Re: No, Mandating Self-Archiving Is Not Like Invading Iraq! Part III

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Dear Stevan,

The tenure and promotion processes at the research universities 
I've known do not proceed by the mechanical counting of papers. 
Talking only of the sciences, the committees that decide on 
appointments and promotions do at look to see in which journals 
they have been published them, and whether these journals are the 
most prestigious and appropriate. In some subjects there is a 
well known hierarchy of such journals, and the process of adding 
up the quality of papers can be mechanical. Faculty and 
universities already do this routinely, and capturing of such 
data as it flows from the archive to the journals does not help 
all that much--and that is all that self-archiving can offer, 
even if one makes the assumption that the major journals will 
either survive or reconstitute as peer-review groups. (And I'm 
asuming archves with metadata of the quality of PubMed Central.

The procedural steps differ, but research universities always 
consider the judgment of outside referees on the quality of the 
work, as well as the judgements of their own faculty and 
administrators. As with peer review and grant review, the 
essential, time-consuming, and difficult parts of this are the 
unpaid intellectual work of the reviewers. The operating 
structure, whether peer review of journals or the reviewing of 
dossiers, has a relatively minor contribution. It is necessary to 
keep the material organized, and that is indeed aided at all 
steps by various processing systems. The contribution that either 
archives or publishers can make to this is relatively minor.

I do not know the detailed functioning of the academic hierarchy 
in the UK, and I have had no need to follow the discussion of UK 
assessments, so I have no knowledge of whether your procedures 
are perhaps more mechanical.


David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 6:25 pm
Subject: No, Mandating Self-Archiving Is Not Like Invading Iraq! Part III
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

>    [Third of three postings, divided into smaller parts, as requested
>     by Ann Okerson]
>
>> My observation of efforts by universities to change the
>> tenure-and-promotion system over four decades in the face of
>> obvious dysfunction doesn't make me optimistic that
>> universities can bring about even gradual change very easily,
>> let alone swift and comprehensive change!
>
> This is incomparably simpler. All universities need to do is
> mandate a few extra keystrokes per year, for record-keeping
> purposes; and their mandates will be backed up by the mandates of
> their research funders. Nothing radical or complicated; just some
> simple administrative practices, already quite natural in the
> online era.
>
>     Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the
>     Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
>     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
>
> Best wishes, Stevan