As the SPARC repositories conference approaches in Baltimore, repositories are the topic of conversation all over the place. Les Carr will be running an eve-of-meeting session where people can contribute and share evidence or anecdotes about how repositories are benefiting researchers. I've had a few whispers in my ear that people are still saying researchers don't rate repositories. Perhaps they don't, where they don't fully understand the picture, or where they've not (yet) personally seen the benefits of using one. But they certainly rate them when they do see those benefits. And that shows we must get the right messages to researchers - and, critically, in the right way.
One conduit is an articulate peer. John Willinsky's lovely tale of how he persuaded his fellow faculty members at Stanford to vote unanimously to mandate themselves to provide OA, greenly, through the repository is illustrative of the power of the peer. It needs a champion who has the arguments marshalled, is respected in his/her peer community, and the right moment. John used a Faculty of Education 'Retreat' at Monterey to stand up and speak to his peers. He managed to persuade them of the arguments so effectively that they had time to take a walk on the beach afterwards. That can happen elsewhere, too, though not everyone will have a beach to hand, obviously. But OA advocates who wish to rise to the 'champion' challenge can identify events or mechanisms in their own institution that can be used effectively to persuade their peers of the issues. Afterwards they can go to the park or the pub: bonding is location-independent.
The testimony of peers to the effect that using a repository to provide OA has really shown a benefit is also powerful. I've long used a quotation from a US philosopher, offered in a free-response box in one of our author surveys, to make a point to researcher audiences. It goes: "Self-archiving in the PhilSci Archive has given instant world-wide visibility to my work. As a result, I was invited to submit papers to refereed international conferences/journals and got them accepted". Not much to argue with there. One big career boost, pronto.
Let's look at another such. Last month at the Open Access & Research conference in Brisbane, Paula Callan presented some data from her own QUT repository in a workshop on 'Making OA Happen' (all the ppts are up on the conference website). The data pertain to a chemist, Ray Frost, who has personally (yes, please note, all those who say that researchers cannot be asked to deposit their own articles) deposited around 300 of his papers published over the last few years. Now, this man is prolific in his publishing activity and it is the fact that he has provided such a great baseline that means we can really trust the data here. An increase of 100% on nought is still nought, and an increase of 100% on two is only two. What we've always needed is a sizeable base to start with, so that we can legitimately say that a certain percentage increase (or whatever) has occurred.
Ray Frost has provided us with one. Look at the charts at the top of this post. What the data show is this: on the left are the papers Frost has published each year since 1992 (the data are from Web of Science). These have been downloaded 165,000 (yes) times from the QUT repository. On the right are the citations he has gathered over that time period.
From 2000 to 2003, citations were approximately flat-lining at about 300 per year, on 35-40 papers per year. When Ray started putting his articles into the QUT repository, the numbers of citations started to take off. The latest count is 1200 in one year. Even though Ray’s publication rate went up a bit over this period – to 55-60 papers per year – the increase in citations is impressive. And unless Ray’s work suddenly became super-important in 2004, the extra impact is a direct result of Open Access.
Now, there’s another little piece of information to add to this tale: the QUT library staff routinely add DOIs to each article deposited in the repository. Would-be users who can access the published version will generally do so using those. The 165,000 downloads are from users who do not have access to Ray’s articles through their own institution’s subscriptions – the whole purpose of Open Access. That’s an awful lot of EXTRA readership and a lot of new citations coming in on the back of it.
The final example of a reason for rating repositories comes from Ann Marie Clark, the Library Director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. ‘The Hutch’ has a repository built on the EPrints software and is starting to capture the output of the Center as the Library develops an advocacy programme. No doubt individual researchers at the Hutch will in future enjoy the same sort of increase in impact as Ray Frost in Brisbane. Already, though, one other reason for depositing has come to the fore in Seattle. Ann Marie reports that the National Institutes of Health, the major funder for work done by scientists at The Hutch, nowadays require that most grant applications come in electronic form only. Along with this new electronic submission system came new policies. "One in particular," Ann Marie says, "affects how our researchers think about OA and their own papers. This new rule limits them, when citing papers that support their grant proposal, from attaching more than three published PDFs. Any papers cited, beyond that limit, may only offer URLs for freely-accessible versions. As a result, convincing faculty members to work with our librarians to deposit their papers into our repository has not been difficult at all. The icing on the cake for our faculty is that our repository also offers a stable and contextual home to their, historically orphaned, supplemental data files."
So there we have it. Or them, rather. Reasons researchers really rate repositories: vast visibility, increased impact, worry-reduced workflow.
Alma Swan
Optimal Scholarship
