Stevan Harnad has circulated this announcement to several lists:
As announced at yesterday's (June 10) Electronic Thesis and Dissertations meeting ETD 2009: Bridging the Knowledge Divide, Universities are now invited to register their Open Access Thesis Deposit mandates in ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies), alongside the existing 85 university and funder mandates to deposit refereed research articles.
Actually, OA thesis deposit mandates have been growing for years. (Please include the date of adoption, if possible, when registering.) The reason ROARMAP had not been recording OA thesis mandates until now was that refereed-research deposit mandates had not yet become sufficiently widespread and well-known, so there was some risk that OA mandates would be identified exclusively with thesis deposit mandates.
But now that there are already a respectable number of refereed-research deposit mandates, adding the thesis mandates into ROARMAP should help accelerate the adoption of both kinds of mandates by universities. Indeed, each university should integrate the two kinds of mandates into a unified policy on archiving, managing, assessing and showcasing its own research output.
So please do register your own university's OA thesis mandates as well as its OA refereed-research mandates in ROARMAP -- for the record, for the continuously updated growth table, and for the growth curves (which will soon be continuously updating too), as well as in order to encourage further adoptions by other universities....
PS: I second the motion, and hope that every research institution will mandate OA for ETDs as well for the peer-reviewed research articles of the faculty.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/11/2009 06:06:00 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.
