Re: Publish-or-Perish Mandates and Self-Archiving Mandates

["Atanu Garai" <atanugarai.lists@gmail.com>]

Dear Sandy

I stated earlier that authors can not be made responsible for any 
post-manuscript writing activities. Publishing is a different 
sort of activity, so is its dissemination. If authors are 
supposed to do the librarian's job or that of the university 
press, then there is no need of the existence of these 
institutions. Self-archiving anyway does not mean that authors 
themselves have to deposit their publications in IR and in a 
"legally mandated" environment "ideally" there should be an 
office responsible for this activity. This could be university 
registrar, librarian, office of scholarly communications or 
something else. But in a university, the numbers of potential 
authors could range from few hundreds to several thousands and it 
is the only these offices which will have exact details of the 
activities of the authors in a university. The notion that 
authors will deposit their publication by their own hand stems 
from an activist's effort of OA populisation, not from the 
realization of how universities work in a large framework of 
interconnected departments and offices.

Atanu Garai
Globethics.net


From: Sandy Thatcher
Subject: Re: Publish-or-Perish Mandates and Self-Archiving Mandates

> What surprises me here is that there is only 95% compliance. 
> For any mandatory ETD program like the one that exists at Penn 
> State now (http://www.etd.psu.edu), a graduate student cannot 
> graduate without depositing the thesis in electronic form. One 
> wonders why there is less than 100% compliance under these 
> circumstances.
>
> This kind of mandatory policy, of course, has teeth that others 
> do not. What is the penalty for a faculty member who ignores a 
> university policy to deposit research papers in the 
> university's IR?
>
> Until "mandatory" means something more than "strongly suggest" 
> and has serious consequences for noncompliance, I suspect that 
> the uptake will fall far short of Stevan's ideal Green OA 
> world.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State Press