On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Greg Kuperberg wrote: > We have had much more success by moving in the opposite direction, > i.e., by strengthening distributed open archival with a centralized > foundation.
And continued good success to the math arXiv project! But why restrict efforts to centralized ones only? The whole point of OAI interoperability is that it should no longer make any difference whether a refereed paper is archived in a central archive or a distributed archive or both! (The only alternative we want to avoid is "neither"!) By way of example of how it no longer makes any difference, CogPrints <http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk> is a centralized archive for cognitive science -- but it is using EXACTLY the same OAI-compliant Eprints architecture as is has been developed for distributed, institution-based archiving by http://www.eprints.org. In fact, the OAI-compliant Eprints software was DERIVED from the prior centralized CogPrints software! And institutions are institutions, whether they mount centralized archives or institutional archives. And mirroring and harvesting for reliability and permanence are available to both. So why keep repeating that centralized archiving helped accelerate math archiving more quickly than the prior (pre-OAI) distributed archiving? True, but things didn't stop there. And linear growth is still linear growth, whereas what we need is exponential growth, across all disciplines, if we are to reach the optimal and inevitable before we expire! So let 1000 flowers bloom, central and distributed. Interoperability will harvest them all. > The MPRESS project (http://mathnet.preprints.org/) > has a lot in common with OAI, and it was started before the universal > math arXiv. It has its own metadata standard, "Dublin Core", and its > has a number of institutional preprint series among its data feeds. > But it hasn't yet caught on. Maybe that was because it was going it alone, instead of distributing its efforts across disciplines, as the Open Archives Insitiative is doing. It's one thing to adopt a standard, quite another to get others to adopt it too. (This is why your advocacy of centralized archiving and anti-advocacy of distributed archiving is divisive and counterproductive: We should be supporting every effort that gets all the refereed literature up there, online, accessible, searchable, navigable, and free for all. Centralized archiving has not managed this alone, so let it now benefit from the help of Distributed Archiving!) > It doesn't seem to make much difference to > authors whether a preprint series is indexed by MPRESS or not. I don't understand this point. It may be another symptom of the conflation between publishing and archiving, and between preprints and postprints: What authors are choosing when they PUBLISH a paper, is a journal, i.e., a quality-certifier with a known level of quality, a trusted "brand." What authors are choosing when they ARCHIVE their eprint -- whether the journal-certified, refereed POSTprint or the unrefereed PREprint -- is a means of making their paper maximally visible and accessible online, for free for all. OAI-interoperability provides that, provided the metadata-protocol is shared by all archives, irrespective of whether they are centralized or institutional. MPRESS apparently did not become such a universal (we might even call it "distributed") standard. Perhaps this was in part because it did not inititially adopt OAI's strategy of minimalism: Pick the minimal functional metadata set, to maximize the ease of compliance, rather than going all the way to Dublin Core from the outset. (OAI is inching towards Dublin Core too, but thanks to minimalism and proselytising across disciplines, it may manage to bring everyone else along with it.) > Part of > the trouble with MPRESS is that not all of its sources are providing > as good metadata as they promised. Ironically the lion's share of good > metadata in MPRESS comes from the math arXiv. > > I would like to know where OAI thinks that MPRESS went wrong. In fact > since I maintain a "service provider" for the math arXiv, I looked into > using OA-compliant metadata instead of the ad hoc metadata that I get from > the arXiv. I discovered that the OA standard is an oversimplification > of the full arXiv metadata record, to the point that I can't use the > OA format. I will have to leave this to OAI experts to reply to. > But don't get me wrong. I am in favor of fragmented interoperability if > you really can't hope for something better. And as I said, the overall > STM literature might well have to be fragmented, for now, down to the > level of individual disciplines (e.g. chemistry) or small groups of > disciplines (physics+math+cs). "Fragmented interoperability" is a tautology": The whole point of interoperability is shared metadata standards unifying distributed ("fragmented") systems. As to "hopes": The only pertinent hope is the freeing of the entire refereed literature online. Centralized self-archiving alone (which I backed for a number of years, initially advocating putting the whole literature into arXiv) just is not progressing fast enough. Enter OAI and distributed institution-based self-archiving to help speed it on its way. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
