On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, Sally Morris (Morris Associates,
Publishing
Consultancy) wrote:
> It's one of the curious things about the 'Open Access
movement' that uptake
> by the academics themselves (for whose benefit it is
supposed to be) depends
> on compulsion.
Sally is quite right to point out that despite the
substantial
benefits to researchers from making their publications Open
Access, it is now a historic fact that it required no less
than a
mandate from their institutions and funders to induce them
to go
ahead and reap those benefits.
But if "compulsion" is indeed the right word for
mandating
self-archiving, I wonder whether Sally was ever curious
about why
publication itself had to be mandated by researchers'
institutions and funders ("publish or perish"),
despite its
substantial benefits to researchers?
And although I quite agree with Sally that it is researchers
themselves who are most to blame for the ludicrously late
arrival
of the optimal and inevitable outcome (100% OA
self-archiving),
more than a few of the 34 causes of this "Zeno's
Paralysis" can
be attributed to obstacles that their publishers had put in
their
paths:
Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's
Paralysis, in
Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical
and Economic
Aspects, Chandos.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/01/harnad-jaco
bsbook.htm
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32-worries
Many thanks to Arthur Sale for his latest evidence of the
success
of mandatory self-archiving policies, below.
Stevan Harnad
> From: Arthur Sale (U. Tasmania)
> Subject: Mandatory policy success
>
> The results of a survey carried out by the Australasian
Digital
> Theses program have recently been released. The full
report is
> available at
> http://adt.caul.edu.au/memberinformatio
n/submissionsurvey/survey2006.doc.
> It applies to the deposit of open access electronic
copies of
> research theses (eg PhD) in university repositories in
Australia and
> New Zealand (and thence searchable through the ADT
gateway
> http://adt.caul.edu.au/).
>
> It is apparent from the report (and indeed highlighted
by the
> authors) that a mandatory deposit policy results in a
submission rate
> of 95% of all theses accepted, while its absence
results in a
> submission rate of 17-22% (in other words, a pitifully
empty
> repository). While this should not be news to anyone,
the report has
> hard quotable facts on the success of an institutional
mandatory
> policy over a substantial population of universities.
>
> 59% (ie 33) of Australian and New Zealand universities
have mandatory
> deposit policies in place in 2007, so the technological
change has
> gone well beyond the tipping point. I expect the
remaining 41% of
> universities to follow suit in the very near future;
the report
> suggests that 24% had already started planning to this
end in 2006.
>
> In another interesting fact, three universities have
provision for a
> thesis to be lodged electronically only (in other words
no paper
> copy) and one is considering it. It is not clear how
much this
> provision is used for hypermedia theses, or if it will
spread.
>
> Arthur Sale
> University of Tasmania
>
>
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