From an e-mail alert sent by BioMedCentral:
Earlier this month the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) announced an open access mandate to take effect on September 1, Open Access: Der SNF erlässt Weisung für die Umsetzung. The policy requires open access archiving for the results of SNF-funded research. Grantees may deposit their work in institutional or disciplinary repositories, and must respect any embargo imposed by their publisher.
You can find the text of the announcement here (in German) or here (translated by Google). Open access archiving makes a lot of sense. It gives scholarly publishers a chance to recoup the money they spend reviewing, edicting, and preparing articles for publication, and it ensures that articles are widely available to everyone who is interested after a reasonable period.
The major problem with open access archiving is that the text of the articles posted in repositories may not be identical to the text that appears in journals. I think that the text of articles I deposited in UConn's DigitalCommons is the same as what appeared n the published articles. But all I can say for sure is that the two versions are very similar. It's unlikely that anyone will care enough about exactly what I wrote to care about any differences between the versions, but I can imagine cases where it would be critical to know which version is the “authentic” version.
Or maybe it's not a problem at all. Maybe as scholarship evolves in a digital age, we'll worry less about authenticity.
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