Re: CIBER 2005: The foxes survey the chicken-coop

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 12:23:19 +0100

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Velterop, Jan Springer UK wrote:

> Interesting new (to me) survey:
> www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf

One at first wonders why Jan Velterop would recommend a survey asking
disinterested questions of the form:

    Question 10
    Consider this statement:
    'A major shift to open access publishing would undermine the
    current scholarly journals system'

    Question 10a
    To what extent do you think this is likely to happen?
        Very unlikely / Quite unlikely / Neither likely nor unlikely /
        Quite likely / Very unlikely / I don't know

    Question 10b
    To what extent do you think this would be a good thing or a bad thing?
        Very bad / Quite bad / Neither good nor bad / Quite good /
        Very good / I don't know

But as one reads further one finds the kind of question that probably
piqued Jan's own interests:

    Question 16
    Consider the statement:
    'A major shift to archiving published articles in institutional
    repositories would undermine the current scholarly journals system'

    Question 16a
    To what extent do you think this is likely to happen?
        Very unlikely / Quite unlikely / Neither likely nor unlikely /
        Quite likely / Very unlikely / I don't know

    Question 16b
    To what extent do you think this would be a good thing or a bad thing?
        Very bad / Quite bad / Neither good nor bad / Quite good /
        Very good / I don't know

and

    Question 15
    Are you happy that, under an institutional repository model,
    readers would be able to retrieve several different versions of
    your articles? (for example, the 'official' version of your paper on
    the publisher's website, together with one or more pre-publication
    versions on public web sites)?
        Very happy / Quite happy / Not very happy / Not at all happy /
        I don't know

Nolo contendere. I prefer surveys that do not plant words or thoughts
into the surveyee's mouths/minds...

Better still, I prefer empirical evidence of actual effects to surveys
of opinions about hypothetical effects.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Oct 18 2005 - 12:31:58 BST