What's holding back the OA policy at the SSHRC?

Stevan Harnad, Canada's SSHRC Just Keeps Spinning Its Wheels, Open Access Archivangelism, October 14, 2006. Excerpt:

Comments on Richard Akerman's blogged notes on David Moorman's SSHRC talk at Institutional Repositories: The Next Generation (Ottawa, October 10, 2006)

"SSHRC has embraced OA in principle, but [it's] a big challenge going from principle to action"

Five out of the eight UK Research Councils (BBSRC, CCLRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC) nevertheless seem to have managed to go from principle to action...

"Does SSHRC have a policy? No. There is more to this than just mandating OA."

Four out of the eight UK Research Councils (BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC) nevertheless seem to have managed to mandate it, and Canada's CIHR seems to have managed to propose to mandate it...

"Figure out how to support OA journals. Conducting experiments to figure out best approach."

Why is SSHRC fussing about supporting OA journals instead of mandating the self-archiving of SSHRC research output? Is SSHRC a research funder or a journal funder? The OA mandate pertains to the former, not the latter: to maximizing the access and impact of SSHRC research output, not to the budgeting of SSHRC's journal subsidies. Journals SSHRC may happen to be subsidising have nothing to do with the mandate in question....

"grant[s] can't have post-award conditions, e.g. can't require article deposit"

Nonsense. If publishing the research in a peer-reviewed journal can be a grant fulfillment condition, so can self-archiving the article....