So, where are we with IOAs [Institutional Open Archives] in the UK? Five years is certainly long enough to determine a trend, and it is clear that the trend is for growth. In search of the trend, I examined the sites of those universities in the UK with IOAs (26 in all)....[PS: Omitting notes in sites included and excluded.] The cumulative growth curve looks impressive, but the picture revealed by the annual number of items recorded suggests that, rather than growing rapidly, the curve has levelled out....In fact, the data shows a very patchy record for the 22 archives, and one institution, the University of Southampton,
holds more than 50 per cent of all items recorded over the period. Had I included departmental archives, the prominence of Southampton would have been even greater, as the Department of Electronics and Computer Science has an archive of 9,342 items – more than the total in the institutional archive – and if these were included Southampton would hold more than 75 per cent of the new total of 19,168 items....[I]n
general, the humanities and social sciences are less well represented in IOA than are science, medicine and engineering....This suggests that universities in the UK may be finding it very hard to get the message of IOA through to all their constituent departments....By any measure it can hardly be claimed that the concept of open archiving has taken off in British universities and I don’t think that any of its protagonists would claim otherwise. The movement is at an early stage, with something in the order of 12 per cent of UK universities involved and with a minuscule proportion of the total research output covered by the IOA. For 2004, a search of the Web of Science for papers by authors whose address included ‘England’ produced 58,710 items and, when we exclude the Scottish universities from the table (since Scottish addresses were not searched for), we find that fewer than 2,000 of these have been archived in institutional archives....
Those institutions that are involved appear to be having difficulty in getting academics to contribute, perhaps because they are putting insufficient effort into the process, but also, perhaps, because the whole idea of self-archiving in institutional archives is based upon false
assumptions about the behaviour of academic authors.
Academics publish and the problem with the concept of an archive is that it is generally perceived as a mode of preservation, not a mode of publishing. Archiving also depends on the voluntary depositing of already published, or about to be published, material, and some strategy is needed to ensure that academics collaborate. A start has been made in the direction of motivating participation by the decision of the research councils to require the open archiving of all papers resulting from the research they fund....[PS: Omitting a call for OA journals that charge no fees on the author side or the reader side.]
Comment. Wilson is right to point to the draft RCUK policy as exemplary. But it has not yet been adopted and it appears to be weakening under the onslaught of publisher lobbying.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/24/2006 09:13:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
