Report on the ALPSP-SSP seminar

Kate Worlock, Repositories and their impact on publishing: the evidence begins to mount, EPS Insights, November 30, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). A report on this week's ALPSP-SSP seminar, Preprint and postprint repositories and their impact on publishing (London, November 28, 2005). Excerpt:

The number of institutional repositories worldwide is reaching significant levels, at least in some countries. SHERPA manager Bill Hubbard reported that there are now 57 repositories in the UK (some departmental, some institutional and some subject-based) and 153 in the US. The Netherlands has a policy that all academic research institutions must run their own repository and now boasts 17; China and India are making their mark with 13 and 5 respectively, and surprisingly Brazil has 30. While there have been claims that repositories are expensive to run...Hubbard claims that the cost to Nottingham University of running its repository equates to one technician working three days a week over the course of a year. Policies are now appearing from research funding organisations, institutions and departments either requesting or mandating that researchers place content in repositories. Key Perspectives' data showed that 81% of academics would willingly comply with a mandate, 14% would comply reluctantly, and 5% would not comply. However, where organisations request rather than mandate deposit, this has had little effect: the National Institutes of Health policy requests and strongly encourages deposit of content in a repository, but in October only 2.73% of relevant articles were deposited as per this request....At the latest NIH committee meeting, members voted 9-3 in favour of making deposit mandatory, and this is likely to come into force in the summer of 2006. Jenny Pickles of Emerald Publishing expressed the fear that research funder mandates of this sort forced publishers to introduce embargoes, and saw this as a retrograde step for the open access movement....Key Perspectives' Alma Swan laid out the reasons behind academics using repositories - the most important was to communicate their results to their peers. Other reasons included career advancement, personal prestige, to attract funding and for financial reward (a distant last). However, only 15% of academics surveyed had added preprint material to an institutional repository, while 20% had added postprint content....John Haynes of IOPP reported a near 100% overlap in high energy physics and astrophysics between what is published in journals and what is held in the renowned arXiv repository, which has become so well-used that for some physicists it is a "daily destination point". IOPP policy allows deposit of postprints in arXiv because this increases visibility, and even allows authors to submit articles by simply sending in an arXiv e-print number. IOPP has found that where journals have a strong degree of overlap with arXiv, then articles are predominantly read on arXiv rather than on the publisher site, although the journal remains valued for prestige and citations.