Letters

"...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?..."

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

Stevan Harnad
harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html