Miskatonic University Press

Access 2009, Thursday #9 - Stevan Harnad, Grasping What is Already Within Immediate Reach: Universal Open Access Mandates

conferences

Stevan Harnad wasn't there, so he sent a screencast of him giving the talk over his slides. It worked quite well, and was lightened by a couple of interludes where he got up to let his cat in or out. We could hear it meow. After the video, he came up on screen in a live video feed and answered questions. He couldn't see us but did very well considering. The videos are online.

Peter Zimmerman blogged the talk. Here are my notes.

Defined open access. Free, open access.

To what? Essential: all 2.5 million articles published each year in all 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, in all scholarly and scientific disciplines, worldwide.

Open access does this. 25% - 250% greater research impact. Lawrence (2001) in Nature showed big citation advantage for open access computer science papers. Later work showed same result in all other disciplines.

Golden way: Pulishers conveert their jounrals into OS. Depends on publishers.

Green way: Researchers deposit all their published articles into their own institution's repository. Depends only on research community. Research community can't make publshers change to Golden, but they can change themselves to Green.

EPrints (openarchives.org) is OAI harvestable.

But IRs are a necessary but not sufficient condition for green OA. Most of them are empty. Need to have mandates that say everyone does OA.

U Southhampton does it. Showed how their repository is growing. World's first green OA mandate.

"You self-archive unto others as you would have others self-archive unto you."

Self-archiving mandate is natural extension of publishing mandate, for the web era.

Vast majority of people willing to self-archive, but don't bother to go to the trouble unless it's mandated.

57 university mandates so far, 4 in US, three faculty-level and MIT's university-wide one.

EUA recommended mandate for all 791 universities in 46 countries, but not adopted yet.

Discussed green OA self-archiving advocacy and how to show its advantages to people.

Mandate should require: deposit of all articles; in the institutional repository; immediately upon acceptance of publication.

(look for Which Green OA Mandate is Optimal? and other links)

63% of journals already endorse green OA self-archiving.

EPrints has a solution for the others: button so you can request a copy for research purposes. ID/OA mandate. Immediate Deposit + Open Access.

"Don't succumb to Gold Fever. The fastest and surest road to OA is Green."

Three points about why us OA. Maxmize research output. Measure and reward research output. collect, showcase, manage a permanent record of that research output.