Open Access Archivangelism

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Minh Ha Duong wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

I want to sell to the higher-ups at my national research institution (CNRS) the idea of an open evangelization mission to promote open archiving. I think that just saying "now everybody on the payroll should archive" is likely not to be efficient. We are especially interested in the department of Social Sciences and Humanities, which comprises a few hundred lab or research teams.

First, do not underestimate the potential impact of a mandate:

"[This] international, cross-disciplinary [author] study on open access had 1296 respondents:... The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

But it would also help to show researchers why they should self-archive: to maximise research usage and impact. See especially the findings in Social Sciences (Sociology, Economics).

What do you think? Do you know of any instances of such institutional effort to promote OA? How did they go about it, and with what results?
Minh Ha Duong Chargé de recherches au CIRED, CNRS

On how institutions actually promote OA self-archiving, I'm afraid I have no data. -- Postings from those institutions that do promote self-archiving, to let us know how they are promoting it, would be most welcome. -- The OSI Eprints Handbook as well as the Self-Archiving FAQ suggest ways to implement and promote self-archiving.

But it is the institututional self-archiving mandate itself that is the most effective way of generating self-archiving, as can be seen by comparing archive growth and size for those institutions that have no institutional self-archiving policy (1), a policy o recommending but not requiring self-archiving (2), and a policy of requiring self-archiving (3):
The only two institutions in the world so far that have a policy of requiring self-archiving (3) -- Southampton ECS and CERN -- have each (ECS, CERN) achieved a 90% self-archiving rate for current research output, exactly as the above JISC Survey findings indicated. The archives of institutions with only recommended self-archiving (2) are filling less, and less quickly; those of institutions with no self-archiving policy at all even less so.

For (2) and (3) see the Registry of Institutional OA Policies. For (1) see the Registry of Institutional OA Archives.

Stevan Harnad