[GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs. publisher's version-of-record

[Arthur Sale]

Anthony

Point 1 - absolutely true. Only a small minority of downloads lead to
citations. Have a look at the download data of eprints.utas.edu.au. However
I cannot resist writing that citations are not the same as impact. Only in
academic circles are citations highly regarded and that is useful but not
totally relevant. In most places what one is looking for is impact. For
example if I write an article on improving fish farming, I want the fish
farmers to take it up. If they only get the AM, well yes that is much better
than nothing (as Stevan says) and they might contact me. However, their
directors will want to know (for legal reasons) that their recommendations
are firmly-based, and that means access to the VoR, which fish farmers may
not have. Hence researcher attitudes to the VoR.

Point 2 - sorry no. The observation is anecdotal. Largely based on my
university and Australian universities, but supported by website, blog and
Mendeley evidence. I believe it is why some mandates are not worth their
disk space (or the paper they may be written on) - they are ignored by real
live researchers. The OA movement needs to engage with researchers and
convince them that the mandate is worth complying with, because they do not
believe it. You may be interested to know that ALL Australian universities
have repositories, but only those of the University of Queensland, the
Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Tasmania (mine)
are in the top 100 of the Webometrics survey? Why? Probably because most of
the 'mandates' are ineffective, except in gathering citations and restricted
documents. The first two universities have strong mandates.

The OA world is bigger than 'mandates at all costs'. It needs to recognise
the reality of revolutions. They disrupt normal practice (in this case of
science and scholarly dissemination).

Best wishes

Arthur

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Andrew A. Adams
Sent: Wednesday, 15 February 2012 6:47 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft vs.
publisher's version-of-record

In response to Stevan Harnad, Arthur Sale wrote: 
> When we turn to the researcher, the situation changes significantly,
> if slightly. Researchers regard the VoR as the canonic version of
> their article, almost exclusively (I exempt you and me and a small set
> of similar-minded people). As far as they are concerned, all earlier
> versions are suspect and not to be displayed once they have served
> their purpose. They also believe they wnthe VoR. This is not an
> cademic ideal but a practical reality. The VoR is THE CANONIC
> VERSION. It is one reason why many researchers fail to post anything
> on an OA repository, because they do not understand what their rights
> are and they are reluctant to post something they conceive of as
> flawed.

There's an assumption in many of the posts on this topic that all articles 
accessed will be cited. My experience is that I identify many articles from 
their abstract (usually available for free), a forward and backwards 
reference search (an article is cited by another I've read or cites another 
one I've read), from the list of publications of an author whose other works

I've read and from a number of other sources. If that article is available
to 
me in the VoR or as an AM then I can first skim the introduction/conclusions

and if it seems of further interest read the full article, or selected 
elements of it. After this proper reading of all or some of either the VoR
or 
the AM then at some point I MAY wish to reference the article or quote from 
it. Then and only then is the VoR actually needed at all, ad actually I (as 
you note below) rely on the open access AM version if I don't have access 
already to the VoR (of course any article I don't have access to doesn't get

read and therefore not cited - in particular I almost never pay the 
ridiculous per-article costs requested by publishers - one article costing 
the same as 50-100% of full books? That just demonstrates exactly how 
ridiculous are the subscription rates on which the per-article charges are 
sert pro-rata). If I really felt I needed the VoR for the articles I want to

cite then I could pay the per article charge (I don't, but others may be
more 
hesitant). In my experience, and this is just personal anecdote, I identify 
perhaps 50-100 times as many articles as of potential interest as I actually

cite. For someone in a less interdisciplinary field perhaps their numbers 
might be lower, but then again they may also already have subscription
access 
to the journals they feel they need - the narrower one's research focus, and

the large one's group of researchers with the same interest, the more likely

one is to have access to the necessary literature. However, I would suspect 
that most researchers do not cite every article they ever read. For any 
article one does not actually wish to cite, the VoR is not necessary. The AM

should absolutely be sufficient for evaluating the importance of the
article.

Arthur Sale continued:
> Interestingly though, I believe there are a growing number of
> researchers who totally ignore any agreement they sign with
> publishers, and post their VoR regardless, because it is heirs It is
> this practice (in the form of providing electronic "reprints") that
> publishers find difficult to ignore, and possibly why the copyright
> transfer agreements are strengthened. 
[snip]

You make a quantitative claim here. Do you have any evidence you can offer 
for this?

[further snippage]

-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/


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