More Reasons for the Immediate Deposit Mandate and the Eprint Request Button

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

                   ** Cross-Posted **

     For hyperlinked references, see:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/292-guid.html

The paper reprint request era's prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, had
already anticipated many of the current developments in Open Access:

     (1) Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the
     World Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic
     Archive. The Scientist 13(4):14.
         EXCERPT: It is the utopian expectation of those who live
         in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create
         Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The
         social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has
         major consequences for the future.
             Garfield, E. (1965) Is the 'free reprint system' free and/or
             obsolete? Essays of an Information Scientist 1:10-11.
             Garfield, E. (1972) Reprint Exchange. 1. The multimillion
             dollar problem ordinaire, Essays of an Information Scientist
             1:359-60.

     (2) Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations?
     Scientometrics 56: 283-286.
         ABSTRACT: Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of
         an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint
         requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of
         citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over
         a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the
         number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were
         retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews
         (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range
         1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent
         correlation between the number of requests and citations to
         article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55;
         95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that
         received most reprint requests are cited more often.

     (3) Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The
     case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93-101.
         EXCERPT: This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests
         (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed
         each year, most being triggered by Current Contents...

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In the online era, the days of reprint requests ought to be over,
with Open Access taking their place. But some research funders and
universities are still hesitating about mandating Open Access
Self-Archiving, because they are concerned about publishers'
embargoes. Here is the solution:

         Even where a publisher embargoes or does not endorse OA
         self-archiving, universities and research funders can and
         should still go ahead and mandate immediate deposit anyway,
         with no exceptions or delays, but allowing the deposit to be made
         Closed Access instead of Open Access during any publisher-
	 imposed embargo period.

The Institutional Repository's semi-automatized Email Eprint 
Request Button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to tide 
over all researcher usage needs webwide till the end of the 
embargo (or till embargoes die their natural and well-deserved 
deaths, under the growing pressure and increasingly apparent 
benefits of OA).

Stevan Harnad