Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, February 22, 2008

Variations on the theme of the Harvard OA policy

Stevan Harnad, The Hybrid Copyright Retention and Deposit Mandate, Open Access Archivangelism, February 22, 2008.  Excerpt:

Summary:  In a blog posting that I quote and comment upon below, my OA comrade-at-arms, Peter Suber, compares Harvard's Copyright-Retention Mandate, with opt-out (CMo), with an immediate Deposit Mandate, with no-opt-out (DMn).

The amendment of the Harvard mandate that I am urging, however, is not to substitute DMn for CMo but to upgrade CMo so as to jointly mandate BOTH CMo AND DMn (the former with an opt-out option, the latter without: CMo+DMn).

That way the Harvard policy will capture all the deposits that would have been made by authors who did not opt out of copyright retention PLUS the deposits that would not have been made, because the author had opted out of the copyright retention clause.

The amended mandate only gains; it loses nothing at all of what would have been generated by the original Harvard mandate alone....