Begin forwarded message:
From: Carolina Rossini <carolina.rossini gmail.com>
Date: February 17, 2009 9:42:50 AM EST (CA)
To: BOAI Forum <boai-forum ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: [BOAI] BU goes open access for faculty scholarship
http://www.bu.edu/today/node/8320
University Council Approves Open Access Plan
BU TO CREATE FREE ARCHIVE OF FACULTY RESEARCH
Dear All,
As it is not clear from the Press Release whether this is a mandate
or just a recommendation, I've written to Prof. Barbara Millen of BU,
co-chair of the committee, to ask for a clarification:
First, congratulations on the adoption of the resolution "to support
an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty
and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the
authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit."
But could I ask you what the actual policy is? Is it a mandate, like
NIH's or Harvard's?
Or is it just a request/recommendation/invitation/encouragement to
faculty to deposit their work in the new BU archive?
It makes a big difference, because experience so far shows that
mandates (i.e., requirements) work, whereas requests do not: The NIH
mandate was first adopted as a request, and after 2 years it was
realized that it had failed -- generating only 4% deposits, which is
even below the global baseline for spontaneaou (unmandated) deposit
of 15%. But once it was made into a mandate, it quickly reached 60%
compliance and is soon likely to approach 100%.
If the BU OA policy is indeed a mandate, could I ask you
to register it as such in the Registry of Open Access Repositories'
Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) alongside the 65 other OA
Mandates that have been adopted worldwide?
Many thanks,
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Feb 17 2009 - 16:09:03 GMT