On Mon, 9 May 2005, Lisa Dittrich wrote:
> I love all the rhetoric about faculty not "knowing what's good for them"
> and how they simply have to be "educated" about the virtues of OA and IRs.
> Baloney. If it was of value to them, they'd know, and they'd do.
Here is a partial reply (re-posted from Alma Swan):
Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 17:58:46 +0100
From: Alma Swan <a.swan_at_TALK21.COM>
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: What Provosts Need to Mandate
"I can now report that I have completed the data analysis for the
latest survey on self-archiving and the results on this issue of
mandating are as follows:
"Percentage of authors who would willingly self-archive if their
employer or funder required them to do so = 81%
Percentage who would do so reluctantly = 13%
Percentage who would not self-archive, even with a mandate = 5%
"The 'most willing' country is the USA, where 88% of authors would
self-archive willingly under a mandate and a further 11% would
self-archive reluctantly. The 'least willing' is China, where 58%
would self-archive willingly and 32% would do so reluctantly.
"The report is now written and out with reviewers. It will be published
by JISC shortly."
Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK
> I have been reading lately about how uninterested authors seem to be in
> OA (except a vocal few) and how the response is "we must educate them."
> Too funny. Summer is upon us: shall we organize special camps?
I would say that, for example, the 34,000 biologists who signed the
PLoS open letter hardly betoken a lack of interest in OA:
http://www.plos.org/about/history.html
But there is certainly still a lack of awareness on the part of many
researchers about OA, how and why to provide it, and especially about
its dramatic influence of research impact:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
I will close with some more data from the remarkable Alma Swan,
along with her recommendations on ways of raising faculty awareness,
from a presentation she is doing in Amsterdam this very day:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Making the strategic case for institutional
repositories (CNI, JISC, SURF) Amsterdam, May 10-11
Alma Swan (2005) Session on [Raising] "Faculty Awareness"
http://www.surf.nl/en/bijeenkomsten/index4.php?oid=6
AWARENESS OF SELF-ARCHIVING:
Of those who have not self-archived any articles:
-- 29% are aware of the possibility of providing open access this way
-- 71% are not
-- Non-archivers = 51% of the population
-- 31% of researchers are not aware of the possibility of self-archiving
-- Only 10% of self-archivers know about the SHERPA/RoMEO
publisher policies directory
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
-- Less than 25% are aware of the UK House of Commons Select Committee
recommendations
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm
-- Less than 25% are aware of the NIH proposals
What to do about author awareness, then? Make them AWARE:
-- of the citation advantage of open access work
-- of the existence of IRs and what is in them
-- that THEY can self-archive too and reap the benefits
easy to do
-- doesn't take long - just a few minutes, a few keystrokes
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
-- copyright
-- of moves on the official requirement to self-archive
-- officially require them to self-archive!
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT:
-- Providing "hit" statistics
http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/
http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php
-- Demonstrating the citation advantage
http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
-- Showing how to find citation counts
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad
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Received on Tue May 10 2005 - 04:48:42 BST