Re: Peer Review and the Target Content of Institutional and Funder Open Access Deposit Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:38:27 -0500

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Talat Chaudhri
<t.chaudhri_at_ukoln.ac.uk> wrote:

      Stevan Harnad wrote:

            ...blurring the target of OA mandates to
            include contents that the author may not wish
            to deposit or make public would create a
            slippery slope that compromises the prospects
            of capturing the mandatory OA target content
            -- which is exclusively peer-reviewed
            articles.

I don't believe that there is any clear evidence for that
conjecture,


If anyone feels that attempting to mandate that authors must deposit
in their IRs all books, software, multimedia, unrefereed preprints
and research data they have produced -- rather than just mandating
that they must deposit their peer-reviewed articles (as now) -- would
not (1) greatly increase author objections to such mandate (2)
greatly reduce the likelihood of author compliance with such a
mandate, and (3) greatly reduce the likelihood of adoption of a
mandate at all in the first place, then it seems to me the burden is
on them to collect evidence for that conjecture. (The null hypothesis
is always the commonsense one, not the conjecture that goes against
the odds and common sense.)

      the debate did not seem to me about mandating these
      things, only whether or not such content would be
      accepted by repositories


I preceded my posting by apologizing that I had not been following
the peer-reviewed thread closely, and that my comment was only about
the implications of the "peer-reviewed" criterion for deposit
mandates, not for optional deposit.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Feb 11 2009 - 16:38:50 GMT