More Reasons for the Immediate Deposit Mandate and the Eprint Request Button

[Stevan Harnad]

                   ** Cross-Posted **

     For hyperlinked references, see:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/292-guid.html

The paper reprint request era's prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, had
already anticipated many of the current developments in Open Access:

     (1) Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the World
     Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic Archive. The
     Scientist 13(4):14.
         EXCERPT: It is the utopian expectation of those who live
         in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create
         Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The
         social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has
         major consequences for the future.
             Garfield, E. (1965) Is the 'free reprint system' free and/or
             obsolete? Essays of an Information Scientist 1:10-11.
             Garfield, E. (1972) Reprint Exchange. 1. The multimillion
             dollar problem ordinaire, Essays of an Information Scientist
             1:359-60.

     (2) Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations?
     Scientometrics 56: 283-286.
         ABSTRACT: Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of
         an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint
         requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of
         citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over
         a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the
         number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were
         retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews
         (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range
         1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent
         correlation between the number of requests and citations to
         article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55;
         95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that
         received most reprint requests are cited more often.

     (3) Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The
     case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93-101.
         EXCERPT: This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests
         (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed
         each year, most being triggered by Current Contents...

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In the online era, the days of reprint requests ought to be over, 
with Open Access taking their place. But some research funders and 
universities are still hesitating about mandating Open Access 
Self-Archiving, because they are concerned about publishers' 
embargoes. Here is the solution:

         Even where a publisher embargoes or does not endorse OA
         self-archiving, universities and research funders can and
         should still go ahead and mandate immediate deposit anyway,
         with no exceptions or delays, but allowing the deposit to be made
         Closed Access instead of Open Access during any publisher-imposed
         embargo period.

The Institutional Repository's semi-automatized Email Eprint Request 
Button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to tide over all 
researcher usage needs webwide till the end of the embargo (or till 
embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths, under the 
growing pressure and increasingly apparent benefits of OA).

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
     http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
     BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
     http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
     BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
     a suitable one exists.
     http://www.doaj.org/
AND
     in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
     in your own institutional repository.
     http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
     http://archives.eprints.org/
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/