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

[sgt3@psu.edu]

What surprises me here is that there is only 95% compliance. For 
any mandatory ETD program like the one that exists at Penn State 
now (http://www.etd.psu.edu), a graduate student cannot graduate 
without depositing the thesis in electronic form. One wonders why 
there is less than 100% compliance under these circumstances.

This kind of mandatory policy, of course, has teeth that others 
do not. What is the penalty for a faculty member who ignores a 
university policy to deposit research papers in the university's 
IR?

Until "mandatory" means something more than "strongly suggest" 
and has serious consequences for noncompliance, I suspect that 
the uptake will fall far short of Stevan's ideal Green OA world.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press

>>  From: Arthur Sale (U. Tasmania)
>>  Subject: Mandatory policy success
>>
>>  The results of a survey carried out by the Australasian Digital
>>  Theses program have recently been released. The full report is
>>  available at
>>
>>  http://adt.caul.edu.au/memberinformation/submissionsurvey/survey2006.doc
>>
>>  It applies to the deposit of open access electronic copies of
>>  research theses (eg PhD) in university repositories in
>>  Australia and New Zealand (and thence searchable through the
>>  ADT gateway http://adt.caul.edu.au/).
>>
>>  It is apparent from the report (and indeed highlighted by the
>>  authors) that a mandatory deposit policy results in a submission
>>  rate of 95% of all theses accepted, while its absence results
>>  in a submission rate of 17-22% (in other words, a pitifully
>>  empty repository). While this should not be news to anyone,
>>  the report has hard quotable facts on the success of an
>>  institutional mandatory policy over a substantial population
>>  of universities.