RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

As your Iowa example indicates, there has been a little pushback 
against the mandated deposit of dissertations in IRs or 
centralized databases like ProQuest's or the Networked Digital 
library of Theses and Dissertations.  But I emphasize "little." 
In truth, junior faculty put themselves at a disadvantage by 
having their dissertations archived in such places because, as I 
have written elsewhere, many libraries refuse to purchase books 
based on dissertations, and in turn presses become reluctant to 
publish them because their sales tend to be lower.  Exceptions 
are mostly made for dissertations in science where patent issues 
are involved.

I won't dispute your contention that journal authors are not 
motivated to publish for monetary gain. In fact, though, some of 
them profit very handsomely from having their articles frequently 
reprinted and used in coursepacks. Some of our journal authors 
have made far more money from these sales than our book authors 
have made from royalties.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

> On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
> > > Stevan Harnad: We must think beyond just the NIH mandate to 
> > > all university research output, funded and unfunded, in all 
> > > disciplines.
> > You don't really mean "all," do you, Stevan? Repeatedly in the 
> > past you have excluded research that appears in book form. 
> > This, of course, doesn't make sense from the standpoint of 
> > achieving comprehensive coverage of all research output of 
> > universities and imposes artificial barriers between research 
> > appearing in different formats. There can ultimately be no 
> > intellectual justification for this separation.
> You are quite right, Sandy. I don't mean all research output, I 
> mean all peer-reviewed journal/conference output (the c. 2.5 
> million papers per year).
>
> (I keep ritually reiterating the same portmanteau phrases so 
> often that I sometimes truncate them to give those who have 
> heard them too often a bit of a break!)
>
> And you are also right that a distinction between a research 
> paper and a research monograph is not a principled distinction 
> insofar as content is concerned. It is just a practical 
> distinction, insofar as (current) author motivation is 
> concerned. But as a current, practical distinction, it is 
> pertinent, accurate, and needs to be taken into account:
>
> *All* peer-reviewed research paper authors, without a single 
> exception, give away their articles, having written them 
> *exclusively* for research impact, not for royalty income 
> (actual or potential). Let us call them "give-away authors." 
> http://cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#1.1
>
> This is simply not true of all scholarly/scientific book and 
> monograph authors (often the same authors, but wearing different 
> hats): Not all (probably not even most) such book authors are 
> give-away authors.
>
> Hence it follows that even if most do not do it spontaneously of 
> their own accord (for paradoxical reasons I've dubbed "Zeno's 
> Paralysis -- consisting mostly of overwork inertia, copyright 
> paranoia, and simple ignorance, lately diminishing), give-away 
> authors can be induced by a mandate from their institutions and 
> funders to go ahead and give away their give-away work by 
> self-archiving it free for all online (preferably in their 
> Institutional Repository), *willingly* (as Alma Swan's surveys 
> have shown). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/
>
> But non-give-away authors cannot and should not be mandated to 
> give away their non-give-away work, so we should not even think 
> of trying it. That would only complicate the already needlessly 
> complicated road to Green OA self-archiving mandates for the 
> give-away work (already complicated by premature and unnecessary 
> over-reaching on copyright retention and by completely 
> unnecessary insistence on direct central deposit instead of 
> institutional deposit and central harvesting). 
> </ritual-repetition> 
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html 
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/374-guid.html
>
> Counter-productively insisting on the OA self-archiving of books 
> that authors do not currently wish to give away would be very 
> much like insisting on copyright retention by authors who are 
> paranoid about not putting their chances of publication in their 
> preferred journals at any perceived risk. And it would be just 
> as unnecessary -- since, for both of these desirable outcomes, 
> their time will come in due course (as it will for Gold OA 
> publishing too). But first things first. And it is Green OA 
> self-archiving mandates for give-away research that will pave 
> the way.
>
> A symptom of the fact that OA book mandates would be a no-no comes
> from the recent kerfuffle about Iowa Theses: Even though most theses
> are probably author give-aways, and will be willingly self-archived,
> those held in reserve for future book publication will not, so OA
> should not be mandated for them.
> http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/march/031708mfa.html
>
> Here again, Green OA IRs offer a possible interim compromise: Like
> articles published in journals that have not yet endorsed immediate
> OA self-archiving, non-give-away theses can be deposited as Closed
> Access instead of Open Access. The authors need simply refuse all
> email eprint requests received via the Button. (They can even store
> their refused eprint requests and use them as evidence of demand for
> their work when they approach a publisher!)
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html
>
> Stevan Harnad