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#access2009pei – Stevan Harnad – Grasping what is already within immediate reach
1 Oct 09
Open Access means free, online, immediate, permanent access to reading, downloading, storing, printing, data crunching
Primary target is 2.5M articles written for academic journals, primarily author giveaways. Optionally can include books and other categories.
About 25K journals published worldwide. Most universities can only subscribe to a small fraction. Research is having only a fraction of its potential impact, achieving only a fraction of its productivity. OA provides a remedy. Free articles found to be cited > 3x as often (Lawrence 2001), with significant impact advantage. True in every field tested, Research that is freely accessible has 25-250% greater impact (Brody & Harnad 2004).
Two ways to do it: publishers convert to OA (the golden way), researchers deposit in IRs (the green way). However, only 15% of articles are being voluntarily submitted. Gold relies on publishers, whereas Green only requires the research community. USouthampton has created EPrints (which Harnad strongly recommends over DSpace).
Creating IRs is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating 100% OA. Many repositories, but most are almost empty. Incentives are not sufficient to increase self-archiving. To guarantee 100% self-archiving, must make it an administrative requirement. USouthampton ECS repository virtually 100%. Why?
Publishing is mandated already (publish or perish), self-archiving mandate can be a natural extension. Surveys indicate 95% or researchers would comply, more than 80% willingly. Only those IRs with mandated deposit achieve any where near 100% self-archiving. There are currently 98 institutions world wide with Green mandated deposits. That’s out of over 10,000 institutions. See ROARMAP. There are 57 university mandates so far. There are 41 research funder mandates. In Canada, only one departmental mandate, 8 funder mandates, one funder proposed (NSERC).
OA articles accelerate the research/access/use/citation cycle: OA articles are cited sooner. Time-course of citation/use cycle shows more citations means more downloads. Higher early downloads means correlate with high citation rates later.
Mandates should be to
– deposit all articles
– in an IR
– immediately upon acceptance for publication; a compromise is the “immediate deposit – delayed access” mandate
63% of journals endorse immediate, Green OA self-archiving. For the remaining 37%, EPrints has an EPrint Request button. Any user on the web can still reach the metadata, but click “request a copy”, then send an email form that indicates the article is needed for research purposes. Email goes to the author, who can then click “OK” thereby sending a copy to the requestor.
EPrints has rich use metrics. Integrates with CiteBase. One of the rewards of self archiving mandates: authors are often interested in vanity searches. Also important in evaluating impact etc.
Posted by pzed on October 1, 2009 at 10.17pm
Categories: access 2009, conferences, libraries, twitter
