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: Repository effectiveness
On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bj...@hanken.fi wrote: Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best practice fashion. You can check the results at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took me about one weekâs workload in all including finding the proper files, reformatting the personal versions, checking the copyright issues etc. The actual task of uploading, once I had everything ready, took perhaps the six minutes suggested, but all in my experience around an hour would be more appropriate. Thanks for providing some actual experience and feedback to the list. I have had a look at your user record in your institutional DSpace repository, (how is that related to your home page?, is the material automatically generated by the repository for inclusion in the home page?) and the 24 items that are available for public view (perhaps some are stuck in the editorial process?) appeared at the following times 3 items on 2010-Apr-28 5 items on 2010-Jun-01 8 items on 2010-Jun-17 5 items on 2010-Aug-12 3 items on 2010-Aug-16 DSpace does not reveal whether you submitted them in a single batch and the library processes batched them up, or whether you deposited them in batches and they were made available immediately. I think that the pattern of deposit is important in determining the overall impact of the workload on the author - and more importantly, on the psychological impact of the workload. It must be the case that depositing thirty articles seems like a substantial administrative task, especially when there are so many other activities demanded of an academic's daily time. Even five or six items a day is a substantial diary blocker! This is the backlog phenomenon - any new repository (or new user) has to face the fact that getting started is the hardest part of using a repository. Depositing a reasonable representation of your recent (or historical) output is A Huge Chore. However, once you have achieved that, then the incremental workload for depositing an individual paper when you have just written it seems trivial. Especially compared to the job of sorting out the references :-) This was certainly the case for our (school) repository in 2002, when we decided to mandate the use of EPrints for returning our annual list of research outputs to the University's admin office. (Stevan may remember this!) People whined, people complained, people dragged their heels, but ultimately they did it. But the following year, there were no complaints, just a few reminders sent out. And an incredibly onerous admin task (a month's work of 6 staff to produce the departmental research list) was reduced to a 10 minute job for one person (using Word to reformat the list that EPrints provided). And since then, we haven't looked back. There is a report available which details the study we did at that time to determine the effort involved in self-deposit: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ It includes all the data that we collected, and some visualisations of the Web activity that was involved in depositing several hundred records. That is where the 6 minute figure comes from, if you are interested. We are helping out some other key researchers at my school to upload and there are many non-trivial task. For instance researchers in Finance whose âpersonal versionsâ consist of text files and several tables which are provided to the publishers as sheets in excel files. There may be several hours of work to format a decent personal version of such a papers. Since some of best authors are very busy (dean and vice dean of the school) this has to be done by admin staff. You can make a Sunday best version of the papers and the spreadsheet tables, or you could just deposit the texct and the tables separately - if that is acceptable to the authors. (This is a common phenomenon in Open Educational Resources - people's teaching materials are never finalised, and there are always just one or two more adjustments to make to prepare them for public view. And so a desire for the best sometimes means that material is never shared.) Secondly the situation reseachers face in making the decision to upload a green copy resembles the situation faced by any individual deciding whether or not to take into use a new IT system. There is a large body of literature on this in Information Systems (my field) research and the UTAUT model :...I would suggest that using a model like these to model how rational scholars behave could be could quite fruitful, rather than staring from scratch. It would be interesting to analyse some of the Open Access experience from the last decade in terms of these models, but we are not starting from scratch in this area. The MIS models are very general, and the OA experience is very specific. Harnad, for example, maintains a list of 38 rationalisations that people
Re: Repository effectiveness
Dear all Bo-Christer Bjork timing data are interesting, but there is an important distinction in the way of archiving that must be underscored: Archiving your past articles is absolutely not the same thing as archiving your current articles immediately upon acceptance. I am now a retired librarian but I began proxy self-archiving articles on behalf of the researchers in my lab, in 2002. Much as reported by Bo-Christer, this exercise took a lot of time (checking the files, checking the copyright, asking for the approval of the researcher, getting the drafts into the right format, etc.), and with a sluggish old computer -- not far from 2 hours per article. But later I started to self-archive my own articles about OA and even if it didn't take me 6 minutes per article, I think that it took no more than 15. Why? First, because you improve your skill in self-archiving progressively. Second, because I already knew whether I had the right to make the article open access immediately: I had checked it in choosing my periodical (and each researcher should do the same). I tried to train the researchers in my lab to read the copyright they signed and once in 2003 I was very happy in reading the message of a researcher sending me his article and saying: you have the right to self-archive it! He hadn't even used ROMEO which was not as complete as it is nowadays. Nor did the Button exist yet, for users to request copies of closed-access deposits. Third, and most important, deposit was accelerated because the file had just been completed; it was fresh in my memory and at hand, ready to be self-archived in the requisite format just by a click on the chosen archive! In conclusion, I know from experience that self-archiving is an easy task for all. Researchers should deposit their articles immediately upon acceptance by the journal: it will not take them more than 15 minutes per article. If they wish, they can leave it to library staff to check the copyright and decide whether access to the deposit should be made immediately open access, or closed access with an embargo. Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: bj...@hanken.fi To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2010 5:09 PM Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness Dear Stevan, Could you post this to the list Bo-Christer Dear all, Two points about this discussion. Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best practice fashion. You can check the results at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took me about one weekâs workload in all including finding the proper files, reformatting the personal versions, checking the copyright issTitle: User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view Journal: MIS QUART, 27 (3): 425-478 SEP 2003 Citations: 382 Authors: Venkatesh, V;Morris, MG;Davis, GB;Davis, FDues etc. The actual task of uploading, once I had everything ready, took perhaps the six minutes suggested, but all in my experience around an hour would be more appropriate. We are helping out some other key researchers at my school to upload and there are many non-trivial task. For instance researchers in Finance whose âpersonal versionsâ consist of text files and several tables which are provided to the publishers as sheets in excel files. There may be several hours of work to format a decent personal version of such a papers. Since some of best authors are very busy (dean and vice dean of the school) this has to be done by admin staff. Secondly the situation reseachers face in making the decision to upload a green copy resembles the situation faced by any individual deciding whether or not to take into use a new IT system. There is a large body of literature on this in Information Systems (my field) research and the UTAUT model : User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view Journal: MIS QUART, 27 (3): 425-478 SEP 2003 Citations: 382 Authors: Venkatesh, V;Morris, MG;Davis, GB;Davis, FD Is the standard refernce (2800+ references in Google Scholar) A variation on this is the model by Gallivan: Organizational adoption and assimilation of complex technological innovations: development and application of a new framework MJ Gallivan - ACM Sigmis Database, 2001 - portal.acm.org I would suggest that using a model like these to model how rational scholars behave could be could quite fruitful, rather than staring from scratch. Uploading green copies to a repository may not be so different from starting a profile and uploading stuff to Face Book or other similar voluntary IT acts we have to decide on. A mandate lacking police actions such as lower pay etc makes the uploading in reality voluntary and hence the above models still apply. Bo-Christer Björk
Re: Repository effectiveness
I'm not sure Charles is right - certainly, in the study I carried out for the Bioscience Federation in 2007/8, of 648 who said they did not self-archive, only 42 said they didn't know how, or had no access to a repository or support for self-archiving, while a further 23 said they didn't have time. 'Too difficult' was not mentioned at all Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of C Oppenheim Sent: 20 September 2010 11:41 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am inclined to think it is a combination of the two; on the one hand, it's not a high priority in the eyes of many researchers; and on the other, they perceive (wrongly) that it is a chore to self-archive. Indeed, the idea that it is a chore may be a convenient justification for failing to take the matter seriously. Having, say, a librarian to take on the job of doing the self-archiving helps, but doesn't totally overcome some academics' resistance. I also agree that for a mandate to be effective, there must be negative consequences if the academic does not co-operate. Charles From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris [sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk] Sent: 20 September 2010 11:36 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am not convinced that the primary obstacle is the difficulty of deposit. The impression obtained from the studies I did was that the majority of scholars did not know (or had a very vague and often inaccurate idea) about self-archiving, and most had no particular interest in depositing their own work A question of mote and beam, perhaps?! Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr Sent: 20 September 2010 10:21 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bj...@hanken.fi wrote: Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best practice fashion. You can check the results at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took me about one week's workload in all including finding the proper files, reformatting the personal versions, checking the copyright issues etc. The actual task of uploading, once I had everything ready, took perhaps the six minutes suggested, but all in my experience around an hour would be more appropriate. Thanks for providing some actual experience and feedback to the list. I have had a look at your user record in your institutional DSpace repository, (how is that related to your home page?, is the material automatically generated by the repository for inclusion in the home page?) and the 24 items that are available for public view (perhaps some are stuck in the editorial process?) appeared at the following times 3 items on 2010-Apr-28 5 items on 2010-Jun-01 8 items on 2010-Jun-17 5 items on 2010-Aug-12 3 items on 2010-Aug-16 DSpace does not reveal whether you submitted them in a single batch and the library processes batched them up, or whether you deposited them in batches and they were made available immediately. I think that the pattern of deposit is important in determining the overall impact of the workload on the author - and more importantly, on the psychological impact of the workload. It must be the case that depositing thirty articles seems like a substantial administrative task, especially when there are so many other activities demanded of an academic's daily time. Even five or six items a day is a substantial diary blocker! This is the backlog phenomenon - any new repository (or new user) has to face the fact that getting started is the hardest part of using a repository. Depositing a reasonable representation of your recent (or historical) output is A Huge Chore. However, once you have achieved that, then the incremental workload for depositing an individual paper when you have just written it seems trivial. Especially compared to the job of sorting out the references :-) This was certainly the case for our (school) repository in 2002, when we decided to mandate the use of EPrints for returning our annual list of research outputs to the University's admin office. (Stevan may remember this!) People whined, people complained, people dragged their
Re: Repository effectiveness
The points made by Sally and Charles suggest that the 'why should I bother (to self-archive)?' question is likely to be the primary thought among authors new to open access repositories. This isn't surprising and the effect is easily underestimated in our own enthusiasm. This is the problem addressed by mandates and other initiatives, but clearly there is further to go and this needs continued momentum. It is often convenient or tempting to assume that when a tool or service is not used as widely as expected that this may be something to do with system, software, interface, etc., but this tends to overlook the more fundamental problem of this question above. In fact, it is hard to measure the effectiveness of such aspects unless people are using them properly as intended. Nevertheless, my suspicion is that the usability of repository interfaces as a broad topic has been inadequately investigated and therefore, as also indicated in this thread, there may be weaknesses. A quick scan of Google Scholar reveals some work, but not an extensive list and not all recent. It's not clear if such weaknesses might affect all repositories, some repositories depending on software used, or - since repository interfaces are customisable - individual or local repositories. There may be scope for the current JISC projects on repository deposit, such as DepositMO, to look at this. Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, Building 32 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 On 20 Sep 2010, at 12:56, Sally Morris wrote: I'm not sure Charles is right - certainly, in the study I carried out for the Bioscience Federation in 2007/8, of 648 who said they did not self-archive, only 42 said they didn't know how, or had no access to a repository or support for self-archiving, while a further 23 said they didn't have time. 'Too difficult' was not mentioned at all Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of C Oppenheim Sent: 20 September 2010 11:41 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am inclined to think it is a combination of the two; on the one hand, it's not a high priority in the eyes of many researchers; and on the other, they perceive (wrongly) that it is a chore to self-archive. Indeed, the idea that it is a chore may be a convenient justification for failing to take the matter seriously. Having, say, a librarian to take on the job of doing the self-archiving helps, but doesn't totally overcome some academics' resistance. I also agree that for a mandate to be effective, there must be negative consequences if the academic does not co-operate. Charles From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris [sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk] Sent: 20 September 2010 11:36 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am not convinced that the primary obstacle is the difficulty of deposit. The impression obtained from the studies I did was that the majority of scholars did not know (or had a very vague and often inaccurate idea) about self-archiving, and most had no particular interest in depositing their own work A question of mote and beam, perhaps?! Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr Sent: 20 September 2010 10:21 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bj...@hanken.fi wrote: Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best practice fashion. You can check the results at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took me about one week's workload in all including finding the proper files, reformatting the personal versions, checking the copyright issues etc. The actual task of uploading, once I had everything ready, took perhaps the six minutes suggested, but all in my experience around an hour would be more appropriate. Thanks for providing some actual experience and feedback to the list. I have had a
Re: Repository effectiveness
Steve makes an excellent suggestion for further JISC work. I would be happy to support such an initiative, which should involve experts in usability studies. Charles From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Steve Hitchcock [sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: 20 September 2010 14:10 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness The points made by Sally and Charles suggest that the 'why should I bother (to self-archive)?' question is likely to be the primary thought among authors new to open access repositories. This isn't surprising and the effect is easily underestimated in our own enthusiasm. This is the problem addressed by mandates and other initiatives, but clearly there is further to go and this needs continued momentum. It is often convenient or tempting to assume that when a tool or service is not used as widely as expected that this may be something to do with system, software, interface, etc., but this tends to overlook the more fundamental problem of this question above. In fact, it is hard to measure the effectiveness of such aspects unless people are using them properly as intended. Nevertheless, my suspicion is that the usability of repository interfaces as a broad topic has been inadequately investigated and therefore, as also indicated in this thread, there may be weaknesses. A quick scan of Google Scholar reveals some work, but not an extensive list and not all recent. It's not clear if such weaknesses might affect all repositories, some repositories depending on software used, or - since repository interfaces are customisable - individual or local repositories. There may be scope for the current JISC projects on repository deposit, such as DepositMO, to look at this. Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, Building 32 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 On 20 Sep 2010, at 12:56, Sally Morris wrote: I'm not sure Charles is right - certainly, in the study I carried out for the Bioscience Federation in 2007/8, of 648 who said they did not self-archive, only 42 said they didn't know how, or had no access to a repository or support for self-archiving, while a further 23 said they didn't have time. 'Too difficult' was not mentioned at all Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of C Oppenheim Sent: 20 September 2010 11:41 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am inclined to think it is a combination of the two; on the one hand, it's not a high priority in the eyes of many researchers; and on the other, they perceive (wrongly) that it is a chore to self-archive. Indeed, the idea that it is a chore may be a convenient justification for failing to take the matter seriously. Having, say, a librarian to take on the job of doing the self-archiving helps, but doesn't totally overcome some academics' resistance. I also agree that for a mandate to be effective, there must be negative consequences if the academic does not co-operate. Charles From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris [sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk] Sent: 20 September 2010 11:36 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am not convinced that the primary obstacle is the difficulty of deposit. The impression obtained from the studies I did was that the majority of scholars did not know (or had a very vague and often inaccurate idea) about self-archiving, and most had no particular interest in depositing their own work A question of mote and beam, perhaps?! Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr Sent: 20 September 2010 10:21 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bj...@hanken.fi wrote: Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best
