On 2 Oct 2007, at 06:56, N. Miradon wrote:
> I thank Professor Harnad for his long and detailed reply.
>
> Meanwhile, I have received some results from a random spidering of
> staff
> publication lists at
> http://www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=****
>
> Here are the first three entries
>
> Prof. Mike McDonald ... 307 publications (17 in ePrints Soton)
> Prof. Chris Clayton ... 221 publications (14 in ePrints Soton)
> Prof. AbuBakr Bahaj ... 155 publications (25 in ePrints Soton)
There are very different stories to tell about the School repository
previously reported and the Institutional Repository for which my
colleagues in the University Library are responsible. I hope that my
comments do not err into 'spin', but give some genuine insight into
the differences of the numbers that are seen here.
The base numbers of publications reported are for the entire career
history of the academics concerned - in Mike McDonald's case, going
back to 1971. Perhaps we will eventually be concerned with
backfilling all these valuable publications, but for the moment the
repository is concentrating on something nearer to the present.
If we take only smaller time slices, then Prof M lists three 2006
publications on his web page, only one of which is in
eprints.soton.ac.uk . But in 2005 there are 4 papers, all of which
are deposited in the repository. Prof Clayton has 3 of 5 publications
deposited in 2006 and 2 out of 3 in 2005. Prof Bahaj has 4 of 6 in
2006 and 5 of 7 in 2005.
So a better contemporaneous record for deposits, but you are unlikely
to find a high percentage of full texts for those deposits because
SOuthampton, like many repositories in the UK, is highly influenced
by the National Research Assessment Exercise (whose cutoff date is
next month). The processes imposed on the repository by the funding
councils force high metadata quality, DOIs, ISSNs and submission of
*printed outputs*, but eschews (to all intents and purposes) PDFs and
all manifestations of electronic publication. The story is more
complex than that, but the upshot is that UK repositories engaged in
supporting the RAE have to concentrate on metadata deposit over and
above full text deposit. Suffice to say that we are all looking
forward to revisiting these deposits in the new year!
--
Les Carr
University of Southampton
Received on Tue Oct 02 2007 - 13:40:57 BST