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Re: Open access jeremiads, archivangelism and self-archiving mandates Dan Lester 25 Sep 2006 19:27 UTC

Saturday, August 19, 2006, 9:58:05 PM, you wrote:

SH> Only the empirical example of those institutions that already
SH> mandate self-archiving, and have thus demonstrated the success of
SH> mandated self-archiving, will generate self-archiving mandates -- and
SH> self-archiving, and 100% OA.

SH>     http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

A bit late for a response, oh Jeremiah, but....

Your page lists Kansas as one that "mandates" self archiving:

However, the following quote from their policy page, for which I thank you
for providing a link, says:

"Calls on all faculty of the University of Kansas to seek amendments to
publisher’s copyright transfer forms to permit the deposition of a digital
copy of every article accepted by a peer-reviewed journal into the ScholarWorks
repository, or a similar open access venue;"

That sounds like a nice positive thing to do, but hardly qualifies as
a mandate to me.

And for NIH, another non-mandate:

"strongly encourages all NIH-funded investigators to make their peer-reviewed
author final manuscripts available to other researchers and the public at the
NIH National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC)"

And at Cornell:

"The Senate strongly urges all faculty to deposit preprint or postprint copies
of articles in an open access repository"

And, finally at Case Western:

"Be it resolved that the Faculty Senate urges the University and its
members to...Post their work prior to publication in an open digital
archive"

Those are the four from the USA on the list.  I didn't take the time
to review those from the UK or Australia or elsewhere.  Although they
all say good and appropriate things, I don't see that a single one has
a mandate, much less one from someone who could enforce it, such as a
Provost. So, they encourage OA, but they do NOT mandate it.

Perhaps we should be more precise in our usage of the English
language?  Or maybe it is a problem of translation from Hebrew or
Aramaic or something else?

dan

--
Dan Lester, Data Wrangler  dan@RiverOfData.com 208-283-7711
3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho  83716-7115 USA
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