Re: University of Leicester's Self-Archiving Policy

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:18:56 +0100

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, J.P.L.Barwick_at_lboro.ac.uk wrote:

> Here at Loughborough University, we have been encouraging our authors to
> sign a licence to publish as opposed to the traditional Copyright
> Transfer Agreement. This has been endorsed by our Vice-Chancellor and a
> letter was sent to all academic and research staff, with a model
> licence. This has raised awareness amongst academics about the rights
> they have over their work once submitted to a journal and provoked much
> interest and discussion.

Loughborough is encouraging rights retention and also encouraging (but
not mandating) deposit. Now Loughborough needs to look at and compare
its deposit and growth rates with those for other IRs, mandated and
mandated. That will give an objective indication of the likelihood that
encouragement to deposit (with or without encouragement to retain rights)
does any better at Loughborough than the worldwide baseline.

Time's a'wasting, and impact is being lost, while we keep trying small
steps that have already shown themselves to be insufficient,
repeatedly...

    http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

> Unfortunately, this does not help overcome the thorny problem of
> publisher PDFs versus author final versions and we too have had similar
> experiences to Keith. It seems to me that there is a need for
> institutions to make a stand rather than expecting individual academics
> to do so.

The thorny problem is not PDFs versus author final versions! The thorny
problem is getting papers deposited at all. And the solution is already
known, and need only be adopted: The ID/OA mandate:

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

Instead of continuing to fumble at reinventing the wheel, spoke by
spoke, we should take the model that has already been shown to work,
and adopt it!

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
    http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
    BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
    a suitable one exists.
    http://www.doaj.org/
AND
    in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
    in your own institutional repository.
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://archives.eprints.org/
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Mon Jun 11 2007 - 13:49:18 BST

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