Summary of Keynote Address to be given at
8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Disstertations
Wednesday 28 - Friday 30 September 2005
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Austrlia
http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/etd2005.html
Maximising Research Impact By Mandating Institutional Self-Archiving
It is a foregone conclusion that the next generation of researchers
will self archive their research output in their own Open Access
(OA) Insititional Repositories (IRs) for all potential users
online, and they are already beginning now, with their theses
and dissertations. But what about the present generation of
researchers? Only 15% of the annual 2.5 million articles being
published in the world's 24,000 journals is being self-archived
today. Self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact
50%-250+% by making the research available to those users whose
institutions cannot afford access to the official journal version. The
marginal dollar value of a citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986
to be $50-$1300 (US). Updating to 2005, converting to Australian
dollars ($65-$1700) and using even the most conservative ends of
these esimates (50% x $65) and multiplying by the 85% of Australia's
annual journal article output of about 35,000 (according to ISI)
that is not yet OA, this translates into an annual loss of $966,875
in revenue to Australian researchers for not having done the few
extra keystrokes per article it takes to self-archive it. And that
is without even considering the loss in revenue from potential usage
and applications of Australian research findings in Australia and
worldwide, nor the even more general loss to the progress of human
inquiry. The solution is obvious, and Research Councils UK are on the
verge of implementing it: a mandate to extend the existing universal
requirement to 'publish or perish' to 'publish and also self-archive
the final peer-reviewed author's draft in your OA IR'. Over 90% of
journals already endorse author self-archiving and an international
JISC author study (plus the actual experience of the two institutions
that have already adopted such a requirement) show that over 90% of
authors will comply. I will present the evidence, across disciplines
and countries, for the 50%-250% OA citation impact advantage.
Stevan Harnad
Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Chaire de recherche du Canada
Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC)
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8
harnad at uqam.cahttp://www.crsc.uqam.ca/
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
harnad at ecs.soton.ac.ukhttp://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
