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

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Subject: Two Happy Accidents Demonstrate Power of "Eprint Request" Button
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Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:53:44 EST
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             ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

     Increasing Institutional Repository Content with "email eprint" Button
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5293.html

     New Request Copy feature in DSpace
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5297.html

Here are two rather remarkable anecdotes about the recently
created "EMAIL EPRINT" button that allows any would-be user
webwide to email a semi-automatic "eprint request" to the author
of any eprint in an IR that has been deposited as "Closed Access"
rather than "Open Access" to request an individual copy for
personal use. (The author need merely click on an "approval" URL
in his email message in order to fulfil the request.)

Two recent "accidents," occurring independently at two different
institutions, provide dramatic evidence of the potential power of
this feature: The button is intended to tide over researcher
usage needs during any embargo interval. As such, it is expected
to apply only to a minority of deposits (as the majority of
journals already endorse immediate Open Access-setting:
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php ).

The two accident-anecdotes come from University of Southampton
and Universite du Quebec a Montreal:

Southampton has many IRs: A departmental IR (Department of
Electronics and Computer Science) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
already has an immediate full-text deposit mandate, but the
university-wide IR http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/ does not yet have
a mandate, so it has many deposits for which only the metadata
are accessible, many of them deposited via library mediation
rather than by the authors themselves. This will soon change to
direct author deposit, but meanwhile, "The Button" was
implemented, and the result was such a huge flood of eprint
requests that the proxy depositors were overwhelmed and the
feature quickly had to be turned off!

The Button will of course be restored -- with the LDAP feature
used to redirect the eprint requests to the authors rather than
the library mediators -- but the accident was instructive in
revealing the nuclear power of the button! Authors, we expect,
will be gratified by the countable measures of interest in their
work, and we will make a countable metric out of the number of
eprint requests. Authors will be able to opt out of receiving
eprint requests -- but we confidently expect that few will choose
to do so! (Our confidence is based on many factors, take your
pick: (1) Authors' known habit of looking first at the
bibliography of any article or book in their field, to see "Do
they cite me?" (2) Authors' known habit of googling themselves as
well as looking up their own citation-counts in Web of Science
and now in Google Scholar. (3) Employers' and funders' growing
use of research performance metrics to supplement publication
counts in employment, promotion and funding decisions...)

Much the same thing happened at UQaM
http://www.acceslibre.uqam.ca/ but this time it was while a new
IR was still under construction, and its designers were still
just testing out its features with dummy demo papers (some of
them real!). "The Button" again unleashed an immediate torrent of
eprint requests for the bona fide papers, so the feature had to
be (tremulously, but temporarily) disabled!

Caveat Emptor!

Stevan Harnad
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