Hi, To be clear, we will seek a university mandate in Aberystwyth, but expect that compliance will only follow if backed up by adequate and ongoing advocacy. I have also seen this morning a report of only 4% of mandates succeeding, so I feel that I am receiving rather mixed messages on this. I am not sure that lobbying parliaments to force funding bodies to comply is the best first step, since, as you pointed out yourself, funding bodies are increasingly going in this direction themselves (in Britain, anyway), so it is clear that developing a voluntary code works to this extent. However, despite the six out of seven funding bodies requiring green OA, we do not yet see substantial compliance from academics as a result. We now need a growth in awareness amongst the authors, as well as among the funders. In short, inclusivity and rewards tend to breed co-operation, whereas mere legal directives are generally less well received. So the mandate from Brussels might not actually have changed the immediate situation much, except perhaps in terms of publicity.
I take the point that not all research is funded, as I come from an arts background myself, where it is less frequently so. Here the need for advocacy is even stronger, as we have no carrot to offer except web hits. On the other hand, we can hope, as you point out, that the new metrics system will offer a greater carrot, if it lives up to expectations and if it takes OA archiving properly into account. How this system will work has been left to some extent deliberately unclear. I feel that the position of OA repositories is not yet strong enough to deliver our message adequately to legislators, which may be the reason why the initiative in the EU Parliament failed. As very few repository managers are full time, often engaged in other library or IT work, professional representation remains weak. At a recent UKCoRR meeting, only three members (where roughly half the total members were present) were full-time, including myself. In answer to the reply made by Prof. Charles Oppenheim, I reiterate my case study of a member of staff here being unaware that the funding body for his research required OA archiving, in which he would have failed because he did not read the agreement and therefore risked losing further grants. Clearly funding bodies can't penalise the vast number of academics in his position at the outset without engaging in some publicity and advocacy themselves in the beginning. They can usefully give the impression that they will do so, however, as it may in any event advance the cause of OA. To summarise, we are all approaching the issue from much the same point of view, but it is jumping the gun to think we can find a simple legal solution out of the box without doing the necessary work in talking to our audience first. Yes, something useful could have been done in Brussels, possibly. However, not enough ground work has been done, so I reiterate that the time is *not* in fact ripe as suggested. Most repositories are embryonic, without proper policy or software frameworks, some with almost no content on which to build. We need to act in our own universities by going out and speaking to the academic staff, not spend increasing amounts of time discussing the niceties of the matter here, fiddling while Rome burns. If some of you wish to spend your time lobbying parliaments instead, there is room for all kinds of contributions. However, we cannot expect everybody to do so, without any kind of professional representation. In the meantime, for my own small part, I will go back to advocacy, and handling the latest submissions in my repository, which on a collective basis, between us all, will exponentially drive the growth of OA repositories. As you say, Stevan, it is a matter of making sure that the keystrokes are actually made. Best wishes, Talat