I agree with Subbiah Arunachalam in: "On Distinguishing Open Access Self-Archiving from Open Access Journal Publishing" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
To boost Open Access means to convince (or urge or force or mandate) research journal article authors to do the following: (a) self-archive all material that authors want read and used by scholarly colleagues (b) self-archive all articles submitted to "full-green" (postprint) journals (70%) (c) self-archive all articles submitted to "pale-green" (preprint) journals (20%) http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php and for the remaining 10% too: self-archive the preprint before submission and delete the pertinent clause in the contract [which we have been doing since 1995, without a single complaint by a publisher] or add a sentence: "the preprint version has been self-archived on my webserver." So, how are we to induce authors to self-archive? (i) provide authors with the quantitative evidence that they will get read and cited if they do [most do not know this yet]. http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ (ii) mandate self-archiving through the Institute, Government, funding agency, because it increases the scientific visibility and impact of the institution and should thus be added to employee, grant-fundee and institutional performance review procedures. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:H.R.5006: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php (iii) Inform authors how simple it is to self-archive (e.g.): - fill in a simple form http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/services/mmm/ - download the resulting file and put it, together with your document, on any webserver (personal, workgroup, institute, University,..) - link from and to link collections of the department or related collections. That's it. The metadata will pave the way to the big search engines. So, what has been tried so far? (1) To design services such as PhysNet www.physnet.neet and wait for the authors to understand and act (or harvest documents)? This has been since 1995. (2) discuss with like-minded colleagues, such as the participants in this forum and discuss subtleties of possible strategies? (3) publish declarations (like Berlin, Budapest, etc.)? http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm (4) offer FAQs (such as Harnad's), 31 worries and their replies http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ and Argumente (in german) http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/publications/11argumente.html etc. and wait for someone to read them. (5) design and implement University publishing services and wait for the customer to come. None of these strategies has yet been altogether successful in the sense of generating a dramatic burst in self-archiving. Instead, we have seen a continuous, steady slow increase since 1994 -- although there are some signs it may now be accelerating: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=analysis Thus we must look for more efficient ways to reach out to authors. Any practical proposals will be praised and tried. The good luck is that now one can test them: - The collaborative ISI studies: Brody, T., Stamerjohanns, H., Vallieres, F., Harnad, S. Gingras, Y., & Oppenheim, C. (2004) The effect of Open Access on Citation Impact. Presented at: National Policies on Open Access (OA) Provision for University Research Output: an International meeting, Southampton, 19 February 2004. http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/OATAnew.pdf Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html can be repeated and followed over time over specific journals where the authors have been addressed at a given time http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/~stamer/isi_study/ - in citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search eprints http://archives.eprints.org/?page=all PhysDoc http://de.physnet.net/PhysNet/physdoc.html we have weblogs and can measure the real effect of taking the step of self-archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3950.html So, come up with a way to reach the OA content-providers -- research article authors -- and we will try to measure the effects for them! The nice thing about our (research) community is that we can act pro-actively, propose ideas, try them out, and measure the outcome! Yes, I know, that mandating self-archiving as a condition for receiving research funding is the most effective way to generate OA (and underway) but I am also looking for additional effective ways to accelerate the process! Yours Eberhard R. Hilf h...@isn-oldenburg.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Initial AmSci Topic Thread: "The self-archiving sweepstakes" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2662.html