On 25-Jun-08, at 9:51 AM, Peter Cliff wrote:
> Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > (1) I will wager everything and anything I own that the main thing that
> > has been holding back IR deposits is keystroke inertia.
>
> Wow! I'm impressed by your conviction (or lack of materialism! :-))!
> However, I'd be curious to know if any repository managers on this list
> agree that keystroke inertia is the main reason. I think the picture is
> vastly more complicated than just keystrokes - the mistrust of Open Access
> and what it might do for an academics career for example.
Mistrust of what it would do to an academic's career to make his published
journal articles freely accessible to all users rather than just those at
subscribing universities?
I recommend Alma Swan's two international, cross-disicpline surveys of what
authors actually know, think, do, don't do, and say they would do -- about
OA:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/
Summary: They don't and won't do the keystrokes -- though they know OA is
good for their careers -- until and unless their institutions and/or their
funders mandate that they do the keystrokes (81% of them willingly, 14%
reluctantly).
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
And Arthur Sale's studies have confirmed that, once the keystrokes are
mandated, authors really do as they said in the surveys they would do.
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/authors/Sale,_AHJ.html
> > (2) The way to remedy keystroke inertia is not to ask for even more
> > keystrokes!
>
> Or any keystrokes - so why bother with repositories at all as by this
> premise they are a barrier to self-archiving in themselves?
Because OA and IRs about providing OA to research articles, for researcher
use, not about splendid metadata classification schemes for empty IRs...
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Jun 25 2008 - 15:12:18 BST