Almost half (44 per cent) said they had sent their work in response to a request to do so (from the library), 44 per cent cited the potential for increased visibility of their work – ‘the feeling that if things are not available electronically nowadays they may as well not be done.’ – and 22 per cent mentioned increased citations, but overall the response was reactive rather than proactive, such as: ‘The library sent an email asking […] I thought well there’s nothing to lose by giving it to them, I mean, publicity is good and if somebody gets hold of my stuff and cites it that’s great.’
Self-archiving versus mediated deposit
As mentioned above, some authors expressed concerns about the time they thought might be involved in sending work for deposit in QUEprints and some suggested that the library could provide help. When asked directly: Whom would you prefer to manage the self-archiving – that’s the depositing – of your work to QUEprints?, 76 per cent said that they would prefer the library staff to do it and 24 per cent stated as part of their answer that they would not want to do it themselves. Some authors elaborated on their answer and their comments suggested compelling reasons both for retaining the mediated service and for the library to continue to provide that service, for example:
‘Anyone other than me. I mean what are my options on that, because I would have thought that having it done centrally by a qualified librarian is a really cool idea?’
‘I think library staff because of the whole copyright issue and I think they would have the expertise to deal with those issues.’
‘…someone in the library that knows proper cataloguing policy. […] if we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly, with proper indexing, proper cataloguing, you know, professional. You don’t want to let academics loose on it because
they’ll […] use all their own little systems. No, I want a proper information specialist to do it.’