Publish-or-Perish Mandates and Self-Archiving Mandates

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

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-jacobsbook.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/memberinformation/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
>
>