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Re: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate & Govt Repositories

I'm wondering, since some libraries now appear not to "make better informed choices about whether or not to buy the value-added materials" when it comes to revised dissertations, but simply ask their approval-plan vendors to screen out all books based on dissertations (because they already have access to dissertations through ProQuest), what makes you think, Ann, that they will take the trouble to make determinations of "value added" by publishers when it comes to government-funded research?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


At 7:53 PM -0400 10/30/07, Ann Okerson wrote:
ready availability of reports to the public would clearly show where publishers add value (or not) (see also Anthony Watkinson's comments about poorly written reports) and will enable libraries to make better informed choices about whether or not to buy the value-added materials.

Bonnie, these days most grant proposals are submitted via online forms or at least by e-mail, as are most interim and final reports, which funding agencies require from grantees, either 6 or 12 month intervals and also upon completion. It's hard to understand why at least some appropriate parts of these could not be made available in a useful form. To be sure, it would take some investment on the part of each granting agency (such as Web site, organizing, formatting/light editing work -- but most of them probably already have Web sites?).

Having such publicly available reports would serve several good purposes: (1) demonstrating grantee accountability; (2) identifying *all* grants and describing progress, whether findings are published in peer review journals or not (it may be that research findings from agencies such as NSF and NIH are generally published, but in various other fields that's not the case (humanities, social sciences, for example) and it is very hard to find out who's doing what -- try it sometime; and (3) ready availability of reports to the public would clearly show where publishers add value (or not) (see also Anthony Watkinson's comments about poorly written reports) and will enable libraries to make better informed choices about whether or not to buy the value-added materials.

Ann Okerson/Yale Library

On 10/29/07, Klein, Bonnie CIV DTIC O <BKlein@dtic.mil> wrote:
 1) Re: Ann's note.  You are correct that often the documented
 results of government funded research winds up in filing
 cabinets, doomed as gray literature and to extinction.  However,
 some government agencies do have the infrastructure and do
 support public websites where they make available reports
 resulting from contracts or grants.  These repositories, however,
 face the same issues of repositories everywhere -- getting the
 producing and sponsoring organizations to contribute their
 documents.

 An example of a government repository is DoD's Defense Technical
 Information Center(DTIC).  Searching the Technical Reports
 database http://stinet.dtic.mil/str/guided-tr.html for Corporate
 Author "Yale" matched 2134 out of 981113 citations.  Of those,
 418 are full-text.  The latest accession is ADA471819 (Full Text
 Handle http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA471819 )  Title: A Fast
 Randomized Algorithm for the Approximation of Matrices Corporate

> Author: YALE UNIV NEW HAVEN CT DEPT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE Report
> Date: 31 JUL 2007.  If you do a Google search of the document
> title, Yale's copy is the first hit and DTIC is second.  Also see

 DOE's GrayLit Network:  http://www.osti.gov/graylit/ and
 www.science.gov .

[SNIP]


 Bonnie Klein
 Technical Reports Team
 Defense Technical Information Center