[GOAL] 3-Year Success Signs for MIT's Green OA Mandate

[Stevan Harnad]

Three years after the adoption of its Green Open Access Self-Archiving
Mandate -- http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/ -- MIT announces that its
articles are being downloaded worldwide:
http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/news/faculty-articles-2/7941/

(To draw any comparative conclusions, however, comparative data will
be needed, for download rates from institutions with comparable
research outputs and prestige, but without OA mandates. Raw download
stats are otherwise just the sound of one hand clapping...)
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[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-03-10, at 4:49 AM, [Identity deleted because email was addressed to me and not the the GOAL list] wrote:

> Stevan
> You can draw comparative conclusions with MIT 'Google Scholar' search and citation rankings before and after the mandate surely?
> [Deleted]

Yes, one certainly can -- and that comparison (and a number of other potential comparisons) can (and I hope will) be done soon (though not necessarily just by our research group!).

Yassine Gargouri (of our research group) has done a a preliminary overall analysis of deposit rates (not for citations) that found a significant positive correlation between mandates and deposit rates, but a more informative result will be to compare, year by year, the citation rates for papers from comparable mandated and unmandated institutions.

(Since mandates increase OA and OA increases citations, one would expect a significant positive correlation once the number of mandated institutions has become big enough, and the mandate has been in effect long enough. But one of the variables that needs to be taken into account is that not all kinds of mandates are equally effective. Yassine Gargouri's preliminary study on deposit rate, which will be posted soon, takes both the age and the "strength" of the mandate into account.)

Stevan Harnad