European Research Council Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving Stevan Harnad 12 Jan 2008 06:34 UTC

As a historic matter: The European Research Council finalised its Green
OA Self-Archiving Mandate (and it did so 19 days before the NIH mandate!):

     "The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded
     research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate
     research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv
     or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access
     within 6 months of publication."
http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC_Guidelines_Open_Access_revised_Dec07_FINAL.pdf
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Like the NIH mandate, the ERC mandate is also an immediate-deposit
mandate, with the allowable embargo applying only to the date that the
deposit is made OA, not to the date it is deposited (which must be
immediately upon publication). The ERC embargo is also shorter (6
months, whereas NIH is 12 months). Better still, the deposit may be
either institutional or central.

The only way to improve on this nigh-optimal mandate is to require that
the deposit be institutional ("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest
Centrally") except if the grant recipient's institution does not yet
have an institutional repository (in which case deposit should be in an
interim generic repository such as the UK's DEPOT or Europe's
EurOpenScholar).

     Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

     Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
http://roar.eprints.org/

     Depot
http://depot.edina.ac.uk/FAQ/

     EurOpenScholar
http://recteur.blogs.ulg.ac.be/?p=151

Bravo to both the US and Europe. Now it is time for the other US and
EC funding agencies -- and, even more importantly, all the US and
European universities -- to follow suit with Green OA Self-Archiving
Mandates of their own.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

Chaire de recherche du Canada		Professor of Cognitive Science
Institut des sciences cognitives	Electronics & Computer Science
Universite du Quebec a Montreal		University of Southampton
Montreal, Quebec			Highfield, Southampton
Canada  H3C 3P8				SO17 1BJ United Kingdom
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/		http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/