On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 6:01 AM, Sally Morris (Morris Associates)
<sally_at_morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> That's what they told Alma. It is not, however, what they are doing so far
Before you become too settled in this wistful, wishful thinking,
Sally, it might be prudent to have a look at some of the actual
mandate compliance outcome data available so far:
For funder mandates:
http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2009/03/17/nih-mandate-made-permanent/
For institutional mandates:
http://fcms.its.utas.edu.au/scieng/comp/project.asp?lProjectId=1830
and our own:
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/yassine/SelfArchiving/LogisticRegression.htm
And, Sally, with the growth of mandates I am afraid it is only going
to keep getting worse (or better, depending on one's point of view).
I can quite understand why the publishing community may not realize,
or may hope that researchers will not realize, what is in the best
interests of research and researchers, when that happens to be in
conflict with the interests of publishers.
But researchers, sleepy as they have been, do wake up once it is
mandated, and then the news (and palpable benefit) spreads, and things
only get better (or worse, depending on your point of view).
Stevan Harnad
> Sally
>
>
> Sally Morris
> Partner, 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
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
> [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
> Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: 23 June 2009 14:13
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Subject: Re: The Beginning of Institutional Repositories
>
> On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:
>
> > The perceived necessity for institutional and other mandates does, in a
> > sense, reflect a failing - that researchers simply do not see 'what is in
> it
> > for them' and therefore do not, by and large, deposit voluntarily. What
> > this tells us is an interesting question
>
> It is indeed an interesting question. I think a partial answer is given
> by Alma Swan's surveys, which showed not only that 95% of researchers
> would comply with a deposit mandate, but that 81% would do so
> *willingly*, and only 14% reluctantly.
>
> To me, that suggests that researchers are inclined to deposit, but not
> inclined enough to do so without a mandate from their institutions or
> funders.
>
> The reasons most are *inclined* to do so, yet only a few actually do it
> without a mandate are multiple. I have identified at least 34 of them:
>
> Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in
> Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic
> Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/
>
> The three chief worries are about doing so are that (1) it might be
> illegal, (2) it might put their paper's acceptance for publication by
> their preferred journals at risk, and (3) it might be time-consuming.
>
> These -- and the 31 other worries -- are all groundless, and individual
> researchers can be successfully informed about this, one by one; but
> that is not a very practical route to reaching a deposit rate of 100%
> worldwide. Official institutional and funder mandates reassure researchers
> that there is nothing to worry about, their institutions and funders
> back them, everyone is doing it, and, as they quickly learn, the time
> it takes to deposit it is minuscule.
>
> Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A
> Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
>
> I am not saying that this fully resolves the puzzle of why it is taking so
> long to reach the outcome that is so obviously and demonstrably optimal
> for research and researchers, and fully within reach. We will have to
> leave that to future historians and sociologists. What is urgent now
> -- for the sake of research itself, as well as for researchers, their
> institutions and funders, and the tax-payers that fund the research --
> is that this optimal and inevitable outcome should be facilitated and
> accelerated by mandates, so we reach it at long last. For the longer we
> delay, the more research impact and progress keeps being lost, needlessly.
>
> So full speed ahead with deposit mandates now, and then we can study
> why it took so long -- and why it needed to be mandated at all -- at
> our leisure, after we have universal OA.
>
> Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Jun 24 2009 - 13:54:33 BST