Summary: Individual departments should not sit and wait for their university to get its act together: Unless a consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide mandate can be reached promptly, departments should go ahead and adopt their own bottom-up mandates (the "patchwork mandates" recommended by Arthur Sale), as Southampton's ECS did in 2003. Apart from maximising the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output, an OA Repository (with a self-archiving mandate) can serve as its internal record, ending an institution's or department's need to rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor and assess its own research output. (Southampton now has at least 13 EPrints Repositories to date; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.) ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/03/2007 10:26:00 AM.
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.
