The ever-alert Napoleon Miradon, has raised two very important and valid
questions in connection with my posting about the estimates of the
current deposit rate in the repository of the Department of Electronics
and Computer Science at Southampton University.
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/301-guid.html
One of the questions is an explicit empirical one, and the
other is an implicit methodological one. I shall answer the
methodological question first. Reformulated explicitly, the question is:

     Since, apart from their institutional repositories (IRs) themselves,
     there is today no record of their total research output, Southampton
     (and most other universities and departments worldwide) have no way of
     knowing what their total research output is. So how can they determine
     what percentage of that total research output is being self-archived?

The answer is that it can only be estimated today by consulting external
databases, such as ISI's Web of Science, or ACM's Digital Library (or
Google Scholar), to sample what has been published, and then to check
back to see whether they are in the IR. That is what Les Carr did, and
that is where his percentages come from.
http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2007/09/self-deposit-rates-external-calibration.html

The point to note here is that one of the added benefits of having an IR
and a self-archiving mandate, is that once the deposit rate has been
confirmed (by such external sampling) to be at or near 100%, the IR
itself can be used as the internal record of the institution's or
department's research output. Count that -- alongside the fact that it
maximises the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of the
research output -- as yet another reason for having an IR, and for
mandating deposit: It is a very powerful and useful form of internal
record-keeping. It also releases the institution or department from the
need to consult and depend on external proprietary databases in order to
monitor its own research output.

But I think M. Miradon in fact understood the fact that IR deposit rates
currently have to be estimated through sampling; I have only made the
methodological point explicit for readers who might have needed the
clarification. We now move on to M. Miradon's empirical point: He has
done a bit of random sampling himself, and indeed he has managed to do
this using a Southampton-internal record of Southampton publications: He
has sampled the staff publications list in Southampton's Department of
Civil Engineering, and he has found many publications to be absent from
Southampton's ECS IR: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

But the explanation for this is very simple: I was reporting the results
for the 4-year-old  IR and mandate of the Department of Electronics and
Computer Science at Southampton, not the Department of Civil
Engineering! I stressed (in connection also with Arthur Sale's
recommendation that universities should quickly proceed with adopting
bottom-up departmental mandates -- "patchwork mandates" -- until/unless
they have prompt consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide
mandate). ECS's mandate, the world's first as far as I know, was a
departmental mandate, not a university-wide mandate.

Which prompts me to describe a few more historical details about
self-archiving policy at the University of Southampton. As anyone can
see by consulting ROARMAP, Southampton does have another IR and another
IR policy: It has a university-wide IR
     http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/ 
and has had it nearly as long as it has had the ECS IR. Southampton
also now has a university-wide mandate proposal, one that has even been
officially approved; but it has not yet been officially adopted. (Don't
ask me why it is taking so long! I have no idea, except that I note that
the delay is commensurate with the delay at many other institutions. All
the more reason for individual departments like ECS to push ahead with
Arthur Sale's "Patchwork Mandate"!)
     http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/sale/01sale.html

Last point: I confidently count a self-archiving mandate a success if it
generates a deposit rate of 100%. That means the keystrokes are getting
done, and it is -- and always was -- just the keystrokes that were
standing between the research community and 100% Open Access to its own
research output.
     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

Les Carr points out that some of the ECS IR deposits are Closed Access
(CA) rather than Open Access (OA). That is not a problem, because the
IR's semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (also known as the
"Fair Use" Button) can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA during a
Closed Access embargo period, providing for all user needs until either
embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths under pressure from
the increasingly palpable benefits of OA, or authors tire of performing
the extra keystrokes involved in fulfilling individual eprint requests,
and hit the master key that transforms their deposit from "CA" to "OA."
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html

A slightly more problematic case is the one where the authors have only
done the keystrokes to deposit their metadata, but have failed to do the
last keystroke, the one that deposits their full-text (whether as OA or
CA). There we have a visible but orphaned reference, with no text to
request or send. The EPrints IR software has not implemented a second
button, with which would-be users can prod the author to deposit the
missing text (and then send it), because we are confident that this
dysfunctional practice is becoming increasingly rare and will remedy
itself with time and experience of its own accord -- inasmuch as it
needs to  be remedied at all. For there are cases where an author may
legitimately wish to deposit only a paper's metadata, for record-keeping
purposes, but not the text itself. Examples would be seminars and
conference papers that are written but not published, being merely
precursors of later published papers. And of course there are books, of
which the author may not wish to deposit the full text! ECS's
self-archiving mandate applies only to published, peer-reviewed articles
(in journals or refereed conference proceedings). Authors are not
obliged to deposit every text they have ever keyed, let alone make it
all OA!

Stevan Harnad

On Mon, 1 Oct 2007, N. Miradon wrote:

>> Professor Harnad wrote "The Department of Electronics and Computer
>> Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton was the world's first
>> ... ECS's deposit rate in 2006 (the fourth full year of the ECS mandate)
>> is over 80% for an ISI Web of Knowledge sample and nearly 100% for an
>> ACM Digital Library sample. ... This should encourage other universities
>> to adopt self-archiving mandates."
>
> I know that RepositoryMan Dr Leslie Carr wrote 
> (http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2007/09/self-deposit-rates-external-calibration.html)
>> "Consequently we genuinely can't answer questions about the percentage
>> of our research output that gets put into our repository, because we have
>> [no] independent way of knowing what the size of our research output is!"
>
> But a quick search in the staff publications site
> http://www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=****
> (where *** is a random integer between ?1 and ?1890) gives
> many publications that do not seem to be available in
> http://eprints.soton.ac.uk .
>
> It would be interesting to know the % deposit rate in ECS from all
> faculties (Divisions, Research Centres) in Southampton University. Could
> someone do a quick spidering of allstaff/staffpubs.asp ?