Academic participation Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania

Where am I from? Hobart, Tasmania, Australia Rainforest Mountains and Sea

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 self- archiving rewarding (and easy) though a variety of pro-active measures.

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. 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?

Time after publication

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:

Links HERDC Australian data collection HERDC ANZSRC classification ANZSRC Mandates directory Mandates Acquisition paper Acquisition Publish or Perish tool Publish or Perish Scopus database Scopus Scimago analysis Scimago UTas ePrints repository UTas ePrints