Dear all
Bo-Christer Bjork timing data are interesting, but there is an important
distinction in the way of archiving that must be underscored: Archiving your
past articles is absolutely not the same thing as archiving your current
articles immediately upon acceptance.
I am now a retired librarian but I began "proxy self-archiving" articles on
behalf of the researchers in my lab, in 2002. Much as reported by
Bo-Christer, this exercise took a lot of time (checking the files, checking
the copyright, asking for the approval of the researcher, getting the drafts
into the right format, etc.), and with a sluggish old computer -- not far
from 2 hours per article.
But later I started to self-archive my own articles about OA and even if it
didn't take me 6 minutes per article, I think that it took no more than 15.
Why?
First, because you improve your "skill" in self-archiving progressively.
Second, because I already knew whether I had the right to make the article
open access immediately: I had checked it in choosing my periodical (and
each researcher should do the same). I tried to train the researchers in my
lab to read the copyright they signed and once in 2003 I was very happy in
reading the message of a researcher sending me his article and saying: "you
have the right to self-archive it!" He hadn't even used ROMEO which was not
as complete as it is nowadays. Nor did the Button exist yet, for users to
request copies of closed-access deposits.
Third, and most important, deposit was accelerated because the file had just
been completed; it was "fresh in my memory" and at hand, ready to be
self-archived in the requisite format just by a click on the chosen archive!
In conclusion, I know from experience that self-archiving is an easy task
for all. Researchers should deposit their articles immediately upon
acceptance by the journal: it will not take them more than 15 minutes per
article. If they wish, they can leave it to library staff to check the
copyright and decide whether access to the deposit should be made
immediately open access, or closed access with an embargo.
Hélène Bosc
----- Original Message -----
From: <bjork_at_HANKEN.FI>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2010 5:09 PM
Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness
Dear Stevan,
Could you post this to the list
Bo-Christer
Dear all,
Two points about this discussion.
Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our
(D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best practice
fashion. You can check the results at
http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took me about one week’s
workload in all including finding the proper files, reformatting the
personal versions, checking the copyright issTitle: User acceptance of
information technology: Toward a unified view Journal: MIS QUART, 27
(3): 425-478 SEP 2003 Citations: 382 Authors: Venkatesh, V;Morris,
MG;Davis, GB;Davis, FDues etc. The actual task of uploading, once I
had everything ready, took perhaps the six minutes suggested, but all
in my experience around an hour would be more appropriate. We are
helping out some other key researchers at my school to upload and
there are many non-trivial task. For instance researchers in Finance
whose ”personal versions” consist of text files and several tables
which are provided to the publishers as sheets in excel files. There
may be several hours of work to format a decent personal version of
such a papers. Since some of best authors are very busy (dean and vice
dean of the school) this has to be done by admin staff.
Secondly the situation reseachers face in making the decision to
upload a green copy resembles the situation faced by any individual
deciding whether or not to take into use a new IT system. There is a
large body of literature on this in Information Systems (my field)
research and the UTAUT model :
User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view
Journal: MIS QUART, 27 (3): 425-478 SEP 2003 Citations: 382 Authors:
Venkatesh, V;Morris, MG;Davis, GB;Davis, FD
Is the standard refernce (2800+ references in Google Scholar)
A variation on this is the model by Gallivan:
Organizational adoption and assimilation of complex technological
innovations: development and application of a new framework
MJ Gallivan - ACM Sigmis Database, 2001 - portal.acm.org
I would suggest that using a model like these to model how rational
scholars behave could be could quite fruitful, rather than staring
from scratch. Uploading green copies to a repository may not be so
different from starting a profile and uploading stuff to Face Book or
other similar voluntary IT acts we have to decide on. A mandate
lacking police actions such as lower pay etc makes the uploading in
reality voluntary and hence the above models still apply.
Bo-Christer Björk
Received on Mon Sep 20 2010 - 11:35:23 BST