Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
I wrote: Japanese universities are moving towards greater requirements on their academics to publish in international journals in English. Alongside these moves, we should be promoting the adoption of a deposit mandate to ensure the broadest impact of these articles. Syun replied: I don't think I can agree. Japaense research institutions were under severe pressure toward pulihishing their results in international journals in the 1990s and they, together with the never-stable government then, have succeeded in increasing the number of articles published in the impact-factor branded journals, which are international, in ten years. Last year, China overtook Japan in terms of the number of published articles and Japan's market share is gradually decreasing, but China has over ten times as large a population so I don't care. The pressure still continues, as you say in your posting, of course, but the researchers here apparently want to talk to those in rich enough universities worldwide through the impact-factor branded journals, whose number is far less than half of Stevan's 25,000 titles. And the pressure itself is equally strong all over the advanced societies including China. You say the Japanese universities are now forced to improve their international representation, and I agree. But if you look at the THE ranking or other rankings, the problem about our universities does not lie in their research impact but in their education impact. Research related scores, like the number of articles published in branded journals, have been going up, probably not because of the organic growth of the production but because of the improvement of the precision in counting, though the institutional summary is actually very difficult on account of the tough task of name disumbiguation(The University of Tokyo might have increased their score thanks to the many other Tokyo Universities of Scholary-Genre-Name which tend to be merged as part of Tokyo University, though the accuracy is getting better). So I should say that if the international thing is important in the Japanese context, that's not the issue around education rather than research. The university management is under higher pressure with respect to education than to research. Without good enough students, universities can not survive only with good researchers. I don't think this is any Nihonjinron but an objective view of the situation of the current Japanese higher education. So the talks about mandating can't get prioritized in terms of management and the faculty is passive not because of bureaucracy but because just sitting pretty. Of course, this does not mean I would not argue for the mandating in the good sense. Thanks anyway for rainsing such interesting but arguably important points. Thanks for your detailed reply. This helps me in writing my talk for HOkkaido to understand the differences between a top tier and second tier university in Japan. It may indeed be that those at top tier Universities are currently under pressure to improve their international teaching credentials in order to improve their ranking positions. However, outside the top 10 Japanese universities the pressure to improve international research as well as educational performance is very high. Even within the top ten, Keio University is putting strong pressure on staff to perform well internationally in research. If the belief that only high impact factor journals matter and that only those in other universities which can afford full tollgate access to these journals matter as readers, then that is an important point for me to address in my talk at Hokkaido. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@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/
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
Stevan, Very good to have a dialog with you again. I perfectly agree with you that in sum, Japan needs -- and can adopt -- Green OA self-archiving mandates no more nor less feasibly than every other research-active country on the planet. I don't know everything about campus politics or the scholar's way of thinking all over the world, but from my conversations with and observations of the colleagues both on the teaching faculty and in the library, I actually suspect that Japan is not unique with respect to the passivity issue. All scholars like OA and they would say yes if asked to deposit their articles by a serious and benevolent librarian, though most of the time without any action of really logging on to their institution's repository. But I am not convinced that I would deposit should it be mandated on my campus to deposit. If I should deposit, I would be doing it because I thought I should, not becaused it was mandated. If I didn't, I would not because of time or labor but just because I didn't think I would. If i happen to have an article published by a prestigious journal, my university might reward me materially and/or morally, or the scholarly society which I am member of might praise me very cheaply, anyway to my satisfaction. I, as a hedonistic person, don't have to care about the real impact of my work. Unless there was a chance of being fired because of not depositing, I would not be inclined to deposit. With some form of mandates, I would just weigh the consequences of following and not following the mandate. If you are respected scientist, you will want to have your articles read by respectable scientists. Such scientists tend to be employed by good higher education or research institutions, which tend to be rich enough to subscribe to all good enough journals. You don't have to read all peer reviewed articles, but you have only to work seriously on good articles written by good authors. No doubt Hokkaido University can not afford to subscribe to all journals so that their researchers have access to all peer reviewed journals, but they have access probably to all good enough articles. Researchers there can not help being passive. So your reference to your Point #29 is quite correct. I agree that those who are sitty pretty don't understand the relationship between impact of and access to scholary articles, and so I would be wrong. But that is how they and we are. We have to change them and must not keep telling them that they are wrong. Mandating does not seem to me to change them, but just encourage them to come up with reasons for not being able to deposit. You will still have to talk to them. But I agree that it should be possible for our knowledge to be shared and made accessible by the humankind today and for ever, just because it is knowledge. There is no doubt about it. Best, Syun
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
Andrew, You appear to be falling into the Nihonjinron trap in believing that Japan is unique. That does not seem to a correct description. I have already fallen into your Nihonjinron trap, though I don't like to do any Nihonjinron. For thouse of you this term, Nihonjinron, which could be translated as the discussion of the Japanese people, does not make sense, let me add that the Nihonjinron is a particular set of attitudes and discourses which tend to view the Japanese nationality not only as unique and unintelligible worldwide but, interetingly, inferior to the Western cultures. But as a good Japanese student and scholar, trained in the Japanese educational system successfully, I am proud to say that there are some things I as a Japanese alone know which others, mayby including my Japanese colleagues, might not know. If you call it a Nihonjinron, yes, I am trapped. But if you say Japanese universities are moving towards greater requirements on their academics to publish in international journals in English. Alongside these moves, we should be promoting the adoption of a deposit mandate to ensure the broadest impact of these articles. I don't think I can agree. Japaense research institutions were under severe pressure toward pulihishing their results in international journals in the 1990s and they, together with the never-stable government then, have succeeded in increasing the number of articles published in the impact-factor branded journals, which are international, in ten years. Last year, China overtook Japan in terms of the number of published articles and Japan's market share is gradually decreasing, but China has over ten times as large a population so I don't care. The pressure still continues, as you say in your posting, of course, but the researchers here apparently want to talk to those in rich enough universities worldwide through the impact-factor branded journals, whose number is far less than half of Stevan's 25,000 titles. And the pressure itself is equally strong all over the advanced societies including China. You say the Japanese universities are now forced to improve their international representation, and I agree. But if you look at the THE ranking or other rankings, the problem about our universities does not lie in their research impact but in their education impact. Research related scores, like the number of articles published in branded journals, have been going up, probably not because of the organic growth of the production but because of the improvement of the precision in counting, though the institutional summary is actually very difficult on account of the tough task of name disumbiguation(The University of Tokyo might have increased their score thanks to the many other Tokyo Universities of Scholary-Genre-Name which tend to be merged as part of Tokyo University, though the accuracy is getting better). So I should say that if the international thing is important in the Japanese context, that's not the issue around education rather than research. The university management is under higher pressure with respect to education than to research. Without good enough students, universities can not survive only with good researchers. I don't think this is any Nihonjinron but an objective view of the situation of the current Japanese higher education. So the talks about mandating can't get prioritized in terms of management and the faculty is passive not because of bureaucracy but because just sitting pretty. Of course, this does not mean I would not argue for the mandating in the good sense. Thanks anyway for rainsing such interesting but arguably important points. Best, Syun
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
The remarkable thing is that even in the subdiscussion of THE university rankings and league tables, teaching/research trade-offs, student quantity/quality, and national competitiveness, not one of the considerations adduced turns out to be unique to Japan -- not even the misapprehension that it is unique! The very same factors, when they are contemplated elsewhere, whether at the national level or at an institutional level, likewise tend to fall into the trap of being misperceived as locally unique and characteristic. (If you like, this could be dubbed a generic, global sense of local Nihonjinron: see the discussion threads on the peculiarities of France, Netherlands, Germany, India, the US -- also North/South and the Harvards /Have-Nots.) But insofar as mandating OA is concerned, it is all moot. I have already replied that if a sense of Sitting Pretty (i.e., of having all the subscription access one feels one need and wants, and believing that this is also reciprocal, insofar as one's intended readership is concerned) motivates some authors not to comply with a self-archiving mandate, *that's ok*. It's certainly no reason for not adopting such a mandate. The compliance rate will still be far higher than the unmandated global baseline deposit rate of 5-25%. And if the word mandate has negative connotations, choose another word -- requirement, regulation, rule, procedure, policy, mechanism, format -- just as long as it is made clear that deposit is being officially required, as a matter of administrative policy, not merely invited, encouraged, recommended, requested or urged, as a matter of taste or ideology. And, as noted, it's most effective if the institutional repository is officially designated as the sole locus and mechanism for submitting publications for performance review and research assessment -- paper copies and PDF email attachments are formats that can no longer be processed⦠(By the way, there seems to be some evidence that mandating institutions may be batting above their weight in League Tables, though this remains to be systematically tested.) Stevan Harnad On 2010-09-18, at 10:28 PM, Syun Tutiya wrote: Andrew, You appear to be falling into the Nihonjinron trap in believing that Japan is unique. That does not seem to a correct description.  I have already fallen into your Nihonjinron trap, though I don't like to do any Nihonjinron.  For thouse of you this term, Nihonjinron, which could be translated as the discussion of the Japanese people, does not make sense, let me add that the Nihonjinron is a particular set of attitudes and discourses which tend to view the Japanese nationality not only as unique and unintelligible worldwide but, interetingly, inferior to the Western cultures. But as a good Japanese student and scholar, trained in the Japanese educational system successfully, I am proud to say that there are some things I as a Japanese alone know which others, mayby including my Japanese colleagues, might not know.  If you call it a Nihonjinron, yes, I am trapped. But if you say Japanese universities are moving towards greater requirements on their academics to publish in international journals in English. Alongside these moves, we should be promoting the adoption of a deposit mandate to ensure the broadest impact of these articles. I don't think I can agree. Japaense research institutions were under severe pressure toward pulihishing their results in international journals in the 1990s and they, together with the never-stable government then, have succeeded in increasing the number of articles published in the impact-factor branded journals, which are international, in ten years.  Last year, China overtook Japan in terms of the number of published articles and Japan's market share is gradually decreasing, but China has over ten times as large a population so I don't care. The pressure still continues, as you say in your posting, of course, but the researchers here apparently want to talk to those in rich enough universities worldwide through the impact-factor branded journals, whose number is far less than half of Stevan's 25,000 titles.  And the pressure itself is equally strong all over the advanced societies including China. You say the Japanese universities are now forced to improve their international representation, and I agree.  But if you look at the THE ranking or other rankings, the problem about our universities does not lie in their research impact but in their education impact. Research related scores, like the number of articles published in branded journals, have been
Re: Repository effectiveness (was: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online))
On 18 Sep 2010, at 21:59, Velterop wrote: o Make a repository easy to find (a Google search for University of X repository more often seems to produce a link to an article or press release about the repository than a link to the repository itself, at least on the first few pages of the search results â repositories often have names or acronyms that make them difficult to find if you don't know the name) o Draw attention, unambiguously and very clearly, on the repository home page, to the possibility of submitting a paper/manuscript (e.g. a brightly coloured submit now! button) o Make the deposit procedure very, very easy and intuitive. Involve UX experts where possible. o Make deposit the *prime* focus of the repository. Repositories and their contents can be searched in a variety of ways and via many routes, but submission of articles can only take place via the repository's own web site. I'd like to take this opportunity to mention the new JISC DepositMO project whose aim is to increase the ease of deposit into repositories chiefly by allowing direct deposit from word processors, office programs and the computer desktop (save as... and send to... directly into EPrints or DSpace). Although the repository's web interface should be a useful and advantageous environment for the author as well as the reader, the fact is that depositing is An Extra Thing to add to the author's workflow, and it might help to woo some recalcitrant professors if it appeared to be the same thing as saving a new copy and it could be achieved in the familiar interface of Microsoft Word. I don't think that technology changes alone will stimulate more Self Archiving (improve the repository! make it more friendly! make it faster! make it more useful!) There has to be a combination of social, management and technological advances all pressing in the same direction. Make Open Access policies mandatory, make open access practices a key part of your institutional business activities and make open access technology as useful as possible. --- Les Carr http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/depositmo/ PS Please note that the work of DepositMO (where MO stands for Modus Operandi) is building on the SWORD protocol for repository deposits and on Microsoft's Article Authoring Add-in.
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Andrew A. Adams wrote: AAA: During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan Splendid news from AAA, Asian Archivangelist! and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited, unless published in an OA journal) This is the familiar gold rush, which impels institutions to imagine, unthinkingly, that what they need to do in order to have OA today is to spend their scarce resources to subsidize the costs of Gold OA publication -- even though most of the potential funds to do so are still tied up in paying the institutional subscriptions that are covering the costs of journal publication today. And meanwhile these institutions are not adopting the cost-free Green OA self-archiving mandates that would provide OA to all their subscription journal articles too! Stevan has misinterpreted my admittedly very shorthand description of Hokkaido's situation. What I was referring to was the Hokkaido as a well-funded top-10 University in Japan subscribes to many of the publishers' complete access but also provides direct payment for individual item access costs when Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the existing subscription. Thus, researchers at Hokkaido themselves experience no access problems in their reading, but their writing misses out on readers just the same as everyone else's. They haven't succumbed to pre-emptive Gold Fever, but have not yet embraced a Green Mandate. My goal in speaking there will be to promote the benefits of mandating archiving to the authors and the institution in terms of visibility and impact. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@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/
Fwd: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
Many thanks to Andrew for pointing out my pre-emptive error (in sniffing out Gold Fever)! No, Hokkaido University is not paying pre-emptively for Gold Open Access. It is merely (like all universities) paying for subscription access and (like all but 100 universities so far) limiting the potential impact of its own research output as well its own users' access to the research output of other universities published in journals to which it cannot afford to subscribe. So (like all universities that have not yet done so) the only thing Hokkaido needs to do now is to mandate the Green OA self-archiving of its own research output. That done, all else will take care of itself, as a natural matter of course... Stevan Harnad PS I doubt that any university in the world can afford to pay pay-per-view costs for every paper any one of its users ever clicks on! On 2010-09-18, at 6:46 AM, Andrew A. Adams wrote: On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Andrew A. Adams wrote: AAA: During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan Splendid news from AAA, Asian Archivangelist! and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited, unless published in an OA journal) This is the familiar gold rush, which impels institutions to imagine, unthinkingly, that what they need to do in order to have OA today is to spend their scarce resources to subsidize the costs of Gold OA publication -- even though most of the potential funds to do so are still tied up in paying the institutional subscriptions that are covering the costs of journal publication today. And meanwhile these institutions are not adopting the cost-free Green OA self-archiving mandates that would provide OA to all their subscription journal articles too! Stevan has misinterpreted my admittedly very shorthand description of Hokkaido's situation. What I was referring to was the Hokkaido as a well-funded top-10 University in Japan subscribes to many of the publishers' complete access but also provides direct payment for individual item access costs when Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the existing subscription. Thus, researchers at Hokkaido themselves experience no access problems in their reading, but their writing misses out on readers just the same as everyone else's. They haven't succumbed to pre-emptive Gold Fever, but have not yet embraced a Green Mandate. My goal in speaking there will be to promote the benefits of mandating archiving to the authors and the institution in terms of visibility and impact. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@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/
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
It is good to hear again from Syun Tutiya, Chiba University. This open dialogue on optimal Open Access policy and strategy in advance of Open Access week is very helpful, not only for Japan, but worldwide, for I think that the situation and developments in Japan are very much like those in other parts of the world: On 2010-09-18, at 8:44 AM, Syun Tutiya wrote: If I may, I would like to add, as part of the Japanese repository community, that it has consciously kept away from Gold Open Access Fever or whatever you make call it. Gold fever is the (very mistaken) idea that Open Access is synonymous with Open Access Publishing (Gold OA) and the (equally mistaken) idea that the fastest or surest way to provide OA is by publishing in a Gold OA journal or providing funds for publishing in Gold OA journals. Both of these views are erroneous, because the other way of providing OA -- author self-archiving of the final refereed draft of each journal article, in the author's institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication: Not only is Green OA just as OA as Gold OA, but it is also the fastest and surest way of providing immediate OA today. It also does not entail any extra cost. There is only one obstacle to immediate, universal Green OA, and it is neither cost nor publisher opposition: It is researcher passivity. And the remedy is very simple: Institutions and funders need to mandate (i.e., require) Green OA self-archiving (as 170 have already done: see ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ Across the past decade, both the feasibility and the benefits of OA have been made widely known to researchers (although of course further dissemination of this information is still helpful today): There are Institutional repositories all over the planet, ready for authors to self-archive in (see ROAR). The majority of the journals (including virtually all the top journals worldwide) have already endorsed immediate Green OA self-archiving (and there is a solution even for those articles for which the author wishes to honour a publisher's access embargo). A significant OA citation impact advantage has now been repeatedly demonstrated in every discipline tested. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html The only thing needed is the adoption of a Green OA mandate. If adopted, the mandate works, climbing from 60% OA toward 100% within a few years of adoption. In contrast -- and this too has been demonstrated repeatedly, in year after year, institution after institution and country after country -- neither providing information about OA, nor providing repositories to self-archive in, nor requesting, inviting, encouraging, or urging researchers to self-archive -- generates a self-archiving rate greater than the 5-25% baseline. This is true even if researchers are offered incentives and assistance for self-archiving. The only policy that works is mandating Green OA self-archiving; and cross-disciplinary, international surveys (including in Japan!) have also found that over 90% of researchers report they will comply with self-archiving mandates, and, most important, over 80% of them will comply *willingly*: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ So researcher passivity is exactly that: passivity, not opposition. When explained clearly, not only is OA not opposed by researchers, but neither are OA mandates. The trouble is, that although -- apart from Gold Fever -- OA itself is becoming much more widely known and understood globally, Green OA mandates are not yet well enough understood, so the incorrect impression is being given -- even by some well-meaning advocates -- that OA mandates are somehow infringements on academic freedom or an imposition of something that is against researcher's will. The reality is nothing of the sort: OA requirements are more like a change in format requirements, involving a few extra keystrokes. Instead waiting for self-archiving rates to rise above the 5-25% unmandated baseline as a result of encouragement, advocacy, incentives or assistance is simply to wait in vain for still more years to discover that researchers will only self-archive systematically and in sufficient numbers if it is mandated, just as publish or perish is. That is the only way to overcome the inertia of their (groundless but paralytic) worries that (e.g.) self-archiving might violate copyright, bypass peer review, bias journals against accepting their papers, or cost a lot of time and effort to do. It has been working on voluntary though assisted self-archiving through collaboration with the faculty and reseachers rather than implementing the mandated depositing . Yes, it has maybe just reached the baseline deposit rate but we believe that it is not tactically wise to rush and shout for the mandate in the atomsphere of the Japanese campus politics, which I don't to like to detail in a short message. We still believe
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
The repeated use of terms such as gold fever or gold rush impels me to weigh in a little on this thread. For back ground, let me remind readers that I favor both green and gold. However, I do not favor all flavors of gold, and I do not favor saying that green is superior to gold. I have strong reservations against author-pay approaches, if only because it discriminates economically against authors from poor countries or poor institutions. However, I do believe libraries can and ought to get involved with their resources and know-how to support both green and gold. On the green side, there is no question that libraries should support repositories and should support getting mandates to fill these repositories. On the gold side, I could easily see libraries taking a fraction of their acquisition budget, say 10%, and put this in a consortial pool (but beware of existing consortia as they tend to be little more than procurement offices that actually do the job publishers want them to do) to support national or regional (i.e. multi-national) journals of quality (I leave the details aside here) and promote them internationally through Open Access. It is in effect what the SciELO people are doing, although not with library money, but Redalyc and SciELO could both be supported by such a scheme. Social science and humanities journals could form a very interesting first wave of experiments, followed by the creation of important new scientific journals in all fields, in open access, that would compete on the market of ideas. Europe is an obvious place where to begin thinking about this sort of things, and Latin America already owns some of the crucial ingredients. And this scheme could also extend to monographs, thus encompassing projects such as OAPEN in Europe. Meanwhile and in parallel, and I want to underscore this, all efforts should be extended for repositories and mandates, including the best of mandates, i.e. the faculty-organized mandates initiated at harvard a couple of years ago. Jean-Claude Guédon Le samedi 18 septembre 2010 à 10:51 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Andrew A. Adams wrote: AAA: During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan Splendid news from AAA, Asian Archivangelist! and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited, unless published in an OA journal) This is the familiar gold rush, which impels institutions to imagine, unthinkingly, that what they need to do in order to have OA today is to spend their scarce resources to subsidize the costs of Gold OA publication -- even though most of the potential funds to do so are still tied up in paying the institutional subscriptions that are covering the costs of journal publication today. And meanwhile these institutions are not adopting the cost-free Green OA self-archiving mandates that would provide OA to all their subscription journal articles too! University of Michigan is the latest US University that has, like Hokkaido, committed to subsidizing Gold OA without first mandating Green OA: http://bit.ly/pregold University of Michigan is the 9th university to commit to COPE. Only two (Harvard and MIT) of the nine COPE signatories to date are among the 170 institutions, departments and funders that have already mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of their refereed research output. The other seven COPE signatories should first emulate Harvard and MIT on providing Green, before provisioning Gold: http://www.oacompact.org/signatories/ So should Hokkaido University. For the record: An institution or funder committing to COPE (or SCOAP3 or pre-emptive Gold OA Membership deals) is fine *after* the institution or funder has already mandated Green OA self-archiving of all of its refereed research output; but it is both wasteful and counterproductive *before* (or *instead*). Here are some links that might help you at Hokkaido and Otaru during OA week in explaining the logic and pragmatics of subsidizing Gold only after mandating Green: Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/576-guid.html Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/563-guid.html On Throwing Money At
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
Dear all, Many thanks to Andrew for pointing out my pre-emptive error (in sniffing out Gold Fever)! No, Hokkaido University is not paying pre-emptively for Gold Open Access. It is merely (like all universities) paying for subscription access and (like all but 100 universities so far) limiting the potential impact of its own research output as well its own users' access to the research output of other universities published in journals to which it cannot afford to subscribe. So (like all universities that have not yet done so) the only thing Hokkaido needs to do now is to mandate the Green OA self-archiving of its own research output. That done, all else will take care of itself, as a natural matter of course... If I may, I would like to add, as part of the Japanese repository community, that it has consciously kept away from Gold Open Access Fever or whatever you make call it. It has been working on voluntary though assisted self-archiving through collaboration with the faculty and reseachers rather than implementing the mandated depositing . Yes, it has maybe just reached the baseline deposit rate but we believe that it is not tactically wise to rush and shout for the mandate in the atomsphere of the Japanese campus politics, which I don't to like to detail in a short message. We still believe that advocacy should work. Hokkaido is, in a sense, unique that mandating is openly discussed on campus for reasons I don't know. A couple of factual comments: Generally speaking, Hokkaido University has virtually no problem about accessing but it not confirmed yet that it has lost impact because the researchers there have not deposited enough or because they have not published in OA journals. Last year and this year, journals have been much cheaper in JPY than in USD/EUR/GBP if the quotations are in the latter currencies, by the way. One of Andrew's statements is not correct. He says that the university provides direct payment for individual item access costs when Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under the existing subscription, but this is not true. The university directly only pays for site licenses. When a researcher needs an article in an unsubscribed journals, he can request a photocopy of the article through the library just in the same way as in the rest of the world. The cost for the photocophy and postage(!) is not covered by the library budget, though. Each researcher has pay from their own research fund. Students may have to pay from their own pockets. Needless to say, the univesity or library does not pay for any pay-per-view articles downloaded. Syun Tutiya -- Syun Tutiya Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, Chiba University Address: Faculty of Letters, Chiba University 1-33 Yayoicho, Inageku, Chiba, Chiba, 263-8522 JAPAN Email: tutiya @ kenon.l.chiba-u.ac.jp Web: http://cogsci.l.chiba-u.ac.jp/~tutiya/
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
On Sun, 19 Sep 2010, Syun Tutiya wrote: Stevan, Very good to have a dialog with you again. I perfectly agree with you that in sum, Japan needs -- and can adopt -- Green OA self-archiving mandates no more nor less feasibly than every other research-active country on the planet. I don't know everything about campus politics or the scholar's way of thinking all over the world, but from my conversations with and observations of the colleagues both on the teaching faculty and in the library, I actually suspect that Japan is not unique with respect to the passivity issue. Syun, That's right. Japan differs from the rest of the world neither on the matter of mandatability nor on the matter of passivity. (That was my point.) All scholars like OA and they would say yes if asked to deposit their articles by a serious and benevolent librarian, though most of the time without any action of really logging on to their institution's repository. Passivity is not just laziness about doing the keystrokes. (That is just one of the at-least-38 reasons for passivity. Others, as I said, include [groundless] worries about copyright, peer review, journal acceptance etc. Mandates are needed to placate all these worries.) http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#38-worries But the worry about keystrokes is a particularly silly one, these days. We have shown that deposit takes only about 6 minutes. (Multiply this with how many papers an author publishes per year -- and compare it with the time it takes to do the keystrokes to write the paper itself, let alone the research on which it is based.) Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ And don't forget that most scientists and scholars would not bother doing the keystrokes to write up the paper at all, if there were no publish or perish mandate. A self-archive to flourish mandate is simply a natural extension of the publish or perish mandate for the Online Era: Doing the research and then putting the results in a desk-drawer is not enough (hence publish or perish). Now publishing them and leaving them behind a toll-access barrier is not enough (self-archive to flourish). The reward for self-archiving is enhanced research impact. Research performance is already being evaluated by richer criteria than publication counts. For example, citations are now also being counted (and so are an increasing number of rich and diverse new research uptake and impact metrics that open access will both enable and enhance). So if the reason publish or perish mandates work in getting scholars and scientists to publish is because publications count, it is already increasingly true that citations count too, and will amply reward the small number of keystrokes per paper that they cost. The best way to implement Green OA self-archiving mandate is simply to make deposit in the institutional repository the means of submitting publications for institutional performance review (and national research assessment, as in the UK and Australia): If a publication is not deposited, it is invisible for performance review. (See the U. Liege mandate in ROARMAP, for a model.) Researchers are quite accustomed to doing things electronically these days. This is just another such thing. But I am not convinced that I would deposit should it be mandated on my campus to deposit. If I should deposit, I would be doing it because I thought I should, not because it was mandated. If I didn't, I would not because of time or labor but just because I didn't think I would. If i happen to have an article published by a prestigious journal, my university might reward me materially and/or morally, or the scholarly society which I am member of might praise me very cheaply, anyway to my satisfaction. I, as a hedonistic person, don't have to care about the real impact of my work. Unless there was a chance of being fired because of not depositing, I would not be inclined to deposit. Well, you answered your own question. No need for negative consequences like firing! Positive consequences like promotion, tenure, salary and prizes are enough. Some of this already comes with publishing in a prestigious journal. Enhanced citations are another thing that universities and research assessors are already rewarding -- as they should, because the purpose of publishing research is uptake, usage and impact, not just decoration! And of course it helps one's motivation if one knows that unless a paper is deposited in the institutional repository, it will be invisible for institutional and national performance assessment altogether. One would have thought that the empirical findings on how OA enhances uptake and impact would have been enough to motivate self-archiving without any need for a mandate, but apparently not. They are, however, enough to motivate institutions to adopt a mandate, so as to
Repository effectiveness (was: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online))
Stevan makes the point that deposit takes only about 6 minutes. He's undoubtedly measured it precisely. I don't know at what point his measurements started, but I presume at the point where he has already found the submission page (and the link to it doesn't produce a 404). mandates are the stick; citation advantage etc. the carrot; but the problem is that the carrot often lies behind a fence that is difficult to climb. Might, just might it be that therein lies at least some of an explanation of the author's passivity? I did a random â unscientific â spot check of a number of repositories listed on the OpenDOAR web site. It needs a systematic follow-up, but what I found in my random sample are the following issues: 1. The OpenDOAR link doesn't always link to a repository, but fairly often to the library home page where finding a link to the institutional repository can be a challenge. 2. When one is on a repository page, it is overwhelmingly focussed on search, and rarely if ever does it attract attention to submissions 3. Links to submission forms are sometimes broken (producing the 404 'page cannot be found' error) 4. Submission forms are sometimes very cumbersome 5. Sometimes, one can only submit an abstract and metadata, not the whole article. What needs to happen is at least the following: * Make a repository easy to find (a Google search for University of X repository more often seems to produce a link to an article or press release about the repository than a link to the repository itself, at least on the first few pages of the search results â repositories often have names or acronyms that make them difficult to find if you don't know the name) * Draw attention, unambiguously and very clearly, on the repository home page, to the possibility of submitting a paper/manuscript (e.g. a brightly coloured submit now! button) * Make the deposit procedure very, very easy and intuitive. Involve UX experts where possible. * Make deposit the *prime* focus of the repository. Repositories and their contents can be searched in a variety of ways and via many routes, but submission of articles can only take place via the repository's own web site. The relentless and repetitive appeal to, and preoccupation with, logic and rationality should surely be dropped. They don't persuade. As Syun Tutiya so rightly says about authors, We have to change them and must not keep telling them that they are wrong. Empathy has to take the place of nagging. Persuasion techniques that are more like those used in marketing need to be deployed. And things like the completely useless bashing of OA publishing (Gold rush) may perhaps dissuade some people from submitting to OA journals, it definitely doesn't help to persuade them to go green. And Open Access suffers as a result. If one cannot motivate authors to self-archive, it's not their 'passivity' that is to blame, it is one's lack of persuasiveness. Success! Jan Velterop Stevan Harnad wrote: [cut] But the worry about keystrokes is a particularly silly one, these days. We have shown that deposit takes only about 6 minutes. (Multiply this with how many papers an author publishes per year -- and compare it with the time it takes to do the keystrokes to write the paper itself, let alone the research on which it is based.) [cut] Syun Tutiya wrote: So your reference to your Point #29 is quite correct. I agree that those who are sitting pretty don't understand the relationship between impact of and access to scholarly articles, and so I would be wrong. But that is how they and we are. We have to change them and must not keep telling them that they are wrong. Mandating does not seem to me to change them, but just encourage them to come up with reasons for not being able to deposit. You will still have to talk to them.
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
Dear Professor Harnad, Thank you for your interest and comments in JAIRO and institutional repositories in Japan. IR has increased at a high speed in the past 5 years under the positive influence of NII's financial support and the formation of IR communities in Japan. 1 million contents and 0.7 million full-texts are the results of those succesful efforts. Congratulations to Japan's JAIRO http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/en/ for harvesting the 700,000 full-texts (out of one million total) self- archived in Japan's 158 Institutional Repositories since 2007. I'v attached an excel file indicating the number of articles submitted and haversted by JAIRO on a monthly basis during 2009. According to this statistics, total number of researh articles is 27,718 and it consists of 8,307 English papers and 19,411 Japanese ones (incl. other some languages). *You can download the same data from http://irdb.nii.ac.jp/analysis/index_e.php *It should be noted that year 2009 in JAIRO means Japanese fiscal year from April 2009 to March 2010. So I used figures from the period between January to December in 2009 for the comparison below. On the other hand, according to ISI Thomson-Reuter's Global Reseach Report Japan (published this June), total number of English articles published in the journals which are included in the Web of Science is approximately 75,000. It is next to UK. TR Global Report Japan http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/grr/ (Resigtration is required, but freely available) So just comparing the number of papers writen in English in 2009 (8,307 / 75,000), the ratio of self-archive is about 11.1%. As you expected, it falls within the unmandated average of 5%-20%. I think 158 IRs do cover almost all the reseach-intensive universities in Japan. In that sense, this comparison using WoS's figure may be relatively reasonable for the rough estimation of the self-archive rate on a national level. But I don't have any statisitcal data concerning the annual outputs of all the japanese researchers, so it is difficult to estimate the accurate percentage of the self-archive by academics. *Any comments are welcome from Japan. From the growth chart (if I have interpreted it correctly), about 75% of 50,000 articles (i.e., 35,000 full-texts) were deposited in 2009. If we can assume that those deposits were all articles published within that same year (or the preceding one), then the question is: What percentage of Japan's (or of those 158 institutions') annual portion of the 2.5 million articles published yearly worldwide do these 35,000 full-texts represent? Does it exceed the worldwide unmandated baseline of 5-25%? Judging from the ratio above, our IR communities will have to carry out as many advocacies as possilbe toward academics now and in the future. I'd think it would be a common task for repository and research communities around the globe. As you might know, I hear Hokkaido University (one of top 10 universities in Japan and hosting IR named HUSCAP) is now considering to adopt a university-wide mandate. If Hokkaido will succeed, it may have a positive impact on universities and other higer education institutions. At least, I hope so. HOKKAIDO http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Hokkaido%20University HUSCAPhttp://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/index.jsp?locale=enlang=en The reason I stress this point is that it is important that we do not content ourselves with absolute self-archiving totals and growth rates that look sizeable considered in isolation. The figure to beat is the unmandated baseline of 5-25%, and the only institutions that consistently beat it are those that mandate self-archiving. Their deposit rates jump to 60% and approach 100% within a few years. There are already 170 self-archiving mandates worldwide registered in ROARMAP -- 96 institutional, 24 departmental and 46 funder mandates -- but alas none yet from Japan. If there are any, it would be very helpful if they would be registered in ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ I'm also sorry to hear about such a low registration rate as open access repository in the ROAR. We will try to persuade IR managers to register their IRs. Also, although Japan has at least 158 repositories, only 77 of them are registered in ROAR: http://roar.eprints.org/view/geoname/geoname=5F2=5FJP.html It would be very helpful if the rest were registered in ROAR too... Stevan Harnad Best Wishes, Hideki *Mail address changes from @ad. to @adm. Hideki UCHIJIMA Kanazawa University Library Kakuma Kanazawa City Ishikawa Prefecture JAPAN Telephone : +81-76-264-5203 Fax : +81-76-234-4050 Mail:uchij...@adm.kanazawa-u.ac.jp http://www.lib.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/index.html http://dspace.lib.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/dspace [ Part 2, Application/VND.MS-EXCEL (Name: Articles by Japanese ] [ Reseachers.xls) 23 KB. ] [
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited, unless published in an OA journal), -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@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/
Re: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
Congratulations to Japan's JAIRO http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/en/ for harvesting the 700,000 full-texts (out of one million total) self-archived in Japan's 158 Institutional Repositories since 2007. To understand what this figure means, however, the fundamental question is whether or not it represents an increase over the worldwide baseline average for spontaneous (i.e. unmandated) self-archiving, which varies between 5-25% of the total annual output of the primary target content of the Open Access movement: the 2.5 million articles per year published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals across all disciplines and languages. Of JAIRO's 700K full-text total, about 110K (15.5%) consisted of journal articles, based on http://irdb.nii.ac.jp/analysis/index_e.php From the growth chart (if I have interpreted it correctly), about 75% of 50,000 articles (i.e., 35,000 full-texts) were deposited in 2009. If we can assume that those deposits were all articles published within that same year (or the preceding one), then the question is: What percentage of Japan's (or of those 158 institutions') annual portion of the 2.5 million articles published yearly worldwide do these 35,000 full-texts represent? Does it exceed the worldwide unmandated baseline of 5-25%? The reason I raise this question is because absolute figures -- even absolute growth rates across years -- are not meaningful in themselves. They are only meaningful if expressed as the percentage of total annual output. For a single institutional repository, this means the percentage of that institution's annual output of refereed journal articles. For Japan's 158 institutional repositories, it means the percentage of the total annual output of those 158 institutions. On the conservative assumption that research-active universities publish at least 1000 refereed journal articles per year, the estimate would be that those 35K articles represent at most about 22% of those institutions' annual refereed journal article output, which falls within the global 5-25% unmandated baseline. The reason I stress this point is that it is important that we do not content ourselves with absolute self-archiving totals and growth rates that look sizeable considered in isolation. The figure to beat is the unmandated baseline of 5-25%, and the only institutions that consistently beat it are those that mandate self-archiving. Their deposit rates jump to 60% and approach 100% within a few years. There are already 170 self-archiving mandates worldwide registered in ROARMAP -- 96 institutional, 24 departmental and 46 funder mandates -- but alas none yet from Japan. If there are any, it would be very helpful if they would be registered in ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ Also, although Japan has at least 158 repositories, only 77 of them are registered in ROAR: http://roar.eprints.org/view/geoname/geoname=5F2=5FJP.html It would be very helpful if the rest were registered in ROAR too... Stevan Harnad Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLOS ONE 5(6): e11273. http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273 Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE (in press) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/ Harnad, S, (2008) Estimating Annual Growth in OA Repository Content. Open Access Archivangelism. August 9 2008 http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/445-guid.html Harnad, S. The Denominator Fallacy http://bit.ly/DenominatorFallacy Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited. http://eprints.utas.edu.au/257/ Sale, A. The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/april2006-sale Sale, A. Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/index.html Sale, A. The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/sale/index.html Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/sale/01sale.html On 2010-09-16, at 12:14 AM, å 島ç§æ¨¹ wrote: Dear all, The number of the contents in JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repository Online) has reached to 1 million which include approximately 0.7 million fultexts. JAIRO is a national potal which harvest metadata from 158 Institutional Repositories in Japan. English pages on JAIRO has also been updated. They include statics,
