Summary of Keynote Address to be given at
8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Disstertations
Wednesday 28 - Friday 30 September 2005
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Austrlia
http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/etd2005.html
Maximising Research Impact By Mandating Institutional Self-Archiving
It is a foregone conclusion that the next generation of researchers
will self archive their research output in their own Open Access (OA)
Instititional Repositories (IRs) for all potential users online,
and they are already beginning to do it now, with their theses and
dissertations. But what about the present generation of researchers?
Only 15% of the annual 2.5 million articles being published yearly
in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals is being
self-archived today. Self-archiving has been shown to increase
citation impact 50%-250+% by making the research available to those
users whose institutions cannot afford access to the official journal
version. The marginal dollar value of a citation was estimated
by Diamond in 1986 to be $50-$1300 (US). Converting to Australian
dollars ($65-$1700), updating their value by 170% from 1986-2005
($110-$2890) and using even the most conservative ends of these
estimates (50% x $110) and multiplying by the 85% of Australia's
annual journal article output (about 35,000 according to ISI) that
is not yet OA, this translates into an annual loss of $1,933,750 in
revenue to Australian researchers for not having done (or delegated)
the few extra keystrokes per article it takes to self-archive it. And
that is without even considering the loss in revenue from potential
usage and applications of Australian research findings in Australia
and worldwide, nor the even more general loss to the progress of
human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and Research Councils UK
(RCUK) are on the verge of implementing it: a mandate to extend the
existing universal requirement to 'publish or perish' to 'publish
and also self-archive the final peer-reviewed author's draft in your
OA IR'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving
and an international JISC author study (plus the actual experience
of the two institutions -- CERN and University of Southampton ECS --
that have already adopted such a requirement) show that over 90% of
authors will comply. I will present the evidence, across disciplines
and countries, for the 50%-250% OA citation impact advantage.
Stevan Harnad
Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Chaire de recherche du Canada
Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC)
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8
harnad_at_uqam.ca
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Received on Thu Sep 08 2005 - 14:05:22 BST