Open Access Archivangelism

---

SUMMARY: Adopted in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of such mandates worldwide. (As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed.) In 2004-5, two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys by Alma Swan had predicted that the willing compliance rate for such self-archiving mandates would be over 80%. In 2005-6, Arthur Sale estimated from data on actual depositing behaviour in Australian repositories that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate in about two years.
    Now Southampton's Les Carr has confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations: the ECS Departmental Repository's deposit rate in 2006 is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample. This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates and help persuade US legislators to upgrade the failed NIH "public access" policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

---

Set in motion by Prof. Tony Hey in 1999, drafted in 2001, and officially adopted by Prof. Wendy Hall in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate of the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was the world's first. It has since served as a model for a growing number of Green OA mandates worldwide. As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed, for a total of 40 to date.

In 2004-5, Dr. Alma Swan, of Key Perspectives Associates, on the basis of two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys, had predicted (in the face of widespread scepticism about the likely success of self-archiving mandates) that the willing compliance rate for self-archiving mandates would be over 80% (with total compliance over 90%).



In 2005-6, Prof. Arthur Sale, in a study comparing data on actual deposit rates for three Australian universities (two unmandated and one, Queensland University of Technology, mandated since 2004), found that yearly deposit rates for the repositories without mandates remained low (c. 15%), even with incentives and library assistance (c. 30%), whereas the mandated deposits grew much faster. Extrapolating these growth rates, he estimated that mandates would reach Swan's predicted compliance rate (80-90%) in about two years.

Dr. Les Carr, co-drafter of the ECS mandate and now also the administrator of Southampton's ECS Departmental Repository, has now confirmed Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations. ECS's deposit rate in 2006 (the fourth full year of the ECS mandate) is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM Digital Library sample.



This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving mandates. (Sale especially recommends starting at the departmental level rather than waiting for university-wide consensus, if consensus is not reached quickly: a "patchwork" mandate.)

The demonstrated success of institutional self-archiving mandates also has implications for research-funder and national-level policy: In the US, the proposed NIH self-archiving "public access" policy was downgraded from a mandate to a mere request; adopted in 2004, it has failed, miserably (deposit rate <5%). Let us hope that the evidence of the success rates for Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates will help open the eyes of US legislators to the need to upgrade the NIH policy to a mandate in the next US Senate Appropriations Bill.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

SUMMARY: (1) If some publishers (commercial or otherwise) should ever decide to abandon journal publishing because of lowered profit prospects, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to Gold OA publishers. (2) If ever faced with the (currently hypothetical) question "Do we use our newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay (2a) for our newfound publication costs for our research publication output, or (2b) for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" universities will find their way, quite naturally, to the obvious solution.

---

Sandy Thatcher, President, Association of American University Presses (AAUP) wrote:

ST: "[I]t is not a matter of whether the STM business could be run profitably with NIH-type restrictions in place, but instead the expectations the companies most invested in this business have about profit margins and their willingness to continue in the business at a lower level of profit when their funds might be redirected to more profitable uses elsewhere. Money tends to go where the expectations for profits are greatest."

If some players (commercial or otherwise) eventually abandon the journal publishing game because of lowered prospects for profit, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to other players (like PLoS or BMC or Hindawi) who are quite happy to stay in, or enter, the Gold OA arena (but we are again getting ahead of ourselves: it is Green OA, Green OA mandates and Institutional OA Repositories whose time is coming first, not Gold OA). Journal title migration itself is not hypothetical: it is happening all the time, irrespective of OA. (So is journal death, and birth.) A learned journal consists of its editorship, peer-reviewership, authorship, and reputation (including its impact metrics), not its publisher. We know (and value) journals by their individual titles and track-records, not their publishers.

ST: "One would hope... that "logic" would apply, of all places, within academic institutions. But I have been writing now for two decades providing "evidence" of ways in which higher education does not act according to logic, or norms of rationality, that one would expect from it."

It is certainly true that universities sometimes (often?) act irrationally, sometimes even with respect to their own best interests: not only universities, but corporations (and even people, individual and plural) betimes obtund. But reality eventually exerts a pressure (if the stakes and consequences are nontrivial) and adaptation occurs -- not necessarily for the best, in ethical and humanistic terms, but at least for the better in terms of "interests".

And the competition of interests in the question of what universities will do with their hypothetical windfall journal-cancellation savings (if/when Green OA mandates ever generate the -- likewise hypothetical -- unsustainable subscription cancellations) is a competition between the other things universities could do with those newfound windfall savings -- e.g., (1) buying more books for the university library, or withdrawing them from the university library budget altogether and spending them on something else -- versus (2) using those savings to pay for the university's newfound research publicaton costs (which, on the very same hypothesis, will emerge pari passu with the university's windfall cancellation savings).

It seems a safe bet that since the logical brainwork in question is just a one-step deduction (which I think university adminstrators, even with their atrophied neurons, should still be capable of making, if they are still capable of getting up in the morning at all), the new dance-step will be mastered: Faced with the question "Do we use our newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay for our newfound publication costs of our research publication output, or for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" they will -- under the pressure of logic, necessity, practicality, self-interest, and a lot of emails and phone-calls from their research-publishing faculty -- find their way to the dead-obvious (dare I say "optimal and inevitable"? solution...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Sandy Thatcher, President, Association of American University Presses (AAUP) wrote:

ST: "You make it all sound so simple, Stevan, but there is nothing simple about a transition from Green OA to Gold OA, including the redirection of savings from journal subscriptions to funding Gold OA journals, because as many wise people like Jim O'Donnell have pointed out on this list [liblicense], universities don't work that way."

I make no wishes, wise or unwise. And I make no conjectures ("Hypotheses non Fingo") -- except perhaps (if forced) as counter-conjectures, to counter others' unforced conjectures.

The actual empirical evidence (neither wish nor conjecture) is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) is (1) feasible, (2) being done, (3) beneficial, and (4) being mandated. Whether and when it ever goes on to generate cancellations and transitions and redirections is all pure speculation, based on no empirical evidence one way or the other (except that it hasn't happened yet, even in fields that reached 100% Green OA years ago). But if you insist on asking a hypothetical "what if?" question just the same, I respond with an equally hypothetical "then..." answer.

The factual part is fact. If wise men have privileged access to the future, so be it. I have none. I have only the available evidence, and logic. (And logic tells me, platitudinously, that necessity is the mother of invention, and where there's a will, there's a way, especially if/when the hypothetical cancellation windfall savings that no one has yet seen should ever materialize. Till then, I'll just go with the evidence-based four -- OA self-archiving (2), OA self-archiving mandates (4), and their already demonstrated feasibility (1) and benefits (3) -- leaving the speculation to those who prefer that sort of thing.)

ST: "Wishing it were so does not make it so. And by talking about peer review only, you oversimplify what is involved in journal publishing, which requires skills that go beyond simply conducting peer review and that are not most economically carried out by faculty, who are not trained for such tasks and whose dedication of time to them detracts from the exercise of their main talents as researchers."

Well, I could invoke my quarter century as founder and editor in chief of a major peer-reviewed journal as evidence that I may know what I am talking about...

But I'd rather just point out that the conjecture about journal-publication downsizing to just peer-review service-provision is part of the hypothetical conditional that I only invoke if someone insists on playing the speculation game. It is neither a wish nor a whim. I am perfectly content with 100% Green OA. Full stop.

Apart from that, I'll stick with the empirical facts -- reminder: self-archiving, self-archiving mandates, their demonstrated feasability and their demonstrated benefits -- and abstain from the hypothesizing.

ST: "You are also wrong in interpreting PRISM as just another repetition of the same old tired anti-OA rhetoric. As a member of the publishing community whose press is a member of the PSP (but not an endorser of PRISM), I can tell you that this is not just more of the same."

If PRISM is making any new points -- empirical or logical -- I would be very grateful if Sandy (or anyone) would point out to me exactly what those new points are. For all I have seen has been a repetition of the very few and very familiar old points I and others have rebutted so many, many times before...

(Sandy seems to have overlooked the linked list of 21 references I included as evidence that these points have all been voiced, and rebutted, repeatedly, in bygone days. If anyone sends me a list of new points, it would be very helpful if they first checked that list to see whether those points are indeed new, rather than dated, discredited duplicates.)

ST: "Whether we are getting close to a "tipping point" is of course a matter of conjecture, but then so is the overall benefit from Green OA, which you always state as though it were an established fact rather than a hypothesis with some evidence in support of it yet hardly overwhelming evidence at this point in time."

First, since we are talking about wishful thinking, I know full well that the OA self-archiving advantage -- in terms of citations and downloads -- is something that the anti-OA publishers dearly wish were nonexistent, or merely a methodological artifact of some kind.

Second, I and others are quite happy to continue conducting actual empirical studies and analyses confirming the OA advantage, and demonstrating that it is not just an artifact (of either early access or self-selection bias for quality). That interesting ongoing question is at least substantive and empirical, hence new (especially when the challenges come from those -- such as Kurtz and Moed -- who have no vested interests in the outcome one way or the other). The doomsday prophecies and the hype about government control and censorship are not.

"Where There's No Access Problem There's No Open Access Advantage"

(I expect that the tobacco industry did more than its share of wishing that the health benefits of not smoking would turn out to be nonexistent or a self-selection artifact too: When money is at stake, interpretations become self-selective, if not self-serving, too!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The Biosciences Federation: "supports increasing access to science research articles, and sees Open Access publishing as a workable approach for most disciplines, provided that research funders can make sufficient money available... so that the viability both of journals, and of the various activities which are made possible by journals income - conferences, meetings and other educational events as well as grants, bursaries and research funding - are not threatened... Open Access publishing would also reduce the risks of self-archiving, which could otherwise damage the viability of journals and thus threaten the substantial other contributions which learned societies make to UK science. The Federation is commissioning a study to quantify these contributions in order better to understand what the impact might be... The results of the research studies will be published early in 2008."

The Biosciences Federation's statement is familiar, old, many times rebutted stuff, and another Trojan Horse. It's of course not at all about promoting Green OA Self-Archiving, or Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates, but about continuing to try to delay or derail them. This time what is instead being self-servingly invoked (Good Cop, Bad Cop) is Gold OA Publishing -- something that cannot be mandated, and is growing far too slowly of its own accord, for many practical and logistical reasons (which is why OA's fast-track is Green OA and Green OA Mandates, rather than waiting for Gold OA).

The Biosciences Federation is simply making the bland statement that if you pay us for it, and pay us enough, and guarantee that payment, we will not oppose Gold OA! Meanwhile, we will continue to oppose Green OA and Green OA mandates, and we will commission yet another study to "investigate" the damage they are likely to do. (This time, it will look at how hypothetical lost subscriptions will affect Learned Societies' "good works," such as the funding they provide for conferences and scholarships, and -- a new one! -- the funding they provide for research!)

Well, several of these self-serving studies (in reality just delay-tactics, in an ongoing filibuster) have already been commissioned and conducted by various sectors of the publishing industry (and others are still underway).

Meanwhile, there is no such spare money to be had, to pay for or guarantee advance payment for Gold OA, and no one to guarantee it. That potential money is all tied up right now in subscriptions. McDonalds would also happily commit itself to free burgers for anyone on the planet if all those who are currently paying for burgers would commit in advance to guarantee to keep paying for them all in advance, at an agreed flat rate, in perpetuum. (That formula always trumps Supply and Demand...)

Pretending not be opposed to OA is just one of the conscious (and unconscious) stratagems to which those who perceive their revenues to be at potential risk are resorting in order to try to stave off the optimal and inevitable (for research), and instead keep everything running on their terms.

We should not be taken in by this: Research is not funded, conducted and published as a service to the publishing industry, but vice versa. We need to stop letting the publishing tail wag the research dog!

"Learned Societies: By Their Works Shall Ye Know Them"

Peter Suber has done the decisive rebuttal to this latest delay strategy by the Biosciences Foundation here, raising (in a far gentler way) all the points that are raised above -- and have been raised countless times before.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Thomas & McDonald (2007) wrote:

"This study's findings only reinforce... predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior"

Sandy Thatcher, President, AAUP, responded:

'If you'll remember our prior discussion about open access, Stevan, I warned that just this "success" might be the "tipping point" to drive a host of commercial and society publishers out of the business of journal publishing. One "tipping point" causes another? Witness, as partial proof, the reaction of STM publishers represented by the PRISM initiative. I read that as a warning that, if the government forces a change in their business model, they may just walk away from the business. I assume you wouldn't consider that a bad thing at all, but my question would be what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?'

What is remarkable is how actual empirical facts (very few) are being freely admixed, willy-nilly, with fact-free speculations for which there is, and continues to be zero empirical evidence, and, in many cases, decisive and familiar counterevidence, both empirical and logical.

Nothing has changed since our prior discussions except that there have (happily) been some more Green OA mandates (total adopted: 32, plus 8 further mandates proposed).

There has been no "tipping point." Just talk about tipping points, and that talk about tipping points has been going on for years.

There has been no one driven out of business, nor any empirical evidence of a trend toward being driven out of business. Just talk about being driven out of business, and that talk about being driven out of business has been going on for years.

And as to the "partial proof" in the form of the STM/PRISM "reaction" -- that very same reaction (with the very same false, alarmist arguments) has been voiced, verbatim, by the very same publisher groups (STM, AAP, ALPSP), over and over, for over a decade now. And they have been debunked just as often (see long list of links below). But that certainly hasn't been enough to make the publishers' anti-OA lobby cease and desist. Do you consider the relentless repetition, at louder and louder volume, of exactly the same specious and evidence-free claims, to be "proof" of anything, partial or otherwise?

And the phrase "the government forces a change in their business model" is just as false a description of what is actually going on when it is spoken in Sandy's own well-meaning words as when it is voiced by PRISM and Eric Dezenhall: The government is not forcing a change in a business model. The funders of tax-payer-funded research -- and, increasingly, universities, who are not "the government" at all! -- are insisting that the researchers they fund and employ make their peer-reviewed research freely available to all would-be users online, in line with the purpose of conducting and funding and publishing research in the first place.

This quite natural (and overdue) adaptation to the online age on the part of the research community -- mandating Green OA self-archiving -- may or may not lead to a transition to Gold OA publishing: no one knows whether, or when it will. But what is already known is that OA itself, whether Green or Gold, is enormously beneficial to research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds research and for whose benefit it is funded, conducted and published. (OA is also a secondary benefit to education and the developing world.)

So the "tipping point" for Green OA itself would be an unalloyed benefit for everyone except the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry, whether or not it led to a second tipping point and a transition to Gold OA.

But reality today, to repeat, is a growth in Green OA mandates, not a tipping point (let alone two), not a subscription decline, not publishers going out of business, not government pressure toward another publishing model.

You ask "what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?" I presume you are referring to the multiple hypothetical conditional: if Green OA mandates reach the tipping point that generates 100% Green OA, and if that in turn generates journal cancellations that reach the tipping point that generates a transition to Gold OA? The answer (which I have provided many times before) is simple: That "structure" will be Gold OA, funded out of (a part of) the institutional cancellation savings.

And this is not about publishing in general -- commercial, society, university, or otherwise. It is only about peer-reviewed journal publishing, and their hypothetical transition to Gold OA under cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA.

(2005) Critique of ALPSP'S 1st Response to RCUK's Open Access Self-Archiving Proposal.
(2005) Rebuttal of STM Response to RCUK Self-Archiving Policy Proposal.
(2005) Applying Optimality Findings: A Critique of Graham Taylor's Critique of RCUK Policy Proposal.
(2006) Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing"
(2006) How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate
(2006) Critique of AAP/PSP Critique of FRPAA Proposal
Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique
(2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration
A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy
Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry
Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal
Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal
Critique of Stanford/HighWire Press Critique of NIH Proposal
Critique of APS Critique of NIH Proposal
Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!
Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration
Critique of Research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal
Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society
Feedback on the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access
The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Peter Suber in the SPARC OA Forum: "Forwarding from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), with its permission. This is an excerpt from the minutes of its June 2007 meeting, which were sent to all Hong Kong university vice-chancellors and presidents on August 6, 2007. The "UGC institutions" are the eight universities supported with public funds by the University Grants Committee." -- Peter Suber

Open-access Repositories for Research Results from UGC Institutions

15. Some countries have already adopted policies that require results of publicly funded research be made publicly accessible via open-access repositories, and a suggestion has been made to the RGC that we shall adopt similar practice in Hong Kong. After deliberation, the RGC decided not to make it compulsory for the Principal Investigators (PIs) to allow open access of their research outputs. However, the RGC strongly encourages your institution and researchers to make available the research output via open-access repositories on a voluntary basis, and/or other publication venues such as journals and books.

Hong Kong's RGC is alas out of step, and -- perhaps unaware of the history of requesting vs. requiring OA -- is fated to repeat that history. Adopting a request rather than a requirement is an already tried and true recipe for failure in providing open access to research (cf. the failed NIH "strong encouragement" policy (compliance rate: <4%) that is now under strong momentum toward upgrading to a mandate).

[It may just be a coincidence, but possibly it is pertinent that China was the odd man out in Swan & Brown's 2005 international/interdisciplinary surveyof researchers worldwide: Most respondents said they would not self-archive unless their institutions and/or funders required it. When asked whether they would comply with an institutional or funder requirement to self-archive, the international average was about 95% compliance: over 80% willing compliance and less than 15% reluctant compliance. (This has since bben confirmed by Arthur Sale's comparative statistics on actual compliance). But for some reason, China was the most reluctant of all, with only 58% willing compliance, and 31% reluctant (Figure 3). (Perhaps in China OA mandates are being mistakenly equated with totalitarianism -- whereas they should rather be seen as an extension of the benign, ubiquitous, even if unstated, publish-or-perish mandate that ensures that research findings are published at all; and closer to the spirit of paying taxes in order to support and reap the benefits of public services.) ]

---

Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report, Key Perspectives Inc.

---

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).

Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.
Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited. .

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

This is to commend and strongly endorse the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology's (IRCSET's) proposed Green Open Access self-Archiving Mandate. Other supporters are encourage to write to IRCSET before 28 September to provide their endorsement too.

[Thanks once again to the Peter Suber for alerting us all to this one too!]

IRCSET's proposed mandate is not only timely and welcome, but it is the optimal funder mandate, being based on the EURAB's proposed mandate, likewise the optimal one.

IRCSET proposes mandating immediate deposit, without exception, in an OA Repository (Institutional or Central) and it puts a maximum cap of 6 months on the length of the allowable access embargo, after which access to the deposit must be made Open Access rather than Closed Access.

Most other funder mandates to date are not quite as good as this IRCSET's. Most (1) peg the date of deposit to the end of the embargo, which is a huge mistake. And many (2) do not put any cap on on the permissible length of embargo, which, together with (1) essentially moots the mandate completely, making it the publisher who determines whether and when an article is deposited at all. Third, (3) many insist on central self-archiving, rather than institutional self-archiving.

So, bravo to IRCSET for requiring immediate deposit, for capping the permissible mandate at 6 months, and for specifying only that the repository must be an OAI-compliant OA repository, rather than insisting on or favouring central deposit.

(If there is one thing that could be brought out more explicitly, it is that institutional deposit is preferable to central: central repositories can always harvest from institutional ones. But it is institutional self-archiving that has all the local institutional incentives, that covers all research output, and that scales to cover all of research, whether funded or unfunded.)

But even exactly as it stands, IRCSET's is the best of the existing funder mandates (there are now 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA self-Archiving mandates adopted, and 8 more [including Ireland's] proposed, for a total of 40, worldwide). If the Irish mandate is adopted in its present form, it will immediately become the best of the adopted funder and national mandates, and the one for all subsequent funder and national mandates to model themselves upon. (Some of the already adopted institutional/departmental mandates, such as Southampton's, Minho's, QUT's and CERN's are already optimal, requiring immediate deposit, and of course institutional deposit.)

Comhghairdeas, Eire!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Thomas, Chuck & McDonald, Robert H. (2007) Measuring and Comparing Participation Patterns in Digital Repositories: Repositories by the Numbers, Part 1. D-lib Magazine 13 (9/10) doi:10.1045/september2007-mcdonald

Excerpt: "As for mandatory-deposit repositories, the limited available data indicate authors represented in such repositories tend to contribute more of their intellectual output. Sale (2006) predicted institutions establishing deposit mandates were likely to see such results within three years of implementing these policies. Harnad (2006) cited surveys showing 95% of scholars [would] comply if their university mandates depositing in an institutional repository. This study's findings only reinforce such predictions and arguments favoring institutional mandates. As the data in this article show, a mandate is arguably the "tipping point" described by Gladwell (2000) that can make depositing behavior among scholars not just widespread, but also more of an ingrained and complete behavior."

On: Janet Malcolm "Pandora's Click," a review of Shipley & Schwalbe's The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe

The Power of Skywriting

What makes email into a potential nuclear weapon (and, like nuclear energy, amenable to both melioration and mischief) is its "skywriting" potential: the fact that multiple copies can easily, and almost instantly, proliferate, intentionally or unintentionally, to targets, intended and unintended, all over the planet. Paper letter-writing (indeed all writing) already had much the same capability for hastiness, thoughtlessness, solecism and misinterpretation, and it too was deprived of the emotional, interpersonal cues native to the oral tradition of real-time, "live," interactive speech. But it was when writing soared skyward into cyberspace with email and the web that it came into its own. Hearsay, even when augmented by video and telecommunications, never quite attained the destructive (and constructive) power of skywriting. It's all a matter of timing, scope and scale. Verba volunt, scripta manent.

Harnad, S. (2003) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines. In: Salaün, Jean-Michel & Vendendorpe, Christian (eds.). Le défi de la publication sur le web: hyperlectures, cybertextes et méta-éditions. Presses de l'enssib.

In the online era, the days of reprint requests ought to be over, with Open Access taking their place. But some research funders and universities are still hesitating about mandating Open Access Self-Archiving, because they are concerned about publishers' embargoes. Here is the solution:

Even where a publisher embargoes or does not endorse OA self-archiving, universities and research funders can and should still go ahead and mandate immediate deposit anyway, with no exceptions or delays, but allowing the deposit to be made Closed Access instead of Open Access during any publisher-imposed embargo period.

The Institutional Repository's semi-automatized Email Eprint Request Button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to tide over all researcher usage needs webwide till the end of the embargo (or till embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths, under the growing pressure and increasingly apparent benefits of OA).

See how the paper reprint request era, and its prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, already anticipated most of this:

Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations? Scientometrics 56: 283-286.

Abstract: Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range 1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent correlation between the number of requests and citations to article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55; 95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that received most reprint requests are cited more often.

Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93–101.

Abstract: This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed each year, most being triggered by Current Contents...

Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the World Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic Archive. The Scientist 13(4):14.

Excerpt: It is the utopian expectation of those who live in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has major consequences for the future.

Garfield, E. (1965) Is the 'free reprint system' free and/or obsolete? Essays of an Information Scientist 1:10-11.

Garfield, E. (1972) Reprint Exchange. 1. The multimillion dollar problem ordinaire, Essays of an Information Scientist 1:359-60.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum