[GOAL] Re: Research Works Act & AAP Members

[HCE]

On 20/01/2012 03:15, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On 2012-01-19, at 11:02 AM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
>> Can you give me any numbers for scientists within the U.S. who do not have
>> access to the professional literature they need through either their institutional
>> affiliations or services like DeepDyve?
> I can give you the following pieces of indirect evidence:
>
> (1) The (now-out-of-date) ARL stats on institutional serials holdings. The estimate
> is that  the articles in the serials that the institution cannot afford to subscribe to or
> license  are inaccessible  to the users at that institution:
> http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats
>
> (2) The data on the OA advantage in downloads and citations
> (indicators of what is being lost if access is restricted to subscribers only):
> http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
>
> More direct evidence can only come from polling researchers or monitoring their
> web activity automatically, to see how many times they click on articles and are
> stopped by a pay-wall (including a DeepDyve pay-wall).

There is a group on Friendfeed that has been informally, and with an enormous 
selection bias, registering the different kinds of requests for PDFs from 
scientists to other scientists who do have access to given journals through 
institutional subscriptions. Cf. conversation thread here and links therein; 
it's pretty self-explanatory : http://ff.im/D8dEw. Not sorted by country of 
origin, though.

From: Danny Jones Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:46:43 -0600
>> I am very
>> interested in seeing (specifically in my case) NIH-funded final
>> reports made publicly available.
> Fine, and welcome.
>
> But, as I said, no substitute for access to refereed journal articles,
> for researchers.

Absolutely not a substitute! But there was CRISP and now 
http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm for consulting a large if not 
complete set of funded projects. Insufficiently advertised, and what about the 
NSF for example?

"The RePORT Expenditures and Results (RePORTER 
<http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm>) system is an electronic tool that 
allows users to search a repository of both intramural and extramural NIH-funded 
research projects from the past 25 years and access publications and patents 
citing this support."

Requiring annual progress reports to also be public starts to get a little 
difficult to implement, and indeed tricky for the researcher to be able to 
benefit from their own data, or else an incentive to under-report until the next 
financial cycle is underway.

As far as depositing own articles into a repository, when it must be done, it 
will be. I have a lot of options, and only want to pick the most efficient one 
to do it once and only once. But I don't find it more constraining than, for 
example, the character or pixels-per-square-inch or other constraints the 
publishers place on me to typeset my own article before it makes it to print. A 
hassle, yes, but at least the final result is public and recognized as my work.

Heather


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