On 23/03/2010 00:21, "Charles Christacopoulos"
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Stevan Harnad said the following on 22/03/2010 23:13:
>>
>> On 22-Mar-10, at 6:28 PM, leo waaijers wrote:
>>
>>> (Un?)fortunately, potential mandators are members of the set of
>>> grown-up academics themselves. Why would it be easier to convince
>>> potential mandators instead of convincing authors directly? Leo.
>>
>> Because there are many, many academics to persuade one by one, and far
>> fewer rectors: For every rector you persuade to mandate, you get
>> thousands of academics and tens of thousands of deposits. With
>> individual academics, you just get a sore throat, like the chronic one
>> I've developed over the past two decades... ;>)-O-
>
> Absolutely correct.
>
> For us, the last time something was mandated was circa 1990 because of
> an external mandate (by the then CVCP predecessor to Universities UK).
> That mandate (requirement) was for a simple database of research outputs
> for the RAE1992, not for a depository. Once the external requirement
> stopped existing so did the internal requirement.
> Trying to convince individual academics is a non-starter,
Somehow I find this utterly depressing.
> and if the repository was to cost
> the academics time and effort it would be in danger of being shut down.
>
> I do not think we are unique amongst the 200 or so Universities in the UK.
I am sure you are not.
When I became an academic, I thought I joined a community of scholars with
enlightened self-interest and the good of society at heart.
People could get us to do things by providing arguments that appealed to
these ideas.
I was clearly naïve then, and/or such people are clearly no longer valued.
I am well out of it, but somehow I still care.
Sorry, Charles, but this is an example of the sort of thing that I think
pisses off academics when they get a sense of it - I may be wrong, and 95%
of academics might find it fine (as Swan's paper suggest), but I find that
unlikely.
Ah, you might say, but there is no problem in academics being pissed off.
True. But there is if it means they don't do what you want because of it.
Cheers
Hugh
>
> Cheers
> Charles
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