[GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex

[Andrew A. Adams]

The challenge now for UK Universities will be to keep librarians out of the 
way of reserachers, or their assistants, depositing the basic meta-data and 
full text in the repository. At the University of Reading, where I was 
involved in early developments around the IR but left the University before 
the final deposit mandate (*) was adopted and the process decided on, they 
have librarians acting as a roadblock in getting material 
uploaded.Thisistotheextentthat a paper published in an electronic proceedings 
at a conference was refused permission to be placed in the repository, for 
example, while there is a significant delay in deposited materials becoming 
visible, while librarians do a host of (mostly useful but just added value 
and not necessary) checking. Sigh, empire building and other bureaucratic 
nonsense getting in the way of the primary mission - scholarly communications.

(*) They have a deposit mandate but refuse to call it that. I'm not sure why, 
butthey insist on calling it a "policy". If one reads this policy, it's a 
mandate (albeit not an ideal one). For a University with an overly strong 
management team and a mangerialist approach, this unwillingness to call a 
spade a spade and a mandate a mandate, seems odd. Perhaps it's that this 
policy came from a bottom up development and not a senior management idea so 
they're unwilling to give it a strong name.

-- 
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/