Open Access Mandates and the ‘Fair Dealing’ Button
eekilcer@gmail.com's bookmark collection 2012-10-08
Summary:
"With the growth of the Internet in general, and of researchers’ institutional home-pages in particular, and with it the mounting demand for free online access to refereed research, known as Open Access (OA), it became apparent that authors’ Institutional Repositories (IRs) could make both requesting and providing eprints much easier, faster, surer and more efficient. The obvious and optimal option was for eprints to be deposited in their author’s IR and immediately made OA, so anyone on the web could find and download them whenever they wished (Harnad 1995).
For articles published in the majority of journals this soon became possible in principle, because their publishers had endorsed this OA self-archiving by their authors immediately upon publication (SHERPA RoMEO). But the remaining journals either endorsed only the self-archiving of the unrefereed preprint, or imposed an embargo of 6–12 months or more before their authors could make their refereed final drafts OA, or they did not endorse OA self-archiving at all. Thus was born what would later be variously called the ‘Request-a-copy’ Button..."