Hello Something about possible duplication of information was bothering me for some time, and the word 'otherwise' (underlined below) prompted this mail and the two questions.
> UNIFIED OPEN-ACCESS PROVISION STRATEGY: > (OAJ) Researchers publish their research in an > open-access journal if a suitable one exists [5%], *otherwise* > (OAA) they publish it in a suitable toll-access > journal [95%] and also self-archive it in their own research > institution's open-access research archive. (1) Are there any guidelines about self-archiving (adding to the Institutional E-print server) articles which have been published in 'gold' journals? The disadvantages due to duplication are probably self-evident. However, not all 'gold' journals provide good search facilities. Secondly, it may not be easy (at least for some of the gold journals) for them to make their holdings easily accesible for the search engines of other archives. I personally feel that the advantages would easily outweigh the disadvantages, but would be grateful for critical advise on this matter. Fortunately, an excellent E-print archive facilty has been set up at our institute (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India) by Dr. Rajashekar. Unfortunately (and perhaps expectedly) the response from the reseachers has been lukewarm at best. The Institute publishes more than a thousand papers in peer reviewed journals every year, and a sizable fraction is in the 'gold' journals. A simple 'go ahead' from the authors would (I suppose) be adequate for the Administration to download the articles from the gold journals and deposit them in the archives (after doing that small but crucial bit of work for making appropriate entries). But before such an initiative is launched, I wanted to know if there are any problems that may crop up later and which I have missed. (2) How are "toll-free but registration required" journals to be classified? The DOAJ permits listing such journals, but the issue of searchability probably becomes more serious for these. Thank you in anticipation. N. V. Joshi
