Stevan Harnad comment for the SSHRC on OA

Stevan Harnad has posted his comments for the SSHRC consultation on OA in a new blog posting to Archivangelism. Excerpt:

Let journal reform take care of itself: SSHRC's concern should only be with research access (and impact). Mixing that up with forced journal-reform will again just elicit needless opposition and delay for the primary target: 100% OA for Canadian SSHRC-funded research article output (authors' final drafts) so that all users worldwide can access, use, apply and build upon it, and not just those users who (or whose institutions) happen to be able to afford to access the journal in which the publisher's official version happens to be published. Publishing in OA journals should be encouraged where possible, but not mandated. IF SSHRC wishes, it can offer to help support authors' OA journal publishing costs. In sum: Mandating OA self-archiving and encouraging (and supporting) OA publishing is all that's needed from SSHRC. The rest will come with the territory. But if SSHRC instead needlessly over-reaches, needlessly trying to strong-arm publishing reform directly, the whole thing will just get needlessly bogged down for years more....nstitutional repositories present no "operation challenges," either for SSHRC or for institutions. Institutional Repositories (IRs) can and will take care of themselves. SSHRC should mandate self-archiving, and the IRs will be created and filled. SSHRC needs no central SSHRC or Canadian archive. Distributed institutional self-archiving is the most natural, and efficient route to 100% OA: the IRs all interoperable because they are OAI-compliant. If SSHRC wishes, it can harvest from them the articles it has funded. See the Swan/Brown JISC study on central vs. distributed institutional self-archiving and central harvesting....