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/