Re: Comparing Physicists' Central and Institutional Self-archiving Practices at Southampton

From: Sally Morris (Morris Associates) <"Sally>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 12:30:32 -0000

I had no alternative hypothesis - I simply wanted to point out, in my
usual stickler-for-accuracy way, that Stevan's statement:

 

"The outcome of the study was that the hypothesis is incorrect: If
anything, veteran Arxiv self-archivers are more resistant to IR
deposit than ordinary nonarchivers, because they neither wish to
change their longstanding locus of deposit, nor do they wish to
double-deposit."

 

... was a bit misleading, as the study itself asked, and thus found,
nothing about the `because'...

 

Hardly worth prolonging this!

 

Happy New Year

 

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


____________________________________________________________________________


From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 05 January 2009 11:48
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Comparing Physicists' Central and Institutional
Self-archiving Practices at Southampton

 

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 4:21 AM, Sally Morris (Morris Associates)
<sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Did the researchers ask physicists why they did or didn't use one or
the other repository?  If they did not (and the abstract only talks
about correlation), then Stevan's explanation is pure speculation,
surely?

The (Indiana University) study was done on University of Southampton
physicists. The (Indiana University) author did not ask the
Southampton physicists any questions; he just analyzed the
Southampton IR's (and Arxiv's) metadata logs. 

 

But we at Southampton did of course did ask our physicists, and they
did of course reply that they preferred to continue depositing in
Arxiv and Arxiv only, as they had already been depositing for many
years, rather than depositing instead -- or in addition
(double-depositing) -- in the University's own IR: .

 

Since the answer was more or less obvious, I would be interested to
hear what other hypothesis Sally might be speculating was the real
reason our physicists preferred to continue depositing in Arxiv
rather than their own institution's IR.

 

(I might add that the latest RAE outcome for physics at Southampton
might possibly now increase Southampton physicists' inclination to
double-deposit -- but even that is mooted by the SWORD protocol,
which can and will do the imports automatically.)

 

(I will be taking up a perhaps more interesting question in my next
posting, which will be about physicists' belief that a central
repository like Arxiv can provide functionality that distributed IRs
and their central harvesters cannot provide. The belief is in fact
incorrect, but it has furnished the basis for a quite natural and
timely research project that Les Carr and I will be submitting as a
proposal to JISC: designing a functional demonstration that a central
harvester of distributed IR OAI-PMH metadata can duplicate all of
Arxiv's current functionality, plus a lot more, built on
Southampton's Celestial OAI-PMH harvester . Stay tuned!)

 

Stevan Harnad

 
Received on Mon Jan 05 2009 - 14:46:16 GMT