Re: Incentives (RE: In the news (Georgia State)

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Rick's question suggests another: the main rationale for using 
IRs to promote OA seems to be that universities have a strong 
interest in exhibiting the research that their faculties produce, 
but do administrators really believe that?  Is an administrator 
at a state university testifying before a legislative hearing and 
trying to get more funding going to point to all that research on 
the IR as a reason for the state to increase its financial 
support? And just how would this kind of demonstration work? And 
who are private universities trying to impress? Members of 
Congress whose votes are needed to increase funding for NIH, 
Defense Department research, etc.? Are universities perhaps 
trying to impress each other so as to raid one another for their 
best faculty? It is just unclear to me what this presumed 
self-interest universities have in their IRs really amounts to, 
and how it can actually be put to practical use. Does anyone have 
a good answer?

--Sandy Thatcher, Penn State Press

> > Not wishing to split hairs, Joe, but Paul Ginsparg didn't
> >  separate certification and dissemination - the high energy
> >  physics community had done that already.  For years they had
> >  shared preprints with the rest of the (fairly small) community.
> >  What arXiv did was make that process faster, cheaper and more
> >  convenient.  That's why it didn't take a government mandate to
> >  force authors to use it.
> Not to split a different hair, Ian, but I'm not sure speed,
> affordability and convenience add up to incentive.  What has
> attracted the physics community to the arXiv is the fact that it
> solves a problem for them: the need to get good (though not
> finished and formally branded) information out into the community
> where it can be used.  If the arXiv provided a solution to a
> problem they didn't have, it wouldn't have attracted any users no
> matter how fast, cheap and convenient it was.
>
> It seems to me that one problem OA in general is that it doesn't
> solve a problem for many of the people on whom it depends for
> content.  If, as some argue, authors cared only about
> disseminating their work as widely as possible, then it might --
> but really, under those circumstances OA wouldn't even be a topic
> for discussion, because a very good mechanism for free worldwide
> distribution already exists.  Any author who simply wants to
> distribute her work widely can just put it up on a website and
> let everyone have it.  The problem is that many authors care very
> much about how and in what forum their work is distributed and
> very little about how quickly and widely it's distributed (that's
> why they keep submitting their articles to slow-moving
> toll-access journals rather than putting them up on free
> websites).  For those authors, OA may be a neutral factor at
> best.  Remember that relatively few academic disciplines place
> much value on getting unfinished, unbranded scholarship out into
> the community as quickly as possible -- physics is somewhat
> unusual in this regard.
>
> Here's my standard disclaimer: None of this is to say that OA is
> a bad thing.  Only that we need to put ourselves in authors'
> shoes, and remember that what seems on the surface to be an
> unalloyed good for the end user can have unintended consequences
> behind the scenes.  Authors are consumers of distribution
> services, and history suggests that when you force consumers to
> do something they don't seem to want to do, the result is often
> unsatisfactory.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
> Marriott Library
> University of Utah
> rick.anderson@utah.edu