Re: Publish-or-Perish Mandates and Self-Archiving Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:00:21 +0100

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 sgt3_at_psu.edu wrote:

> What surprises me here is that there is only 95% compliance. For
> any mandatory ETD program...
>
> ...What is the penalty for a faculty member who ignores a
> university policy to deposit research papers in the university's
> IR?
>
> Until "mandatory" means something more than "strongly suggest"
> and has serious consequences for noncompliance, I suspect that
> the uptake will fall far short of Stevan's ideal Green OA world.

(1) 95% compliance is just fine! From today's starting point of c. 15%
spontaneous, unmandated deposits, 95% is and should be music to all of
our ears.

(2) No penalty for noncompliance. We are just talking about doing
a few keystrokes, for the author's own benefit. As long as the
institutional/funder mandates are official, explicit links to the CV
and performance review are sufficient, as the actual outcomes already
show. The rest is already driven by incentives, in the form of the
increasingly palpable benefits of enhanced research access, usage
and impact.

(3) To help make those benefits all the more palpable and motivating,
incentive metrics will soon be burgeoning too, sweetening the road.
See the Netherlands "Cream of Science", Citebase, and Arthur Sale's
download metrics.

(4) In other words, the "serious consequences" are positive, not
negative!

The only essential component is the mandates, and they are on the way...

Stevan Harnad

> >> From: Arthur Sale (U. Tasmania)
> >> Subject: Mandatory policy success
> >>
> >> The results of a survey carried out by the Australasian Digital
> >> Theses program have recently been released. The full report is
> >> available at
> >>
> >> http://adt.caul.edu.au/memberinformation/submissionsurvey/survey2006.doc
> >>
> >> It applies to the deposit of open access electronic copies of
> >> research theses (eg PhD) in university repositories in
> >> Australia and New Zealand (and thence searchable through the
> >> ADT gateway http://adt.caul.edu.au/).
> >>
> >> It is apparent from the report (and indeed highlighted by the
> >> authors) that a mandatory deposit policy results in a submission
> >> rate of 95% of all theses accepted, while its absence results
> >> in a submission rate of 17-22% (in other words, a pitifully
> >> empty repository). While this should not be news to anyone,
> >> the report has hard quotable facts on the success of an
> >> institutional mandatory policy over a substantial population
> >> of universities.
>
>
Received on Tue Jun 26 2007 - 10:39:55 BST

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