Re: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Barbara Birenbaum wrote:

> I am an MLIS student at UCLA.  I am currently working on a paper on
> institutional repositories.  I understand from some of my readings
> that the reality of the institutional repository has moved in another
> direction from the concepts of both the OA model of access and the
> SPARC model of encouraging alternative methods of scholarly
> publication.  Will the NIH mandate, if it is signed into law, move the
> institutional repository back to one or both of its prior purposes or
> will those concepts remain just a part of the broader scope of the
> present repositories?  I would really appreciate hearing the list
> members' thoughts on this.

It was -- and continues to be -- a mistake that the NIH mandate 
specifies PMC as the place to deposit. The way to get maximimum 
benefit from the NIH mandate, and to generalize its benefits to 
all fields and all institutions, is to specify that the deposit 
should be in the author's own Institutional Repository (except in 
the inceasingly rare case where the author's institution does not 
yet have an IR). Then PMC and any other repository can harvest 
the metadata (and, if desired, the deposit itself).

Here is the optimal mandate: "Optimizing OA Self-Archiving 
Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?" 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

Stevan Harnad