I am with Hugh on this matter. Compliance is crucial to the successful introduction of any mandate. I am not a fan of the mandate because I do not want to become the "police" for a mandate. I want to be an enabler and not an enforcer.
I take this attitude because I have never been just a repository manager (and since 1 March this year I am no longer the repository manager at Warwick): I am a librarian and I work in the context of a library that has worked very hard over many years to build up understanding and goodwill amongst the academic community whom we serve. Researchers would rather have one more journal subscription than one more librarian (regardless of whatever work that librarian is doing!) and in the current economic climate we are reminded of this more and more often.
Getting a mandate might well be possible, but do I want to direct my efforts towards getting one? Not really. Even if we achieve one, we will spend as much time chasing up those reluctant to deposit with a stick as we might otherwise have spent encouraging them with a carrot (as Hugh recognises). And librarians really do not need to become the repository mandate police, nor to be watching our back in case of the appointment of a new VC or Pro-VC who is repository mandate unfriendly, so that we would have to win the argument all over again.
Even if we had a working mandate at Warwick, with no need for a stick we would be so overwhelmed with records on the repository that we would need a whole different model than the one we currently have, because we could never perform copyright checks or create professional metadata records for that amount of content. I know that there are arguments against this particular model of a repository as well as our reasons for this model, but that is the model we have so there would need to be a lot more groundwork done to support a mandate.
Of course, I recognise that this particular context is my own. There are many different models of repositories out there, and not all are managed by librarians: there are many different attitudes amongst pracitioners. We are all learning from each other and watching each others' progress. UKCoRR-Discussion is the place to go for a practical discussion of advocacy tactics, rather than consideration of the virtues or otherwise of a mandate.
I appreciate that many are impatient to achieve open access to research articles and that a mandate has been shown to achieve large levels of open access content availability in research studies. A mandate might be the most effective way to make large quantities of content available on open access but it is not the only way, nor indeed necessarily the best for every repository at every institution. Open Access availability is not the only goal for every single repository.
Meanwhile, Warwick's repository is growing very healthily even without a mandate. There are over 2000 open access, full text articles in WRAP today, and we are gathering more repository fans all the time.
kind regards,
Jenny Delasalle
Academic Support Manager (Research)
University of Warwick Library
Gibbet Hill Road
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
Tel: (+44) (0) 2476 15 12 75
Submit your work to WRAP: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/irsubmit
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