Open Access Archivangelism

Summary of Keynote Address to be delivered at
8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Disstertations
Wednesday 28 - Friday 30 September 2005
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/etd2005.html

Maximising Research Impact
By Mandating Institutional Self-Archiving

Stevan Harnad

It is a foregone conclusion that the next generation of researchers will self archive their research output in their own Open Access (OA) Instititional Repositories (IRs) for all potential users online; they are already beginning to do it now, with their theses and dissertations. But what about the present generation of researchers? Only 15% of the 2.5 million articles being published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals is being self-archived today. Self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact 50%-250+% by making the research available to those users whose institutions cannot afford access to the official journal version. The marginal dollar value of a citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to be $50-$1300 (US). Converting to Australian dollars ($65-$1700), updating their value by 170% from 1986-2005 ($110-$2890) and using even the most conservative ends of these estimates (50% x $110) and multiplying by the 85% of Australia's annual journal article output (about 35,000 according to ISI) that is not yet OA, this translates into an annual loss of $1,933,750 in revenue to Australian researchers for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it takes to self-archive it. And that is without even considering the loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of Australian research findings in Australia and worldwide, nor the even more general loss to the progress of human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and Research Councils UK (RCUK) are on the verge of implementing it: a mandate to extend the existing universal requirement to 'publish or perish' to 'publish and also self-archive the final peer-reviewed author's draft in your OA IR'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and an international JISC author study (plus the actual experience of the two institutions -- CERN and University of Southampton ECS -- that have already adopted such a requirement) show that over 90% of authors will comply. I will present the evidence, across disciplines and countries, for the 50%-250% OA citation impact advantage.