From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 03:24:48 +0000

Responding to Ellen, Richard, and Lisa —

OK, I get it. It’s not that someone has been _asserting_ that social
networks and OA repositories are the same thing, but rather that we
have reason to believe that at least some faculty members think of
them as the same thing, or at least as functionally equivalent. I have
no problem believing that that’s the case.

As for being forced to choose between them because of limits on
time/energy: I agree that this is a real problem. Those of us who run
IRs are, unfortunately, put at a disadvantage by the fact that the
social networks have done such an amazing job of making participation
easy. Anyone who joins Academia.edu or ResearchGate gets regular email
messages that say “Hey, we’ve found some papers that look like they
were written by you — are we right?”, and if you click through and
then hit the “yes” button you’re all done. The result is not a deposit
in an OA repository, that’s for sure. But if all you care about is
making your paper available to the public, it’s probably going to seem
good enough, especially at the cost of two mouseclicks.

I suspect you guys are right that if you asked most participating
faculty members to tell you what the difference is between what
they’re doing and what constitutes actual IR deposit, they wouldn’t be
able to answer correctly. It would be very interesting to know how
many of them, once the difference has been clearly explained, would
really care that much. (I’m not saying they shouldn’t care, of course,
only wondering how many of them would.)

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
[log in to unmask]