There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
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It’s Open Access Week 2012. Now in it’s 6th year, the organizers are promoting Open Access as the new norm in research and scholarship. Here’s a summary of some happenings…
- The week started with a webcast co-sponsored by SPARC and the World Bank featuring a conversation with 5 Open Access Experts.
- Follow and contribute to Twitter buzz at #OAWeek, #OAWeek2012 and #openaccess
- SPIE, the society of optics and photonics, is taking the plunge into Open Access
- Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene is a new Open Access journal venture by BioOne
- Author Peter Suber released a new book on Open Access
Read about more Open Access stuff going on this week in this post by Heather Joseph of SPARC, and check out the main Open Access Week web site.
27 Oct 2012, 9:18 am
TESTING THE FINCH HYPOTHESIS ON GREEN OA MANDATE INEFFECTIVENESS
We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show 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%. 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, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (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.
Gargouri Y, Lariviere V, Gingras Y, Brody T, Carr L & Harnad S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness Open Access Week 2012 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/344687