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

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.
For dissertations, 95% compliance means that 5% of graduate students are NOT getting their degrees, if compliance is a prerequisite to getting the degree awarded, as it is where most nonvoluntary ETD programs exist. I was talking specifically about dissertations, Stevan, not about Green OA for articles. In this context, 95% compliance is appalling.

(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.
If such positive incentives were so self-evident, then how come the uptake hasn't been much greater?

(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.