Academic participation
Arthur Sale
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
University of Tasmania
[email protected]
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/8693
Where am I from?
Rainforest
Mountains
and Sea
Hobart, Tasmania,
Australia
They don’t need much…
If it is explained to them, most academics
don’t need much encouragement.
The main obstacle is fear – fear of legal
action, fear of being regarded as vanity
publishing.
Secondarily, it is really easy to make selfarchiving rewarding (and easy) though a
variety of pro-active measures.
The Diamond Route
The best way to get academics to selfarchive is to have a university policy that
requires them to do it – what the world
calls a mandate.
Academics then see the university as
endorsing and underwriting self-archiving
and they do it willingly.
Let’s look at the evidence.
Australia
Australian universities have to submit a list
of publications to the Federal Government
every year (HERDC).
Hence their annual output is known. It is
easy to compare this with how much is
actually on open access.
Here are the results for three universities:
no effort, a lot of effort but no mandate,
and a mandate.
University of Tasmania
University of Queensland
Queensland Uni of Technology
Does it really really work?
Figure 2 - QUT deposit rates
1000
800
Documents
600
2006
2005
2004
Model
400
200
0
-365
0
365
Days after 1 Jan of publication year
730
1095
Time after publication
Figure 5 - QUT deposit delays
30
2004
25
2005
2006
% documents/month
20
15
10
5
0
-6
0
6
12
Months after publication
18
24
30
How to get to a mandate?
The problem is to convince senior executives
• Start with a patchwork mandate
• Target leading research departments
• Put pressure on senior executives and
keep it up for years if need be. Talk about
more income to the university.
• Never rest until your university endorses
self-archiving as required of all academics
and PhD students
OK, but will they like it?
It is relatively easy to make academics like
self-archiving.
It doesn’t take them much time once
they’ve done it once or twice. What’s five
minutes in a research program?
There are multiple benefits you can show
them, and you should put some effort into
this.
Like what?
The first and biggest benefit is more people
reading their research – it is what
research is about!
Not far behind is more citations of their
work, depending on the field. If a work is
not cited, was it worth doing? Perhaps, but
the researcher has to prove this.
Promote these as the key reasons to senior
people. The university benefits.
Involvement
The second class of user incentives is to
involve the academics in their research
dissemination, in a way they haven’t seen
before.
Provide them with research statistics,
especially downloads.
Rankings are possibly good but more
controversial and dubious.
Downloads
Countries
Direct benefits
Provide the academics with a ‘cv’ link they can put
on their personal web page to generate all their
publications in the repository. Saves them time,
and is always up-to-date if they self-archive!
Provide a ‘Request-a-copy’ button that allows users
to send a copy of their restricted paper under
‘fair-use’ copyright legislation to interested
searchers. Also saves them and their department
money.
Examples…
Auto cv
Request a copy
Mobile staff
Staff who are mobile can access all their
publications from anywhere in the world, even
if they are ‘restricted’ – the author always has
permission.
This allows them to discuss the paper with
colleagues they are visiting, give them copies,
etc. Many researchers place great value on
this.
Use your entry page
• Use your entry page as a portal to search
engines and other useful stuff (such as Publish
or Perish).
• Remember that 99% of outside viewers never
see your entry page – it is there for (a) your
own staff and students, and (b) for crawlers to
start from.
• Optimize your Google score – staff love seeing
their papers high in the rankings.
Graduate students
Offer workshops to graduate students, maybe
organized and sponsored by the department.
Explain how deposit enhances their citations and
their careers.
Show them how to look up journal rankings on
Scopus (SJR) and ISI (JIF) when choosing where
to publish.
Talk about citations.
Graduate students influence their supervisors!
Questions?
© Copyright 2009 Arthur Sale
All rights reserved
Arthur Sale asserts the right to be
recognized as author of this work
Contact: [email protected]
Links
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HERDC Australian data collection
ANZSRC classification
Mandates directory
Acquisition paper
Publish or Perish tool
Scopus database
Scimago analysis
UTas ePrints repository