Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, February 26, 2007

Update on the ERC's OA mandate

Stevan Harnad, ERC OA Self-Archiving Mandate Pledge Upgraded, a post to several discussion forums, February 25, 2007.  Excerpt:

This is an update on the European Research Council (ERC) Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate.

It was registered this January as a "pledged" mandate (rather stronger than a "proposed" mandate) and it will soon take effect, so I've upgraded it in ROARMAP to a full funder mandate.

Here is what Professor Jeffrey has written about it (for posting): ...

Here's the base FP7 figures for the duration of the work programme:

From this you see ERC is 7.5 bn of 50.5bn i.e. almost 15%

The key point here is the leveraging; the EC R&D funding is ~ 5% of total R&D funding in Europe and the interactions between the EC programme and national programmes are complex - basically politicians try to lever either negatively (if EC funds this area of research or researcher we won't) or positively (if EC funds this we'll fund it too).

The ERC is to fund individual researchers, not teams. It will thus give great prestige to the successful researchers. With am OA self-archiving mandate it will give a leadership to all Europe research unachievable otherwise - i.e. it is a totem. If a (prestigious) researcher with ERC funding does parallel green deposit for ERC then she will also do it for her nationally-funded research - by force of habit if nothing else! The research team around will 'get the habit' too.

Significantly this leadership should also be extended to EIT (European Institute of Technology). This will be ~75% industry funded according to the EC and will involve large numbers of researchers (15-20,000). Of course it is yet to be approved by the parliament but Barrosso (EC president) seems determined to push it through.