RATIONALE FOR UNIVERSITY
SELF-ARCHIVING POLICY
1.1 There exist 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (and conference proceedings) publishing 2.5 million articles per year, across all disciplines, languages and nations.
1.2 No university anywhere, not even the richest, can afford to subscribe to all or most of the journals that its researchers may need to use
2.3 Hence citation
counts are (i) robust indicators of research performance, (ii) they are
not
currently maximised for those articles that are not self-archived and
(iii)
those articles that are being self-archived have a substantial
competitive
advantage over those that are not.
3.1 Only 15% of the 2.5 million articles published annually are being spontaneously self-archived worldwide today.
3.2 Creating an
Institutional
Repository (IR) and
encouraging staff to self-archive their articles therein is a good
first step,
but it is not
sufficient to raise the self-archiving rate appreciably above the
15%
baseline for spontaneous self-archiving.
3.3 Adding library help to encourage and assist staff to self-archive raises the self-archiving rate somewhat, but insufficiently.
3.4 The correct measure of institutional success in self-archiving is the ratio of annual self-archived articles in a university's IR relative to that university's total annual article output.
3.5 The only institutions that are reliably approaching a 100% annual self-archiving rate today are those that not only create an IR (3.2) and provide library help (3.3) for depositing, but also adopt a self-archiving policy requirement or mandate.
3.6 A self-archiving mandate is a simple and natural extension of universities' already existing mandate to publish research findings ('publish or perish'); it is already linked to incentives by the fact that staff are promoted and funded on the basis of research performance indicators, of which citation impact is a prominent correlate, as in the RAE (2.2).
3.7 Two international, cross-disciplinary JISC surveys have found that 95% of authors will comply with a self-archiving mandate (81% willingly, 14% reluctantly).
3.8 The four institutions worldwide that have adopted a self-archiving mandate to date (CERN in Switzerland, Queensland University of Technology in Australia, Minho University in Portugal, and the ECS Department at University of Southampton) have each confirmed the outcome of the JISC author surveys (3.7), with their institutional self-archiving rates reliably climbing toward 100%,whereas institutions without mandates remain at the 15% spontaneous self-archiving baseline rate.
4.1 This university should now maximise its
own RAE ranking and set an example for the
rest of the world by adopting a
self-archiving mandate university-wide.
5. The Importance of Prompt Action
5.2 This university
should not delay in adopting a self-archiving mandate: 100% OA is both
optimal
and inevitable -- for research, researchers, their universities, their
funders,
and the tax-paying
public that supports both the research and the universities. It
will also give this university a strong competitive impact advantage
over later adopters.
5.4 The
mandate need
have no penalties or sanctions in order to be successful; it need only
be
formally adopted, with the support of Heads of Schools, the library,
and
computing services. The rest will take care of itself naturally of its
own
accord, as the experience of Southampton ECS, Minho, QUT and CERN has
already
demonstrated.
A1 U. Southampton ECS department was the first department and institution in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate (2001).
A2 ECS hosts Psycprints (1991), BBSPrints (1994), Open Journals (1995), OpCit (1996), CogPrints (1997); the American Scientist Open Access Forum (1998).
A3 ECS designed the first and most widely used software for creating institutional archives (Eprints, 2000), now already used by about 200 institutions worldwide; ECS also created Citebase (2002), the citation-based OA search engine (well before Google Scholar).
A5 ECS/Eprints maintains ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories, tracking the number, size and growth of IRs and their contents worldwide.
A6 ECS/Eprints maintains ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies, tracking the institutions worldwide that have adopted self-archiving policies, from recommendations to full mandates.
