Thursday, October 4. 2007Departmental Repositories, Institutional Repositories, and Research Record-KeepingOn Mon, 1 Oct 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum: NM: I know that Dr Leslie Carr wrote: "...we genuinely can't answer questions about the percentage of our research output that gets put into our repository, because we have [no] independent way of knowing what the size of our research output is!"The ever-alert Napoleon Miradon, has raised two very important and valid questions in connection with my posting about Les Carr's estimates of the current deposit rate in the repository of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. One of the questions is an explicit empirical one, and the other is an implicit methodological one. I shall answer the methodological question first. Reformulated explicitly, the question is: The answer is that that can only be estimated today by consulting external databases, such as ISI's Web of Science, or ACM's Digital Library (or Google Scholar), to sample what has been published, and then to check back to see whether they are in the Repository. That is what Les Carr did, and that is where his percentages come from.Since, apart from their Repositories themselves, there is today no record of their total research output, Southampton -- and most other universities and departments worldwide -- have no way of knowing what their total research output is: The point to note here is that one of the added benefits of having an OA Repository and a self-archiving mandate is that once the deposit rate has been confirmed (by such external sampling) to be at or near 100%, the Repository itself can be used as the internal record of the institution's or department's research output. Count that -- alongside the fact that it maximises the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output -- as yet another reason for having an OA Repository, and for mandating deposit: It is a very powerful and effective form of internal record-keeping, so an institution (or department) can track its own research productivity as well as submit it for external performance assessment. Having and filling its own OA Repository also releases the institution or department from the need to consult and rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor its own research output. But I think M. Miradon in fact understood the fact that Repository deposit rates currently have to be estimated through sampling; I have only made the methodological point explicit for readers who might have needed the clarification. We now move on to M. Miradon's empirical point: He has done a bit of random sampling himself, and indeed he has managed to do this using a Southampton-internal record of Southampton publications: He has sampled the staff publications list in Southampton's Department of Civil Engineering, and he has found many publications to be absent from Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science's IR: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ But the explanation for this is very simple: I was reporting the results for the 4-year-old Repository and mandate of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton (ECS), not the Department of Civil Engineering! I stressed -- in connection also with Arthur Sale's recommendation that universities should promptly proceed with adopting bottom-up departmental mandates ("patchwork mandates") until/unless they have rapid consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide mandate -- that ECS's mandate, the world's first OA mandate as far as I know, was a departmental mandate, not a university-wide mandate. Which prompts me to describe a few more historical details about self-archiving policy at the University of Southampton: As anyone can see by consulting ROARMAP, Southampton does have another, bigger Repository, and another Repository policy: It has a university-wide Institutional Repository (IR) -- ePrints Soton -- and has had it for nearly as long as it has had the ECS Departmental Repository ("DR"). Southampton also now has a university-wide mandate proposal (not yet announced), one that has even been officially approved; but it has not yet been officially adopted. (Don't ask me why it is taking Southampton so long to adopt its approved self-archiving mandate! I have no idea, except that I note that the delay is depressingly commensurate with similar bureaucratic delays at many other institutions. All the more reason for individual departments like ECS to push ahead with Arthur Sale's "Patchwork Mandate" rather than sitting around waiting for their university to get its act together: Southampton has at least 13 EPrints Repositories; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.) Last point: I confidently count a self-archiving mandate a success if it generates a deposit rate of 100%. That means the keystrokes are getting done; and it is (and always was) keystrokes alone that have been standing between the research community and the 100% Open Access to its own research output that has been within its reach ever since the dawn of the online era. Les Carr points out that some of the ECS Repository deposits are Closed Access (CA) rather than Open Access (OA). That is not a problem, because the Repository's semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (also known as the "Fair Use" Button) can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA during a Closed Access embargo period, providing for all user needs until either embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths under mounting webwide pressure from the increasingly palpable benefits of OA, or authors simply tire of performing the extra keystrokes involved in fulfilling individual eprint requests one by one, and hit the master key that transforms their deposit from "CA" to "OA" once and for all. A slightly more problematic case is the one where the authors have only done the keystrokes to deposit their metadata, but have failed to do the last keystroke, the one that deposits their full-text (whether as OA or CA). There we have a visible but orphaned reference, with no text to request or send. The EPrints IR software has not implemented a second button, with which would-be users can prod the author to deposit the missing text (and then send it), because we are confident that this dysfunctional practice is becoming increasingly rare and will remedy itself with time and experience of its own accord -- inasmuch as it needs to be remedied at all: For there are cases where an author may legitimately wish to deposit only a paper's metadata, for record-keeping purposes, but not the text itself. Examples would be seminars and conference papers that are written but not published, being merely precursors of later published papers. And of course there are books, of which the author may not wish to deposit the full text! ECS's self-archiving mandate applies only to published, peer-reviewed articles (in journals or refereed conference proceedings). Authors are not obliged to deposit every text they have ever keyed, let alone make them all OA! NM: I have received some results from a random spidering of staff publication lists at www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=nnnnI am afraid I did not explain sufficiently explicitly: U. Southampton has a number of other Repositories (at least 13) besides that of the ECS Department. The biggest of them is the university-wide IR, ePrints Soton. However, as explained in my reply above, whereas the departmental mandate of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was officially adopted in January 2003, the university-wide mandate, though already officially approved some time ago, is still (for reasons unknown to me!) awaiting official adoption. In the meanwhile, the university as a whole has no self-archiving mandate yet, so whatever deposits you find in ePrints Soton will be the usual spontaneous (unmandated) ones (for which the worldwide baseline deposit rate is about 15%), probably increased in this case beyond that baseline also by library mediation and encouragement (which Arthur Sale's analyses show to produce a better deposit rate, but nothing anywhere near Alma Swan's predicted 80-90% for mandated deposit). The deposit of only a subset of a researcher's total publications reflects the fact that depositing current and future papers requires far fewer keystrokes and effort than depositing one's full prior opus (which may even require scanning and OCR) -- though eventually that should of course all be deposited too!. I hope this dispels any further ambiguity! Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, July 21. 2007Making Visibility Visible: OA Metrics of Productivity and Prestige![]() 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. What Arxiv has is content (in one field); IRs as a whole do not (in any field).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. 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"). 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.)Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: 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... Some of the absolute visibility metrics are already implemented in U. Southampton's EPrints IRs: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. 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 Saturday, June 9. 2007London Open Research Conference![]() Open Research: 3rd London Conference on Opening Access to Research Publications Open Access Institutional Repositories 'vital to UK economy'![]() 'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK... Thursday, December 28. 2006The Name Game: Names Get In Our Way
In "Quantum Game Theory and Open Access Publishing," Hanauske et al (2006) try to use game-theoretic modeling -- pitting "author-reputation" (in the form of citations) against "journal-reputation" -- to show that authors will inevitably switch from "traditional publishing" to "open access publishing." This would be a welcome conclusion if Hanauske et al's underlying assumptions and their definition of OA publishing had been valid. But the article defines "Green OA" as self-archiving in an Institutional Repository, "Gold OA" as publishing in an OA journal, and "OA Publishing" as a "third option," with self-archiving in Arxiv (a Central Repository) as its prime example. In reality, of course, self-archiving in Arxiv is not OA publishing at all, but simply another example of OA self-archiving (Green OA). Hence the assumption that "OA Publishing" (in this incorrect sense) pits "author-reputation" (citations) game-theoretically against "journal-reputation" (with citations eventually winning) is invalid too. The correct conclusion, requiring no game-theoretic modeling at all, is that OA will inevitably win over non-OA eventually (especially once accelerated by Green OA self-archiving mandates), simply because more citations are better than fewer citations. Nothing to do with OA publishing (Gold OA) in particular, which also benefits from more citations, nor with traditional publishing, which likewise benefits from more citations.
Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H. and Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30(4).Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, December 25. 2006OA Progress in France![]() ![]() ![]() [Linearlog/log fit and projections done via Origin] Spontaneous self-archiving in HAL seems to have begun in about 2002, so it is not clear whether the monthly deposit rate will continue to accelerate or was simply catching up with the baseline at which all other unmandated self-archiving rates have been idling for years now. If HAL's monthly deposit growth rate is indeed exponential, then HAL will reach 100% self-archiving in 5 years without a mandate; if it is a power curve ("puissance") it will take 15 years; ![]() Franck Laloe: [translated from French] "There are also some small research institutes in France which are already self-archiving 100% of their research output, for example IN2P3, a component (high-energy physics) of CNRS. A team of 3 documentalists deposits 100% of IN2P3 article output in Hal-IN2P3, because on a small scale this is possible. Another example is IFREMER, a small institute for research on seas and oceans. They have a small, well-done archive containing 100% of their output. As to my own field of research, it has been self-archiving at 99% in ArXiv for a long time…"There seem to be two morals to this story: (1) Even a centralised national archiving system in a centralised country like France, cannot succeed without a national deposit mandate; (2) until France adopts a national deposit mandate, it too, like all other countries, will have to rely on individual institutional (and research-funder) mandates. Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Are things otherwise in France? (began May, 1999)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, December 16. 2006Central versus Distributed Archives
On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Heather Morrison wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
Arxiv has been showing this same, steady, unswerving linear increase in the number of deposits per month (quadratic acceleration of the total content) since the year 1991, and Arxiv has been tracking its own growth, monthly, since then.HM:"arXiv is showing very healthy growth, around 20% annually. I've been tracking arXiv on a quarterly basis, starting Dec. 31, 2005: [here]." ![]() The year 2006 is hence not the one in which to fete this as "very healthy" growth -- unless we want to wait till doomsday to reach 100% OA. At this rate, Ebs Hilf estimates that it would take till 2050 to reach 100% OA in Physics. And that is without mentioning that Arxiv-style central self-archiving has not yet caught on in any other field (except possibly economics) since 1991. In contrast, distributed self-archiving in, for example, computer science, has already long overtaken Arxiv-style central self-archiving. See Citeseer (a harvester of locally self-archived papers in computer science, already twice the size of Arxiv): Logic alone should alert us that ever since Institutional IRs and Central CRs became completely equivalent and interoperable, and seamlessly harvestable and integrable, with the OAI protocol of 1999, the days of CRs were numbered. It makes no sense for institutional researchers either to deposit only in a CR instead of their own IR, or to double-deposit (in their own IR plus CRs, such as PubMed Central). The direct deposits will be in the natural locus, the researcher's own IR. And then CRs will harvest, as Citeseer, OAister -- and, for that matter, Google and Google Scholar -- do. OA self-archiving is meant to be done in the interests of the impact, visibility, and recording of each institution's research output. Institutional self-archiving tiles all of OA space (whereas CRs would have to criss-cross all disciplines, willy-nilly, redundantly, and arbitrarily). Most important, institutions, being the primary research providers, have the most direct stake in maximising -- and the most direct means of monitoring -- the self-archiving of their own research output. Hence institutional self-archiving mandates -- reinforced by research funder self-archiving mandates -- will see to it that institutional research output is deposited in its natural, optimal locus: each institution's own IR (twinned and mirrored for redundancy and preservation). CRs (subject-based, multi-subject, national, or any other combination that might be judged useful) can then harvest from the distributed network of IRs. - "Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Saturday, November 25. 2006Open Access Archiving in France
![]() But what is unlikely is that France is so much of an exception that it will be able to do this without a national self-archiving mandate. (See the graphs of HAL's current and projected growth rate in Franck's presentation and draw your own conclusion about whether and when 100% OA is likely to be reached in France without a mandate. Its present desposit rate seems to be about 12% of French output, which is about the international average for spontaneous [unmandated] self-archiving.) ![]() The advantage of such centralisation, however, is that one national mandate will be enough. Here are some sentimental flashbacks: Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Are things otherwise in France? (began May, 1999)Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, November 20. 2006Two Happy Accidents Demonstrate Power of "Eprint Request" Button![]() Two recent "accidents," occurring independently at two different institutions, provide dramatic evidence of the potential power of this feature: The button is intended to tide over researcher usage needs during any embargo interval. As such, it is expected to apply only to a minority of deposits (as the majority of journals already endorse immediate Open Access-setting. The two accident-anecdotes come from University of Southampton and Université du Québec à Montréal: Southampton has many IRs: A departmental IR (Department of Electronics and Computer Science) already has an immediate full-text deposit mandate, but the university-wide IR does not yet have a mandate, so it has many deposits for which only the metadata are accessible, many of them deposited via library mediation rather than by the authors themselves. This will soon change to direct author deposit, but meanwhile, "The Button" was implemented, and the result was such a huge flood of eprint requests that the proxy depositors were overwhelmed and the feature quickly had to be turned off! The Button will of course be restored -- using LDAP to redirect the eprint requests to the authors rather than the library mediators -- but the accident was instructive in revealing the nuclear power of the button! Authors, we expect, will be gratified by the countable measures of interest in their work, and we will make a countable metric out of the number of eprint requests. Authors will be able to opt out of receiving eprint requests -- but we confidently expect that few will choose to do so! (Our confidence is based on many factors, take your pick: (1) Authors' known habit of looking first at the bibliography of any article or book in their field, to see "Do they cite me?" (2) Authors' known habit of googling themselves as well as looking up their own citation-counts in Web of Science and now in Google Scholar. (3) Employers' and funders' growing use of research performance metrics to supplement publication counts in employment, promotion and funding decisions...) Much the same thing happened at UQaM but this time it was while a new IR was still under construction, and its designers were still just testing out its features with dummy demo papers (some of them real!). "The Button" again unleashed an immediate torrent of eprint requests for the bona fide papers, so the feature had to be (tremulously, but temporarily) disabled! Caveat Emptor! Increasing Institutional Repository Content with "email eprint" ButtonStevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum ![]() ![]() Please Register Your Institutional Repository in ROAR
In order to give everyone a clear update on progress in the growth of Instititutional Repositories (IRs) and in order to encourage others to create IRs, could you please register your IRs in the Registry of Open Access Repositories ROAR.
And if your institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP. Before registering your IR in ROAR, please check whether it is already registered! This is also a good time to try some of ROAR's powerful new features for monitoring IR growth.
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