Dear Arthur,
I think that is a good document for repository owners.
Some great advice in there, and nicely put.
Actually, I think I was (also) looking for something more along the lines of
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/15concerns.html
but perhaps appealing to an even baser instinct! – that it will make life easier.
Perhaps list members would like to offer any such advice, hopefully based on experience?
I would guess the Sherpa people are watching.
Here are a couple from me that might help:
On metadata entry:
"I haven't got the time to put all that in - I publish 5/50/500 papers a year".
I can see your concern, but there seems to be a misunderstanding here.
*You* don't have to put all the data in.
How many of your papers are single author?
For the rest, you can rely on your co-authors entering the data for many of them, especially if you are a senior researcher; if you are a supervisor, you can certainly rely on your postgraduates doing the work for you on their papers. In fact you will find you need to spend less time managing your publications, as you can then export the entries to your own system.
You may well find that you never have to enter anything, as your co-authors will do it for you.
On full-text deposit.
"I don't have the full text to deposit - my researcher submitted it."
It's a real problem when you don't have the text of one of your papers because your research/grad student didn't give you it (or you have it somewhere in your email folder or hard disk).
It's much better if your co-author or you deposited the text in a repository, so it is managed for you, and always accessible to you.
Best
Hugh
On 25/03/2010 23:19, "Arthur Sale" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Advice on filling your repository
Arthur Sale, University of Tasmania, 26 March 2010
1. Preface
I was moved to produce this by Hugh Glaser’s remarks that no-one was prepared to offer advice to beginners or people transitioning to a properly mandated repository. This advice is not new. It has been said by many others in part, and I have been preaching it in Australia and New Zealand for at least five years. It is however firmly based on experience, and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in many universities, right around the world.
2. Long-term target
The long term target of every repository manager must be that depositing research publications should become an automatic part of an academic’s work pattern, just like submitting their research for publication, or setting their examinations. I take this as so obvious that I will not argue it.
The only known route to achieving this is via what is called a “mandate”. As an important transition to getting the long-term target to happen, and happen worldwide, institutions (and research funders) have to require their employees (grantees) to deposit their research publications in an OA repository. This is unexceptionable and few complain about it. Alma Swan’s studies support this as does actual on the ground evidence. Again, I will not argue this, except to note that it is the only strategy known to fill repositories with more than 50% of the available research publications. This is well documented. See for example http://eprints.utas.edu.au/388/.
Once depositing and making publications Open Access (OA) is universal (or even as low as 50% of the world) the momentum of the technological revolution will be unstoppable, and academics publishing quality papers will rush to deposit. It has already happened in Physics and Computer Science in case you think this is fanciful. Mandates will no longer be required except to deal with problem cases or will exist as an historical leftover from the beginning of a technological change. Those academics that don’t accept this will be the cast-offs of that generation of scholars, just like previous scientific revolutions such as that for plate tectonics.
3. Short term targets
Assuming that you do not have an enlightened senior executive, each repository manager has to adopt a different strategy. If it isn’t oriented towards gaining a mandate in the long term, you are wasting your time, unless you believe in prayer and miracles. Voluntary persuasion has consistently been shown to achieve around 15% (sometimes a little higher) of available deposits. See http://eprints.utas.edu.au/264/. Five years of experience has not changed that evidence. The only thing that will change this in a voluntary environment is the universal adoption of OA mentioned above which will drag in most.
4. Strategies
I suppose you are in this situation. You have not got a mandate. What to do?
Firstly you should accept that the idea of one person (other than the Vice-Chancellor or one of the Senior Executive issuing a mandate) changing the work practices of a university is such a foolish notion a priori that it can be put aside as a delusion. The theory of change says that change comes either quickly through fiat (a mandate), or slowly through evolutionary principles. So here are some suggestions to start slow but aim at fast.
Patchwork Mandate
Do not try a scatter gun approach. It won’t work because your effort is too thinly scattered. Soon backsliders come to balance the converts. This is common centuries-old missionary experience.
Sit down and identify target departments in your university and target them. (More missionary experience – go for the chiefs.) Each university is different so you need to choose your own targets. Set in place measures that will ensure that even when you move on to another target, you have a champion in that target area who will be your surrogate to deal with backsliding. Support the champion. Massage their ego and with information. Read the paper http://eprints.utas.edu.au/410/, and apply known techniques of change management to the problem. Did I mention that I was previously a Pro Vice-Chancellor before I retired?
Why do we do this?
Your first and main answer to an academic should be that open access increases citations. Counts of publications are now passé, and they were only ever the crudest form of metric for research impact. Citations are now the fashion, and they are a less crude surrogate – if an article is cited at least someone read it! As time goes on we shall see more complex measures like the SJR and the set of Hirsch indexes coming to the fore in a basket of metrics that attempt to measure the multi-dimensional aspects of impact, different for every discipline. Work has to be online to be assessed!
You should download Anne-Will Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm. Try it out. Demo it to authors. Good for people with unique or rare names, like me. Not so good for John Smiths. However it shows how online access (in this case through Google Scholar) can be used to develop sophisticated metrics of research impact. Has X published one excellent paper in their life twenty years ago, or has X a record of good papers over that time? It matters.
Performance
Using performance management to promote your repository is a double edged sword, so be careful. Some academics might hate you, and then where are you? Better if a Head of Department asks for help. However, get your repository able to deliver a research record summary so that a high-performing academic can attach it to his or her report for performance management. The Head of Department will get the message...
Forget about using your repository for promotion cases, etc unless you have senior management support. It comes with the mandate territory, not as a precursor.
Things that do not cut any ice
Don’t bother to explain that the university administration would like to know what research is being carried out. 99% of academics would say “Stuff that!” Don’t try to explain how when everyone goes OA, then your researchers will have free access to the world’s literature. They don’t care – they have never paid for access anyway.
An especial word of warning. Do not publish lists of individual academics who are most downloaded this month, or similar. Do not try to award prizes to individual academics. Most academics absolutely hate this, and you’ve lost them for years. The exceptions are (surprise) those few at the top. My experience is that the same people are at the top rather consistently, so what are you doing? Pandering to their ego, that’s what. And maybe you get pats on the back for your perspicacity. As a matter of interest, the same object has been consistently top of the UTas downloads for at least three years! Psychiatry is popular it seems. It probably has impact above its citation count.
Other things that are useful
Most of the following tips are very useful with individual academics, but responses to each one varies widely. They are worth doing centrally in your repository. Especially they are the answer to the people who already put their papers on their websites (so they are OA) and think that a repository isn’t any better than their website. Disabuse them, because they aren’t converts, they are dyed-in-the-wool OA providers. They won’t backslide once you’ve convinced them.
* Put effort into making sure that Google indexes your repository really well. Many academic crow about being top of the list in Google on their search term. You can’t guess that search term – it is the topic of their research that other researchers are likely to use.
* Make sure that your authors can read good statistics on how often their paper is downloaded. Some academics follow these avidly and deduce from the patterns that someone just cited their work and try to find out who. See http://eprints.utas.edu.au/es/index.php?action=show_detail_eprint;id=410; or indeed any paper in the UTas repository that takes your fancy.
* Provide an easy service so that authors can put a link to an up-to-date list of publications on their personal website. For example http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/authors/Sale,_AHJ.html.
* Make sure that each author can download his own paper (even if restricted) wherever they are in the world. Very active researchers value this a lot, because it is like carrying a no-weight library of all your publications with you when you travel internationally. Makes collaborative research a lot easier.
* Offer Departmental seminars on how to use OA information to best advantage. Use Google Scholar shamelessly (doesn’t really work without OA). Talk about Harzing’s Publish or Perish and demo it. Talk lots about metrics, citations, and Scimago. Throw in citations as a way of searching forward in time from a significant paper. Especially target postgraduate (PhD) candidates. They influence more indolent supervisors.
5. Debunking some myths and Summary
This advice is meant to be useful to repository managers and librarians who are new to this Open Access enterprise. However there are a few extra myths that need to be squashed (not for academic eyes).
* The metadata entered by authors is in general as good as or better than that entered by librarians. Do not try to do better. You are wasting money.
* Since almost all searches are done by Google, full text analysis rules. Keywords and Phrases are of such little consequence that it is a pity to waste a librarian’s time on them when they could be doing something useful.
* Copyright issues can be vastly overdone. If your mandate or your advice calls for the Accepted Manuscript (aka postprint) as it should, just ignore checking copyright and let it go up. If a publisher complains (they almost never do nor have any grounds to), make it restricted without arguing. Do not accept the Version of Record (aka publisher’s “pdf”) unless it is guaranteed open access. In case it isn’t tell the author that the submission has been rejected because they violated copyright. They’ll learn. They’re good at learning. They won’t learn unless you teach them.
So to summarize: mandates are the only thing that works now. Persuasion is a weak reed, but worth doing to prepare the ground for a mandate, but be very selective in who you seek to persuade. Use change management tools to assist you. The persuasive techniques continue to work once you’ve got a mandate. Keep them going.
Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania
26 March 2010
