Re: What Provosts Need to Mandate

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 15:19:59 +0100

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Michael Carroll wrote:

> I have a question that I'm sure you've covered in a prior
> posting, but it would help to get the executive summary version
> of your answer. I hear you to be arguing:
>
> 1. 100% OA is desirable from society's perspective.
> 2. 100% OA also is in authors' and their employing institutions' self
> interest, respectively.
> 3. 100% OA does not require changes in business models or allocations
> of copyright.
> 4. Technological hurdles to 100% OA are trivial.
> 5. Therefore the only real obstacle to 100% OA (at least in STM
> literature) is authors' unwillingness to step over the trivial
> technological hurdle.
>
> My question to you as a scientist is why? What explains the failure of
> so many authors to act in their self interest?

Swan & Brown's survey results answer this question completely.

    Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2004) Authors and open
    access publishing. Learned Publishing 17(3):pp. 219-224.
    http://cogprints.org/4123/
    Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2004) JISC/OSI JOURNAL AUTHORS SURVEY
    Report. In JISC Report
    http://cogprints.org/4125/
    http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt

The one-word summary is KEYSTROKES. It is merely keystroke inertia that stands in
our way (and has been for 10+ years), nothing else.

    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.ppt

Here is an executive summary of the reasons the keystrokes are not being
performed, in order of priority:

    (1) Author unawareness of the impact-enhancing effects of OA
    self-archiving

    (2) Author unawareness of the possibility and the means of doing
    OA self-archiving

    (3) Among the (minority of) authors who are aware of OA and its
    benefits (1 and 2), the incorrect assumption that it is time-consuming
    to do the keystrokes (it actually 6-10 minutes per paper, i.e., 40 minutes
    per year for the average researcher):

        Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of
        the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
        http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

    (4) Author reports, from Swan & Brown's two international,
    cross-disciplinary surveys, that they are busy, overloaded, and
    will only self-archive if/when they are required to do so by the
    employers and/or funders, but if they are so required, 79% report
    they will do it WILLINGLY, 17% that they will do it reluctantly,
    and only 4% that they will not do it.

So what is clearly needed for immediate 96% self-archiving is

    (a) a mandatory self-archiving policy for universities and
    research-funders (as recommended by Berlin 3 and the UK Select
    Committee):
  http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html
  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm

    plus

    (b) an information campaign to inform researchers,
    their institutions and their funders about (i) how OA self-archiving
    enhances research impact
  http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
    as well as (ii) how to go about self-archiving
  http://software.eprints.org/handbook/

> To put it another way, your consistent response to various posts is
> that they miss the point - the only thing that has to happen is to get
> scientists to use the rights they have under their copyright agreements
> to self-archive. If we all were to agree with you, what action(s)
> has/have to occur to bring about that change in behavior?

Vide supra!

> One answer could be that institutions have to mandate self-archiving
> (and I know you have many posts along these lines), and the studies show
> that many scientists would welcome such a mandate. But that response
> actually indicates that scientists either (a) don't know that they
> already can self archive; or (b) don't think the benefits to them of
> self-archiving are worth the costs of doing it unless they're ordered
> to.

Not quite: What it indicates is that that researchers (and their
institutions) (a) don't know that they already can self archive (as you
correctly note)
AND they (b) don't know the impact-enhancing benefits of self-archiving,
AND (c) they don't know how to self-archive, nor what time/effort it involves,
AND consequently, being busy, (d) they will not do it until/unless it is required.

One might note in passing that many of them would not publish either, unless
it was required ("publish or perish")!

So what is needed is carrots and sticks: Information on the benefits and on the
ease of the means, and a policy requiring it. The rewards (for publication and
citation impact, which hiring, promotion and even funding committees are already
rewarding) are already in place. It is merely the causal connection that needs
to be made explicit for researchers.

(For 32 other causes of Zeno's Keystroke Paralysis, see:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32-worries ).

> If your answer is along one of these lines, what specific actions need
> to be taken - and by whom - to alter authors' understanding or
> cost-benefit calculation?

Maybe only a crass translation of all of this into salary and research
dollars will do the trick (and I have urged doing that explicit
translation many times before!).

Here is the preprint of a short paper I have just submitted to Research
Money Magazine (in Canada):

    Canadian Universities Need to Self-Archive Their Research Articles
    Online To Maximize Their Research Impact

    Stevan Harnad

    The research community fills about 24,000 peer-reviewed research
    journals across all fields and languages worldwide, publishing about
    2.5 million articles per year. The output of one research-active
    university might be from 1000 to 10,000 or more articles per year
    depending on size and productivity. Researchers are employed,
    promoted and salaried -- and their research projects are funded --
    to a large extent on the basis of the usefulness and impact of their
    research. Research that is used more tends to be cited more. So
    citations are counted as a measure of usage and impact.

    The dollar value (in salary and grant income) of one citation varies
    from field to field, depending on the average number of authors,
    papers and citations in the field; the marginal value of one citation
    also varies with the citation range (0 to 1 being a bigger increment
    than 30 to 31, since 60% of articles are not cited at all, 90%
    have 0-5 citations, and very few have more than 30 citations:
    http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/classement_citations.htm ).
    A much-cited study estimated the "worth" of one citation
    (depending on field and range) in 1986 at $50-$1300:
    http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf

    One of the ways researchers try to maximize the usage and impact of
    their research is by submitting them to journals with high "impact
    factors" (i.e., average citation counts per article). Journal impact
    factors vary as citations do: Most journals hover just below and
    above 1 (excluding author self-citations); journals with impact
    factors above 30 are rare. Success in getting a paper accepted by
    a high impact journal depends on the paper's quality and the rigor
    of the standards of the journal's peer review system. In general,
    higher impact journals (in the same field) tend to have higher
    rejection rates:
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/BMJ.html

    But now there is a new way to increase every article's research
    impact, over and above publishing it in the highest quality journal
    whose peer review standards it can meet: The online medium has now
    made it possible for authors to supplement the usage and impact
    that their research receives from those users whose institutions can
    afford to subscribe to the journal in which the article is published
    with the usage and impact of all potential users whose institutions
    cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it is published
    -- by self-archiving an online version of the article in their own
    institutional web archive, openly accessible to all would-be users
    webwide: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/

    There is now a growing number of studies on research impact
    for articles across all fields,in each case comparing the
    citation counts (always within the same journal and year)
    for articles that have and have not been self-archived by
    their authors. With virtually no exceptions the articles that
    have self-archived supplements are turning out to have 50%
    to over 300% greater research impact than those that do not:
    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html. Considering that
    90% of research articles today have 5 or fewer citations, this is
    a dramatic result for research progress itself, even before we try
    to translate it into its financial "worth" to researchers and their
    institutions in terms of prestige and research income in 2005.

    Yet, despite its substantial benefits, self-archiving -- now at
    10-20% across fields -- is still growing far too slowly:
http://www.isinet.com/isihome/media/presentrep/essayspdf/openaccesscitations2.pdf

    There exist at least 200 institutional open-access archives worldwide,
    but most are less than 20% full, relative to each institution's annual
    output of research articles. Canada, with 27 of those archives, is
    fourth in the world in archive number (after the US, UK and Germany)
  http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
    but its archives are as underfilled as the rest, even though Canada
    is also high in proportionate research output
  http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/analyse_pays.htm

    Researchers have been slow to self-archive, partly because
    they are not yet aware of its benefits, and partly because
    they feel they already have enough to do (unaware that
    it takes only 6-10 minutes per article to self-archive it:
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/). Publishers are certainly not
    at fault for the fact that authors have been so slow to self-archive:
    Ninety-two percent of the 8450 journals surveyed to date (including
    most of the top journals) have already given their authors an explicit
    green light to self-archive: http://romeo.eprints.org/

    In two international surveys, researchers have indicated
    exactly what needs to be done to get them to self-archive:
    Seventy-nine percent of authors replied that they do not now
    self-archive, and will not self-archive, until and unless their
    employers or funders require them to do so; but if/when they do
    require it, they will self-archive, and self-archive willingly:
    http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt

    The remedy is on the way: At the recent international conference at
    the University of Southampton UK on formulating a concrete policy for
    institutions to adopt in order to implement the Berlin Declaration
    on Open Access -- http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html -- the
    delegates recommended exactly what the researchers in the two surveys
    had indicated was needed in order to motivate them to self-archive:
    an institutional self-archiving mandate. And soon afterward, some
    of the world's biggest research institutions (including FranceÕs
    CNRS and the multinational CERN) led the way by adopting the policy:
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

    It is now time for Canada to follow suit:
  http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
    to the benefit of Canadian researchers, their institutions, their
    funders, their funder's funder (i.e., the Canadian tax-payer) and
    to the benefit of (worldwide) research itself.
Received on Thu May 05 2005 - 15:19:59 BST

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