Re: OA in Europe suffers a setback

From: Arthur Sale <ahjs_at_ozemail.com.au>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:42:07 +1100

Talat

Thank you for your robust reply, Stevan has already responded to most of
your points, but I should pick up a few myself since my post provoked it.

I do not say that advocacy is not useful. It is, mainly for acculturing
researchers, repository and departmental managers, and senior management to
the purposes of a repository. Indeed without advocacy where would we all be
now? And what am I doing writing emails like this one or the last?

What I wrote and what I will spell out again in absolutely clear language is
this: advocacy that researchers should voluntarily deposit has by itself
never achieved the filling or near-filling of a repository with all
available input (say, all papers published in a particular year). The norm
is in the range of 10 to 20% of available documents. This experience is
based on repositories on all continents, over four years of people trying
advocacy, is independent of the age of the repository, and despite every
advocacy idea that the collected intellect of repository managers can come
up with.

No repository manager should fool themselves thinking otherwise - that their
ideas will have more effect than the rest of the world. The evidence is
absolutely incontrovertible. 100% of all universities with voluntary deposit
exhibit this feature. This applies to new foundations and those that have
been going for many years, regardless of university size. If there was one
exception I would have heard about it by now. Conversely 100% of all
universities or departments that adopt a mandate (requirement) achieve 80%
or more within three years. It probably takes this long for researchers to
internalize the minor additional workload as part of their normal required
duties.

You outlined that you were also seeking mandates. Great, and so you should
if you want to fill your repository. You also mentioned that you were trying
to get heads of departments and research directors to create local
departmental mandates. Great also. This strategy is called the Patchwork
Mandate http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/january2007-sale and is very useful while
you keep hammering away at obtuse senior executives.

You also asked if anyone knew why voluntary deposit coupled with advocacy
did not achieve significant goals. Unfortunately many universities which
fail in this way are reluctant to discuss why they have failed, probably
because they don't want to admit it even to themselves. Those that have
succeeded, all with institutional or departmental mandates, are very willing
to talk.

What seems clear is the primary answer I gave you: it is voluntary avoidable
work, and under pressure of work and other more enjoyable activities will be
avoided by most. However, there seems to be another factor working that
Stevan did not mention: researchers who are converted, do not stay
converted. So as rapidly as advocates convert new persons to deposit, others
backslide and drop out, for the above reason.

I can even show you a big university in Australia whose deposit-advocacy
policies are second to none in my opinion. They give out prizes and
publicise the most downloaded author, they run feature articles in the house
magazine and publish leaderboards, they provide usage statistics to their
authors, and they are well-known in the community for their advocacy policy.
They achieved close to the 20% of available documents annually that I
mentioned as the likely upper limit for voluntary policies. However, when
you look at the facts, in the last six months, the deposit rate has been
declining. The reasons why are not clear, but there could be factors such as
loss of converts, becoming blasé, other matters taking priority, etc. What
is not in dispute though is that the deposit rate is not going up! That's
factual.

So let's revisit the Patchwork Mandate. This is a strategy for divide and
conquer. Perhaps an advocate like yourself can manage to keep a set of
departmental heads or research directors converted by assiduous attention,
and then rely on them promulgating a requirement (mandate) to their staff.
When this set becomes big enough, the right people will be there for making
this requirement a university policy.

And as an aside, may I point out that over 50% of Australian universities
mandate that PhD graduates must deposit their final theses in a repository
indexed at http://adt.caul.edu.au/, and the number is steadily growing. Why?
The reason is equally obvious. Of course, it much easier for a university to
mandate student behavior than staff behavior.

Finally, let me say that I have no wish or intention of discouraging you or
anyone else. Indeed the reverse. But I want you and all people on this list
to be realists in their appreciation of the facts, which is why I, at least,
spend time writing papers and these posts. Better to act with factual
knowledge than delude yourself in ignorance. Best wishes.

Arthur Sale
Professor of Computer Science
University of Tasmania
Received on Fri Nov 30 2007 - 02:01:53 GMT

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