Summary: The European Commission (EC) Grant Agreement mandates that "an electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript accepted for publication shall also be provided to the Commission" but does not specify how to provide it.
This is an implementational detail. The only thing the Commission needs to do is to specify that the electronic copy should be provided by providing the Commission with the URL of the deposit in the grant-recipient's Institutional Repository (IR).
That will create a synergy with the European University Association's recommendation that its 791 universities in 46 countries mandate that their research output (in all disciplines, whether or not EC-funded) be self-archived in each university's IR.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which likewise needlessly requests direct central deposit, should adopt exactly the same implementational detail. Institutional IR deposit and central harvesting would extend the power and reach of the NIH mandate far beyond just the research NIH funds, and would help to universalize OA and OA mandates.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/29/2008 11:39:00 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.
