Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: There is no problem at all with the visibility -- to their would-be users webwide -- of the 15% of articles that are already being self-archived in IRs. But there definitely is a problem with the visibility of that visibility and usage -- to the authors of those articles -- and especially to the authors of the other 85% of articles, the ones that have not yet been self-archived (as well as to their institutions and funders, who have not yet mandated that they be self-archived, to make them Open Access [OA]).
   Hence OA metrics -- the visible, quantitative indicators of the enhanced visibility and usage vouchsafed by OA -- have to be made directly visible to all, immediately and continuously (rather than just being published in the occasional study); and not only absolute metrics but comparative ones. That will make the greater visibility of the self-archived contents visible, thereby providing an immediate, continuous and palpable incentive to self-archive, and to mandate self-archiving.
   These are the kinds of visibility metrics that Arthur Sale at U. Tasmania, Les Carr at Southampton, Leo Waaijers at SURF/DARE and Tim Brody's citebase have been working on providing. The biggest showcase and testbed for all these new metrics of productivity and prestige, and of OA's visible effects on them, will be the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise. Then universities and research funders will have a palpable sense of how much visibility, usage, impact and income they are losing (absolutely, and to their competitors), the longer they delay mandating OA self-archiving.

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On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, my colleague Steve Hitchcock wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

Hitchcock: Yes, of course, mandates and content are the no. 1 priority. But that doesn't mean we should ignore anything else that might help facilitate more of both. We have enough content in IRs [Institutional Repositories] now for improved visibility to be an issue, and it's an issue that will become more acute as content continues to grow.

We don't, unfortunately, have enough content in IRs now! And for what we do have, google provides more than enough visibility. What's needed, urgently, is increased content, not improved visibility.

Yes, mandates are the no. 1 priority; but the reason they are still so slow in coming is because we keep getting distracted and diverted to priority no. 2, 3, 4... instead.

Harnad: IRs do not need "to do more to be highly visible." Their problem is not their invisibility, it is their emptiness. And Steve Hitchcock ought to know this, because his own department's IR is anything but invisible -- for the simple reason that it has content. And it has content because self-archiving is mandated!

Hitchcock: My point is not about one single IR, or any single IR, but about services that reveal IRs collectively. It's services that allow us to have effective IRs - OAI and interoperability and all that. And I didn't say they are invisible, but that they could and should be more visible. It's not just about search, it's about awareness and currency as well. Arxiv has that, IRs as a whole do not.

What Arxiv has is content (in one field); IRs as a whole do not (in any field).

The IRs' problem is not the visibility of what little they have, but how little they have.

If we keep on distracting the attention (of what I am increasingly coming to believe is a research community suffering from Attention-Deficit-Disorder!) toward the non-problem of the day -- this time the "discoverability/visibility" problem -- instead of staying focused on the only real, persistent problem -- which is providing that missing OA content -- then we are simply compounding our persistent failure to reach for what is already long within our grasp.

It is not sufficient to say that mandates are the no. 1 priority. We have to actually make them the no. 1 priority, until they are actually adopted. Then we can move on to our other pet peeves. Right now the ill-informedness, noise and confusion levels are still far too high to justify indulging still more distractions.

Hitchcock: I'm not arguing for central repositories, but others are. Critically, some mandates require them, e.g. Wellcome, while the RCUK mandates are more open. So the best we can say is that the most important mandates so far are ambivalent about [whether to deposit in central] subject [CRs] vs IRs. In that case some authors affected by the mandates have a choice, and this is a challenge to IRs now in which IRs can help their cause with better services.

Mandating CR deposit instead of IR deposit is simply a fundamental strategic and practical error, and can and should be dealt with as such, not as a fait-accompli motivating a detour into yet another irrelevancy ("discoverability").

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?

And there is no point touting nascent IR functionalities that purport to remedy IRs' non-existent "visibility" problem when IRs' only real problem is their non-existent content -- for which mandates, not IR visibility-enhancements, are the solution. We don't solve -- or even contribute to the grasp of -- a real problem by diverting attention to a non-problem and its solution, as if it were all or part of the solution to the real problem. (There has already been far too much of that sort of wheel-spinning in OA for 13 years now and we need to resist another spell of still more of the same.)

There is, however, something that we can do that is not only complementary to mandates, but an incentive for adopting them -- and it just might serve to redirect this useless fuss about "visibility" in a more useful direction:

No, there is no problem with the visibility -- to their would-be users webwide -- of the 15% of articles that are already being deposited in IRs; but there definitely is a problem with the visibility of that visibility and of that usage to the authors of those articles -- and especially to the authors of the 85% of articles that have not yet been deposited (and to the institutions and funders of those authors who have not mandated that they be deposited).

I am speaking, of course, of OA metrics -- the visible, quantitative indicators of the enhanced visibility and usage vouchsafed by OA. It is not enough for a few of these metrics to be plumbed, and then published in journal articles and postings -- as admirably indexed by Steve Hitchcock's very useful bibliography of the effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact.

We have to go on to make those metrics directly visible to self-archivers and
non-self-archivers alike, immediately and continuously, rather than just in the occasional published study -- and not only absolute metrics but comparative ones. That will make the greater visibility of the self-archived contents visible, thereby providing an immediate, continuous and palpable incentive to self-archive, and to mandate self-archiving.

Those are the kinds of visibility metrics that Arthur Sale at U. Tasmania, Les Carr at Southampton, and Leo Waaijers at SURF/DARE have been working on providing.

And the biggest showcase and testbed for all those new metrics of productivity and prestige, and of OA's visible effects on them, will be the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise (although I rather hope OA will not wait that long!). Then universities and research funders (worldwide, not just in the UK) will have a palpable sense of how much visibility, usage, impact and income they are losing (and losing to their competitors), the longer they delay mandating OA self-archiving...

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.

Some of the absolute visibility metrics are already implemented in U. Southampton's EPrints IRs:
as well as U. Tasmania's Eprints IRs.

A clever adaptation of Tim Brody's citebase, across IRs, could provide the comparative picture too.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum