As a historic matter: The European Research Council finalised its Green
OA Self-Archiving Mandate (and it did so 19 days before the NIH mandate!):
"The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded
research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate
research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv
or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access
within 6 months of publication."
http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC_Guidelines_Open_Access_revised_Dec07_FINAL.pdf
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Like the NIH mandate, the ERC mandate is also an immediate-deposit
mandate, with the allowable embargo applying only to the date that the
deposit is made OA, not to the date it is deposited (which must be
immediately upon publication). The ERC embargo is also shorter (6
months, whereas NIH is 12 months). Better still, the deposit may be
either institutional or central.
The only way to improve on this nigh-optimal mandate is to require that
the deposit be institutional ("Deposit Institutionally, Harvest
Centrally") except if the grant recipient's institution does not yet
have an institutional repository (in which case deposit should be in an
interim generic repository such as the UK's DEPOT or Europe's
EurOpenScholar).
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
http://roar.eprints.org/
Depot
http://depot.edina.ac.uk/FAQ/
EurOpenScholar
http://recteur.blogs.ulg.ac.be/?p=151
Bravo to both the US and Europe. Now it is time for the other US and
EC funding agencies -- and, even more importantly, all the US and
European universities -- to follow suit with Green OA Self-Archiving
Mandates of their own.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
Chaire de recherche du Canada Professor of Cognitive Science
Institut des sciences cognitives Electronics & Computer Science
Universite du Quebec a Montreal University of Southampton
Montreal, Quebec Highfield, Southampton
Canada H3C 3P8 SO17 1BJ United Kingdom
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/ http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/
