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A good insight in OA versus non-OA publishing and, within OA, about Green versus Gold may be gained from a recent BMC-article "Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure" bij Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk.
Leo.
Op 28-10-2012 12:57, Stevan Harnad schreef:
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On 2012-10-28, at 6:44 AM, David Wojick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Stevan, did you verify that the deposits were actual articles? In many cases the records counted by ROAR are metadata or other items. For example Cambridge is listed as very large but it has almost no articles. Does ROAR log actual articles separately? I have not seen that in their data but may have missed it.

David, you are quite right to ask this question, and the answer is no:

1. ROAR does not yet have a reliable way to determine whether a deposit is the full-text of a refereed journal article or just the metadata (or some other kind of content).

2. However, we do have a robot that can sample and test that with high accuracy, and one natural follow-up study is to use the robot to estimate what proportion of repository content is full-text journal articles.

3. In a prior study we have already used the robot to confirm about  70% full-text deposit for the oldest and strongest mandates.

4. Meanwhile, however, whatever that full-text percentage is globally, it seems reasonable to suppose that it is roughly the same across repositories: hence an increase in the average number of deposits means an increase in full-text deposits, whatever the average full-text percentage is.

5. The mandates in question are full-text deposit deposit mandates: they are not fulfilled by depositing metadata alone (or other kinds of content).

6. Hence it seems reasonable to suppose that if the deposit rate is higher, the stronger the mandate, the increase is in full-text deposits, not just metadata (or other kinds of content), regardless of the baseline proportion of full-text across repositories.

7. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose a rather complicated and ad hoc form of bias: that the institutions which tend to adopt stronger Green OA mandates are also the institutions which tend to have higher deposit rates already -- and/or deposit rates with full-text ratios systematically different from the global average.

8. We did test for bias in university webomtrics rankings associated with mandate strength, but found none.

(You are quite right about the enormous number of deposits -- 216,692, mostly not articles -- in the Cambridge repository. This did not enter into our analysis because (a) Cambridge has no mandate at all. Moreover, (b) Cambridge does not rank highly in the medium deposit rate ranking that ROAR considers most closely matched to annual university article output: This suggests that Cambridge is uploading huge batches of some sort of data rarely, rather than regularly depositing approximately the number of articles that universities produce across the year.)

Stevan Harnad



On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:58 PM, Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 1:44 PM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

This is a significant and important set of findings, which should be forwarded on to decision-makers, both in Universities and in funding agencies.

More like this, please Stevan

Professor Charles Oppenheim

More on the way. 

But meanwhile, OA advocates, please do forward these findings on mandate strength to decision-makers at your university and funding agencies. 

It's now more important than ever to make sure that OA policy decisions are evidence-based, especially to counter the extensive negative effects of the publishing lobby, as most dramatically exerted very recently on the Finch Report and the resulting RCUK policy.

Stevan Harnad

From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, 26 October 2012, 18:59
Subject: OA Week: Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Effectiveness

In June 2012, the UK Finch Committee made the following statement:
"The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories…" [Finch Committee Recommendation, June 2012] 

Testing the Finch Hypothesis
We have now tested the Finch Hypothesis. Using data from ROARMAP institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we found that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of  70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of  20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%.
 
Conclusion
The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.
The findings are in the link below. Discussion invited!
Gargouri, Yassine, Lariviere, Vincent, Gingras, Yves, Brody, Tim, Carr, Les and Harnad, Stevan (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Effectiveness. Open Access Week 2012