On 2012-10-28, at 6:44 AM, David Wojick <dwoj...@craigellachie.us> wrote:

> Stevan, did you verify that the deposits were actual articles? In many cases 
> the records counted by ROAR are metadata or other items. For example 
> Cambridge is listed as very large but it has almost no articles. Does ROAR 
> log actual articles separately? I have not seen that in their data but may 
> have missed it.

David, you are quite right to ask this question, and the answer is no:

1. ROAR does not yet have a reliable way to determine whether a deposit is the 
full-text of a refereed journal article or just the metadata (or some other 
kind of content).

2. However, we do have a robot that can sample and test that with high 
accuracy, and one natural follow-up study is to use the robot to estimate what 
proportion of repository content is full-text journal articles.

3. In a prior study we have already used the robot to confirm about  70% 
full-text deposit for the oldest and strongest mandates.

4. Meanwhile, however, whatever that full-text percentage is globally, it seems 
reasonable to suppose that it is roughly the same across repositories: hence an 
increase in the average number of deposits means an increase in full-text 
deposits, whatever the average full-text percentage is.

5. The mandates in question are full-text deposit deposit mandates: they are 
not fulfilled by depositing metadata alone (or other kinds of content).

6. Hence it seems reasonable to suppose that if the deposit rate is higher, the 
stronger the mandate, the increase is in full-text deposits, not just metadata 
(or other kinds of content), regardless of the baseline proportion of full-text 
across repositories.

7. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose a rather complicated and ad hoc 
form of bias: that the institutions which tend to adopt stronger Green OA 
mandates are also the institutions which tend to have higher deposit rates 
already -- and/or deposit rates with full-text ratios systematically different 
from the global average.

8. We did test for bias in university webomtrics rankings associated with 
mandate strength, but found none.

(You are quite right about the enormous number of deposits -- 216,692, mostly 
not articles -- in the Cambridge repository. This did not enter into our 
analysis because (a) Cambridge has no mandate at all. Moreover, (b) Cambridge 
does not rank highly in the medium deposit rate ranking that ROAR considers 
most closely matched to annual university article output: This suggests that 
Cambridge is uploading huge batches of some sort of data rarely, rather than 
regularly depositing approximately the number of articles that universities 
produce across the year.)

Stevan Harnad


> 
> On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:58 PM, Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): 
>> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 1:44 
>> PM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM <c.oppenh...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>> 
>> This is a significant and important set of findings, which should be 
>> forwarded on to decision-makers, both in Universities and in funding 
>> agencies.
>> 
>> More like this, please Stevan
>> 
>> Professor Charles Oppenheim
>> 
>> More on the way. 
>> 
>> But meanwhile, OA advocates, please do forward these findings on mandate 
>> strength to decision-makers at your university and funding agencies. 
>> 
>> It's now more important than ever to make sure that OA policy decisions are 
>> evidence-based, especially to counter the extensive negative effects of the 
>> publishing lobby, as most dramatically exerted very recently on the Finch 
>> Report and the resulting RCUK policy.
>> 
>> Stevan Harnad
>> 
>> From: Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com>
>> To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk 
>> Sent: Friday, 26 October 2012, 18:59
>> Subject: OA Week: Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate 
>> Effectiveness
>> 
>> In June 2012, the UK Finch Committee made the following statement:
>> "The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities 
>> themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make 
>> their publications accessible in institutional repositories…" [Finch 
>> Committee Recommendation, June 2012] 
>> 
>> Testing the Finch Hypothesis
>> We have now tested the Finch Hypothesis. Using data from ROARMAP 
>> institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional 
>> repositories, we found that deposit number and rate is significantly 
>> correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the 
>> mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit 
>> rates of  70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated 
>> deposit rate of  20%. The effect is already detectable at the national 
>> level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, 
>> has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%.
>>  
>> Conclusion
>> The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access 
>> Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger 
>> the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance 
>> evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all 
>> universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be 
>> well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate 
>> institutional and funder mandates.
>> The findings are in the link below. Discussion invited!
>> Gargouri, Yassine, Lariviere, Vincent, Gingras, Yves, Brody, Tim, Carr, Les 
>> and Harnad, Stevan (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate 
>> Effectiveness. Open Access Week 2012
>>  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 

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