I'm wondering, since some libraries now appear not to
"make
better informed choices about whether or not to buy the
value-added materials" when it comes to revised
dissertations,
but simply ask their approval-plan vendors to screen out all
books based on dissertations (because they already have
access to
dissertations through ProQuest), what makes you think, Ann,
that
they will take the trouble to make determinations of
"value
added" by publishers when it comes to government-funded
research?
Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press
At 7:53 PM -0400 10/30/07, Ann Okerson wrote:
>ready availability of reports to the public would
clearly show
>where publishers add value (or not) (see also Anthony
>Watkinson's comments about poorly written reports) and
will
>enable libraries to make better informed choices about
whether
>or not to buy the value-added materials.
>
>Bonnie, these days most grant proposals are submitted
via online
>forms or at least by e-mail, as are most interim and
final
>reports, which funding agencies require from grantees,
either 6
>or 12 month intervals and also upon completion. It's
hard to
>understand why at least some appropriate parts of these
could
>not be made available in a useful form. To be sure, it
would
>take some investment on the part of each granting agency
(such
>as Web site, organizing, formatting/light editing work
-- but
>most of them probably already have Web sites?).
>
>Having such publicly available reports would serve
several good
>purposes: (1) demonstrating grantee accountability; (2)
>identifying *all* grants and describing progress,
whether
>findings are published in peer review journals or not
(it may be
>that research findings from agencies such as NSF and NIH
are
>generally published, but in various other fields that's
not the
>case (humanities, social sciences, for example) and it
is very
>hard to find out who's doing what -- try it sometime;
and (3)
>ready availability of reports to the public would
clearly show
>where publishers add value (or not) (see also Anthony
>Watkinson's comments about poorly written reports) and
will
>enable libraries to make better informed choices about
whether
>or not to buy the value-added materials.
>
>Ann Okerson/Yale Library
>
>On 10/29/07, Klein, Bonnie CIV DTIC O <BKlein dtic.mil> wrote:
>> 1) Re: Ann's note. You are correct that often the
documented
>> results of government funded research winds up in
filing
>> cabinets, doomed as gray literature and to
extinction. However,
>> some government agencies do have the
infrastructure and do
>> support public websites where they make available
reports
>> resulting from contracts or grants. These
repositories, however,
>> face the same issues of repositories everywhere --
getting the
>> producing and sponsoring organizations to
contribute their
>> documents.
>>
>> An example of a government repository is DoD's
Defense Technical
>> Information Center(DTIC). Searching the Technical
Reports
>> database http://stin
et.dtic.mil/str/guided-tr.html for Corporate
>> Author "Yale" matched 2134 out of 981113
citations. Of those,
>> 418 are full-text. The latest accession is
ADA471819 (Full Text
>> Handle http://handle.
dtic.mil/100.2/ADA471819 ) Title: A Fast
>> Randomized Algorithm for the Approximation of
Matrices Corporate
> > Author: YALE UNIV NEW HAVEN CT DEPT OF COMPUTER
SCIENCE Report
> > Date: 31 JUL 2007. If you do a Google search of
the document
> > title, Yale's copy is the first hit and DTIC is
second. Also see
>> DOE's GrayLit Network: http://www.osti.gov/gray
lit/ and
>> www.science.gov .
>
>[SNIP]
>
>> Bonnie Klein
>> Technical Reports Team
>> Defense Technical Information Center
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