Re: Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> I wish I could share your optimism, Stevan, but we just 
> published a book about Rutgers (by an English professor there) 
> that shows that the Rutgers administration, pressured by the 
> sports boosters on its board of trustees, are quite happy to 
> spend lots of money on upgrading the football stadium and 
> ensuring that the team will rank in the top ten while the 
> academic infrastructure of the school, including classrooms, 
> literally crumbles into disrepair. Is this "rational"? Not to 
> my mind, but it is happening in many places these days. "A lot 
> of e-mails and phone calls" from not only their faculty but 
> students and alumni as well have had no effect on the 
> university's determination to sacrifice its academic reputation 
> at the altar of big-time sports-so much for faculty power and 
> the "dead-obvious solution" to the university's $34 million 
> budget deficit.
(1) Sandy is of course right about these occasional (or frequent) 
egregious failures in judgment on the part of some universities.

(2) But if there were a general rule here, then Rutgers should 
*already* have diverted its library journal budget toward 
alleviating its budget deficits.

(3) Research, like football, is a source of revenue for 
universities, generating research funding, attracting students 
and faculty, and inspiring alumni giving.

(4) So if universities with big budget deficits do not deem it 
desirable to cancel journals and divert those savings toward 
lessening their deficits today, when journals cost money and 
research is published for free, it is not at all obvious that 
they would deem it desirable to divert the (hypothetical) savings 
from the (hypothetical) cancellations generated (hypothetically) 
by 100% Green OA self-archiving, at a (hypothetical) time when 
publication charges would replace subscriptions.

(5) On the other hand, universities with or without budget 
deficits might be able to appreciate the (hypothetical) 
contingency that they would have to pay a lot less for publishing 
their own peer-reviewed research output than they are now paying 
for buying in one another's peer-reviewed research output, once 
it was all being self-archived in each university's own 
institutional repository, free for all, with journals only 
needing to charge for managing the service of peer review.

(6) If the actual evidence of enhanced research usage and impact 
generated by self-archiving their own research is not enough to 
inspire researchers today to self-archive, and to inspire their 
institutions (and funders) to mandate that they self-archive, 
perhaps this added hypothetical prospect -- of overall net 
savings from the hypothetical transition from subscription fees 
to Gold OA fees -- will.

But now lets put an end to speculation and second-guessing about 
what universities *would* do with the money, *if* -- and return 
to what they can and should do (and are already beginning to do, 
with success), at no expense, now: mandate Green OA 
self-archiving, and reap the benefits in terms of enhanced 
research impact.

Stevan Harnad