University of Zurich: 4th Institution with Self-Archiving Mandate

The University of Zurich has just registered its Institutional Self-Archiving Policy at: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

The 14th institution with a policy, Zurich is the 4th (after Southampton, Queensland University of Technology, and CERN) with a mandate rather than merely a recommendation. This is also the second mandate in a Swiss institution:

    "Based on the Berlin Declaration (Berlin, October 2003)     http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html     and the Berlin 3 Open Access recommendations (Southampton, March     2005) the University of Zurich has decided to

1. require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published and refereed articles in the Institutional Repository of the University of Zurich, if there are no legal objections
2. encourage and support their authors to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journals exists and provide the support to enable that to happen"

[If I could make one suggestion to Prof. Borbely: Zurich's policy would be even more effective, and the optimal model for emulation, if it *required* deposit of the full-text and metadata immediately upon acceptance for publication in all cases (no exceptions), and *recommended* that access to them be immediately set as open-access (if there are no legal objections); otherwise access can be provisionally set as institution-internal, and authors can email eprints of the full-text to any eprint-requesters who request them, based on the metadata visible webwide, alongside the metadata for all the articles with access already set as open-access.]

Stevan Harnad Received on Wed Oct 12 2005 - 23:45:00 GMT