Michael W. Carroll wrote:
At least on American campuses, faculty are much more likely
to support a mandate if they vote to impose it upon themselves
rather than have it imposed by an administrator. Look for a
faculty champion who would be willing to take on this cause.
I think this is the most sensible way forward where it has been difficult to
persuade administrators directly. Administrators being preached at from
outside may well be more easily persuaded if they see a ground-swell of
support building amongst the academic faculty. The best way to work on
faculty is through their colleagues.
One way to help this would be to produce a ten slide presentation (available
in a number of common formats, including ppt, odp (open document
presentation) and pdf) with the most compelling case aimed at persuading
collegaues of their own best interest in supporting an OA mandate, along the
lines of:
-- Depositing your work improves your visibility and citation count (evidence
including graphs and tables);
-- Depositing your work in a sparse IR is less use than in a full IR;
-- An IR with a deposit mandate is the way to a full IR (evidence including
graphs and tables);
-- If everyone is mandated to deposit, the time spent on deposit (which is
less than you think it will be) will count directly towards institutional
evaluation of you, and not you relying on jam tomorrow, while others make hay
today;
-- The Prisoner's Dilemma presentation of how, if we all deposit we all
benefit both from access to other's work and others accessing our own.
I've been trying for three years now to move a deposit along at my
Unviersity, but even my on School's head of research hasn't been easy to
convince of the case. I believe, but I don't have the time to search out and
put together the case in a compelling way, and since this is a common need,
we should, as a community, only need to do it once as a platform and then
allow others to make use of it.
Of course, the case could be localised to various types of university and
various faculties/disciplines/subjects, but that could be done after an
initial presentation is developed.
--
*E-mail*a.a.adams_at_rdg.ac.uk******** Dr Andrew A Adams
**snail*27 Westerham Walk********** School of Systems Engineering
***mail*Reading RG2 0BA, UK******** The University of Reading
****Tel*+44-118-378-6997*********** Reading, United Kingdom
Received on Wed Mar 21 2007 - 12:29:09 GMT