Nature‘s editorial “Experts still needed” (Nature 457: 7-8, 1 January 2009) is right that no one metric alone can substitute for the expert evaluation of research performance (based on already-published, peer-reviewed research), because no single metric (including citation counts) is strongly enough correlated with expert judgments to take their place. However, some individual metrics (such as citation counts) are nevertheless significantly correlated with expert judgments; and it is likely that a battery of multiple metrics, used jointly, will be even more strongly correlated with expert judgments. That is the unique opportunity that the current UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) — and our open, online age, with its rich spectrum of potential performance indicators — jointly provide: the opportunity to systematically cross-validate a rich and diverse battery of candidate metrics of research productivity, performance and impact (including citations, co-citations, downloads, tags, growth/decay metrics, etc.) against expert judgments, field by field. The rich data that the 2008 RAE returns have provided make it possible to do this validation exercise now too, for all disciplines, on a major nation-sized database. If successfully validated, the metric batteries can then not only pinch-hit for experts in future RAEs, but they will provide an open database that allows anyone, anywhere, any time to do comparative evaluations of research performance: continuous assessment and answerability.

(Note that what is at issue is whether metrics can substitute for costly and time-consuming expert rankings in the retrospective assessment of published, peer-reviewed research. It is of course not peer review itself — another form of expert judgment — that metrics are being proposed to replace [or simplify and supplement], for either submitted papers or research proposals.)

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11) doi:10.3354/esep00088 Special Issue: The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In Evaluating Scholarly Performance

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

I had the good fortune during the last week to write collaboratively with Mary-Doug Wright of Apex Information. MD has been my colleague for years now so it was good to produce something together. We wrote about Twitter (see the abstract below). To write it together, in a short timeframe,…

[Two members of STM have kindly, at my request, allowed me to see a copy of the STM Briefing on IRs and Deposit Mandates. I focused the commentary below on quoted excerpts, but before posting it I asked STM CEO Michael Mabe for permission to include the quotes. As I do not yet have an answer, I am posting the commentary with paraphrases of the passages I had hoped to quote. If I receive permission from Michael, I will repost this with the verbatim quotes. As it stands, it is self-contained and self-explanatory.]

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has circulated a fairly anodyne briefing to its member publishers. Although it contains a few familiar items of misinformation that need to be corrected (yet again), there is nothing alarming or subversive in it, along the lines of the PRISM/pitbull misadventure of 2007.

Below are some quote/comments along with the (gentle) corrections of the persistent bits of misinformation: My responses are unavoidably — almost ritually — repetitive, because the errors and misinformation themselves are so repetitive.

STM BRIEFING DOCUMENT (FOR PUBLISHING EXECUTIVES) ON INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES AND MANDATED DEPOSIT POLICIES

[Publisher policy on IRs is concerned with how IR deposit mandates might affect publishing and publishing revenues, particularly in the case of refereed final drafts.]

This is a fair statement: The issues for the research community are research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress. The issue for the publisher community is their financial bottom line.

[Publishing and distribution today is successful and adequate. IRs publish an inferior version.]

(1) IRs do not publish: peer-reviewed journal publishers publish. IRs provide access to their own authors’ (peer-reviewed, published) output — for all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher’s toll-based proprietary version — so as to maximize the access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress of their research output.

(2) The version of the published article that the authors deposit in their IRs is the final, revised, peer-reviewed draft (the “postprint“), accepted for publication, but not the publisher’s proprietary PDF. Hence deposit does have the quality controls provided (for free) by the peer-reviewers. (If the copy-editing should happen to detect any substantive errors — which is exceedingly rare! — these too can be corrected in the deposited postprint.)

[Publishing by IRs compromises quality, preservation and discoverability.]

IRs are not substitutes for publishing but supplements to it, providing access to research for access-denied would-be users, for the sake of maximizing research progress. The deposited postprints have undergone the essential quality-control for researchers: peer review.

The discoverability of postprints in IRs (via search engines like google, google scholar, citeseerx, scirus and scopus) is excellent. No problems, and no complaints from all the would-be users webwide who would otherwise lack access to them.

(Preservation is a red herring: Preservation of what? As supplements, rather than substitutes, authors’ self-archived postprints are not the versions with the primary preservation burden (although IR deposits are of course being preserved). The primary preservation burden is on the publisher’s proprietary version, the official version of record, as it always has been.)

[Exclusive copyright transfer is essential so the availability of alternative versions does not prevent publishers from making ends meet. Publishers add value in return for the exclusive rights.]

(a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, and impact, by maximizing access to them.

(b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

(c) But if and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

(d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) merely in order to insure publishers’ current funding model against any possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

(e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them, for research purposes. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is not just publishers that think IRs pose risks; librarian Dorothea Salo has questioned IRs’ costs and usefulness in Â?Innkeeper at the Roach MotelÂ?.]

(Publishers might do better to pay serious attention to the substantive rationale and evidence concerning IR deposits and IR deposit mandates, rather than to the opining of roach motel keepers.)

[It is inaccurate to speak of IR policies as Â?authorsÂ? rightsÂ? policies or Â?open accessÂ? policies.]

IR deposit mandates are accurately described as institutional open access policy. (But IR deposit mandates are certainly not “authors’ rights” policies.)

[Talking points in responding to the media: subscription publishing does require exclusive copyright transfer; perhaps OA publishing doesn’t.]

This mixes up issues: The only relevant issue here for IRs and IR deposit policies is whether or not the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication. (This is called a “Green” publisher policy on OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with author-pays/Gold OA publishing models. And authors paying for the “right” to deposit would be absurd and out of the question.)

[Should we endorse IR deposit? Under what conditions?]

If the publisher has formally endorsed providing open access to the peer-reviewed postprint immediately upon acceptance for publication, the publisher is Green. If there is no endorsement, or OA is embargoed, the publisher is Gray.

[Should we make distinctions between preprint repositories, unmandated IRs and mandated IRs?]

The only potential distinction is between authors’ own institutional IRs and institution-external 3rd-party central repositories. Although OA is OA (and means free online accessibility webwide, irrespective of the locus of deposit), some publishers only endorse deposit in the author’s own IR, in order not to endorse 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers: This limitation is innocuous, and no problem for OA. (In fact, there are many reasons why it is preferable for both kinds of Deposit mandates — those from funders as well as from institutions — to converge on institutional IR deposit, from which the metadata can then be harvested centrally.)

What would be arbitrary (and absurd, and unenforceable) would be to attempt to endorse only voluntary IR deposit and not mandatory IR deposit by authors!

[Should we only endorse IR deposits that are open only to institution-internal users?]

Let there be no ambiguity about this: Such a policy would be Gray, not Green, on OA IR self-archiving.

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only after an embargo period?]

Without an embargo, this policy would be fully Green, and neither IRs nor OA ask for anything more. With an embargo, it would be Gray.

[Should we only allow links from IRs to final versions on the publisher’s website?]

If the posting on the publisher’s website is done immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access to it is immediately open to all users webwide, that would be fully Green too. (For such cases, IRs could, for internal record-keeping purposes, mandate the deposit of the author’s postprint in the IR, but in Closed Access, with the OA link going to the publisher’s freely accessible version for the duration of the publisher’s embargo on making the IR version OA too: no problem.)

[Should we endorse deposits that are open webwide only for a fee?]

Paying to deposit in researchers’ own IRs would be absurd, and roundly rejected as such by the research community.

[Inform the media that publishers have made journal articles more accessible today than ever before.]

True (though thanks also to the advent of the Web). But this literature is not yet accessible to all those would-be users webwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published — and no institution can afford to subscribe to all or most peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress by making all research accessible to all of its would-be users webwide (not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe) that the OA movement was launched. And that is why Green OA self-archiving, generated by funder and institutional IR deposit mandates, is growing, to the great benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers’ research and institutions.

(The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.)

[Online refereed journals are crucial for funders, universities, authors, and authors’ careers.]

Correct. And both the research itself, and the peer review, are provided by the research community, free of charge, to the publishing community, in exchange for the neutral 3rd-party management of the peer review, and the certification of the outcome with the journal’s name and track-record. The publishing community is compensated for the value it has added by receiving the exclusive right to sell the resultant joint product (and no need to pay authors royalties from the sales of their texts).

But that does not mean that researchers cannot and will not continue to give away their own peer-reviewed research findings also to those would-be users who cannot afford to buy the resultant joint product. Nor does it mean that researchers’ institutions and funders cannot and will not mandate that they do so, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress for the benefit of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers’ research and institutions.

[Depositing in an IR is not equivalent to journal publishing, with its editing, peer review, and other added values.]

Correct. And individual authors depositing the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their published articles in their IRs is not publication but supplementary access provision, for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher’s proprietary version.

[IRs might provide a lower quality option that makes publishers and unwilling to perform their value-added services.]

This is merely the repetition of the same point made earlier:

No, IR deposits of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles are not publishing, nor substitutes for publishing, they are author supplements, provided for those would-be users who cannot afford paid access to the publisher’s proprietary version:

    (a) In their IRs, authors deposit supplementary versions of their own peer-reviewed publications in order to maximize their uptake, usage, applications, impact, by maximizing access to them.

    (b) So far, all evidence is that this self-archiving has not undermined the traditional toll-based (subscription/license) funding model for peer-reviewed journal publishing: rather, they co-exist peacefully.

    (c) If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

    (d) What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers’ current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    (e) Unlike trade authors, researchers transfer to the publishers of their peer-reviewed research all the rights to sell the published text, without asking for any royalties or fees in return. They have always, however, exercised the right to distribute free copies of their own articles to all would-be users who requested them. In the web era, OA IRs have become the natural way for researchers to continue that practice, in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[IRs cost money and should only be created if they have a distinct goal rather than just parallel publishing and access-provision]

IRs are undertaken by universities and research institutions — i.e., the research community. It is not at all clear why the publishing community is providing this advice to the research community on its undertaking…

[Should be informed about the damage IRs could so to research publication and dissemination.]

Researchers can and should be fully briefed about the already demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the researchers’ research and the researcher’s institutions — the benefits generated by maximizing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress through Green OA self-archiving and IR deposit mandates.

Researchers need this full briefing on research benefits, because it is based on actual facts and experience.

But is the publishing community suggesting that — in addition to these empirical and practical facts — researchers should also be briefed on publishers’ speculations about how Green OA self-archiving might eventually induce a change in publishers’ funding model?

Why?

    If and when IR deposit should ever make subscriptions unsustainable for covering the remaining essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing, there is an obvious alternative: conversion to the Gold OA publishing funding model.

What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community, however, is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to protect publishers’ current funding model from the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

[Researchers should stay free “to choose how and where to publish.”]

By all means. And they should continue to exercise their freedom to supplement access to their published research by depositing their postprints in their IRs for all would-be users webwide who cannot afford access to the publisher’s proprietary version.

[Institutions that want their employees to reserve certain rights for their published journal articles should collaborate with journal publishers so as not to damage their business.]

It would be excellent if all authors reserved OA self-archiving rights in their copyright agreements with their publishers. Then all authors could immediately deposit all their peer-reviewed research in their IRs, and immediately make them OA without any further ado. But for at least 63% of journals, reserving that right is already unnecessary, as those journals are already Green, so those articles can be made immediately OA by self-archiving them in the author’s IR.

For the remaining 37%, their authors can likewise already deposit the postprints in their IRs immediately upon acceptance without the need of either copyright reservation or any formal endorsement or permission from the publisher: they can set access to the deposit as “Closed Access” — meaning only the author can access it. Then the authors can provide “Almost OA” to those deposits with the help of their IR’s “email eprint request” button: Individual would-be users who reach a Closed Access deposit link (led there by the deposit’s OA metadata) need nearly press the Button and insert their email address in order to trigger an immediate automatic email to the author to request a single copy for personal research purposes; the author receives the eprint request, which contains a URL on which he can click to trigger an immediate automatic email to the would-be user containing a single copy of the requested postprint. This is not OA, but it is Almost-OA.

OA is indisputably better for research and researchers than Almost-OA. But 63% OA + 37% Almost-OA will tide over immediate research usage needs for the time being, until the inevitable transition to 100% OA that will follow from the universal adoption of Immediate IR Deposit mandates by institutions and funders.

This is the information on which the research community needs to be clearly briefed. The publishing community’s conjectures about funding models are important, and of undoubted interest to the publishing community itself, but they should in no way constrain the research community in maximizing access to its own refereed research output in the Web era by mandating IR deposit universally.

To repeat:

    What is definitely not an acceptable alternative for the research community is to refrain from maximixing research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress (by mandating IR deposit) in order to insure publishers’ current funding model against the possibility that universal IR deposit might eventually lead to a change in funding model.

    The publishing industry has to remind itself that the reason peer-reviewed research is conducted, peer-reviewed and published is not in order to fund the publishing industry, but in order to maximize research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.

[It is much harder, however, for institutions to successfully achieve consensus on adopting a mandate at all if the mandate in question is a copyright-reservation mandate rather than an IR deposit mandate. And because it is even harder to ensure compliance for a copyright-reservation mandate (because of authors’ worries that the negotiations with their publisher to reserve immediate-OA self-archiving rights might not succeed and might put at risk their right to “choose how and where to publish”), the one prominent institutional copyright reservation mandate (Harvard‘s) contains an author opt-out clause that makes the mandate into a non-mandate. The simple solution is to add Immediate-Deposit, without opt-out. Even simpler still, adopt an Immediate-Deposit mandate as the default mandate model suitable for all, worldwide, and strengthen the mandate only if there is successful consensus and compliance in favor of a stronger mandate.]

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

One of the recurring themes in the educational literature for academic librarians is ‘personalizing’ library workshops and making your sessions as relevant as possible. Today’s millennials are not unlike other adult learners in that they want to see the value in attending library workshops. A good way to design workshops…

Doctoral thesis highly commended

“The Emerald Group Publishing Limited have informed the Department [of Information Science (DIS) at Loughborough University] that Dr. Michael Norris has been named as a Highly Commended Award winner of the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the Information Science category for his doctoral thesis Â?The citation advantage of open access articlesÂ?. These prestigious awards have now been running for four years and attract submissions of an exceptionally high quality from across the globe in all subject areas.

“Michael was awarded his Ph.D. in the autumn of 2008 and is continuing to work on a research project in DIS. Charles Oppenheim, Head of Department commented: ‘This recognition of Dr. NorrisÂ? research is richly deserved. His outstanding research explored the topical and contentious issue of whether Open Access journal articles receive more citations than toll access journals, and if so, why. His work demonstrated that the reasons for the increase of citations are complex and cannot be explained away in a simplistic fashion, as some have tried to do’.Â?

Published version: Norris, M, Oppenheim C, Rowland F. (2008) The citation advantage of openaccess articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(12) 1963-72.

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{One does, however, wonder why — although Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository has not yet adopted a self-archiving mandate — neither this thesis nor this paper numbers among the 47 items deposited by (or for) any of its co-authors (none of them more recent than 2007)…}

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

At a deep level, the web – in particular the use of social media – has connected us to each other in ways that few other technologies have. Some years ago – in a decidedly ‘pre-Twitter’ period – I said that “the web [was] a reflection of who we are”……

SUMMARY: The answer to the question of whether longstanding Arxiv self-archivers need either change their locus of deposit or do double the keystrokes if they are to deposit their papers in both Arxiv and their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) is that this can now be accomplished automatically, depositing only once, thanks to the IR software’s SWORD import/export functionality. A second question is whether central harvesters of distributed IRs can provide (at least) the same functionality as direct-deposit central repositories (or even better). The provisional reply is that they can, for example, by building the functionality on top of the Celestial OAI-PMH harvester. It is now important and timely to demonstrate this capability technically, in the service of OA’s fundamental objective: Getting the OA IRs filled. The demonstration that central harvesting of distributed IR deposits can not only duplicate but surpass the functionality of direct central deposit should help encourage funders to adopt the convergent IR deposit mandates that facilitate the adoption of complementary mandates by the universal provider of research output: the worldwide network of institutions (OA’s “sleeping giant“) — rather than divergent mandates that fail to encourage (or even discourage) institutional mandates.

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Physicist (anonymous):

“If you want to convince me [that institutional self-archiving plus central harvesting can provide all the functionality of Arxiv], then try to do so by conducting the following experiment with any… “harvesting” vehicles you like: 

    (1) Choose an area, such as Mathematical Physics, or Integrable Systems, and find all the papers that have been deposited in any of the archives that they cover, within the past week.  (If they cover 95% of the arXiv, they must necessarily producethis information just as well). No other barrage of junk; just that simple list of papers. 

    (2) Do the same with respect to all the posted publications by a given author for the past ten years. Again: not a barrage of google-like junk dumped upon you, but this specific information. (If I want a ton of junk, I can also go to Google scholar, and waste endless time trying to find what I need.) 

    (3) Find out, at one go, if a given article, or set of articles, from the above list,  has been published in a journal , and what the journal reference is.  

    (4) Get a copy of any of these articles, at once, in any convenient format, like .pdf, that is available.

    (5) Be equally sure that all the above is simultaneously done for all such articles deposited in individual institutional repositories.

“If you can do all the above, successfully, you will have given the ‘proof of principle’.”

Les Carr (ECS, Southampton):

“I think we can reasonably build the required functionality on top of the Celestial OAI-PMH harvester. The “proof of concept” project would need to fund a server to allow registered users to subscribe to alerting emails, based on searches over the “recently added” OAI metadata held in Celestial.” 

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Note: This is not about the relatively trivial issue of whether longstanding Arxiv self-archivers need either to change their locus of deposit or to do double the keystrokes in order to deposit their papers in both Arxiv and their IRs: That can be accomplished automatically, depositing only once, by the IR software’s SWORD import/export functionality. 

This is instead about whether central harvesters of distributed IRs can indeed provide (at least) the same functionality as direct-deposit central repositories (or even better). The provisional reply is that they can, but it is now important and timely to demonstrate this technically.

The functionality question is extremely important for another matter: Getting the IRs filled. It has become clear that deposit mandates are needed in order to fill repositories (whether central or institutional) with OA’s target content: the 2.5 million articles per year published in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, in all disciplines and languages, and originating from all the world’s research institutions (universities, mostly).

OA deposits need to be mandated by all the world’s research institutions, the research providers, reinforced by deposit mandates from the funders of the funded subportion of that research. The universal adoption of these deposit mandates needs to be facilitated and accelerated: There have only been 61 adopted so far (from 31 institutions and 30 funders). The institutional mandates cover all research output, whereas the funder mandates only cover funded research. But whereas an institutional mandate covers all research output, cutting across all fields, funded and unfunded, from that institution alone, a funder mandate covers only funded research, usually only in one or a few fields; however, it cuts across many institutions. 

Hence a funder mandate that requires institutional IR deposit (followed by optional automatized central harvesting or export) also simultaneously serves to stimulate, motivate and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates by each of its funded institutions, to cover the rest of each institution’s own research output, across all fields, funded and unfunded. In contrast, a funder mandate that requires direct deposit in an institution-external, central repository (1) touches only the research output that it funds, (2) fails to propagate so as to facilitate the adoption of complementary institutional mandates for all the rest of institutional research output — and even (3) competes with institutional mandates by (giving the appearance of) necessitating double-deposit were the institution to contemplate adopting a deposit mandate of its own too. 

In reality, of course, the SWORD automatic import/export capability moots any need for double-deposit, but this is not yet widely known or understood; and even without double-deposit as a perceived deterrent, divergent funder mandates, needlessly requiring direct institution-external deposit, simply miss the opportunity to provide the synergy and incentive for the adoption of complementary institutional mandates that convergent funder mandates, requiring institutional IR deposit (plus optional central harvesting) do.

Hence the demonstration that central harvesting of distributed IR deposits can not only duplicate but surpass the functionality of direct central deposit should help encourage funders to adopt the convergent IR deposit mandates that facilitate the adoption of complementary mandates by the universal provider of research output, the worldwide network of institutions (OA’s “sleeping giant“), rather than divergent mandates that fail to encourage (or even discourage) institutional mandates.

“Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally“

“Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally“

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

SUMMARY: An Indiana University study (on the Institutional Repository of the University of Southampton) by Xia (2008) has tested the hypothesis that physicists who already habitually self-archive in an Open Access (OA) Central Repository (Arxiv) would be more likely to self-archive in their own institution’s OA Institutional Repository (IR). The outcome of the study was that the hypothesis is incorrect: If anything, veteran Arxiv self-archivers are more resistant to IR deposit than ordinary nonarchivers, because they neither wish to change their longstanding locus of deposit, nor do they wish to double-deposit.
   This outcome is quite natural and to be expected. The solution for this relatively small population of seasoned self-archivers is for their institution-external deposits to be automatically imported back into their IRs using the SWORD protocol (which can also be used to export automatically from IRs to central repositories). There is no need for veteran self-archivers to change their practices or to double-deposit.
   It is not the 15% of authors who already self-archive (whether institution-externally or on their own institutional websites) that are the problem for OA: The problem is the 85% who do not yet self-archive. It is in order to set the keystrokes of those nonarchivers in motion at long last — for their own benefit and that of their employing institutions as well as the tax-paying public that funds their research — that Green OA self-archiving mandates are now being adopted by their institutions and funders.
   When researchers have been polled (by Alma Swan & Sheridan Brown), the vast majority (95%), across all fields, have responded that they would comply with self-archiving mandates by their institutions and/or their funders (over 80% of them reporting that they would comply willingly). And actual outcome studies (by Arthur Sale) have confirmed that this is indeed what happens, with near-100% self-archiving rates reached within about two years once mandated — but continuing to languish at the baseline 15% self-archiving rate (30% with incentives ad assistance) if left unmandated.

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Xia, J. (2008) A Comparison of Subject and Institutional Repositories in Self-archiving Practices. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34 (6):489-495.

(1) The Xia (2008) study‘s finding is quite correct that many more Southampton physicists self-archive centrally in Arxiv rather than institutionally in Southamtpon University’s Institutional Repository (IR). If the same study had been conducted at any other university, the outcome would almost certainly have been identical. The reason is that physicists have been self-archiving centrally in Arxiv since 1991, and today, quite understandably, they have no desire either to switch to local IR self-archiving or to do double-depositing.

(2) This was already known at Southampton, and other institutions know it about their own physicists.

(3) Consequently, it is not at clear why anyone would have expected the opposite result, namely, that longstanding Arxiv self-archivers would be quite happy to switch to local IR self-archiving, or to do double-depositing!

(4) In reality, the problem — for both OA and for IRs — is not the physicists who are already self-archiving, regardless of where they are self-archiving. If all researchers were doing what the physicists have been doing since 1991 (and computer scientists have been doing since even earlier), 100% OA would be long behind us, and IRs could all be filled, if we wished, trivially, by simply importing back all their own institution-external deposits, automatically, using something like the SWORD protocol.

(5) The real problem is hence not the minority of spontaneous self-archivers of long standing (globally, spontaneous self-archiving overall hovers at about 15% overall); the problem is the vast majority, which consists of nonarchivers: Of OA’s target content — the annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines and institutions — 85% is not yet being self-archived. It is for that reason that self-archiving mandates have proved to be necessary.

(6) In choosing to analyze the data on Southampton — which is indeed a hotbed of OA, OA IRs, OA self-archiving, and OA self-archiving mandates — this study has unfortunately chosen to analyze the wrong IR and the wrong mandate! It is Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) that has the planet’s first and longest standing self-archiving mandate (since 2002-2003), and it is the ECS IR that has a full-text deposit rate near 100%. 

(7) The 2008 study analyzed the self-archiving rate for physicists, in the university-wide IR. But the University as a whole only has a university-wide mandate (and a rather vague one) since April 2008, and even that has not yet been publicized or implemented yet. (The university did have a longer standing requirement to enter metadata in the IR for the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), mostly by library proxy deposit, which is why the study found so many abstracts without full texts therein, for there was no requirement to deposit the full text.)

(8) As a consequence, the study’s findings — although quite accurate regarding the general resistance of veteran Arxiv self-archivers to self-archiving alternatively or additionally in their own institution’s IR — do not really have any bearing on mandates and mandated IR behavior in general.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum