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

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I think you are overestimating the extent to which there is any 
centralized knowledge of what scholars in a university actually 
produce. To create such centralized knowledge, and hence 
facilitate the deposit by some other entity than the author of 
the scholarly output of a faculty, would in itself be a huge 
task.

> Dear Sandy
>
> I stated earlier that authors can not be made responsible for 
> any post-manuscript writing activities. Publishing is a 
> different sort of activity, so is its dissemination. If authors 
> are supposed to do the librarian's job or that of the university 
> press, then there is no need of the existence of these 
> institutions. Self-archiving anyway does not mean that authors 
> themselves have to deposit their publications in IR and in a 
> "legally mandated" environment "ideally" there should be an 
> office responsible for this activity. This could be university 
> registrar, librarian, office of scholarly communications or 
> something else. But in a university, the numbers of potential 
> authors could range from few hundreds to several thousands and 
> it is the only these offices which will have exact details of 
> the activities of the authors in a university. The notion that 
> authors will deposit their publication by their own hand stems 
> from an activist's effort of OA populisation, not from the 
> realization of how universities work in a large framework of 
> interconnected departments and offices.
>
> Atanu Garai
> Globethics.net
>
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher
> Subject: Re: Publish-or-Perish Mandates and Self-Archiving Mandates
>
> > 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