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[EP-tech] The Importance of Repository EC- (OpenAire) and RCUK-Compliance Tags for Mandate Compliance Verification

**Cross-Posted **

It is extremely important for the success of both funder and institutional OA mandates worldwide that eprints, dspace and all other repositories be made compliant with funder harvesting requirements such as those of OpenAIRE (as Eloy Rodrigues indicates in the passage appended after this message).

For deposit mandates to work, they need to have a reliable and date-stamped compliance verification mechanism.

Plea to repository managers and software developers world-wide: 

This is the time to make sure that your repositories implement the requisite metadata tags for specifying the funding agency (US, EU or RCUK) as well as the article's journal acceptance date).

A system must be designed for ensuring that the mandate will actually be complied with, which means that there has to be an effective, timely monitoring mechanism, with swift feedback and consequences in case of non-compliance. 

That means that immediate-deposit of full-text upon acceptance for publication has to be monitored continuously, based on authors' ongoing publication calendar dates not just retrospectively in 4-6-year batches. 

If compliance is instead left to the the latter -- long-delayed retrospective batches -- then even the talk about a "6-12-month embargo" becomes meaningless! Embargos can only be observed if publication dates are observed, and hence if deposits, whether embargoed or unembargoed, are immediate. That's how deposit-date needs to be integrated into RCUK authors' annual work-flow, including the all-important date-stamping by the official date of the journal's letter of acceptance -- not the wildly varying and incalculable date on which the journal issue actually appears -- which is in turn often far from the calendar date of publication: as much as a year or more at times.)

The EC's and RCUK's  mandates have to be integrated with institutional mandates so as to implement the following 8 shared conditions: 
 
(1)  immediate-deposit (even if access to the deposit is allowed to be embargoed): 
 
(2) of the final peer-reviewed draft 
 
(3) on the date of acceptance by the journal (which is marked by a verifiable calendar date-stamp)
 
(4) and the immediate-deposit must be directly in the author's own institutional repository (not institution-externally -- central repositories can harvest from IRs)
 
(5) so that immediate-deposit can be monitored and verified by the author's institution (regardless of whether the mandate is from a funder or the institution)
 
(6) as a funding compliance condition and/or an institutional employment condition
 
(7) and institutional repository must be designated as the sole locus of deposit  for submitting publications for institutional performance evaluation, funder conditions and national research assessment.
 
(8) Repository deposits must be monitored so as to generate rich and visible metrics of usage and citation so as to verify and reward authors' deposits as well as to showcase and archive the institution's and funder's research output and impact.
 
An instance of mututally reinforcing funder and institutional policies is the FRS-FNRS policy in Belgium.

Best wishes,
Stevan Harnad

On 2012-11-04, at 12:39 PM, "Eloy Rodrigues"  [OpenAire] wrote:
Hi Stevan,

I agree with the recommendations for compliance-verification for RCUK
that I've seen in another message.

Regarding OpenAIRE we tried that our infrastructure helps/cooperate (and not
compete) with the network of institutional repositories. We tried to have
very "low barrier" guidelines for compliance (we are now calling
compatibility), basically just requiring identification of the EC project
and access status (Open Access, embargoed, closed) in a "standard" way. 
EC funded publications will be regularly harvested from compliant/compatible
repositories. So, authors from institutions with compliant repositories,
just need to deposit on their repository to comply to the EC policy. And
even if an author goes to the OpenAIRE portal to deposit a publication, he
will be re-directed to the repository of it's own institution.

But unfortunately the number of compliant repositories is still not high
enough (except on some southern countries like Portugal and Spain), and is
particularly low in the UK...

Best,
Serviços de Documentação
Eloy Rodrigues
Direcção
Campus de Gualtar, 4710 - 057 Braga -  Portugal
Telefone +351 253 604 156/7/8; Fax +351 253 604 159
Campus de Azurém, 4800 058 Guimarães
Telefone +351 253 510 168; Fax +351 253 510 117
http://www.sdum.uminho.pt  | Siga-nos