Deposit Should Be Immediate and Institutional, Whether Or Not Open Access Is Embargoed
The Congressional Open Access (OA) mandate is extremely welcome and timely. To ensure that it is effective, however, it is crucial to require deposit in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, whether or not access to the deposit is embargoed for 12 months. This (1) ensures that the fundee’s institution will monitor and ensure timely compliance with the funder OA policy and (2) facilitates fundees’ providing individual eprints to individual eprint requestors for research purposes during any allowable OA embargo period. Institutional repository deposits can also be (3) automatically exported to any institutional-external repositories the fundee, funding agency or institution wishes. On no account should compliance with funding agency conditions be left to the publisher rather than the fundee and the fundee’s institution. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/865-.html
