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 apparentbenefits of OA).
See how the paper reprint request era, and its prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, already anticipated most of this:
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.
Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93–101.
Abstract: 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...
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.
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.
