[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

Thank you, Bernard. I should have said, more precisely, that Liège does
not force anything; that it has a mandate and that it is backed up, as
you point out, by the procedures used for in-house research assessment. 

This form of enforcement is very different from that of directly
applying penalties for not conforming, or whatever else has been used
elsewhere. What you are doing, cleverly, is say: if you do not comply,
you will suffer from bad results  in your personal research assessment.

I also believe that this mandate applies to more than journal articles,
or am I wrong? Books and book chapters, so very important for SSH
disciplines, cannot be easily disregarded, and assessing SSH personnel
purely on the basis of journal articles would be a (bad) joke. A dark
archive can take care of all difficulties, and the celebrated button
allows working around most difficulties.

And getting close to 90% is indeed outstanding.

Jean-Claude


-- 

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



Le vendredi 19 septembre 2014 à 19:46 +0200, brentier at ulg.ac.be a
écrit :
> "Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks into
> the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does so to
> assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or grant
> submissions." (JC. Guédon)
> 
> 
> Oh no, Jean-Claude, Liège mandates everything.
> It is a real mandate and it took me a while to get almost every ULg
> researcher to realise that it is to his/her benefit. 
> Linking the deposits to personal in-house assessment was the trick to
> get the mandate enforced in the first place. As well as a few positive
> incentives and a lot of time consuming persuasion (but it was well
> worth it).
> Last Wednesday, the Liège University Board has put an ultimate touch
> of wisdom on its mandate by adding "immediately upon acceptance, even
> in restricted access" in the official procedure. Actually, a nice but
> to some extent useless addition because, with time (the mandate was
> imposed in 2007), ULg authors have become so convinced of the increase
> in readership and citations that two thirds of them make their
> deposits between the date of acceptance and the date of publication. 
> All this explains why we are getting close to 90% compliance, an
> outstanding result, I believe. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Le 18 sept. 2014 à 23:40, Jean-Claude Guédon
> <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> a écrit :
> 
> 
> > A reasonably quick response as I do not want to go into discursive
> > tsunami mode...
> > 
> > 1. Stevan admits that his evaluation of compliance is an
> > approximation, easy to get, but not easy to correct. This
> > approximation varies greatly from one institution to another, one
> > circumstance to another. For example, he admits that language plays
> > a role; he should further admit that the greater or smaller
> > proportion of SSH researchers in the research communities of various
> > institutions will also play a role. in short, comparing two
> > institutions by simply using WoS approximations appears rash and
> > unacceptable to me, rather than simply quick and dirty (which I
> > would accept as a first approximation).
> > 
> > The impact factor folly was mentioned because, by basing his
> > approximation on the WoS, Stevan reinforces the centrality of a
> > partial and questionable tool that is, at best, a research tool, not
> > a management tool, and which stands behind all the research
> > assessment procedures presently used in universities, laboratories,
> > etc.
> > 
> > 2. Stevan and I have long differed about OA's central target. He
> > limits himself to journal articles, as a first step; I do not. I do
> > not because, in the humanities and social sciences, limiting oneself
> > to journal articles would be limiting oneself to the less essential
> > part of the archive we work with, unlike natural scientists. 
> > 
> > Imagine a universe where a research metric would have been initially
> > designed around SSH disciplines and then extended as is to STM. In
> > such a parallel universe, books would be the currency of choice, and
> > articles would look like secondary, minor, productions, best left
> > for later assessments. Then, one prominent OA advocate named Stenan
> > Harvard might argue that the only way to proceed forward is to focus
> > only on books, that this is OA's sole objective, and that articles
> > and the rest will be treated later... Imagine the reaction of
> > science researchers... 
> > 
> > 3. Liège does not mandate anything, so far as I know; it only looks
> > into the local repository (Orbi) to see what is in it, and it does
> > so to assess performance or respond to requests for promotions or
> > grant submissions. If books and book chapters are more difficult to
> > treat than articles, then place them in a dark archive with a
> > button. This was the clever solution invented by Stevan and I agree
> > with it.
> > 
> > 4. To obtain mandates, you need either faculty to vote a mandate on
> > itself (but few universities have done so), or you need
> > administrators to impose a mandate, but that is often viewed
> > negatively by many of our colleagues. Meanwhile, they are strongly
> > incited to publish in "prestigious journals" where prestige is
> > "measured" by impact factors. From an average researcher's
> > perspective, one article in Nature, fully locked behind pay-walls,
> > is what is really valuable. Adding open access may be the cherry on
> > the sundae, but it is not the sundae. The result? OA, as of now, is
> > not perceived to be directly significant for successfully managing a
> > career. 
> > 
> > On the other hand, the OA citation advantage has been fully
> > recognized and accepted by publishers. That is in part why they are
> > finally embracing OA: with high processing charges and the increased
> > citation potential of OA, they can increase revenues even more and
> > satisfy their stakeholders. This is especially true if funders,
> > universities, libraries, etc., are willing to pay for the APC's.
> > This is the trap the UK fell into.
> > 
> > 5. SSH authors are less interested in depositing articles than STM
> > researchers because, for SSH researchers, articles have far less
> > importance than books (see above), and, arguably, book chapters.
> > 
> > 6. I am not citing rationales for the status quo, and Stevan knows
> > this well. This must be the first time that I have ever been
> > associated with the status quo... Could it be that criticizing
> > Stevan on one point could be seen by him as fighting for the status?
> > But that would be true only if Stevan were right beyond the
> > slightest doubt. Hmmmmmmmmmm!
> > 
> > I personally think he is right on some points and not so right on
> > others. 
> > 
> > Also, I am simply trying to think about reasons why OA has been so
> > hard to achieve so far, and, in doing so, I have come to two
> > conclusions: too narrow an objective and too rigid an approach can
> > both be counter-productive.
> > 
> > This said, trying to have a method to compare deposit rates in
> > various institutional and mandate circumstances would be very
> > useful. I support Stevan's general objective in this regard; I
> > simply object to the validity of the method he suggests. Alas, I
> > have little to suggest beyond my critique. 
> > 
> > I also suggest that  a better understanding of the sociology of
> > research (not the sociology of knowledge) is crucial to move
> > forward.
> > 
> > Finally, I expect that if I saw Stevan self-archive his abundant
> > scientific production, I would be awed by the lightning speed of his
> > keystrokes. But are they everybody's keystrokes?
> > 
> > Jean-Claude Guédon
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > GOAL mailing list
> > GOAL at eprints.org
> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20140919/773a2c2d/attachment.html