All,

Talat and others are having problems encouraging acceptance of OA benefits. 
I'd just like to make a couple of points from the information-starved parts 
of the world:

- Sure, some IRs are not very full yet. But the usage of those that are 
filling is spectacular. Please take a look at the EPT Blog posting of March
26th http://epublishingtrust.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html and click 
on some of the listed IRs using stats packages. This blog message is geared
towards usage by developing countries and it is very encouraging - but of 
course usage by the 'more aware' user communities, as well as usage of some 
of the 'fuller' IRs will be greater. So as papers are deposited and made OA, 
there's a lot of usage going on out there, as these stats packages are now 
demonstrating.

- I don't understand the resistance by a few of Talat's university authors 
to 'mandates'. When a scientist is employed to do research by the
university, there is a 'requirement' to do research. If the research arising 
from public funding is good enough, there is a 'requirement' to publish it
in order to advance both global research and the status of the funding 
organisation. There is now a possibility to share research
findings far more widely and gain greater recognition both personally and 
institutionally, so the author's employer/funder requires that this be done 
too. What
is the problem? I rate this 'core to the job'.

- an obvious third point - if you work with researchers in countries who can 
afford maybe NO journals (see Peter Suber's recent blog on UNESCO's 
re-stated report  which says, 'in countries with annual incomes of US$1000 
and less per person, 56% of institutions surveyed had no current 
subscriptions to international journals'), it is clear that OA is the only 
route to creating equality of access to knowledge and solving many of the 
world's problems.

An incentive that worked in India was presented at a Bangalore workshop: 'I 
asked my head of department for travel support to present a paper. He asked 
if I had deposited the paper in the IR. I said no. He said, no travel 
support. I deposited the paper, I later got invitations to more 
international meetings, got travel support and met new colleagues . .'

With the kind of attitudes Talat reports, I applaud the approach and hard 
work that Christine so rightly advocates.

Barbara Kirsop
Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Talat Chaudhri [tac]" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: It's Keystrokes All the Way Down


Tom, and all,

A really useful viewpoint - though I'm grateful to Ingrid for her
concise and useful list of factors that academics do in fact cite as
reasons why they don't deposit - including some of those rejected by
Stevan in his insightful response.

Actually you are just looking at it from a more positive perspective, as
we could have merely added "lack of tangible benefits" to our list. But
this is more useful too, because it gets us thinking about incentives,
which Stevan did also mention too in his earlier response to me, in
addition to mandates, as things that actually do work.

You are quite right to suggest that, in addition to providing
information and training so that people will be able to comply with any
mandates that we (= institutions, IR managers etc) negotiate with them
and their departments and institutions, thus breaking the "cultural"
problems (i.e. working practices) that exist in many disciplines outside
say Physics, Economics and Computer Science, we clearly also need to
talk about exactly what incentives we can offer. I'd like to hear any
suggestions that people have on that. Just saying greater impact doesn't
seem to be enough incentive, since, as you suggest, people often don't
see the connection between the papers they find and the IRs holding
them.

The idea of depositing papers directly into IRs as a locus for
submission, that peer review should occur there and that a revised
version then replaces the original is very seductive, but it does also
mean that IRs would effectively be transformed into e-journals of a
sort. This has been suggested before. Don't get me wrong, I like it very
much. All the same, we must ask ourselves whether, considering that
there are prestige journal titles out there with high impact factors for
assessment exercises such as the RAE/REF, will many academics actually
want to publish in this way instead? If not, how would we alter that?
Until that is answered, this may remain just an interesting experiment
or speculation. I might add that we just had a demo of Digital Commons
by BePress, which includes the facility to house small press e-journals
on open access. I guess there also then needs to be an answer to who
pays for the costs.

That brings me to Gold OA, which has been fairly criticised for its lack
of accessibility on the basis of publication merit rather than ability
to pay author fees (as waivers will not be scalable in the long term).
In brief, I feel that it will not replace the current publishing model
and is merely a speculation that won't gain favour. The reality is that
(rich) institutions in some (rich) countries would pay author fees on
behalf of the author. Effectively this is an institutional subsidy paid
to a third party (the publisher), taking the place of subscriptions. In
the long run, one can't help but wonder whether, since technology such
as Digital Commons clearly allows it, whether less wealthy institutions
(in less wealthy countries) will instead choose to house their own
cheaper e-journals, just as they formerly had consortial or in-house
journals and still have university presses. Instead of paying the
subsidy to a publisher, they will use it directly to cover the costs of
peer review and software maintenance (i.e. reduced publishing costs). In
fact, something similar was achieved with BioLine. The funding problem,
if I understand correctly, has arisen because the University of Toronto
doesn't want to pay for a service largely benefiting poorer institutions
in other countries rather than itself. Enter consortial university
approaches to funding...? A worldwide funding solution...?

I'd like to see DSpace and EPrints developers catch up with Digital
Commons in that regard (= invitation!).

BioLine proves that this isn't just a speculation but something that
there is real demand for in the developing world. As the journals
subscription crisis ever deepens in the developed world too, it seems
likely that we'll see this idea again.

In the meantime, having no such in-house e-journal service to offer with
my DSpace repository, I confine myself to getting pre-published,
peer-reviewed content into my IR on the Green OA model. Nothing in the
above speculations prevents me from involving academics in the process
of negotiating mandates for their benefit, with departments and
university management, and from doing what I can in terms of advocacy
and information. Relying on spontaneous deposit isn't enough, as Stevan
says, nor is relying on trying to boost it by advocacy - but all the
same, these are useful first steps on the way to getting deposit
embedded into the required working practices of an institution. Call
that a mandate if you will. If it becomes part of the established
research reporting and publication process, what we call it doesn't
matter.

Personally I foresee something of a mixed OA economy, but not too much
Gold OA - anyone agree with me?

Thanks to all for their input. Cheers,


Talat

-----Original Message-----
From: Repositories discussion list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Franklin
Sent: 26 June 2008 10:20
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: It's Keystrokes All the Way Down

Franklin Consulting

Its not about key strokes, its about benefits to the depositor.

It seems to me that the real problem is that there are no perceived
benefits
for the end user, and until there are people will not be terribly
interested
in depositing.  How many people are (or at least know that they are)
searching institutional repositories?  Thinking process goes something
like
this - there is nothing in these IRs, so no one is searching them, and
as no
one is searching them there no point in depositing.  My friends /
colleagues
who are most likely to cite the paper will either see it in the journal,
or
I will send them a copy by email.

In fact, if I want to get my paper cited my best bet is to email it to
colleagues who might be interested as that way they are more likely to
read
it; and that is a better use of my time than putting it in the
repository.

Self-deposit will only work if there is something tangible in it for the
depositor - this could be fulfilling a funding body or institutional
mandate
or it could be that there are services that mean that people really are
using IR to locate stuff.  However, I suspect that IR will only really
come
in to their own when we change the publishing model, and authors deposit
in
the IR and it is peer reviewed from there (perhaps with the reviews
being
published in the IR along with the deposited item).


regards

Tom.

Tom Franklin
Franklin Consulting
9 Redclyffe Road
Withington
Manchester
M20 3JR

email:    [log in to unmask]
phone:  0161 434 3454
mobile: 07989 948 221
skype:   tomnfranklin
web:     http://www.franklin-consulting.co.uk/
blog:     http://tomfranklin.blogspot.com/



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: 26 June 2008 02:09
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: It's Keystrokes All the Way Down
>
> On Thu, 26 Jun 2008, Ingrid Mason wrote:
>
> > Thank you John for raising the issue of culture change and deposit
> > rates in institutional repositories.
>
> The cultural change in question is doing the keystrokes to
> deposit all one's articles, as a matter of course.
>
> > My view: the answer at some point and in part the requirement for
> > extra keystrokes might act as an inhibitor to the deposit
> of content
> > in institutional repositories by academics.
>
> The point is not just that extra keystrokes (to add taxonomy
> tags) are an inhibitor: *doing any keystrokes at all* is an
> inhibitor (until we are digits are roused from their lethargy
> by mandates (and the lure of metrics that are their reward).
>
> > In my brief experience (one and a half years) it is by no means THE
> > obstacle - presently.  Perhaps I'm suffering unnecessarily... but I
> > don't think so..  ;-)
>
> Ok: Let's see what else stands in our way but keystrokes:
>
> > What are the obstacles: change in working practice
>
> Must of us have not adopted the practice of depositing all
> our articles; those (like physicists) who have, have.
>
> > (information and computer literacy levels,
>
> We all know how to do keystrokes, and I won't believe
> someone's insistence there's more to it than that until they
> have first gone to demoprints and done a deposit, to see
> exactly what it entails:
> http://demoprints.eprints.org/
>
>      Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A
> Study of the Time
>      and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. Technical Report
> UNSPECIFIED,
>      ECS, University of Southampton.
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
>
> > publishing traditions);
>
> Nothing to do with publishing traditions. Those do not change a whit.
> They are simply supplemented by... keystrokes.
>
> > levels of awareness of (you name it: copyright, publisher
> agreements,
>
> Both irrelevant. Do the deposit. Copyright and agreements
> have nothing to do with whether you can do the keystrokes or
> not. If in any doubt, simply set access as "Closed Access"
> instead of "Open Access" till you've made up your mind.
> (Meanwhile, the IR's semi-automatic "Fair Use"
> Button will take care of usage needs by forwarding you all
> eprint requests for approval (a few more keystrokes:
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html
>
> > peer attitudes);
>
> Irrelevant. They have no say in whether or not you stroke
> those keys...
>
> > time available to academics and library or technical staff
> (little or
> > none);
>
> This is a genuine factor -- but it is the quintessence of
> keystrokes, because we are talking about the time available
> to do the < 10 minutes worth of keystrokes per annual paper.
> (Mandates and performance evaluation metrics are good for
> sorting out one's priorities...)
>
> > etc.  Metadata versus fulltext
>
> What's this? There are the keystrokes for entering the
> minimal obligatory IR metadata, plus the additional keystroke
> to upload the full-text (and set access as either OA or Closed...)
>
> No either/or or versus...
>
> > and information retrieval accuracy, etc,
>
> I'm lost. We were talking about keystrokes to deposit. Where
> did we get into info retrieval accuracy, and who is worried
> about what?
>
> > is one variable in the mix - albeit an important one but I
> don't think
> > it is the deal breaker.
>
> So far I've just heard about keystroke ergonomics and
> chronometrics and nothing else.
>
> > I am inclined to think that just because people might have the
> > advantage of 'knowing what is good for them', i.e. depositing their
> > works in open access repositories, this does not mean they will act.
>
> Correct. The problem is getting them to stroke those keys. We
> know what will do it, because it's been tried, repeatedly,
> and been shown to work:
> Keystroke mandates, by employers and funders. Researchers
> have already indicated they will comply (95%) and willingly
> (81%). And they do (Arthur Sale's data.). And the enhanced
> impact metrics sweeten the deal.
>
> But I know all about keystroke paralysis, so I know that
> without mandates, the digits will not go into motion.
>
> > Hey, I still eat
> > fish and chips even though I'm told that having a salad is likely
> > better for me.. old habits die hard.
>
> Well, we're past the age of parental eating mandates, but
> there's still hope for our research impact, if not for our arteries...
>
> Stevan Harnad