On 6-Feb-09, at 10:38 AM, Tomasz Neugebauer wrote: [snip]
When a researcher makes the decision to publish/provide access to their work, the emergent properties of the repository are a relevant consideration. Consider the following hypothetical situation: a researcher in Buddhist studies may, for example, object to being "mandated" to the act of placing his article on the topic of "interdependent co-arising" in the same repository that is also home to articles from another department in his institution that specializes in, say, promoting the philosophy of Charles Darwin in social science. That researcher may wish to place his article in the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, but not in the IR of his university. I agree with Thomas Krichel that researchers currently have the freedom to choose and promote the channels of distribution for their work. Comment As a librarian and faculty member, I strongly support both academic and intellectual freedom. However, this is not an academic freedom issue. If a researcher is not willing to be affiliated with a university because of other research conducted there, they would not want to publish and list their university affiliation, have their name listed as a faculty member on the university website, etc., etc. In other words, if the researcher has such strong philosophical objections to the work of another researcher at a university, they should not be at that university. In situations like this, many researchers choose to work for institutions with a religious mandate, for precisely this purpose. A university green mandate is advisable, in my opinion, even for researchers for whom the more salient open access archive is a disciplinary repository (or disciplinary harvesting service). Universities with researchers whose work is covered by one of the many medical research funding agency mandates (NIH, Wellcome, UK-MRC, CIHR, and more), would be well advised to supplement the funding agency mandate with a university mandate. This would make it easier for the university staff to ensure compliance with the funding agency mandate, hence increasing the probabiliy of university success in receiving funding by avoid unnecessary delays in future funding due to non-compliance. For example, researchers could be required through a university mandate to deposit in a university repository, and provide such metadata as funding support. Then the university repository can be set up to automatically cross-deposit in the appropriate disciplinary repository as well. Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, and does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library. Heather Morrison, MLIS The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com