Here is a message I sent to the US White House about the OATP Presidential mandate.
First I would like to express my support and thanks for the announcement of the policy on open access to scientific literature announced by Dr John Holdren. This is an important expansion of themove towards open access globally and in all disciplines. THis is in no way a criticism, but a push to help ensure that the implementation of this policy achieves the best effect. There are two problems with the existing NIH policy which impede its effectiveness and I would urge that you consider these in communications with the relevant heads of agencies. The first is that the primary means of achieving Open Access should be by deposit in either an institutional repository (for those researchers with an institutiona such as a research lab or a university) or in a single nominated general repository (preferably the OpenDepot: www.opendepot.org). Please do not encourage agencies to make the mistake of following the NIH which mandated direct deposit in BioMedCentral. By all means encourage automatic harvesting for relevant papers to relevant central or subject repositories such as BMC or even an agencies own. However, mandating deposit in an institutional repository encourages and reinforces institutions to maintain their own repositories and to mandate deposit of all research into that repository (not just federal funded research). While the federal government cannot easily mandate the outputs of research it does not fund to be deposited, specifying institutional repositories as the locus of deposit of outputs from federally-funded projects helps to encourage institutional mandates, and reduces the complexity of complying with multiple funder mandates: researchers deposit in the institutional repository whichever funder or funders they work with (and by adding a "funder" field, any central harvesting can then be automatic, as can reports to the funder about compliance with the mandate - see next point). The second problem with the NIH mandate which should be avoided is related and is the oversight of compliance with the mandate. By specifying that the institution and the author(s) have the responsibility for deposit in their institutional repository, this allows quite simple checking of compliance with the mandate. In particular, the submission of future funding applications and reports on current/recently completed projects can then admit papers as evidence of track record/project success only if they are accompanied by a pointer to the deposit. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
