

Jean-Claude Guédon


Le jeudi 15 décembre 2005 à 13:11 +0000, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> Below is an item from Peter Suber's OA News, excerpted from a Guardian
> article by Richard Wray, announcing that Oxford, Blackwell, and Springer
> have agreed to change their copyright agreements to allow immediate
> self-archiving of Wellcome-funded articles. This is of course most
> welcome, but Oxford, Blackwell, and Springer were already "green"
> publishers, meaning that they had already given their green light to
> immediate self-archiving by all their authors. Springer is both preprint
> and postprint green, and Oxford and Blackwell are preprint green.
> http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html
> http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?all=yes
>
> In this orgy of embargoes of different durations, may I recommend a
> simple light for seeing everyone's way out of the tunnel? Authors can
> *always* deposit their own final, refereed drafts (postprints -- not
> publisher's PDF) in their Institutional Repository (IR) *immediately
> upon acceptance for publication*. Absolutely no permission from anyone
> is required for depositing. Then they can decide whether they wish to
> set access to that postprint as Open Access (OA) or Restricted Access
> (RA). If they set access as RA, the postprint's metadata (author, title,
> journalname, date, abstract, etc.) are still accessible to all would-be
> users webwide, who can then email the author to request the eprint
> (postprint), which the author can immediately email to the requester
> (until the day the author elects to re-set the archives postprint as
> OA). This guarantees immediate free access and full usage and impact to
> all articles, irrespective of embargoes, in the interim. The only delay
> will be the eprint requesting/sending turn-around time (which the Eprints
> IR software will automatise so as to minimise).
>
> To keep things in focus, you need bear in mind only one incontestable
> fact: Research benefits greatly from immediate uptake and usage.
>
> That's all. Researchers can always provide immediate access to their
> own eprints if they wish to. Putting the full text on the web, openly
> accessible to all, is the fastest, simplest, most efficient, and most
> natural way to do this, but putting the metadata on the web
> and emailing the eprint is almost as fast, and will do -- until the
> embargo frenzy dies the inevitable natural death it deserves!
>
> Wellcome deal with Oxford, Blackwell, and Springer Richard Wray,
> Wellcome boost for open access, The Guardian, December 15,
> http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,16781,1667461,00.html
> 2005. Excerpt:
>
> Three major publishers of scientific research, including Oxford
> University Press, will today announce a deal with The Wellcome Trust,
> the world's second largest charitable funder of medical research
> after Bill Gates, that will see thousands of research papers available
> free to everyone over the internet....The Wellcome Trust has emerged
> as a major proponent of open access and mandates its researchers to
> place a copy of their finished articles on the web for everyone to
> see. Today the Wellcome Trust will announce that three publishers -
> Blackwell, Oxford University Press and Germany's Springer - have all
> agreed to change the licences their authors must sign so that research
> funded by Wellcome but published in their journals can be made freely
> available online as soon as it is published. The Wellcome Trust is
> among a number of medical research funders backing a multi-million
> pound digital research facility, modelled on the US-based PubMed
> Central, where these articles would be stored. News of the deal
> will provide support to Research Councils UK (RCUK) - which brings
> together Britain's eight public research funders. Earlier this year
> RCUK proposed mandating its researchers to get involved in open
> access but some traditional publishers attacked the move as putting
> scientific debate in jeopardy.
>
> Posted by Peter Suber at 12/14/2005 10:20:00 PM.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_12_11_fosblogarchive.html#113461718503474897
Received on Thu Dec 15 2005 - 14:24:56 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:48:09 GMT