Over at The Ubiquitous Librarian, Brian Mathews posts about a quick peek at IR statistics. Mathews asked the folks at the institutions with the ten largest DSpace collections for a list of their most-viewed items.
Nature News for Nov.7 has a brief story on the progress of the bill authorizing mandatory deposit of manuscripts reporting the results of research funded by the NIH. The deposit measure is contained in a broader bill, to be voted on this week, that will increase the NIH budget to around $29 billion. President Bush doesn’t like the increases, which he has termed irresponsible, and has promised a veto. But sponsors have attached the funding measure, and by inclusion the mandate, to another bill relating to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. This legislation is popular enough to gather the votes necessary to over-ride the expected veto, or so the supporters hope.
I was waiting for something funny to appear….funny strange, not funny ha! ha!…and in the last paragraph of the Nature News story, there it was. The mandate would apply to fiscal 2008 ONLY. It would have to be renewed each year! This is an absurdity, but is it one to be grateful for, or to reject? The Solons are saying, yes, we buy the argument, but the secret motto of Congress, chiseled in invisible letters over the Capitol entrance is: “we don’t want to hurt or annoy anybody”. So, they give these guys something, and they give those guys something, not enough for either, but too much to say Congress didn’t help. Talk about a poison pill. In the myth Sisyphus was condemned by the Gods, to roll a heavy rock up a hill, only to have it slip away as he neared the top, so he would have to start again. OA advocates will have to do this every year.
Georgia Harper -- University of Texas at Austin
Alex Bienkowski -- University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston
