Academic participation
Arthur Sale
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
University of Tasmania
[email protected]
Where am I from?
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Rainforest
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.
The Diamond Route
The best way to get academics to
self-archive 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
© Copyright 2009 Arthur Sale
All rights reserved
Arthur Sale asserts the right to be recognized as author of this work
