Two other factors come into the Australian scene, for anyone new to this list. They may be interesting too.
(1) Every Australian university must have a repository (and is funded for it by the Dept of Education Science & Training - DEST) by end 2007 - or be in a consortium arrangement. Otherwise it is out of the RQF, and loses funds. (2) We have long had a separate scheme for reporting all our research outputs to the Federal Government, which is pretty much guaranteed to be close to 100% of the types of output covered (refereed journal articles, refereed conference papers, books and book chapters). This goes back over more than a decade. We have a challenge to integrate this with the RQF involving selective outputs, which we are going to tackle here in Tasmania by making the repository drive the data collection. Rumor has it that DEST is going to insist that one assessor looks at each full text rather than the 20% average it is said occurs in the RAE. Certainly they will have the monitoring system in place to report on that. The two countries tackle the problems differently - neither do it perfectly. But they seem to be converging. Arthur > -----Original Message----- > From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] > Sent: Wednesday, 3 October 2007 8:49 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Success Rate of the First of > the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS > > The British Higher Education Funding Councils have negotiated some > rather complicated special arrangements with publishers to ensure that > their panels can get electronic access to the full texts of all the > papers that have been entered for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise > (RAE) even if they are not normally available on OA. Thus the > individual universities don't actually *have* to supply electronic full > texts, but the panels are supposed to look at the full texts and not > just at the metadata. > > It would have been much better if the Funding Councils had mandated all > universities to have an IR in place in time for this RAE, and then said > that all papers entered for the exercise must be on the university's IR > in full text. This would have been a huge fillip for the growth of IRs. > > My own university has a database of metadata for all papers written by > its academics, whether entered for the RAE or not. It may not be > totally complete because the onus is on individual departments to input > their own new publications, but it's probably 80%+ complete. > Unfortunately this database is in a completely separate system (run by > the central administration) from the IR, which is moderately populated > so far, and is run by the Library. > > Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK.
