> Anthony Andrew, actually. But, absolutely no offense taken :-).
> Point 1 - absolutely true. Only a small minority of downloads lead to > citations. Have a look at the download data of eprints.utas.edu.au. However > I cannot resist writing that citations are not the same as impact. Only in > academic circles are citations highly regarded and that is useful but not > totally relevant. In most places what one is looking for is impact. For > example if I write an article on improving fish farming, I want the fish > farmers to take it up. If they only get the AM, well yes that is much better > than nothing (as Stevan says) and they might contact me. However, their > directors will want to know (for legal reasons) that their recommendations > are firmly-based, and that means access to the VoR, which fish farmers may > not have. Hence researcher attitudes to the VoR. While I couched my point in terms of academic work and referencing, I think we're actually talking about the same thing in different contexts. In your example of the fish farm, I think their usage of results in practice shows the same patterns as I gave for academics. They would still, I suspect look at many more articles at some level, gradually drilling down into the ones of most interest/relevance. Only at the very final stage where they wished to make a proposal for adoption of a novel element in their practices drawn from the peer reviewed literature would they need access to the VoR, just as a working scientist or scholar only needs access to the VoR at the point of citation, or other usage (such as replicating the experiment). The benefits of the AM are still enormous in that potential recipients of the research only need, if they feel it necessary, to pay the toll access for the VoR on the small percentage of the articles that get through their filters for relevance > Point 2 - sorry no. The observation is anecdotal. Largely based on my > university and Australian universities, but supported by website, blog and > Mendeley evidence. I believe it is why some mandates are not worth their > disk space (or the paper they may be written on) - they are ignored by real > live researchers. The OA movement needs to engage with researchers and > convince them that the mandate is worth complying with, because they do not > believe it. You may be interested to know that ALL Australian universities > have repositories, but only those of the University of Queensland, the > Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Tasmania (mine) > are in the top 100 of the Webometrics survey? Why? Probably because most of > the 'mandates' are ineffective, except in gathering citations and restricted > documents. The first two universities have strong mandates. > > The OA world is bigger than 'mandates at all costs'. It needs to recognise > the reality of revolutions. They disrupt normal practice (in this case of > science and scholarly dissemination). Here I think you, I, Stevan and many others (Bernard, Alma etc.) are in agreement in practice but are interpreting words slightly differently is all. When I talk of mandates (and I know I'm in complete agreement with Stevan on this) I do not mean just a published policy document, however well worded. The first step is to get as close to the optimal policy as possible, with wording that will be understood by the staff concerned to mean what you want it to mean, and to be acceptable to staff. There are many ways in which staff who do not accept the validity of an institutional policy can actively undermine that policy, even if they cannot get it overturned as policy. So, that acceptance as a valid policy is a necessary step in "adopting a mandate". However, once the mandate is official policy compliance with it needs to be promoted. There are multiple aspects to this. First, there needs to be effort at making deposit as easy as possible and to get people to default to depositing the full text, not just meta-data. Second there are other aspects of policy that can be used to support this, the Liege model being so far as we can tell the most effective (internal evaluation measures are only carried out on full-text deposits (which under ID/OA can be closed access but MUST include the full-text in at least AM form). Third, the benefits to the individual, the research group and the university of depositing (and where at all possible making the deposits open access instead of closed access plus button) need promotion. You appear to somewhat conflate in your discussion above having a mandate (a real mandate not just an encouragement policy) and having a (mostly empty repository). Stevan and others have done a number of studies showing that strong (preferably ID/OA) policy mandates are a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve 80%+ ongoing deposit. The liege model, explanation and promotion of the repository and of the mandate (stressing the need for full text not just meta-data) are the extra conditions, but so far everything less than a real mandate fails to achieve more than 20% or so of deposits. The process of getting a mandate adopted often requires gaining relatively broad acceptance of the idea by promotion and explanation anyway. So, I don't think we have any real disagreement on fundamental practical matters here. We agree that the technology could be better, for example interoperability between repository software and academic networking systems could be improved, ease-of-deposit can be improved by things like local or global disambiguated author lists (I find it frustrating that every time I co-author a paper with people I've coauthored with before that most repositories require me to manually fill in their names again and that they don't have joint "ownership" of the document). But all these are simply nice-to-have add-ons and while the vast majority of the world's research remains behind toll access barriers and while we have evidence of a way that works (properly worded and promoted mandates [shorthand: "mandates"]) all these extra bits of gravy are a distraction for most from following the green brick road to OA. As I've said in my own presentations on OA, a coalition of librarians, academics and management who all stand to benefit in a win-win-win from universal OA, is the way to avoid yet more lost years or even lost decades, byt moving towards adoption of "the optimal mandate solution" described above. -- Professor Andrew A Adams aaa at meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
