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

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

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 sgt3@psu.edu wrote:

> What surprises me here is that there is only 95% compliance. 
> For any mandatory ETD program...
>
> ...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.

(1) 95% compliance is just fine! From today's starting point of 
c. 15% spontaneous, unmandated deposits, 95% is and should be 
music to all of our ears.

(2) No penalty for noncompliance. We are just talking about doing 
a few keystrokes, for the author's own benefit. As long as the 
institutional/funder mandates are official, explicit links to the 
CV and performance review are sufficient, as the actual outcomes 
already show. The rest is already driven by incentives, in the 
form of the increasingly palpable benefits of enhanced research 
access, usage and impact.

(3) To help make those benefits all the more palpable and 
motivating, incentive metrics will soon be burgeoning too, 
sweetening the road. See the Netherlands "Cream of Science", 
Citebase, and Arthur Sale's download metrics.

(4) In other words, the "serious consequences" are positive, not 
negative!

The only essential component is the mandates, and they are on the 
way...

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.