I believe this is not true for all disciplines in academia. Physicists
have been self
archiving for years with ArXiv while most computer scientists have been
putting their
papers online at their web sites for others to download and for digital
library
search engines such as CiteSeer, Rexa, Libra, etc. to crawl and index.
This latter trend is increasing for other disciplines such as cognitive
science, economics and academic business.
Best
Lee Giles
Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:
> What I find interesting about this is that it confirms other findings that
> academics are not actually motivated to self-archive - only compulsion will
> do it.
>
> It's one of the curious things about the 'Open Access movement' that uptake
> by the academics themselves (for whose benefit it is supposed to be) depends
> on compulsion
>
> Sally
>
>
> Sally Morris
> Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
> South House, The Street
> Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
> Tel: +44(0)1903 871286
> Fax: +44(0)8701 202806
> Email: sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
> [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
> Behalf Of Professor Arthur Sale
> Sent: 21 June 2007 03:23
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Subject: Mandatory policy success
>
> The results of a survey carried out by the Australasian Digital
> Theses program have recently been released. The full report is
> available at
> http://adt.caul.edu.au/memberinformation/submissionsurvey/survey2006.doc.
> It applies to the deposit of open access electronic copies of
> research theses (eg PhD) in university repositories in Australia and
> New Zealand (and thence searchable through the ADT gateway
> http://adt.caul.edu.au/).
>
> It is apparent from the report (and indeed highlighted by the
> authors) that a mandatory deposit policy results in a submission rate
> of 95% of all theses accepted, while its absence results in a
> submission rate of 17-22% (in other words, a pitifully empty
> repository). While this should not be news to anyone, the report has
> hard quotable facts on the success of an institutional mandatory
> policy over a substantial population of universities.
>
> 59% (ie 33) of Australian and New Zealand universities have mandatory
> deposit policies in place in 2007, so the technological change has
> gone well beyond the tipping point. I expect the remaining 41% of
> universities to follow suit in the very near future; the report
> suggests that 24% had already started planning to this end in 2006.
>
> In another interesting fact, three universities have provision for a
> thesis to be lodged electronically only (in other words no paper
> copy) and one is considering it. It is not clear how much this
> provision is used for hypermedia theses, or if it will spread.
>
> Arthur Sale
> University of Tasmania
>
Received on Thu Jun 21 2007 - 19:33:23 BST