And if you want to see where the real OA action and growth region is today, see ROARMAP — http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ — which is a registry we maintain at Southampton UK, of all the universities and research funders who have adopted (Green) OA self-archiving mandates. There are now 44 worldwide, most of them in UK, the rest of Europe, and Australia, and including only one North American University, but no mean one: Harvard. And among the North American funders that have mandated Green OA are NIH in the US and CIHR in Canada. Among the mandate recommendations is one from the European Universities Association, with 791 member universities in 46 European countries.

I am just now creating a cluster of Canada Research Chairs (my own at UQAM is in Cognitive Sciences) who will be involved in promoting the adoption of OA mandates at Canadian Universities — as well as in developing Open Access research metrics, in order to measure, recognize and reward online research impact.

I’ll be giving a keynote at ELPUB08 in a few weeks.

Best wishes,
Stevan

http://www.professeurs.uqam.ca/pages/harnad.stevan.htm

He was behind the work on UQAM’s eprint server:

http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/view/people/Lemire,_Daniel.html

Cheers!

In fact, I strongly recommend all of Richard’s superb interviews. For instance, someone who read the Harnad, Suber and Tracz interviews (and their extensive footnotes and references) would learn as much about OA in a day as I’ve learned in several years.

Given the book you have in the works, I cannot overemphasize how useful these interview series are likely to be for you.