Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score

MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, 40 references, 7761 word

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.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figure

Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness

The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions' repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy. Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention; (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA.Comment: 49 pages, 21 figures, 15 tables. Pasteur4OA Work Package 3 report: Open Access policies 201

Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline

Most refereed journal articles today are published in subscription journals, accessible only to subscribing institutions, hence losing considerable research impact. Making articles freely accessible online ("Open Access," OA) maximizes their impact. Articles can be made OA in two ways: by self-archiving them on the web ("Green OA") or by publishing them in OA journals ("Gold OA"). We compared the percent and growth rate of Green and Gold OA for 14 disciplines in two random samples of 1300 articles per discipline out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI using a robot that trawled the web for OA full-texts. We sampled in 2009 and 2011 for publication year ranges 1998-2006 and 2005-2010, respectively. Green OA (21.4%) exceeds Gold OA (2.4%) in proportion and growth rate in all but the biomedical disciplines, probably because it can be provided for all journals articles and does not require paying extra Gold OA publication fees. The spontaneous overall OA growth rate is still very slow (about 1% per year). If institutions make Green OA self-archiving mandatory, however, it triples percent Green OA as well as accelerating its growth rate

Prédétermination des débits maximaux de crue par simulation Monte-Carlo de la pluie nette

Une méthodologie a été proposée pour la prédétermination des débits à partir de la pluviométrie. Il s’agit d’associer, en entrée, les simulations Monte Carlo de hyétogrammes de pluie nette avec un modèle d’hydrogramme unitaire à base de géomorphologie pour obtenir des hydrogrammes simulés en sortie. À la fin des simulations, l’analyse statistique des sorties permet d’apprécier l’étendue de la variabilité de la réponse du bassin aux événements pluvieux et de caractériser les débits et les temps de pointe. Un total de 44 simulations ont été menées pour chacun des 15 événements observés pour un petit bassin versant situé en Tunisie centrale. L’analyse des hydrogrammes générés a montré une assez faible dispersion des débits de pointe, d’une simulation à l’autre, pour un événement donné, et a mis en évidence la dissymétrie des distributions des débits et temps de pointe. L’exploitation des résultats de l’ensemble des simulations permet de dégager des relations empiriques caractérisant le comportement du bassin selon les débits de pointe, les temps de pointe, les temps de base et les volumes écoulés.The predetermination of peak discharges and flood volumes of ungauged basins is an important aspect of the management of surface waters, protection against floods, water supply, etc. In this study, a method is proposed for the predetermination of discharges from rainfall data. The method associates effective rainfall obtained from Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS) with a unit hydrograph based on geomorphology. The unit hydrograph (UH) based on geomorphology is selected knowing that the parameters can be obtained from topographic charts, soil charts and ground occupation charts, as well as from soil data. The UH used was produced from the Nash cascade model in which the scale and shape parameters were taken from the literature. These parameters depend on the hydrographical network, the Horton ratios and the average peak flow velocity, which is assumed to be constant throughout the network and with respect to time. The average peak flow velocity can be expressed as a function of 1) geomorphologic parameters such as the total surface area of the basin, the slope of the highest order stream, the Manning-Strickler coefficient, the width of the channel, the kinematic wave parameter of the highest order stream and the length of the main channel, and 2) the effective rainfall intensity and duration.With respect to effective rainfall intensities, the idea is to consider the effective rainfall as a vector of the parameters of the hydrological model, and then to use the MCS method to generate the corresponding components. The proposed simulation framework includes: 1) the specification of the data for which the geomorphologic parameters and the time increments are fixed for all simulations, whereas the duration of the total rainfall and the effective rainfall volume vary from one event to another, and constitute constraints determining whether or not simulations should be rejected, 2) the random drawing of effective rainfall intensities and durations, 3) the computation of resulting hydrographs and 4) the analysis of the simulated hydrographs, where the hydrographs are first simulated for each event and then simulated in their entirety to highlight indicators to characterize outputs.In order to statistically interpret the simulated hydrographs, the generated peak discharges were classified for each event, and their 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles were analyzed. The same treatment was applied to the simulated times to attain peak values. The use of the 25th and 75th percentiles makes it possible to evaluate the extent of the 50% interval of the simulated discharges, whereas the median and the mode make it possible to position values representative of the distribution of the generated discharges. The hydrographs are assumed have the same “recurrence” as their peak discharge. Hydrograph generation by the MCS method is a two step process: 1) the generation of effective rainfall intensities based on the assumption that the total volume is observed, and 2) the convolution of the unit hydrograph resulting from each interval of effective rainfall.The study site, Saddine1, is a small catchment with a surface area of 384 hectares. It is located adjacent to Makthar in Tunisia (northern latitude 35°48’06’’ and longitude 9°04’ 09’’) in a mountainous zone. The catchment is controlled by a small headwater dam and was monitored from 1992 to 1999. Observed over periods of five minutes, the maximum rainfall intensity was 324 mm/h and the minimal intensity was 10 mm/h. The maximum total rainfall recorded for an event was of 106 mm. The longest duration for an event was of approximately 5 hours (299 min) and shortest was 12 minutes. A great disparity in the volumes was also noted: the maximum volume observed was 67,200 m3 whereas the minimum was 1,275 m3. The peak discharges of the recorded hydrographs were very variable with a minimum/maximum ratio of about 1/1370. Indeed the maximum discharge observed was 85.6 m3/s, and the minimum discharge only 0.062 m3/s. The time to attain peak flows for the rainfall events varied from 10 to 120 minutes. The effective rainfall intensities were calculated using the infiltration index method, ϕ, which remains a method still largely used in spite of its rudimentary character. The effective rainfalls estimated for each event varied from 0.3 mm with 17.5 mm.Before using the MCS, the model was calibrated. The results of the calibration analysis showed that the calculated hydrographs were reasonable comparable to the observed hydrographs. In addition to the shape, the peak discharge and the peak time reconstitutions were satisfactory. A total of 44 simulations were carried out for each of the 15 events observed, of which 13 allowed for the identification of the distributions of effective rainfall intensities and durations. The remaining two events were used for the validation of the approach. The analysis of the generated hydrographs showed a rather weak dispersion of the peak output from one simulation to another, for a given event. Moreover, the discharges and times to attain peak discharge resulting from the generated hydrographs followed a dissymmetrical distribution. The observed values of the peak discharges and times to attain peak discharge represent realisations of output simulations with different probabilities of occurrence. In order to capitalize on the model, relationships between simulated peak discharges, times to peak discharge, base times and volumes were constructed

Ten-year Analysis of University of Minho Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate

University of Minho adopted the first university-wide Green Open Access Mandate in Europe in 2004, requiring all research output to be self-archived in the institution's repository. The mandate was upgraded in 2011 to designate the repository as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for individual and institutional research performance assessment. A 10-year analysis shows that deposit rates are increasing and deposit delays are decreasing. Once the rest of the world follows Minho's example, universal Green OA will not be far behind

La investigación de residuos en la inspección veterinaria de mataderos

Diversas razones zootécnicas y comerciales apoyan el uso de sustancias no autorizadas, como promotoras del crecimiento en la producción animal. A partir de 1990, cuando se dieron las primeras intoxicaciones por beta-agonistas, los consumidores se han ido concienciando seriamente sobre los temas de salubridad-seguridad de los productos alimentarios. Desde las primeras sustancias utilizadas, los implantes, el D.E.S. y los tiouracilos, hasta los beta-agonistas, corticosteroides y otros, de composición desconocida aplicados en nuestros días, diversos productos de acabado del animal, han sido objeto de control por los Servicios Veterinarios Oficiales en los mataderos

Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research

Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; country or institution) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. [See accompanying RTF file for responses to feedback. Four PDF files provide Supplementary Analysis.