On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm...@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

*** The faculty ignore the mandates.
>
> This is the reality - Wellcome, who have the sanction of withholding
> grants and put huge efforts into promoting, still only get 55% compliance.
>
> You have spent > 10 years trying to get effective mandates and they are
> hardly working. The compliance in chemistry is 0%.
>
> ZERO.
>

Really? You'll have to tell that to your colleagues at, for example, U.
Liege: There seem to be 3,620 chemistry papers deposited there:

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151

And that's the optimal ID/OA mandate (Liege model) that I recommended.

Wellcome could raise their compliance rate to 100% if they were willing to
listen to advice. (Admirably [indeed pioneeringly] early in adopting an OA
mandate, they have nevertheless since been deaf to advice for years,
insisting on institution-external deposit, allowing publisher deposit, and
wasting scarce research money on paying for Gold OA instead of shoring up
their Green OA mandate.)

Other funders are listening, however, and integrating their mandates with
institutional mandates, to make them mutually reinforcing:

Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/864-.html

How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate
Institutional Mandates
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/891-.html


> There is no way in my or your liftetime that senior chemists will
> self-archive. And that goes for many other disciplines. What are the VCs
> going to do? Sack them ? they bring in grant money?
>

No: draw their attention to the financial benefits, as Alma Swan & John
Houghton have been doing, for Green and Gold OA:
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf

Yes - and probably << 5% of VCs care about it.
>

You are right that the mandate percentage is still far too small (and the
effective mandate percentage is still smaller). But the benefits are large,
and the costs are next to nothing: just effective policy-making and
implementation.


> My argument - or fairy story - is that nothing will happen if we continue
> as we are. We have to get much tougher. And university mandates are seen as
> next to useless - universities can't police them and it alienates the
> faculty.
>
> The attraction of the fairy story is that it's vastly simpler and quicker
> to carry out. It even builds on the apathy of the faculty - the less they
> care, the easier it is.
>
> I am not against green OA - I am arguing that the OA community should
> unite and take decisive action.
>

I'm for reality rather than fairy tales. And reaching for the reachable,
now, rather than fulminating about the unreachable (especially when
reaching for the reachable, now, is eventually likely to bring more of the
unreachable within reach).

Stevan Harnad
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