Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Brian Simboli wrote: (Worries that people will merely use OAIster or google to bring up all the articles for a given issue can be circumvented if the journal title is suppressed in the metadata for the freely available article.) This wouldn't help citation linking, which is already pretty patchy. Anyway, I think you'll find autonomous services already get around missing metadata through triangulation! Interestingly, aren't the physics societies right now partially committed to something like a de facto subscription overlay model, in that many physics peer-reviewed postprints are being archived on arxiv.org and are therefore freely accessible? Why shouldn't the physics socieities then just directly link to the postprints at arxiv.org, obviating the need for authors to engage in duplicative, afterglow self-archiving efforts? Or is it the case that, if only a portion of articles published by the physics societies have self-archived counterparts on arxiv, the tipping point has not been reached yet where it becomes not in their economic interest to allow access to a free copy (via author self-archiving)? I believe that some physics societies will accept *submissions* from a pre-print server, but it's not the case that the publisher version gets pushed back onto an e-print server (unless the author has permission and does that himself, which I haven't noticed). Searching for referee in arXiv finds only ~1000 matches, referee or corrected only 37,000. So, perhaps: 1) Physicists don't need to make corrections (so only the pre-print is arXived) 2) Only the post-refereed version gets archived 3) Physicists don't provide a comment when they do update to reflect referee's comments See also Alma Swan's presentation http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ppts/swan.ppt). All the best, Tim. Alma Swan wrote: In recent days there has been some discussion as to whether NIH's retreat may in fact be due to a fear of adverse effects on the scholarly publishing industry if immediate self-archiving were to be mandated by NIH for its grantholders (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-05.htm). And, certainly, the Nature Publishing Group appears to be changing its policy on self-archiving. It is not easy to follow NPG's arguments so far because they are rather complicated, but it appears to be suggesting that it is aiding Open Access by moving from allowing immediate self-archiving by authors in their institutional repositories to allowing it only after a period of six months post-publication of an article. The logic of this is not at all clear. It would be very helpful if NPG would clearly explain the causal inferences and its policy but one has to infer that NPG has apprehensions about a possible adverse effect of self-archiving upon its business. Many publishers, particularly some learned societies, share these apprehensions and that is perfectly understandable if they base their view of the future on imaginings rather than on actual evidence. In the case of self-archiving, there is absolutely no need for this sort of self-terrorising. The experiment has been done and the results are clear-cut. Fourteen years ago the arXiv was set up (www.arxiv.org). It houses preprints and postprints in physics, predominantly in the areas of high-energy physics, condensed matter physics and astrophysics. It is the norm for researchers in these areas to post their articles either before or after refereeing to this repository. In 2003, the 421 physics journals listed in ISI's SCI published a total of 116,723 articles. The arXiv receives approximately 42,000 articles per annum, meaning that around a third of all physics research articles appear not only in journals but ALSO in the arXiv. Have physics publishers gone to the wall in the last 14 years? No, and not only have they continued to survive, they have also continued to thrive. I have recently asked questions about this of two of the big learned society publishers in physics, the American Physical Society in the US and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd in the UK. There are two salient points to note: 1. Neither can identify any loss of subscriptions to the journals that they publish as a result of the arXiv. 2. Subscription attrition, where it is occurring, is the same in the areas that match the coverage of the arXiv as it is across any other areas of physics that these societies publish in. Both societies, moreover, see actual benefits for their publishing operations arising from the existence of arXiv. The APS has cooperated closely with arXiv including establishing a mirror (jointly with Brookhaven National Laboratory)... We also revised our copyright statement to be explicitly in favor of author self-archiving. These efforts strengthened (rather than weakened) Physical Review D [an APS journal that covers high-energy physics] ...I would say it is likely we maintained subscriptions to Physical Review D that we may otherwise have lost if we hadn't been so
Re: Southampton Workshop on UK Institutional OA Repositories
The 2-day Southampton Workshop on UK Institutional OA Repositories January 25-26 2005 was very well attended and appears to have been quite successful. Most of the speakers' powerpoints are already available at (a few more to come): http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/programme.html http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/presentations.html What follows is a summary of the event as I saw it. Other attendees are invited to post their own impressions! There were representatives from a large number of UK universities as well as from UK research funding councils -- the two key partners in the UK institutional self-archiving initiative. http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/participants.html Day 1 was a practical workshop introduced in an excellent overview of OA self-archiving by Steve Hitchcock, carefully distinguishing OA self-archiving from OA publishing, and pinpointing its main target content: the university's annual peer-reviewed journal article output. http://opcit.eprints.org/talks/soton-jan05/hitchcock-oairs250105-final.ppt This was followed by two independent parallel streams, one a hands-on technical one, for archive sysads (conducted by Les Carr, Mike Jewell Harry Mason and GNU Eprints developer Chris Gutteridge) and one a strategic/administrative one, for archive managers and university higher administration (conducted by Pauline Simpson, Jessie Hey, and University Librarian Mark Brown of the TARDis). The actual historical steps in the successful strategy that had led to Southampton's university-level commitment to self-archiving all of its research output http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/667 http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php were described by Pauline and Jessie, and there were some surprises (even for me!): Although the real rationale for the worldwide OA movement is the need to maximise research access and impact, most researchers are to this day still ill-informed about this (as Alma Swan demonstrated with her survey data on Day 2). Hence the driving factor in the successful adoption of a university-supported institutional repository as an integral part of the research infrastructure at Southampton was not only researcher awareness of and desire for a way to maximise their research access and impact! It was researchers' desire to save themselves time and effort -- and their administrators' desire to increase power and efficiency -- in fulfilling the functions of institutional performance evaluation and record-keeping! This is not to say that OA's primary objective of maximising access and impact did not play a role in it too; but that role was more salient for convincing Department Heads and higher levels at the university that the increased visibility and impact would be to the advantage of the university. A further very important factor in the ultimate successful outcome at Southampton had been the decision three years earlier by one department (Electronics and Computer Science) to go ahead and implement a mandatory self-archiving policy at the departmental level and then to report to the rest of the university its success in filling its archive. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Feprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk%2F Yet what sold the policy university wide, Jessie and Pauline insist, were three complementary factors: (1) greater access to the research corpus, (2) stewardship of the University's digital assets, and (3) a new way for managing research metrics -- especially in fulfilling the requirements of the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Collaboration between services and academic groups has been a key element in the success of the TARDis project, resulting in progressive coverage of all research output reflecting the needs of each discipline. http://tardis.eprints.org/ The afternoon included presentations on the archiving of empirical data (an important complement to the self-archiving of the research publications themselves) (Simon Coles), on the powerful new webmetric tools developed to measure online usage and citation impact (Tim Brody) http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ppts/brody.ppt and on the link between institutional self-archiving and research assessment and fulfilment (by the author of the OSI Eprints Handbook and the organiser of the workshop, Les Carr.) http://software.eprints.org/handbook/ Breakout sessions focused and reported upon a number of themes, foremost among them being advocacy: How to induce researchers to self-archive and how to induce institutional administrators to induce researchers to self-archive? In other words: How to advocate the adoption of a successful university self-archiving policy? The two foremost candidates were, of course: (1) informing researchers of the growing body of empirical evidence of the usage/citation impact advantage that comes from self-archiving their articles and (2) informing higher university management of both the income implications and the time-saving and efficiency of creating
Résultats d'un sondage sur l'auto-archivage à l'UQÀM.
Des membres du Laboratoire Cognition et Communication (http://www.crsc.uqam.ca) ont conçu un questionnaire (diffusé par courrier électronique interne) visant à répertorier les opinions et connaissances des chercheurs et scientifiques de l'Université du Québec à Montrèal (UQÀM) en ce qui a trait au mouvement d'auto-archivage. Ce questionnaire est disponible à l'adresse suivante: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/questionnaire.htm. Les personnes sondées appartiennent à des disciplines variées et occupent diverses fonctions au sein de l'université (professeurs, chargés de cours, chercheurs, postes administratifs, doctorants, etc.). Suite à l'analyse des réponses obtenues, nous vous présentons ici un bref résumé des points les plus pertinents que nous avons relevé : A. La difficulté principale rencontrèe par les chercheurs est le manque d'accès à la littérature scientifique, soit parce que: (1) la majorité des articles ne sont pas disponibles en accès libre, (2) l'université n'est pas abonnée à certaines revues qui touchent les disciplines des personnes sondées. B. Lorsqu'ils publient des articles, les principaux objectifs des chercheurs sont : (1) l'avancement des recherches, (2) l'obtention de la reconnaissance des pairs, (3) l'amélioration de la réputation de l'université. C. La majorité des répondants pensent qu'il existe une relation directe entre la mise en accès libre des articles scientifiques et le taux de citation de ceux-ci. Cependant, environ 60% des répondants n'ont mis aucun de leurs articles en accès libre. D. Les fausses idées liées au Copyright constituent l'un des obstacles majeurs au développement du mouvement d'auto-archivage. E. Les chercheurs attachent une importance particulière à la réputation de leur université. Ils estiment que leur propre réputation est liée à celle-ci. Par conséquent, l'auto-archivage constitue un intérêt commun au plan scientifique, liant l'institution universitaire et les chercheurs. F. 75% des chercheurs croient qu'il est indispensable de mettre en oeuvre une politique institutionnelle d'auto-archivage. Pour plus de détails, nous vous invitons à consulter le fichier détaillé à l'adresse suivante : http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/Auto-archivaeuqam.pdf Chawki Hajjem Doctoral Candidate Informatique cognitive Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC) Université du Québec à Montréal Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8 tel: 1-514-987-3000 2297# fax: 1-514-987-8952
