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

From: J.F.Rowland_at_lboro.ac.uk <J.F.Rowland_at_LBORO.AC.UK>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 11:48:32 +0100

The British Higher Education Funding Councils have negotiated some
rather complicated special arrangements with publishers to ensure that
their panels can get electronic access to the full texts of all the
papers that have been entered for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE) even if they are not normally available on OA. Thus the
individual universities don't actually *have* to supply electronic full
texts, but the panels are supposed to look at the full texts and not
just at the metadata.

It would have been much better if the Funding Councils had mandated all
universities to have an IR in place in time for this RAE, and then said
that all papers entered for the exercise must be on the university's IR
in full text. This would have been a huge fillip for the growth of IRs.

My own university has a database of metadata for all papers written by
its academics, whether entered for the RAE or not. It may not be
totally complete because the onus is on individual departments to input
their own new publications, but it's probably 80%+ complete.
Unfortunately this database is in a completely separate system (run by
the central administration) from the IR, which is moderately populated
so far, and is run by the Library.

Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK.

-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Arthur Sale
Sent: 03 October 2007 06:54
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates:
University of Southampton ECS

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 - 14:30:22 BST