Correction: On Sun, 17 Oct 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> http://www.oai.unizh.ch/symposium/program.html > > Hans F. Hoffmann Director of Technology Transfer and Scientific > Computing at CERN and Georg W. Botz, of the Administrative Headquarters > of the Max-Planck Society (MPI) reported that both CERN and MPI have > de-facto already implemented an institutional self-archiving mandate > (although neither is yet official de-iure). Georg Botz has since emailed me to say that in his presentation in Zurich (which was unfortunately one of the 2 presentations I could not attend!) he only spoke about steps that are being taken at MPI toward an OA policy, and that it is incorrect to describe these, as I did, as a "de-facto but not yet a de-iure mandate." (Indeed, speaking of this prematurely as a "mandate" at all might even cause unneeded resistance.) I apologise for this misinterpretation. Here is the abstract of Georg Botz's talk: The Open Access Policy of the Max Planck Society Some years ago the Max Planck Society started developing a new strategy for providing the Max Planck Institutes with the scientific information they need in the era of the internet. In this talk I will present the building blocks of the Open Access Policy of the Max Planck Society. After some remarks on the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, a roadmap towards Open Access is outlined. Some general areas of activity like education, communication, legal issues and a sustainable technical infrastructure are described as well as institutional measures to promote and enforce Open Access. In the final part of this talk I will point out the concrete actions which the Max Planck Society is going to implement in order to make Open Access a reality. Stevan Harnad
