RE: Publish-or-Perish Mandates and Self-Archiving Mandates

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> But if "compulsion" is indeed the right word for mandating 
> self-archiving, I wonder whether Sally was ever curious about 
> why publication itself had to be mandated by researchers' 
> institutions and funders ("publish or perish"), despite its 
> substantial benefits to researchers?

"Compulsion" is probably not the right word for the expectation 
that a professor do the job he is being paid for: producing and 
disseminating research.  It most certainly is the right word for 
a legal requirement that the work be disseminated in one 
particular way.

We can argue about whether legally-mandated OA is a good thing or 
a bad thing, but there is no intellectually serious way to argue 
that legal mandates don't constitute compulsion.

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu