Re: Research Reports as Advertisements: An Allegory

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 22:51:56 +0000

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007, Peter Banks wrote:

> I fail to see the logic of mandating that researchers do what, by their own
> behavior, they have said overwhelmingly they do not value. I suppose
> "researchers," you apparently mean a select group of petition-signers, not
> practising researchers at large.

You are quite right to raise this question and it is incumbent on mandate advocates
to reply (and they have, many times!). Here's the latest reply to the latest time the
question was raised, in this Forum. (I will now make it part of the self-archiving
FAQ.)

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, Arthur Smith wrote:

> ...the question under
> discussion was whether authors should be *forced* to make their writings
> OA (through self-archiving). If force is required, it's not clear they
> "are interested" at all.

You are quite right to raise this question and it is incumbent on mandate advocates
to reply. Here goes:

(1) Self-archiving mandates are no more (nor less) a matter of force than
publish-or-perish mandates:

(2) Is it in researchers' interests to publish their findings? Yes. Can they be
relied upon to do so without publish-or-perish? No.

(3) Why don't more researchers self-archive spontaneously? The reasons (in no
particular order) are:

    (3a) Unawareness of the possibility of self-archiving
    (3b) Unawareness of the benefits of self-archiving
    (3c) Worries that self-archiving might be illegal
    (3d) Worries that self-archiving might reduce one's chances of getting published
    (3e) Worries that self-archiving means abandoning peer review
    (3f) Worries that self-archiving is technically hard to do
    (3g) Worries that self-archiving is time-consuming
    (3i) Laziness
    (3j) and dozens of other worries "that despair and shame and [years of
         weariness] forbid me to tabulate"...
         http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32-worries

(4) But not only do Alma Swan's international, interdisciplinary
author surveys show that 95% of authors will nevertheless comply
with self-archiving mandates (over 80% of them willingly), but Arthur
Sale's actual analyses of the success rate of mandated institutional
repositories, compared to unmandated ones, fully bear out the results
of the surveys: Self-archiving mandates work, just as publish-or-perish
mandates (and public smoking bans, and seat-belt regulations) work.

       Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers'
        views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key
        Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.
        http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12428/

        Sale, A. The Impact of Mandatory Policies on
        ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006,
        12(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/april2006-sale

        Sale, A. Comparison of content policies for institutional
        repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.
        http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/index.html

        Sale, A. The acquisition of open access research
        articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.
        http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/sale/index.html

        Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate
        D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February
        http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/sale/01sale.html
        doi:10.1045/january2007-sale

        Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated
        online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving
        the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and
        easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).
        http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/

Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat Mar 03 2007 - 23:30:30 GMT

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