More Skulduggery from SSP's Scholarly Scullery - Open Access Archivangelism
Amsciforum 2014-02-15
Summary:
"LEAVE PROVIDING THE OA TO US..."
If there is any party whose interests it serves to debate the necessary and sufficient conditions for calling an institutional or funder OA policy an OA “mandate,” it’s not institutions, funders or OA advocates, whose only concern is with making sure that their policies (whatever they are called) are successful in that they generate as close to 100% OA as possible, as soon as possible. The boundary between a mandate and a non-mandate is most definitely fuzzy. A REQUEST is certainly not a mandate, nor is it effective, as the history of the NIH policy has shown. (The 2004 NIH policy was unsuccessful until REQUEST was upgraded to REQUIRE in 2007.) But (as our analyses show), even requirements come in degrees of strength. There can be a requirement with or without the monitoring of compliance, with or without consequences for non-compliance, and with consequences of varying degrees. Also, all of these can come with or without the possibility of exceptions, waivers or opt-outs, which can be granted under conditions varying in their exactingness and specificity. All these combinations actually occur, and, as I said, they are being analyzed in relation to their success in generating OA. It is in the interests of institutions, funders and OA itself to ascertain which mandates are optimal for generating as much OA as possible, as soon as possible. I am not sure whose interests it serves to ponder the semantics of the word “mandate” or to portray as sources of “errors and misinformation” the databases that are indexing in good faith the actual OA policies being adopted by institutions and funders. (It is charges of "error and misinformation" that sound a bit more like propaganda to me, especially if they come from parties whose interests are decidedly not in generating as much OA as possible, as soon as possible.) But whatever those other interests may be, I rather doubt that they are the ones to be entrusted with indexing the actual OA policies being adopted by institutions and funders -- any more than they are to be entrusted with providing the OA. I think it is not only appropriate but essential that services like the University of Southampton's ROAR, ROARMAP, the Universities of Barcelona, Valencia and Catalunya's MELIBEA and University of Bielefeld's BASE are hosted and provided by scholarly institutions rather than by publishers. I also think the reasons for this are obvious.
Link:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1098-More-Skulduggery-from-SPPs-Scholarly-Scullery.htmlFrom feeds:
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » AmsciforumOpen Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks