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.

"(2) Why doesn’t N-L adopt a self-archiving mandate?"

We just don't see how -mandating- deposit would improve anything. You can tell people what to do, and maybe they will do it--and, if they do, it's probably not because you told them to. My feeling about it is: Am I serving the needs of my constituents, i.e. the faculty? I feel strongly that I'm here to facilitate access to their work, not to bear down on them with demands of any kind. If it works for them, it works for me--not the other way around.

"(3) Why do you lump together author-pays with author-self-archives?"

I lump them together because they both result in a burden on the author that I feel is best taken up by other constituencies.

Author-pays results in a skewed body of work being published. I watch my close colleagues in academic departments deal with this on a daily basis, and it would be comical if it weren't so deadly serious.

Author-pays, a scenario: The junior author has money from her institution to go with an author-pays journal. The established author doesn't care about impact factor and wants to go with a smaller, more regional journal. The junior author insists that she must publish within a certain subset of prestigious journals, so they submit to one of them. The reviewers that are assigned know very little about the techniques that the authors are using, but it gets pushed through with suggested revisions that the established author knows border on ridiculous. The paper gets published and it's not what the established author had ultimately envisioned, but there you have it.

Self-archiving scenario: An established author has 170 papers going back to 1984. Many of those either do not exist digitally or are not coming through via interlibrary loan, despite several attempts. He has a stack of reprints. He has some manuscripts in various files on his computer, but he's not sure if they're pre-print or post-print. He is administering two large, federally-funded projects, one of which takes him into the field for 2-3 months per year. He teaches at least one class each semester. He runs the weekly seminar for his department. He has three active PhD students, a post-doc, and a master's student who needs a lot of mentoring. He holds two officer positions on national boards that require his attendance at least once a year. He is asked to review dozens of papers per year from for-profit publishers (had to throw that in--all too true). Etc.  ... [drum roll?]  We tell him has HAS TO deposit his papers into our institutional repository.

Is this a person we can reasonably expect to self-archive his work into our repository? Note that he has to understand the vagaries of copyright permissions and post a legal version, or we are going to be doing work after he has complied.

If we do not mandate deposit, and if we offer mediated deposit (as opposed to requiring self-archiving), this faculty member's work will be included in the IR. If we mandate self-archiving, his work will remain in the deep archive that is bound up in older, hard copy research.

So, that is where I am coming from. I see what works and what doesn't, and that's how I have formed my opinions.

Sincerely,

Sue Gardner
Scholarly Communications Librarian/Professor
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, Nebraska, 68588 USA


-----Original Message-----
From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of LIBLICENSE
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2014 6:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster

From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2014 21:42:16 -0400

On Sep 3, 2014, at 3:53 PM, Sue Gardner <[log in to unmask]> 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 OA movement as it is defined. We have seen forces gather (led by publishers and others) that have further galvanized our peripheral position. From my perspective, these forces intend that the initial vision of OA will be realized on the backs of the authors themselves (with author-pays schemes, mandated self-archiving of manuscripts, etc.).

"Should authors have to bear the brunt of the OA movement? To some extent, of course, but ultimately that seems counterproductive since they are the ones who generate the content. As librarians and as the in-house publishing unit within the library, we work with, and for, authors daily and we help them get their work out to readers. We assist with interpretation of permissions, upload the work, and so on.
They create, we facilitate access to their creations.

"In summary, in the discussions that have ensued on the various lists this past week, I see a disconnect between what I experience on a daily basis working with the IR and what we say as a community we are trying to achieve."

Sue Gardner
Scholarly Communications Librarian

*******

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