There are (at least) three, interrelated, problems: (1) Not every researcher deposits his or her research articles in an open repository/archive; (2) Not every institution has an open repository/archive; (3) Not every funder mandates -- or even encourages -- open access publishing and/or open access provision via self-archiving.
I'm not sure that exchanges about what is best, what is bester, and what is bestest is very helpful in solving these problems. Ad (1): Calling researchers that don't yet provide open access to their papers irrational (or worse) is not likely to work that well; presenting arguments may be slightly better; relentlessly showing the examples of what's in it for them, such as improved citations, is likely to work best. What is being done about that? How many active scientists read the postings on the AMSCI list? Wide spread is needed. Spread, spread, spread. Ad (2): Pretending that all institutions already have open repositories and that every researcher can self-archive his/her articles if only he/she wants it, as a basis for building a convincing argument, is a waste of energy. From all the signals I get, it seems that the majority of institutions don't. This is where central archives, such as PubMed Central really would help. Ad (3): Funders' (be they government or not) mandate of open access is paramount. Requiring deposit in a central or in distributed archives is secondary. There's little milage in distributed-central thinking, so to speak. The likelihood of the NIH plan succeeding or not has everything to do with their willingness to mandate; nothing with their focus on PubMed Central. Besides, depositing in a central open archive precludes in no way depositing in an institutional one as well (or just linking from the institutional one to the central one). Sorry, I realise that this must be a dissapointlingly short message, not in keeping with the list's tradition, but I have no time for more; off to work again, getting the message to authors (we aim at trying to reach several tens of thousands each week), institutions (we call them all on the phone), and funders. I'm afraid it's hard work without quick fixes. Jan Velterop > -----Original Message----- > From: Jean-Claude Guédon > To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org > Sent: 04 October 2004 12:59 > Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving > > Here we go...