[OAI-eprints] Open access jeremiads, archivangelism and self-archiving mandates

[Stevan Harnad]

        ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

    Porter, George (2006) Let's Get it Started! 
    Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 47.
    http://www.istl.org/06-summer/viewpoints.html

    "...Stevan Harnad is into the second decade of his jeremiad on
    the subject of self-archiving. A number of platforms have been
    created to support institutional repositories... If librarians and
    academicians agree on the desirability of institutional repositories,
    and software platforms and services are available to make repositories
    technically feasible, one is left to ponder a few questions. Why are
    there so few institutional repositories up and running? Why are the
    existing institutional repositories generally not well filled with
    the intellectual output of their respective institutions?..."

<jeremiad>

Yes, jeremiads for self-archiving are not enough. 

    http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

Yes, creating IR software is not enough. 

    http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD

Yes, creating IRs is not enough. 

    http://archives.eprints.org/

Yes, library activism is not enough. 

    http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000257/

Not even providing the evidence on how self-archiving enhances
research impact is enough: 

    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Only (institutional and funder) self-archiving mandates are (necessary
and) sufficient to set self-archiving inexorably on the path to 100% OA
(yet that's precisely what George Porter fails even to mention!).

    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

Jeremiads are not enough to generate self-archiving mandates either: 

    "What Provosts Need to Mandate" (2003)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#3241

Only the empirical example of those institutions that already
mandate self-archiving, and have thus demonstrated the success of
mandated self-archiving, will generate self-archiving mandates -- and
self-archiving, and 100% OA.

    http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

Amen.

</jeremiad>

Jeremiah