Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS

From: Leslie Carr <lac_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 12:03:36 +0100

I think that Southampton** is quietly confident that if you can talk
up Open Access while actually achieving the metadata deposits as an
embedded institutional process, then the final stage of document
deposit will be relatively painless to achieve. If you ask them
whether they would have planned this as an OA strategy, the answer
would be "NO". But the opportunity of demonstrating the utility of a
repository for ongoing research assessment / metrics / marketing was
too good to miss, and it was decided to take "the long way around" to
the goal of OA. If we hadn't taken that decision, the repository
would have been marginalised and its institutional impact reduced.

--
Les Carr
EPrints Technical Director / University of Southampton
**by "Southampton" I mean the library team who are doing all the hard
work.
I am merely sitting on the steering group and basking in reflected
glory :-)
On 3 Oct 2007, at 06:54, Arthur Sale wrote:
> As a matter of interest the Australian research assessment (RQF)
> refuses to
> allow its assessors to look at any metadata whatsoever, but insists
> that
> every assessable item must be in an institutional repository (even
> articles
> in open access journals), and assessors link direct to them.
> 
> Someday, between the UK and Australia, they'll get it right. In the
> meantime
> we may have the better compromise here, since it encourages
> deposit, in
> which metadata is the by-product.
> 
> Arthur Sale
> University of Tasmania, Australia
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > 
> > 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 Wed Oct 03 2007 - 12:43:33 BST