Bravo to France and to Franck Laloë for the progress of the French national repository, HAL! As noted before in the AmSci Forum, it just might be that France -- an exception among western nations in this regard -- is a sufficiently centralised country to be able to manage 100% self-archiving of its research output of 120,000 articles per year in a centralised national archive (HAL) instead of a distributed network of Institutional Repositories (IRs).
But what is unlikely is that France is so much of an exception that it will be able to do this without a national self-archiving mandate. (See the graphs of HAL's current and projected growth rate in Franck's presentation and draw your own conclusion about whether and when 100% OA is likely to be reached in France without a mandate. Its present deposit rate seems to be about 12% of French output, which is about the international average for spontaneous [unmandated] self-archiving.)
The advantage of such centralisation, however, is that one national mandate will be enough....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/26/2006 09:50:00 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.
