Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS
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- access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk Sent: Wednesday, 3 October 2007 8:49 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org 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.
Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS
As a matter of interest the Australian research assessment (RQF) refuses to allow its assessors to look at any metadata whatsoever, but insists that every assessable item must be in an institutional repository (even articles in open access journals), and assessors link direct to them. Someday, between the UK and Australia, they'll get it right. In the meantime we may have the better compromise here, since it encourages deposit, in which metadata is the by-product. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- So a better contemporaneous record for deposits, but you are unlikely to find a high percentage of full texts for those deposits because SOuthampton, like many repositories in the UK, is highly influenced by the National Research Assessment Exercise (whose cutoff date is next month). The processes imposed on the repository by the funding councils force high metadata quality, DOIs, ISSNs and submission of *printed outputs*, but eschews (to all intents and purposes) PDFs and all manifestations of electronic publication. The story is more complex than that, but the upshot is that UK repositories engaged in supporting the RAE have to concentrate on metadata deposit over and above full text deposit. Suffice to say that we are all looking forward to revisiting these deposits in the new year! -- Les Carr University of Southampton
Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS
I think that Southampton** is quietly confident that if you can talk up Open Access while actually achieving the metadata deposits as an embedded institutional process, then the final stage of document deposit will be relatively painless to achieve. If you ask them whether they would have planned this as an OA strategy, the answer would be NO. But the opportunity of demonstrating the utility of a repository for ongoing research assessment / metrics / marketing was too good to miss, and it was decided to take the long way around to the goal of OA. If we hadn't taken that decision, the repository would have been marginalised and its institutional impact reduced. -- Les Carr EPrints Technical Director / University of Southampton **by Southampton I mean the library team who are doing all the hard work. I am merely sitting on the steering group and basking in reflected glory :-) On 3 Oct 2007, at 06:54, Arthur Sale wrote: As a matter of interest the Australian research assessment (RQF) refuses to allow its assessors to look at any metadata whatsoever, but insists that every assessable item must be in an institutional repository (even articles in open access journals), and assessors link direct to them. Someday, between the UK and Australia, they'll get it right. In the meantime we may have the better compromise here, since it encourages deposit, in which metadata is the by-product. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- So a better contemporaneous record for deposits, but you are unlikely to find a high percentage of full texts for those deposits because SOuthampton, like many repositories in the UK, is highly influenced by the National Research Assessment Exercise (whose cutoff date is next month). The processes imposed on the repository by the funding councils force high metadata quality, DOIs, ISSNs and submission of *printed outputs*, but eschews (to all intents and purposes) PDFs and all manifestations of electronic publication. The story is more complex than that, but the upshot is that UK repositories engaged in supporting the RAE have to concentrate on metadata deposit over and above full text deposit. Suffice to say that we are all looking forward to revisiting these deposits in the new year! -- Les Carr University of Southampton
Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS
On 2 Oct 2007, at 06:56, N. Miradon wrote: I thank Professor Harnad for his long and detailed reply. Meanwhile, I have received some results from a random spidering of staff publication lists at http://www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID= Here are the first three entries Prof. Mike McDonald ... 307 publications (17 in ePrints Soton) Prof. Chris Clayton ... 221 publications (14 in ePrints Soton) Prof. AbuBakr Bahaj ... 155 publications (25 in ePrints Soton) There are very different stories to tell about the School repository previously reported and the Institutional Repository for which my colleagues in the University Library are responsible. I hope that my comments do not err into 'spin', but give some genuine insight into the differences of the numbers that are seen here. The base numbers of publications reported are for the entire career history of the academics concerned - in Mike McDonald's case, going back to 1971. Perhaps we will eventually be concerned with backfilling all these valuable publications, but for the moment the repository is concentrating on something nearer to the present. If we take only smaller time slices, then Prof M lists three 2006 publications on his web page, only one of which is in eprints.soton.ac.uk . But in 2005 there are 4 papers, all of which are deposited in the repository. Prof Clayton has 3 of 5 publications deposited in 2006 and 2 out of 3 in 2005. Prof Bahaj has 4 of 6 in 2006 and 5 of 7 in 2005. So a better contemporaneous record for deposits, but you are unlikely to find a high percentage of full texts for those deposits because SOuthampton, like many repositories in the UK, is highly influenced by the National Research Assessment Exercise (whose cutoff date is next month). The processes imposed on the repository by the funding councils force high metadata quality, DOIs, ISSNs and submission of *printed outputs*, but eschews (to all intents and purposes) PDFs and all manifestations of electronic publication. The story is more complex than that, but the upshot is that UK repositories engaged in supporting the RAE have to concentrate on metadata deposit over and above full text deposit. Suffice to say that we are all looking forward to revisiting these deposits in the new year! -- Les Carr University of Southampton
