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

[Arthur Sale]

Andrew

Sorry for the mistake about your name and thank you for the tolerance. 

I think that you have a rosy idea of what private enterprise researchers
actually do. In many cases their attention span is under a second (well say
five seconds). They have real work to do. But please DO NOT suggest that I
think the AM is not any good. It is. But to suggest that any of this is OK
is ideal is exaggeration, and that is what I was responding to in Stevan's
post. You should also realize that private enterprise researchers (such as a
fish farmer) does not have the easy un-approved access to funds that a
university person has, so they don't go further. (I add that I am an
honorary 'university person' so I admit to bias.) Though I have industry
tacts and experience).

Ion point 2, I agree, mostly. In practice the mandate 'policy' is almost
meaningless. In some cases it means something but is ignored. I do know you
are in complete agreement with Stevan, but he uses shorthand because of the
email flood, which most do not understand.

Where we disagree is that mandates are THE answer. After years of toiling
along this path I have to disagree. Mandates are never going to work, just
by themselves. That is why publishers are so complacent. The answer is more
complex, and proponents of OA should be more perspicuous.

What I most fear is that this mandate policy will cost OA another one or
perhaps two decades.

Arthur

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Andrew A. Adams
Sent: Friday, 17 February 2012 12:16 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

> Anthony

Andrew, actually. But, absolutely no offense taken :-).

> 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.

While I couched my point in terms of academic work and referencing, I think 
we're actually talking about the same thing in different contexts. In your 
example of the fish farm, I think their usage of results in practice shows 
the same patterns as I gave for academics. They would still, I suspect look 
at many more articles at some level, gradually drilling down into the ones
of 
most interest/relevance. Only at the very final stage where they wished to 
make a proposal for adoption of a novel element in their practices drawn
from 
the peer reviewed literature would they need access to the VoR, just as a 
working scientist or scholar only needs access to the VoR at the point of 
citation, or other usage (such as replicating the experiment). The benefits 
of the AM are still enormous in that potential recipients of the research 
only need, if they feel it necessary, to pay the toll access for the VoR on 
the small percentage of the articles that get through their filters for 
relevance

> 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).

Here I think you, I, Stevan and many others (Bernard, Alma etc.) are in 
agreement in practice but are interpreting words slightly differently is
all. 
When I talk of mandates (and I know I'm in complete agreement with Stevan on

this) I do not mean just a published policy document, however well worded.

The first step is to get as close to the optimal policy as possible, with 
wording that will be understood by the staff concerned to mean what you want

it to mean, and to be acceptable to staff. There are many ways in which
staff 
who do not accept the validity of an institutional policy can actively 
undermine that policy, even if they cannot get it overturned as policy. So, 
that acceptance as a valid policy is a necessary step in "adopting a 
mandate". However, once the mandate is official policy compliance with it 
needs to be promoted. There are multiple aspects to this. First, there needs

to be effort at making deposit as easy as possible and to get people to 
default to depositing the full text, not just meta-data. Second there are 
other aspects of policy that can be used to support this, the Liege model 
being so far as we can tell the most effective (internal evaluation measures

are only carried out on full-text deposits (which under ID/OA can be closed 
access but MUST include the full-text in at least AM form). Third, the 
benefits to the individual, the research group and the university of 
depositing (and where at all possible making the deposits open access
instead 
of closed access plus button) need promotion.

You appear to somewhat conflate in your discussion above having a mandate (a

real mandate not just an encouragement policy) and having a (mostly empty 
repository). Stevan and others have done a number of studies showing that 
strong (preferably ID/OA) policy mandates are a necessary but not sufficient

condition to achieve 80%+ ongoing deposit. The liege model, explanation and 
promotion of the repository and of the mandate (stressing the need for full 
text not just meta-data) are the extra conditions, but so far everything
less 
than a real mandate fails to achieve more than 20% or so of deposits. The 
process of getting a mandate adopted often requires gaining relatively broad

acceptance of the idea by promotion and explanation anyway.

So, I don't think we have any real disagreement on fundamental practical 
matters here. We agree that the technology could be better, for example 
interoperability between repository software and academic networking systems

could be improved, ease-of-deposit can be improved by things like local or 
global disambiguated author lists (I find it frustrating that every time I 
co-author a paper with people I've coauthored with before that most 
repositories require me to manually fill in their names again and that they 
don't have joint "ownership" of the document). But all these are simply 
nice-to-have add-ons and while the vast majority of the world's research 
remains behind toll access barriers and while we have evidence of a way that

works (properly worded and promoted mandates [shorthand: "mandates"]) all 
these extra bits of gravy are a distraction for most from following the
green 
brick road to OA.

As I've said in my own presentations on OA, a coalition of librarians, 
academics and management who all stand to benefit in a win-win-win from 
universal OA, is the way to avoid yet more lost years or even lost decades, 
byt moving towards adoption of "the optimal mandate solution" described
above.

-- 
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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