Open Access Archivangelism

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andy Powell [AP] wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

AP: You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true.
   Despite who-knows-how-much-funding being pumped into IRs globally (can anyone begin to put a figure on this, even in the UK?)...

Plenty of figures have been posted on how much money institutions have wasted on their (empty) IRs in the eight years since IRs began. People needlessly waste a lot of money on lots of needless things. The amount wasted is of no intrinsic interest in and of itself.

The relevant figure is this:

How much does it actually cost just to set up an OA IR and to implement a self-archiving mandate to fill it?

For the answer, you do not have to go far: Just ask the dozen universities that have so far done both: The very first IR-plus-mandate was a departmental one (at Southampton ECS); but the most relevant figures will come from university-wide mandated IRs, and for those figures you should ask Tom Cochrane at QUT and Eloy Rodrigues at Minho (distinguishing the one-time start-up cost from the annual maintenance cost).

And then compare the cost of that (relative to each university's annual research output) with what it would have cost (someone: whom?) to set up subject-based CRs (which? where? how many?) for all of that same university annual research output, in every subject, willy-nilly worldwide, and to ensure (how?) that it was all deposited in its respective CR.

(Please do not reply with social-theoretic mantras but with precisely what data you propose to base your comparative estimate upon!)

AP: most [IRs] remain largely unfilled and our only response is to say that funding bodies and institutions need to force researchers to deposit when they clearly don't want to of their own free will. We haven't (yet) succeeded in building services that researchers find compelling to use.

We haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish of their own free will: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to publish of their own free will, we audit and reward their research performance according to whether and what they publish ("publish or perish").

We also haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish research that is important and useful to research progress: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to maximise their research impact, we review and reward research performance on the basis not just of how much research they publish, but also its research impact metrics.

Mandating that researchers maximise the potential usage and impact of their research by self-archiving it in their own IR, and auditing and rewarding that they do so, seems a quite natural (though long overdue) extension of what universities are all doing already.

AP: If we want to build compelling scholarly social networks (which is essentially what any 'repository' system should be) then we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community - social networks that are largely independent of the institution.

Some of us have been thinking about building on these "social networks" since the early 1990's and we have noted that -- apart from the very few communities where these self-archiver networks formed spontaneously early on -- most disciplines have not followed the examples of those few communities in the ensuing decade and a half, even after repeatedly hearing the mantra (Mantra 1) urging them to do so, along with the growing empirical evidence of self-archiving's beneficial effects on research usage and impact (Mantra 2).
Then the evidence from the homologous precedent and example of (a) the institutional incentive system underlying publish-or-perish as well as (b) research metric assessment was reinforced by Alma Swan's JISC surveys: These found that (c) the vast majority of researchers report that they would not self-archive spontaneously of their own accord if their institutions and/or funders did not require it (mainly because they were busy with their institutions' and funders' other priorities), but 95% of them would self-archive their research if their institutions and/or funders were to require it -- and over 80% of them would do so willingly (Mantra 3).



And then Arthur Sale's empirical comparisons of what researchers actually do when such requirements are and are not implemented fully confirmed what the surveys said that the researchers (across all disciplines and "social networks" worldwide) had said they would and would not do, and under what conditions (Mantra 4).



So I'd say we should not waste another decade and a half waiting for those fabled "social networks" to form spontaneously so the research community can at last have the OA that has not only already been demonstrated to be feasible and beneficial to them, but that they themselves have signed countless petitions to demand.

Indeed it is more a koan than a mantra that the only thing the researchers are not doing for the OA they overwhelmingly purport to desire is the few keystrokes per paper that it would it take to do a deposit rather than just sign a petition! (And it is in order to generate those keystrokes that the mandates are needed.)

AP: Oddly, to do that we might do well to change our thinking about how best to surface scholarly content on the Web to be both 1) user-centric (acknowledging that individual researchers want to take responsibility for how they surface their content, as happens, say, in the blogsphere) and 2) globally-centric (acknowledging that the infrastructure is now available that allows us to realise the efficiency savings and social network effects of large-scale globally concentrated services, as happens in, say, Slideshare, Flickr and so on).

It is odd indeed that all these wonders of technology, so readily taken up spontaneously when people are playing computer games or blabbing in the blogosphere have not yet been systematically applied to their ergonomic practices, but the fact is that (aside from a few longstanding social networks) they have not been, and we have waited more than long enough. That systematic application is precisely what the now-growing wave of OA self-archiving mandates by funders (such as RCUK and NIH) and universities (such as Southampton ECS and Harvard) is meant to accelerate and ensure.

AP: Such a change in thinking does not rule the institution out of the picture, since the institution remains a significant stakeholder with significant interests... but it certainly does change the emphasis and direction and it hopefully stops us putting institutional needs higher up the agenda than the needs of the individual researcher.

Individual researchers do not work in a vacuum. That is why we have institutions and funders. Those "research networks" already exist. As much as we may all admire the spontaneous, anonymous way in which (for example) Wikipedia is growing, we also have to note the repeatedly voiced laments of those academics who devote large portions of their time to such web-based activities without being rewarded for it by their institutions and funders (Mantra 5).

OA self-archiving mandates are precisely the bridge between (i) the existing canonical "social networks" and reward systems of the scholarly and scientific community -- their universities and research funders -- and (ii) the new world that is open before them.

It is time we crossed that bridge, at long last (Mantra 6).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum