** Cross Posted **

This is an update on the European Research Council (ERC) Open Access
Self-Archiving Mandate.

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

It was registered this January as a "pledged" mandate (rather stronger
than a "proposed" mandate) and it will soon take effect, so I've upgraded
it in ROARMAP to a full funder mandate.

Here is what Professor Jeffrey has written about it (for posting):

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, Jeffery, KG (Keith) wrote:

Here's the base FP7 figures for the duration of the work programme
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/budget_en.html

 From this you see ERC is 7.5 bn of 50.5bn i.e. almost 15%

The key point here is the leveraging; the EC R&D funding is ~ 5% of total
R&D funding in Europe and the interactions between the EC programme
and national programmes are complex - basically politicians try to lever
either negatively (if EC funds this area of research or researcher we
won't) or positively (if EC funds this we'll fund it too).

The ERC is to fund individual researchers, not teams. It will thus give
great prestige to the successful researchers.  With am OA self-archiving
mandate it will give a leadership to all Europe research unachievable
otherwise - i.e. it is a totem. If a (prestigious) researcher with
ERC funding does parallel green deposit for ERC then she will also do it for
her nationally-funded research - by force of habit if nothing else!
The research team around will 'get the habit' too.

Significantly this leadership should also be extended to EIT (European
Institute of Technology).  This will be ~75% industry funded according
to the EC and will involve large numbers of researchers (15-20,000).
Of course it is yet to be approved by the parliament but Barrosso (EC
president) seems determined to push it through.

Prof Keith G Jeffery
Director Information Technology
and International Strategy
CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
President ERCIM & CCLRC Director:        http://www.ercim.org/
W3C Office at CLRC-RAL                      http://www.w3.org/
President euroCRIS                    http://www.eurocris.org/
VLDB Trustee Emeritus:                    http://www.vldb.org/
EDBT Board Member                         http://www.edbt.org/