European Research Council Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving

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

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