[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
of Liège, Belgium Le 19 sept. 2014 à 21:52, Richard Poynder ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk a écrit : Dear Bernard, I have two questions if I may: 1. You say that Liège is getting close to 90% compliance. Can you explain how you know that, and how you calculate compliance levels? I ask this because the consistent theme coming through from UK universities with regard to compliance to the RCUK OA mandate is that they simply do not know how many research outputs their faculty produce each year. If that is right, what systems does Liège have in place to enable it to produce a comprehensive list of research outputs that UK universities apparently do not have? 2. Does Liège track the licences attached to the deposits in its repository? If so, can you provide some stats, especially the number of items that are available CC-BY (which we are now told is required before a deposit can be characterised as being open access? Thank you. Richard Poynder From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of brent...@ulg.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2014 18:46 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. (JC. Guédon) Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything. It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well worth it). Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch of wisdom on its mandate by adding immediately upon acceptance, even in restricted access in the official procedure. Actually, a nice but to some extent useless addition because, with time (the mandate was imposed in 2007), ULg authors have become so convinced of the increase in readership and citations that two thirds of them make their deposits between the date of acceptance and the date of publication. All this explains why we are getting close to 90% compliance, an outstanding result, I believe. Le 18 sept. 2014 à 23:40, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca a écrit : A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of science researchers... 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree with it. 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Il agree, Richard, but we are not really looking for accuracy here, we are looking for a general trend. The method is approximative and, as Jean-Claude mentions rightfully, it suffers a terrible language and domain bias. In other words, it is plagued by a strong underestimation. Whether ORBi's compliance level is 70, 80 or 90% is not a major concern to me (even though I would love it to reach 100%!), I must admit. I am satisfied to observe that it is very high and not in the 15-30% range which is what happens when a mandate is not being enforced by a link to assessment procedures. Bernard Le 21 sept. 2014 à 10:51, Richard Poynder ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk a écrit : As a layperson I would certainly be interested to know what margin of error levels we can assume the “Web of Science and/or in Scopus” approach has. I am conscious, for instance, that some of the reports by UK universities into RCUK compliance mention using Web of Science, but they all appear keen to stress that they have serious concerns about data accuracy. A list of RCUK compliance reports, by the way, can be found here: http://goo.gl/Yi3twT There is also a very informative blog post on the topic of monitoring open access mandates/policies by Cameron Neylon here: http://goo.gl/Y02S87 Richard Poynder From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: 20 September 2014 23:27 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Extremely good answer, Bernard! It is also very good to clarify the fact that the 90% figure is calculated against the baseline of a combined WoS_Scopus search. However, and this was part of my difficulties with Stevan's argument, I suspect that in SSH, in a French-speaking university, many publish in French-language journals that do not appear in either list. This means that, for Liège, the baseline works from one year to the next, but if you want to compare Liège's mandate and its effectiveness (which, once again, I agree, is - from common sense - the best) with another kind of mandate in an English-speaking university, the baselines will not be comparable. If, furthermore, you imagine two universities that not only differ linguistically, but also differ in the relative weight of disciplines in research output - say one heavily slanted STM and the other heavily slanted SSH, this too will affect the baseline simply by virtue of the fact that SSH publications are not as well covered by WoS and Scopus as are STM publications. In conclusion, the baseline is OK for comparisons of a mandate's effectiveness longitudinally, of for comparison purposes of two successive, but different, mandates, assuming the institution remains pretty much the same over time in terms of mix of research emphases; it is far more questionable across institutions, especially when different languages are involved (but not only). Incidentally, what proportion of papers deposited in ORBI do not appear in either WoS or Scopus? That too would be interesting to know as it might help Stevan refine his baseline and thus make it more convincing. Finally, given that all universities require, an annual assessment of performance, including a bibliography of publications in the completed year, would it be difficult to compare the repository's holding against the publications of the researchers as declared by them? Knowing researchers, every last little scrap of paper will be minutely listed in the yearly assessment forms... image001.png -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le samedi 20 septembre 2014 à 19:10 +0200, Bernard Rentier - IMAP a écrit : Dear Richard, Here are the answers: 1. ORBi, the Liège University Repository, will soon (I believe) reach 90% compliance. It is our target for 2014 and I hope we make it. This figure comes from the calculation of the percentage of ULg papers that can be found in Web of Science and/or in Scopus that are deposited in ORBi as well (see method in http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/) It concerns one year at a time and it is not cumulative. Last May, the compliance level for the publications of 2013 was already 73% and our figure for 2012 is in the 80% range. 2. Only a small proportion of ULg papers are in CC-BY. This is simply because, in order to publish in the journal of their choice (I haven’t tried to do anything against that!), our authors, in the great centuries-old tradition, give away their rights to the publisher. We have no control on that. Later on, there is no way for them to CC-BY the same text (in fact, we are preparing ORBi 2.0, that will offer a CC-BY choice). For now, we are aiming at free access and we are not yet fighting hard for re-use rights. We shall move
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Richard Poynder ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk wrote: Dear Bernard, I have two questions if I may: 1. You say that Liège is getting close to 90% compliance. Can you explain how you know that, and how you calculate compliance levels? I ask this because the consistent theme coming through from UK universities with regard to compliance to the RCUK OA mandate is that they simply do not know how many research outputs their faculty produce each year. If that is right, what systems does Liège have in place to enable it to produce a comprehensive list of research outputs that UK universities apparently do not have? I'll let Bernard give the definitive answer, but let me already mention that last year we did the study on the Liege, Minho, Surrey and Lancaster repositories, using exactly the methodology described here (determine the full yearly output from WoS, then what percentage of it is deposited) and the percentage for Liege was already over 80%. See also the data on Liege's deposit latencies (i.e., how soon papers were deposited, and how soon deposits were made OA), which are also quite impressive. Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent Harnad, Stevan (2013) Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (in E Rodrigues, A Swan AA Baptista, Eds. *Uma Década de Acesso Aberto e na UMinho no Mundo*. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358882/ Stevan Harnad 2. Does Liège track the licences attached to the deposits in its repository? If so, can you provide some stats, especially the number of items that are available CC-BY (which we are now told is required before a deposit can be characterised as being open access? Thank you. Richard Poynder *From:* goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On Behalf Of *brent...@ulg.ac.be *Sent:* 19 September 2014 18:46 *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) *Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster *Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions.* (JC. Guédon) Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything. It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well worth it). Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch of wisdom on its mandate by adding *immediately upon acceptance, even in restricted access* in the official procedure. Actually, a nice but to some extent useless addition because, with time (the mandate was imposed in 2007), ULg authors have become so convinced of the increase in readership and citations that two thirds of them make their deposits between the date of acceptance and the date of publication. All this explains why we are getting close to 90% compliance, an outstanding result, I believe. Le 18 sept. 2014 à 23:40, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca a écrit : A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: part of the 30% (however it is calculated - is it 30% of WoS articles?) comes from the Gold road, and, therefore, falls under a different kind of argument. Yes, it's based on WoS articles (hence an underestimate of the total) and includes both Green and Gold OA. Here are some data from a couple of years ago, when Green OA was about 20%: Gold OA was about 2%: Gargouri, Yassine, Lariviere, Vincent, Gingras, Yves, Carr, Les and Harnad, Stevan (2012) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In: *17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI)*, 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Montréal. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/ Stevan Harnad On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: I will let readers evaluate whether Stevan's answers are satisfactory or not. Except for the Liège mandate where I did not express myself sufficiently precisely, I disagree with points I--III, V-VI. I agree that point VII deserves being studied more precisely. For point VIII, part of the 30% (however it is calculated - is it 30% of WoS articles?) comes from the Gold road, and, therefore, falls under a different kind of argument. This said, I believe that Liège's solution is the best one presently available,* if you can get it*. In countries where university autonomy is far from being the norm (e.g. France), the clout of in-house assessments of performance is perforce very limited. Promoting the Liège solution is also what I do, and I do so everywhere, but promoting OA publishing platforms (such as Redalyc and, with some caveats, Scielo) that are both free and gratis is also what I do. IMHO, this is superior to promoting only and exclusively the Green road: it adds to the Green road without subtracting anything from it. This was also the spirit of BOAI. Finally, I do not need any fancy statistical footwork to agree that the ways and means of the Liège mandate are the best. Common sense is enough for me. Let us get the Liège form of mandate wherever we can (which I am presently trying to do in my own university), and let us also do all we can to promote OA for all (including all disciplines). And I will stop this thread here. -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le vendredi 19 septembre 2014 à 13:17 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : *I.* A Web-of-Science-based estimate of Green OA mandate effectiveness — i.e., of *the annual percentage of institutional journal article output that is being self-archived in the institutional repository *— is fine. So is one based on SCOPUS, or on any other index of annual journal article output across disciplines. *II.* The fact that books are more important than journals in SSH (social science and humanities) in no way invalidates WoS-based estimates of Green OA mandate effectiveness. *The mandates apply only to journal articles.* *III. *Green OA mandates to date apply only to journal articles, not books, for many obvious reasons. *IV.* Jean-Claude writes: *“Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know.” * *Cf:* *“The University of Liege policy is mandatory… the Administrative Board of the University has decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members: - to deposit the bibliographic references of ALL their publications since 2002; - to deposit the full text of ALL their articles published in periodicals since 2002…*” http://roarmap.eprints.org/56/ *V.* The fact that research metrics are currently mostly journal-article based has nothing to do with the predictive power of estimates of Green OA mandate effectiveness. *VI*. The WoS-based estimate of Green OA mandate effectiveness has nothing to do with “impact factor folly.” *VII.* Jean-Claude writes:“SSH authors are less interested in depositing articles than STM researchers.” As far as I know, there is not yet any objective evidence supporting this assertion. In fact, we are in the process of testing it, using the WoS data. *VIII*. *Status quo*: OA to journal articles is around 30% today. Our practical solution: Green OA mandates (and tests for which kinds of mandate are most effective) so they can be promoted for adoption. Other practical solutions? Stevan Harnad On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Bernard Rentier raises an important point about external evaluations here. At the University of Ottawa, we have a really good collective agreement on the topics of tenure and promotion, and any reliance on things like the impact factor of the journals you publish in tenure and promotion decisions is in contravention of the collective agreement. However, as long as external evaluators of both tenure and promotion files and research grant proposals continue to focus on things like impact factor, a faculty member ignores these things at their peril. A potential refusal of tenure - which generally means a loss of employment in a very tough job market - after many years to complete a doctorate and a number more to develop a tenure-worthy dossier is a very harsh punishment. It is my perspective that the OA movement needs to keep this in mind. We need tenured faculty to push forward on open access, and for emerging scholars this means making sure that their support for OA does not hinder their prospects for obtaining tenure. best, Heather Morrison On 2014-09-20, at 1:10 PM, Bernard Rentier - IMAP wrote: Dear Richard, Here are the answers: 1. ORBi, the Liège University Repository, will soon (I believe) reach 90% compliance. It is our target for 2014 and I hope we make it. This figure comes from the calculation of the percentage of ULg papers that can be found in Web of Science and/or in Scopus that are deposited in ORBi as well (see method in http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/) It concerns one year at a time and it is not cumulative. Last May, the compliance level for the publications of 2013 was already 73% and our figure for 2012 is in the 80% range. 2. Only a small proportion of ULg papers are in CC-BY. This is simply because, in order to publish in the journal of their choice (I haven’t tried to do anything against that!), our authors, in the great centuries-old tradition, give away their rights to the publisher. We have no control on that. Later on, there is no way for them to CC-BY the same text (in fact, we are preparing ORBi 2.0, that will offer a CC-BY choice). For now, we are aiming at free access and we are not yet fighting hard for re-use rights. We shall move progressively in this direction of course, while the publishing mores evolve… In other words, I agree that we have free access, not a full fledge open access yet. It is not a failure, it is our objective to gain confidence first. Unfortunately, even if we have established in-house rules for evaluation, external evaluations are still based on traditional indicators such as the highly and rightfully criticized but widely used Impact Factor and the like. In these conditions, today we cannot sacrifice our researchers — singularly the young ones — in the overall competition for jobs and funds, on the altar of « pure » Open Access. Best wishes Bernard Rentier Rector, University of Liège, Belgium Le 19 sept. 2014 à 21:52, Richard Poynder ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk a écrit : Dear Bernard, I have two questions if I may: 1. You say that Liège is getting close to 90% compliance. Can you explain how you know that, and how you calculate compliance levels? I ask this because the consistent theme coming through from UK universities with regard to compliance to the RCUK OA mandate is that they simply do not know how many research outputs their faculty produce each year. If that is right, what systems does Liège have in place to enable it to produce a comprehensive list of research outputs that UK universities apparently do not have? 2. Does Liège track the licences attached to the deposits in its repository? If so, can you provide some stats, especially the number of items that are available CC-BY (which we are now told is required before a deposit can be characterised as being open access? Thank you. Richard Poynder From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of brent...@ulg.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2014 18:46 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. (JC. Guédon) Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything. It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well worth it). Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch of wisdom on its mandate by adding immediately upon
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
*I.* A Web-of-Science-based estimate of Green OA mandate effectiveness — i.e., of *the annual percentage of institutional journal article output that is being self-archived in the institutional repository *— is fine. So is one based on SCOPUS, or on any other index of annual journal article output across disciplines. *II.* The fact that books are more important than journals in SSH (social science and humanities) in no way invalidates WoS-based estimates of Green OA mandate effectiveness. *The mandates apply only to journal articles.* *III. *Green OA mandates to date apply only to journal articles, not books, for many obvious reasons. *IV.* Jean-Claude writes: *“Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know.” * *Cf:* *“The University of Liege policy is mandatory… the Administrative Board of the University has decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members: - to deposit the bibliographic references of ALL their publications since 2002; - to deposit the full text of ALL their articles published in periodicals since 2002…*” http://roarmap.eprints.org/56/ *V.* The fact that research metrics are currently mostly journal-article based has nothing to do with the predictive power of estimates of Green OA mandate effectiveness. *VI*. The WoS-based estimate of Green OA mandate effectiveness has nothing to do with “impact factor folly.” *VII.* Jean-Claude writes:“SSH authors are less interested in depositing articles than STM researchers.” As far as I know, there is not yet any objective evidence supporting this assertion. In fact, we are in the process of testing it, using the WoS data. *VIII*. *Status quo*: OA to journal articles is around 30% today. Our practical solution: Green OA mandates (and tests for which kinds of mandate are most effective) so they can be promoted for adoption. Other practical solutions? Stevan Harnad On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of science researchers... 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree with it. 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty to vote a mandate on itself (but few universities have done so), or you need administrators to impose a mandate, but that is often viewed negatively by many of our colleagues. Meanwhile, they are strongly incited to publish in prestigious journals where prestige is measured by impact factors. From an average researcher's perspective, one article in Nature, fully locked behind pay-walls, is what is really valuable. Adding open access may be the cherry on the sundae, but it is not the sundae. The result? OA, as of now, is not perceived to be directly significant for successfully managing a career. On the other
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. (JC. Guédon) Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything. It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well worth it). Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch of wisdom on its mandate by adding immediately upon acceptance, even in restricted access in the official procedure. Actually, a nice but to some extent useless addition because, with time (the mandate was imposed in 2007), ULg authors have become so convinced of the increase in readership and citations that two thirds of them make their deposits between the date of acceptance and the date of publication. All this explains why we are getting close to 90% compliance, an outstanding result, I believe. Le 18 sept. 2014 à 23:40, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca a écrit : A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of science researchers... 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree with it. 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty to vote a mandate on itself (but few universities have done so), or you need administrators to impose a mandate, but that is often viewed negatively by many of our colleagues. Meanwhile, they are strongly incited to publish in prestigious journals where prestige is measured by impact factors. From an average researcher's perspective, one article in Nature, fully locked behind pay-walls, is what is really valuable. Adding open access may be the cherry on the sundae, but it is not the sundae. The result? OA, as of now, is not perceived to be directly significant for successfully managing a career. On the other hand, the OA citation advantage has been fully recognized and accepted by publishers. That is in part why they are finally embracing OA: with high processing charges and the increased citation potential of OA, they can increase revenues even more and satisfy their stakeholders. This is especially true if funders, universities, libraries, etc., are willing to pay for the APC's. This is the trap the UK fell into. 5. SSH authors are less interested in depositing articles than STM researchers because, for SSH researchers, articles have far less importance than books (see above), and, arguably, book
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Dear Bernard, I have two questions if I may: 1. You say that Liège is getting close to 90% compliance. Can you explain how you know that, and how you calculate compliance levels? I ask this because the consistent theme coming through from UK universities with regard to compliance to the RCUK OA mandate is that they simply do not know how many research outputs their faculty produce each year. If that is right, what systems does Liège have in place to enable it to produce a comprehensive list of research outputs that UK universities apparently do not have? 2. Does Liège track the licences attached to the deposits in its repository? If so, can you provide some stats, especially the number of items that are available CC-BY (which we are now told is required before a deposit can be characterised as being open access? Thank you. Richard Poynder From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of brent...@ulg.ac.be Sent: 19 September 2014 18:46 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. (JC. Guédon) Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything. It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well worth it). Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch of wisdom on its mandate by adding immediately upon acceptance, even in restricted access in the official procedure. Actually, a nice but to some extent useless addition because, with time (the mandate was imposed in 2007), ULg authors have become so convinced of the increase in readership and citations that two thirds of them make their deposits between the date of acceptance and the date of publication. All this explains why we are getting close to 90% compliance, an outstanding result, I believe. Le 18 sept. 2014 à 23:40, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca mailto:jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca a écrit : A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of science researchers... 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree with it. 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty to vote a mandate on itself (but few universities have done so), or you need administrators
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Thank you, Bernard. I should have said, more precisely, that Liège does not force anything; that it has a mandate and that it is backed up, as you point out, by the procedures used for in-house research assessment. This form of enforcement is very different from that of directly applying penalties for not conforming, or whatever else has been used elsewhere. What you are doing, cleverly, is say: if you do not comply, you will suffer from bad results in your personal research assessment. I also believe that this mandate applies to more than journal articles, or am I wrong? Books and book chapters, so very important for SSH disciplines, cannot be easily disregarded, and assessing SSH personnel purely on the basis of journal articles would be a (bad) joke. A dark archive can take care of all difficulties, and the celebrated button allows working around most difficulties. And getting close to 90% is indeed outstanding. Jean-Claude -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le vendredi 19 septembre 2014 à 19:46 +0200, brent...@ulg.ac.be a écrit : Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. (JC. Guédon) Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything. It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well worth it). Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch of wisdom on its mandate by adding immediately upon acceptance, even in restricted access in the official procedure. Actually, a nice but to some extent useless addition because, with time (the mandate was imposed in 2007), ULg authors have become so convinced of the increase in readership and citations that two thirds of them make their deposits between the date of acceptance and the date of publication. All this explains why we are getting close to 90% compliance, an outstanding result, I believe. Le 18 sept. 2014 à 23:40, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca a écrit : A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of science researchers... 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree with it. 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty to vote a mandate on itself (but few universities have done so), or you need administrators to
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
I will let readers evaluate whether Stevan's answers are satisfactory or not. Except for the Liège mandate where I did not express myself sufficiently precisely, I disagree with points I--III, V-VI. I agree that point VII deserves being studied more precisely. For point VIII, part of the 30% (however it is calculated - is it 30% of WoS articles?) comes from the Gold road, and, therefore, falls under a different kind of argument. This said, I believe that Liège's solution is the best one presently available, if you can get it. In countries where university autonomy is far from being the norm (e.g. France), the clout of in-house assessments of performance is perforce very limited. Promoting the Liège solution is also what I do, and I do so everywhere, but promoting OA publishing platforms (such as Redalyc and, with some caveats, Scielo) that are both free and gratis is also what I do. IMHO, this is superior to promoting only and exclusively the Green road: it adds to the Green road without subtracting anything from it. This was also the spirit of BOAI. Finally, I do not need any fancy statistical footwork to agree that the ways and means of the Liège mandate are the best. Common sense is enough for me. Let us get the Liège form of mandate wherever we can (which I am presently trying to do in my own university), and let us also do all we can to promote OA for all (including all disciplines). And I will stop this thread here. -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le vendredi 19 septembre 2014 à 13:17 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : I. A Web-of-Science-based estimate of Green OA mandate effectiveness — i.e., of the annual percentage of institutional journal article output that is being self-archived in the institutional repository — is fine. So is one based on SCOPUS, or on any other index of annual journal article output across disciplines. II. The fact that books are more important than journals in SSH (social science and humanities) in no way invalidates WoS-based estimates of Green OA mandate effectiveness. The mandates apply only to journal articles. III. Green OA mandates to date apply only to journal articles, not books, for many obvious reasons. IV. Jean-Claude writes: “Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know.” Cf: “The University of Liege policy is mandatory… the Administrative Board of the University has decided to make it mandatory for all ULg members: - to deposit the bibliographic references of ALL their publications since 2002; - to deposit the full text of ALL their articles published in periodicals since 2002…” http://roarmap.eprints.org/56/ V. The fact that research metrics are currently mostly journal-article based has nothing to do with the predictive power of estimates of Green OA mandate effectiveness. VI. The WoS-based estimate of Green OA mandate effectiveness has nothing to do with “impact factor folly.” VII. Jean-Claude writes:“SSH authors are less interested in depositing articles than STM researchers.” As far as I know, there is not yet any objective evidence supporting this assertion. In fact, we are in the process of testing it, using the WoS data. VIII. Status quo: OA to journal articles is around 30% today. Our practical solution: Green OA mandates (and tests for which kinds of mandate are most effective) so they can be promoted for adoption. Other practical solutions? Stevan Harnad On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 10:53 AM, Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Most interesting dialogue. I will focus on two points: 1. *Using the Web of Science collection as a reference*: this generates all kinds of problems, particularly for disciplines that are not dominated and skewed by the impact factor folly. This is true, for example, of most of the social sciences and the humanities, especially when these publications are not in English. The purpose of using WoS (or SCOPUS, or any other standardized index) as a* baseline* for assessing OA repository success is to be able to estimate (and compare) *what percentage of an institution's total annual refereed journal article output has been self-archived. * Raw total or annual deposit counts tell us neither (1) whether the deposits are refereed journal articles nor (2) when the articles were published, nor (most important of all) (3) what proportion of total annual refereed journal article output is deposited. Institutions do not know even know their total annual refereed journal article output. (One of the (many) reasons for mandating self-archiving is in order to get that information.) The WoS (or SCOPUS, or other) standardized database provides the denominator against which the deposits of those articles provide the numerator. Once that ratio is known (for WoS articles, for example), it provides an estimate of the proportion of total institutional article output deposited. Anyone can then correct the ratio for their institution and discipline, if they wish, by simply taking a (large enough) sample of total institutional journal article output for a recent year and seeing what percentage of it is in WoS! (This would obviously have to be done discipline by discipline; and indeed the institutional totals should also be broken down and analyzed by discipline.) So if D/W, the WoS-deposit/total-WoS ratio = R, and w/s, the WoS-indexed-portion/total-output-sample = c, then c can be used to upgrade W to the estimate of total institutional article output, and the WoS deposit ratio R can be compared to the deposit ratio for the non-WoS sample (*which must not, of course, be derived from the repository, but some other way!*) to get a non-WoS ratio of Rc. My own prediction is that R and Rc will be quite similar, but if not, c can also be used to correct R to better reflect both WoS and non-WoS output and their relative sizes. But R is still by far the easiest and fastest way to get an estimate of institutional deposit percentages. (As far as I can see, none of this has much to do with impact factor folly. For non-English-language institutions, however, the non-WoS correction may be more substantial.) Stevan has also and long argued about limiting oneself to journal articles. I have my own difficulties with this limitation because book chapters and monographs are so important in the disciplines that I tend to work in. Also, I regularly write in French as well as English, while reading articles in a variety of languages. Most of the articles that are not in English are not in the Web of Science. A better way to proceed would be to check if the journals not in the WoS, and corresponding to deposited articles, are peer-reviewed. The same could be done with book chapters. Incidentally, if I limited myself to WoS publications for annual performance review, I would look rather bad. I suspect I am not the only one in such a situation, while leading a fairly honourable career in academe. Authors are welcome to deposit as much as they like: articles, chapters, books, data, software. But OA's primary target (and also its primary obstacle) is journal articles. Ditto for OA mandates. All disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities, in all languages, write journal articles. This discussion is about the means of measuring the success of an OA self-archiving mandate. It applies to all journal articles (and refereed conference articles) in all disciplines. There are problems with mandating book deposit, or even book chapter deposit, so that is being left for later. Nothing is being said about performance review except that the way to submit journal articles should be stipulated to be repository deposit. 2. *The issue of rules and regulations.* It is absolutely true that a procedure such as the one adopted at the Université de Liège and which Stevan aptly summarizes as (with a couple of minor modifications): *henceforth the way to submit refereed* *journal article** publications for annual performance review is to deposit them in the [appropriate] IR *. Liège does not mandate the deposit of books. However, obtaining this change of behaviour from an administration is no small task. At the local, institutional, level, it corresponds to a politically charged effort that requires having a number of committed OA advocates working hard to push the idea. Stevan should know this from his own
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive tsunami mode... 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I would accept as a first approximation). The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not a management tool, and which stands behind all the research assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories, etc. 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of science researchers... 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree with it. 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty to vote a mandate on itself (but few universities have done so), or you need administrators to impose a mandate, but that is often viewed negatively by many of our colleagues. Meanwhile, they are strongly incited to publish in prestigious journals where prestige is measured by impact factors. From an average researcher's perspective, one article in Nature, fully locked behind pay-walls, is what is really valuable. Adding open access may be the cherry on the sundae, but it is not the sundae. The result? OA, as of now, is not perceived to be directly significant for successfully managing a career. On the other hand, the OA citation advantage has been fully recognized and accepted by publishers. That is in part why they are finally embracing OA: with high processing charges and the increased citation potential of OA, they can increase revenues even more and satisfy their stakeholders. This is especially true if funders, universities, libraries, etc., are willing to pay for the APC's. This is the trap the UK fell into. 5. SSH authors are less interested in depositing articles than STM researchers because, for SSH researchers, articles have far less importance than books (see above), and, arguably, book chapters. 6. I am not citing rationales for the status quo, and Stevan knows this well. This must be the first time that I have ever been associated with the status quo... Could it be that criticizing Stevan on one point could be seen by him as fighting for the status? But that would be true only if Stevan were right beyond the slightest doubt. Hmm! I personally think he is right on some points and not so right on others. Also, I am simply trying to think about reasons why OA has been so hard to achieve so far, and, in doing so, I have come to two conclusions: too narrow an objective and too rigid an approach can both be counter-productive. This said, trying to have a method to compare deposit rates in various institutional and mandate circumstances would be very useful. I support Stevan's general objective in this regard; I simply object to the validity of the method he suggests. Alas, I have little to suggest beyond my critique. I also suggest that a better understanding of the sociology of research (not the sociology of knowledge) is crucial to move forward. Finally, I expect that if I saw Stevan self-archive his abundant scientific production, I would be awed by the lightning speed of his keystrokes. But are they everybody's keystrokes? Jean-Claude Guédon -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le jeudi 18
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:30 PM, Sue Gardner sgardn...@unl.edu mailto:sgardn...@unl.edu wrote: Stevan, Apologies for a delayed response. I have been meaning to reply, and now have time. You have asked some questions of us at UNL. Paul Royster may reply, as well. These are my thoughts. (1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? (Without that figure, there is no way of knowing how well N-L is doing, compared to other institutional repositories, mandated or unmandated.) You are requesting a certain metric and claiming that it is the only valid one. We have approximately 75,000 items in our repository, almost all of which can be read freely by anyone with an Internet connection. We also have several dozen monographs under our own imprint, and we host several journals. We don't devote too much of our time to analyzing our metrics, in part because we are a staff of three (as of two weeks ago--before which we were a staff of two), and we spend much of our time getting content into the repository in favor of administrative activities. Personally, I welcome anyone to analyze our output by any measure and I will be interested to know the result, but that information won't change our day-to-day activities, so it would remain off to the side of what we're doing. Sue, I mentioned it because UNL was being described as one of the biggest and most successful Institutional Repositories (IRs). This may be true if IR success is gauged by total contents, regardless of type. But if it is about success for OA’s target contents — which are first and foremost refereed journal articles — then there is no way to know how UNL compares with other IRs unless the comparison is based on the yearly proportion of UNL yearly refereed journal article output that is being deposited in UNC’s IR (and when). I might add that the question is all the more important as the success of UNC’s IR was being adduced as evidence that an OA mandate is not necessary for IR (OA) success. Stevan Harnad Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository, and what should be its aims and purpose? I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term “institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in “open electronic archives”. http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive their papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24 I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the paper written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”). Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university community.” Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them; Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public value.” http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf But today I would think that when defining the term “institutional repository” most people (especially librarians) refer to a document authored by Clifford Lynch in 2003 (“Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”). Lynch described an institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.” http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/arl-br-226.pdf The above, for instance, is how Cambridge University defines an institutional repository, see: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/repository/about/about_institutional_repositories.html Speaking to me in 2006, Lynch said, “If all you want to do is author self-archiving, I suspect that there are
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Begin forwarded message: From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Date: September 16, 2014 at 5:28:48 PM GMT-4 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Paul Royster proyst...@unl.edu wrote: At the risk of stirring up more sediment and further muddying the waters of scholarly communications, but in response to direct questions posed in this venue earlier this month, I shall venture the following … Answers for Dr. Harnad (1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? About 3 months ago I furnished your graduate student (at least he said he was your student) with 5 years of deposit data so he could compare it to Web of Science publication dates and arrive at some data-based figure for this. I cautioned him that I felt Web of Science to be a narrow and commercially skewed comparison sample, but I sent the data anyway. So I expect you will have an answer to this query before I do. If the news is good, I hope you will share it with this list; if not, then let your conscience be your guide. As for benchmarking, I don’t believe it is a competition, and every step in the direction of free scholarship is a positive one. I hope when they hand out the medals we at least get a ribbon for participation. Thanks for reminding me! It was my post-doc, Yassine Gargouri, and I just called him to ask about the UNL results. He said he has the UNL data and will have the results of the analysis in 2-3 weeks! So the jury is still out. But many thanks for sending the data. Apparently Sue was not aware that UNL had provided those data (and I too had forgotten!). (2) Why doesn’t N-L adopt a self-archiving mandate? I do not even attempt to explain the conduct of the black box that is my university’s administration; so in short, I cannot say why or why not. I can only say why I have not campaigned for adoption of such a mandate. My reasons have been purely personal and idiosyncratic, and I do not hold them up as a model for anyone else or as representing the thinking or attitude of this university. Bluntly, I have not sought to create a mandate because I feel there are enough regulations and requirements in effect here already. Instituting more rules brings further problems of enforcement or compliance, and it creates new categories of deviance. There are already too many rules: we have to park in designated areas; we have to drink Pepsi rather than Coke products; we have to wear red on game days; we can’t enter the building through the freight dock; etc. etc. etc. I simply do not believe in creating more rules and requirements, even if they are for our own good. The Faculty Senate voted to “endorse and recommend” our repository; I have not desired more than that. But I am concerned mainly with 1600 faculty on two campuses in one medium-sized university town—not with a universal solution to the worldwide scholarly communications crisis. I see discussions lately about “putting teeth” into mandated deposit rules, and I wonder—who is intended to be bitten? Apparently, the already-beleaguered faculty. I agree that we are over-regulated! But I think that doing a few extra keystrokes when a refereed final draft is accepted for publication is really very little, and the potential benefits are huge. Also, there is some evidence as to how authors comply with a self-archiving mandate — if it’s the right self-archiving mandate, i.e., If the mandate simply indicates that henceforth the way to submit refereed journal article publications for annual performance review is to deposit them in UNL’s IR (rather than however they are being submitted currently) then UNL faculty will comply as naturally as they did when it was mandaed that submissions should be online rather than in hard copy. It’s just a technological upgrade. (3) Why do you lump together author-pays with author-self-archives? I was not aware that I did this, so perhaps you are responding to Sue’s catalog of various proposed solutions—“author-pays OA, mandated self-archiving of manuscripts, CHORUS, SHARE, and others”—as all being “ineffectual or unsustainable initiatives to varying degrees.” I feel we are strong believers and even advocates for author self-archiving (so-called), and disdainful non-advocates for author-pays models. But I think we have become aware of the divergence of interests between the global theoretics of the open access “movements” on the one hand and the “boots-on-the-ground” practicalities of managing a local repository, even one with global reach, on the other. Crusades for and controversies about “open access” have come to seem far removed from what we actually do, and now seem more of a distraction than a help or guide. I can understand
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Most interesting dialogue. I will focus on two points: 1. Using the Web of Science collection as a reference: this generates all kinds of problems, particularly for disciplines that are not dominated and skewed by the impact factor folly. This is true, for example, of most of the social sciences and the humanities, especially when these publications are not in English. Stevan has also and long argued about limiting oneself to journal articles. I have my own difficulties with this limitation because book chapters and monographs are so important in the disciplines that I tend to work in. Also, I regularly write in French as well as English, while reading articles in a variety of languages. Most of the articles that are not in English are not in the Web of Science. A better way to proceed would be to check if the journals not in the WoS, and corresponding to deposited articles, are peer-reviewed. The same could be done with book chapters. Incidentally, if I limited myself to WoS publications for annual performance review, I would look rather bad. I suspect I am not the only one in such a situation, while leading a fairly honourable career in academe. 2. The issue of rules and regulations. It is absolutely true that a procedure such as the one adopted at the Université de Liège and which Stevan aptly summarizes as (with a couple of minor modifications): henceforth the way to submit refereed journal article publications for annual performance review is to deposit them in the [appropriate] IR . However, obtaining this change of behaviour from an administration is no small task. At the local, institutional, level, it corresponds to a politically charged effort that requires having a number of committed OA advocates working hard to push the idea. Stevan should know this from his own experience in Montreal; he should also know that, presently, the Open Access issue is not on the radar of most researchers. In scientific disciplines, they tend to be mesmerized by impact factors without making the link between this obsession and the OA advantage, partly because enough controversies have surrounded this issue to maintain a general feeling of uncertainty and doubt. In the social sciences and humanities where the citation rates are far less meaningful - I put quotation marks here to underscore the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of citation numbers: visibility, prestige, quality? - the benefits of self-archiving one's articles in open access are less obvious to researchers, especially if they do not adopt a global perspective on the importance of the grand conversation needed to produce knowledge in an optimal manner, but rather intend to manage and protect their career. Saying all this is not saying that we should not remain committed to OA, far from it; is is simply saying that the chances of success in reaching OA will not be significantly improved by simply referring to huge benefits at the cost of only a few extra keystrokes. This is rhetoric. The last time I deposited an article of mine, given the procedure used in the depository I was using, it took me close to half an hour to enter all the details required by that depository - a depository organized by librarians, mainly for information science specialists. All these details were legitimate and potentially useful. However, while I was absolutely sure I was doing the right thing, I could well understand why a colleague less sanguine about OA than I am might push this task to the back burner. In fact, I did so myself for several months. Shame on me, probably, but this is the reality of the quotidian. In conclusion, i suspect that if Stevan focuses on such a narrowly-defined target - journal articles in the STM disciplines - this is because he gambles on the fact that making these disciplines fully OA would force the other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to follow suit sooner or later. Perhaps, it is so, but perhaps it is not. Meanwhile, arguing in this fashion tends to alienate practitioners of the humanities and the social sciences, so that the alleged advantages of narrowly focusing on a well-defined target are perhaps more than negatively compensated by the neglect of SSH disciplines. yet, the latter constitute about half, if not more, of the researchers in the world. -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le mercredi 17 septembre 2014 à 07:07 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Begin forwarded message: From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Date: September 16, 2014 at 5:28:48 PM GMT-4 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Paul Royster proyst...@unl.edu wrote: At the risk of stirring up more sediment and further muddying the waters of scholarly communications, but in response to direct questions posed in this venue earlier this month, I shall
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The gap here may be the service provided by the repository. How easy or difficult is it to deposit in your institutional subject repository? In my experience this is often much more difficult than it needs to be. If faculty or students upload their work, make sure this doesn't take any more than a few keystrokes and give them the URL to share right away (that's a service we get from this), not a few days or weeks later after you've checked the metadata and copyright. Make copyright the responsibility of the person doing the deposit, not the library or repository, or offer this service as an option with the delay this entails. From this service perspective I can see the benefits of initiatives like PeerLibrary. In the long run we are all better off with professionally run open access archives to look after preservation and participation in relevant standards, but when institutional services are too hard to use there is a lot to be said for DIY. A lot of my own informal scholarly work is posted on my blogs using Google Blogger or my new Wordpress blog. Neither Google nor Wordpress has any obligation to make sure that this work continues to be available, so this makes my work vulnerable, but at least it's a way to get the work out there. My perspective is that libraries need to understand that this is the collection of the future and develop programs and services to support this work rather than trying to fit author self-archiving into traditional publishing. The questions should not be, are you allowed to deposit this in the IR given publisher copyright? but rather are you allowed to transfer all copyright to publishers given your obligation to the public to share your work through the IR? The strong institutional deposit mandate (as Stevan recommends) is a good way to change this question at every university. Green policies provide the groundwork for open access publishing to happen. Once you have incentive to look for publishers that provide good dissemination practices, you have incentive to choose open access journals (all else being reasonably equal). best, Heather Morrison On 2014-09-03, at 9:40 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: Begin forwarded message: From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Date: September 3, 2014 at 9:25:39 PM GMT-4 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Three questions for Nebraska-Lincoln (N-L) Libraries, in order of importance: (1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? (Without that figure, there is no way of knowing how well N-L is doing, compared to other institutional repositories, mandated or unmandated.) Simple way to estimate the above (but you have to keep track of both the publication date and the deposit date): Sample total annual N-L output from WoS or SCOPUS and then test what percentage of it is deposited (and when). That can be benchmarked against other university repositories. (2) Why doesn’t N-L adopt a self-archiving mandate? The right mandate — immediate-deposit of all refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication — plus the request-copy Button during any allowable publisher embargo interval — works (especially if librarians keep mediating during the start-up and if deposit is designated as the sole means of submitting articles for performance-review). Try it. (3) Why do you lump together author-pays with author-self-archives? They’re opposites… Only one of them is objectively describable as the author bearing the brunt” (and that’s having to shell out a lot of money — not just do a few extra keystrokes -- or else give up journal-choice). Stevan Harnad On Sep 3, 2014, at 3:53 PM, Sue Gardner sgardn...@unl.edu wrote: As repository managers, many of us are having trouble envisioning getting from where we are currently to what the original OA movement idealistically proposed. This is due to the practical constraints we are faced with (such as restrictive publishers’ policies including not allowing posting of published versions even a decade and more after publication, lack of ready access to authors’ manuscripts, etc.). The solutions being offered to move toward the initial goal include author-pays OA, mandated self-archiving of manuscripts, CHORUS, SHARE, and others, which are—from my standpoint as a repository manager—one-and-all ineffectual or unsustainable initiatives to varying degrees. In populating our repository within the varied constraints, and in offering non-mandated, mediated deposit, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln we are taking a bottom-up approach to access (from the author to the reader) and, as Paul Royster has pointed out, it leaves us in the odd position of actually standing outside the
