All entries for Wednesday 16 January 2008

Open Access and funders

Writing about web page http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/01/oa-mandate-from-european-research.html

The repositories and open access blogosphere are full of the news of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandate for Open Access publishing and deposit. On December 26 2007, a mandate to self-archive all NIH-funded research articles became US law.  

The European Research Council Guidelines for Open Access, published on 10 Jan are also exciting news, and perhaps more directly relevant to WRAP because of the UK context. What the ERC guidelines say is:

"2. The ERC considers essential that primary data - which in the life sciences for example could comprise data such as nucleotide/protein sequences, macromolecular atomic coordinates and anonymized epidemiological data - are deposited to the relevant databases as soon as possible, preferably immediately after publication and in any case not later than 6 months after the date of publication. "

What I think is worth further investigation is what they mean by "Open Access". Because our repository will make pre-prints and post-prints or whichever version is allowed by a publisher openly accessible: would that meet the funder's requirement, or does the funder mean that the final version should be available on open access, ie Open Access with capital letters? Is this distinction that I understand between the capitalised Open Access and open access which we intend to offer something that is widely understood and intended by the ERC?

Also the matter of data being deposited is very interesting, for the further development of institutional repositories like WRAP.

Jenny Delasalle : 16 Jan 2008 11:25 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem