Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness

Sun Oct 28 17:25:57 EDT 2012

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 12:46 PM, leo waaijers <leowaa at xs4all.nl> wrote:

 A good insight in OA versus non-OA publishing and, within OA, about Green
> versus Gold may be gained from a recent BMC-article<http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124>"Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and
> internal structure" bij Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk.
>

That Laakso & Björk article calculates the annual proportion of articles
indexed by WoS and SCOPUS that are published in Gold OA journals (about 12%
in 2011). (An additional 5% defined as "delayed Gold," embargoed for up to
a year, seems to be credited to the wrong year: An article is only OA when
it is OA.)

L & B provide no evidence about Green versus Gold (so I'm not sure what
insight Leo has in mind). Unmandated Green OA (24%) is at least twice
annual Gold OA annually, and mandated Green OA (70%+) is six times annual
Gold OA.

The only Green vs Gold insight I can discern in this is that universities
and funders should mandate Green OA, now, instead of waiting for Gold OA --
or double-paying for Gold pre-emptively, as the Finch Report proposes doing
(on the basis of the Finch Hypothesis that Green OA mandates are
ineffective -- which is precisely what our new data refute...).

Stevan Harnad

>  Op 28-10-2012 12:57, Stevan Harnad schreef:
>
>  On 2012-10-28, at 6:44 AM, David Wojick <dwojick at CRAIGELLACHIE.US> wrote:
>
>  Stevan, did you verify that the deposits were actual articles? In many
> cases the records counted by ROAR are metadata or other items. For example
> Cambridge is listed as very large but it has almost no articles. Does ROAR
> log actual articles separately? I have not seen that in their data but may
> have missed it.
>
>
>  David, you are quite right to ask this question, and the answer is no:
>
>  1. ROAR <http://openaccess.eprints.org> does not yet have a reliable way
> to determine whether a deposit is the full-text of a refereed journal
> article or just the metadata (or some other kind of content).
>
>  2. However, we do have a robot that can sample and test that with high
> accuracy <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/262220/1/sigdet.gif>, and one
> natural follow-up study is to use the robot to estimate what proportion of
> repository content is full-text journal articles.
>
>  3. In a prior study we have already used the robot to confirm about  70%<http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636> full-text
> deposit for the oldest and strongest mandates.
>
>  4. Meanwhile, however, whatever that full-text percentage is globally,
> it seems reasonable to suppose that it is roughly the same across
> repositories: hence an increase in the average number of deposits means an
> increase in full-text deposits, whatever the average full-text percentage
> is.
>
>  5. The mandates in question are full-text deposit deposit mandates: *they
> are not fulfilled by depositing metadata alone (or other kinds of content).
> *
>
>  6. Hence it seems reasonable to suppose that if the deposit rate is
> higher, the stronger the mandate, the increase is in full-text deposits,
> not just metadata (or other kinds of content), regardless of the baseline
> proportion of full-text across repositories.
>
>  7. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose a rather complicated and *ad
> hoc* form of bias: that the institutions which tend to adopt stronger
> Green OA mandates are also the institutions which tend to have higher
> deposit rates already -- and/or deposit rates with full-text ratios
> systematically different from the global average.
>
>  8. We did test for bias in university webomtrics rankings<http://www.webometrics.info> associated
> with mandate strength, but found none.
>
>
>  (You are quite right about the enormous number of deposits -- 216,692,
> mostly not articles -- in the Cambridge repository<http://roar.eprints.org/390/>. This
> did not enter into our analysis because (a) Cambridge has no mandate at
> all. Moreover, (b) Cambridge does not rank highly in the medium deposit
> rate<http://roar.eprints.org/cgi/roar_search/advanced?location_country=&software=&type=institutional&order=-activity_medium/-date> ranking
> that ROAR considers most closely matched to annual university article
> output: This suggests that Cambridge is uploading huge batches of some sort
> of data rarely, rather than regularly depositing approximately the number
> of articles that universities produce across the year.)
>
>  Stevan Harnad
>
>
>
> On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:58 PM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>  Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 1:44
> PM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM <c.oppenheim at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>   This is a significant and important set of findings, which should be
>> forwarded on to decision-makers, both in Universities and in funding
>> agencies.
>>
>>  More like this, please Stevan
>>
>>  Professor Charles Oppenheim
>>
>
>  More on the way.
>
>  But meanwhile, OA advocates, *please do forward these findings on
> mandate strength to decision-makers at your university and funding agencies
> *.
>
>  It's now more important than ever to make sure that OA policy decisions
> are evidence-based, especially to counter the extensive negative effects of
> the publishing lobby, as most dramatically exerted very recently on the Finch
> Report and the resulting RCUK policy<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/342580/1/harnad-cilip.pdf>
> .
>
>  Stevan Harnad
>
>     ------------------------------
>> *From:* Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at GMAIL.COM>
>> *To:* JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>> *Sent:* Friday, 26 October 2012, 18:59
>> *Subject:* OA Week: Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate
>> Effectiveness
>>
>>  In June 2012, the UK Finch Committee made the following statement:
>>
>> *"The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities
>> themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make
>> their publications accessible in institutional repositories…"* *[Finch
>> Committee Recommendation, June 2012<http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf>
>> ]** *
>>
>>  *
>> *
>>  *Testing the Finch Hypothesis*
>>  We have now tested the Finch Hypothesis. Using data from ROARMAP
>> institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional
>> repositories, we found that deposit number and rate is significantly
>> correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the
>> mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit
>> rates of  70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated
>> deposit rate of  20%. The effect is already detectable at the national
>> level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates,
>> has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%.
>>
>>  *Conclusion**
>> *The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open
>> Access Mandates *do* have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate,
>> the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate<http://roarmap.eprints.org/56/>,
>> linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate
>> model). RCUK<http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUK%20_Policy_on_Access_to_Research_Outputs.pdf> (as
>> well as all universities, research institutions and research funders
>> worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates
>> and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.
>>  The findings are in the link below. *Discussion invited!*
>>  Gargouri, Yassine, Lariviere, Vincent, Gingras, Yves, Brody, Tim, Carr,
>> Les and Harnad, Stevan (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA
>> Mandate Effectiveness <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/344687/>. *Open Access
>> Week 2012*
>>  * *
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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