The default version to deposit is the author's final refereed draft, as it is the one with the fewest publisher restrictions and it fulfills all the usage needs of all (otherwise access-denied) users; the publisher's PDF should only be deposited if the publisher agrees.
The locus of the deposit should definitely be the author's own IR. In the OAI-interoperable era, the distributed IR metadata are harvested by central harvesters. Creating and depositing in separate central archives for each discipline and combination of disciplines is not the coherent and systematic way to ensure that all institutional research output is made OA.
The Leicester Research Archive's policy -- deposit the author's postprint, except if the publisher explicitly allows the proprietary PDF to be deposited, and deposit in the author's own IR, rather than central repositories -- is hence correct, but if the IR does not wish to remain near-empty, as now (only 320 deposits in its first year), deposit needs to be mandated, not just invited. I strongly recommend adopting the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/09/2007 01:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
