Open Access Archivangelism

"That the OSTP mandate requires providing OA within a year (at most) is well-known. But how each agency will formulate and implement its mandate is definitely not well-known, nor even fully decided as yet: it is still being worked on, agency by agency (and I'm sure Peter Suber, Heather Joseph, Alma Swan and others with expertise in OA and OA mandates are being consulted). The most important practical implementation issues are: #1 Who must make the paper OA? the fundee or the publisher? Obviously for a uniform, systematically verifiable mandate, it must be the fundee, the one bound by the mandate, and not the publisher, the one that is in conflict of interest with the mandate, and not bound to comply with it (except if paid extra money). #2 Where must the paper be made OA? Here again, for a uniform, systematically verifiable mandate, it must be in one verifiable locus, and the only locus shared by all fundees, all funders and all institutions (and for both Green and Gold OA) is the fundee's own institutional repository - from whence it can be exported or harvested to other sites, such as PubMed Central, if and when needed. #3 When must the paper be made OA? (The mandate already stipulates this: within 12 months of publication at the latest.) #4 When must the paper be deposited? This is the most important question of all, and carries with it the answer to the other questions: the fundee must deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication -- not 12 months after publication -- irrespective of whether it is published in a subscription journal or a Gold OA journal, irrespective of whether the deposit is immediately made OA or embargoed, and irrespective of whether the journal endorses immediate OA or imposes an OA embargo. It is #4 that holds the key to a successful and effective OA mandate, the Liège model 'Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access' model (which Peter Suber calls the 'Dual Deposit/Release' model). The model has been tried and tested, and has already proven to be more effective than any other mandate model, and is both compatible with and subsumes all the other mandate models ..."