SUNScholar/Open Access/Good Practices

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Which Green OA Mandate should an institution adopt?
ID/OA:

The Immediate Deposit, Optional Access-setting (ID/OA) mandate immediately guarantees at least 63% OA plus 37% Almost-OA, moots all objections on copyright grounds, and does not put the author's choice of journal at risk by requiring individual licensing negotiations by the would-be author with the publisher (with no guarantee of a successful outcome). The other alternative candidate mandates are:

ID/IA:

The Immediate Deposit/Immediate Access (ID/IA) mandate is stronger than ID/OA. But how can such a mandate manage to reach consensus on adoption as long as 37% of journals don't endorse immediate OA self-archiving? (Invariably this has meant having to allow an author opt-out or waiver for such cases, in which case the policy is no longer a mandate at all -- i.e., it is weaker than ID/OA. Hence not one of the existing mandates to date is ID/IA.)

ID/DA:

The usual compromise, therefore, is to allow access embargoes, with or without a cap on the maximal allowable length. But an Immediate Deposit/Delayed Access (ID/DA) mandate, with no cap on the allowable delay (embargo) is simply identical to ID/OA! Adding a cap on the maximal allowable embargo delay is splendid, but that's just ID/OA with an embargo cap. (So if an institution can reach successful consensus on this stronger mandate (capped ID/DA), they should by all means adopt it; but if not, they should just go ahead and adopt ID/OA.)

DD/DA:

Next there is Delayed Deposit/Delayed Access (DD/DA), in which the deposit itself may be delayed until the embargo elapses, instead of being done immediately upon acceptance for publication, as in ID/OA. But with or without an embargo cap, DD/DA is in fact needlessly weaker than ID/OA, because it arbitrarily loses the 37% Almost-OA that authors can provide semi-automatically via the button, until the date at which each embargo elapses. (DD/DA further risks needlessly losing a lot of the 63% OA as well, by not requiring immediate deposit in any case.)

The Harvard Good Policy Practice References
See: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/8603


 * Preface
 * Drafting a policy
 * Adopting a policy
 * Implementing a policy
 * Filling the repository
 * Talking about a policy
 * Revising this guide
 * Other formats for this guide
 * Additional resources

UNESCO Guidelines

 * http://sparceurope.org/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access
 * http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access/

How to deal with embargoes
See copy of recent GOAL list email below: The two further mechanisms to reduce/eliminate and above all detoxify OA embargoes are

(1) to require institutional repository *deposit* immediately upon acceptance for publication (whether or not OA is embargoed) and

(2) to implement the institutional repository's email eprint request;

https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy http://wiki.eprints.org/w/RequestEprint

Stevan Harnad