From: "Harnad, Stevan" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 11:51:34 -0400 Here is an important (and very welcome) correction from Eloy Rodrigues: ****** On Jun 19, 2014, at 7:47 AM, Eloy Rodrigues <eloy—sdum—uminho--pt> wrote: Hi Stevan, The CAS mandate is for immediate deposit: CAS requires its researchers and graduate students to deposit an electronic version of the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts of their research articles, resulted from any public funded scientific research projects, submitted and consequently published in academic journals after the issuing of this policy, into the open access repositories of their respective institutes at the time the article is published, to be made publicly available within 12 months of the official data of publication. And CAS already has a network of IRs. Xiaolin Zhang the CAS Library Director has been a very active OA and IR advocate. Best, Serviços de Documentação Eloy Rodrigues Direcção Campus de Gualtar, 4710 - 057 Braga - Portugal Campus de Azurém, 4800 058 Guimarães http://www.sdum.uminho.pt | De: Stevan Harnad Enviada: quinta-feira, 19 de Junho de 2014 12:00 The two Chinese OA Mandates (NSFC and CAS) came fast (2014), but the possibility of complying with them is coming slowly (no repository till 2016). In addition, articles need not be deposited until 12 months after publication. In most fields, especially the fast-moving sciences, the benefits of Open Access (maximised uptake, usage, impact and progress) are biggest and most important within the first year of publication. That is the growth tip of research. Access losses in the first year are never fully caught up in later years. The iron needs to be struck when it is hot. There are two very simple steps that China can take to minimise the needless loss of research uptake, usage and impact because of lost time: (1) China should set up the repositories immediately, using the available free softwares such as EPrints and DSpace. It requires only a server and a few hours worth of set-up time and the repository is ready for deposits. There is no reason whatsoever to wait two years. It would also be sensible to have distributed local repositories — at universities and research institutions — rather than just one central one. Each institution can easily set up its own repository. All repositories are interoperable and if and when desired, their contents can be automatically exported to or harvested by central repositories. (2) Although an OA embargo of 12 months is allowed, China should mandate that deposit itself must be immediate(immediately upon acceptance for publication). Access to the deposit can be set as closed access instead of OA during the embargo if desired, but EPrints and DSpace repositories have the “Request-Copy” Button for closed-access deposits so that individual users can request and authors can provide an individual copy for research purposes with one click each. The repository automatically emails the copy if the author clicks Yes. Stevan Harnad ******* On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 5:04 AM, Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]> wrote: On May 15 both the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) announced new open access policies. Both funders’ policies require that all papers resulting from funded projects must be deposited in online repositories and made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication — a model pioneered by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008, when it introduced its influential Public Access Policy. As a result of the new Chinese policies there will be a significant increase in the number of research papers freely available, not least because it comes at a time when the number of papers published by Chinese researchers is growing rapidly. In reporting news of the policies, Nature indicated that Chinese research output has grown from 48,000 articles in 2003, or 5.6% of the global total, to more than 186,000 articles in 2012, or 13.9%. Of the latter figure, more than 100,000 papers, or 55.2% of Chinese ouput, involved some funding from the NSFC. A Q&A conducted by email with Prof. Yonghe Zheng, Deputy Director General of the Bureau of Policy, NSFC can be viewed here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-open-access-interviews-deputy.html