Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS

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

                    ** Cross-Posted **

                 Full Hyperlinked version:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/301-guid.html

Set in motion by Prof. Tony Hey in 1999, drafted in 2001, and officially
adopted by Prof. Wendy Hall in January 2003, the self-archiving mandate
of the the Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at
the University of Southampton was the world's first. It has since served
as a model for a growing number of Green OA mandates worldwide.
     http://www.eprints.org/documentation/handbook/departments.php
     http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm

As of October 2007, 32 funder and institutional/departmental Green OA
self-archiving mandates have been adopted, and 8 more proposed, for a
total of 40 to date.
     http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

In 2004-5, Dr. Alma Swan, of Key Perspectives Associates, on the basis
of two large international, interdisciplinary author surveys, had
predicted (in the face of widespread skepticism about the likely
success of self-archiving mandates) that the willing compliance rate
for self-archiving mandates would be over 80% (with total compliance
over 90%).
     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/

In 2005-6, Prof. Arthur Sale, in a study comparing data on actual
deposit rates for three Australian universities (two unmandated and
one, Queensland University of Technology, mandated since 2004), found
that yearly deposit rates for the repositories without mandates
remained low (c. 15%), even with incentives and library assistance (c.
30%), whereas the mandated deposits grew much faster. Extrapolating
these growth rates, he estimated that mandates would reach Swan's
predicted compliance rate (80-90%) in about two years.
     http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/sale/index.html

Dr. Les Carr, co-drafter of the ECS mandate and now also the
administrator of Southampton's ECS Repository, has now confirmed
Swan's survey predictions and Sale's Australian extrapolations. ECS's
deposit rate in 2006 (the fourth full year of the ECS mandate) is over
80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an ACM
Digital Library sample.
     http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2007/09/self-deposit-rates-external-calibration.html

This should encourage other universities to adopt self-archiving
mandates. (Sale especially recommends starting at the departmental
level rather than waiting for university-wide consensus, if it is not
reached quickly: a "patchwork" mandate.)
     http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/sale/01sale.html

The demonstrated success of institutional self-archiving mandates also
has implications for research-funder and national-level policy: In the
US, the proposed NIH self-archiving mandate was downgraded from a
mandate to a mere request; adopted in 2004, it has failed, miserably
(deposit rate <5%). Let us hope that the evidence of the success rates
for Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates will help open the eyes of US
legislators to the need to upgrade the NIH policy to a mandate in the
next US Senate Appropriations Bill.
     http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/09/reminder-to-us-citizens.html

Stevan Harnad