Doubtless, I have missed the point(s) but perhaps you may wish to clarify - or refer me to your other contributions!
2a) Preservation surely remains a valid concern. It cannot be adequate to discount the relevance of digital preservation from a programme which may tend to discourage the production of hard copy. Of course, open access should, and must, be pursued but potential incidental impacts cannot be ignored. 2b) Are you implying there is some problem with university 'publication' online? Can you clarify why you think it 'wacky'? 2c) If institutions make their own corpus of material available on the web in a common format with common indexing, then does not this constitute the potential for hard-copy substitution? Are you saying that, because the peer review function has to be external to the institution, electronic self-publication cannot replace the 'journal', something which is surely only a construct defined as a collection of peer-reviewed multi-sourced articles? Is not your thesis that the cost of peer review administration can be covered precisely by the savings in serials budgets? Gerry -----Original Message----- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 27 February 2003 15:21 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: ePrint Repositories On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, [identity deleted] wrote: > [T]he latest report from the RSLG http://www.rslg.ac.uk/final/final.pdf > makes interesting reading and it is clear that at least > some interest groups intend to use institutional repositories not just to > increase access but also to bypass publishers altogether, or have I > misinterpreted? Based on the often contradictory and incoherent plans that are being voiced about institutional repositories these days -- particularly the talk about bypassing publishers -- I can entirely understand your confusion! (It is not you who have misinterpreted, but some of the repository enthusiasts who have got it a bit garbled, because they have not thought it through carefully themselves.) Fortunately, it can all be clarified. (1) Please bear in mind that the idea of institutional repositories is very new, so although there is a lot of talk these days about the *software* for creating these archives, there has been far less talk (and even less thought) about what sort of *content* these repositories should house, and why, and how. (2) Despite the lack of forethought (and often also a surprising lack of information), universities have pushed ahead with the momentum for institutional repositories (because they are basically a very good thing). I think I know quite well by now what the five main notions are that are churning around in administrators' and librarians' minds in this connection, and not all of them make sense, nor are they all compatible, or even desirable: (2a) Preservation of Digital Content: This is the most general, hence the vaguest mandate of all. (What *kinds* of digital content? Whose? Why?) (2b) Publication, Alternative Publication, and Alternatives to Publication: This is in some ways the wackiest notion of all, and a microcosm of the incoherence I spoke of. Universities have the simultaneous desire (i) to become online, in-house publishers themselves (if there is money to be made that way), (ii) to provide alternative "forms" of publication (alternative forms of peer review, for example -- invariably untested and speculative, if not contentious ones), and (iii) to provide means for making some of their own output public in forms other than formal publication. (2c) Remedying the Serials Crisis: The serials crisis is real, but the notion that since it is our institution that generates our published content, we should not need to buy it back from publishers is incoherent (since universities are mostly buying in *other* universities' published content, not their own). Self-archiving our *own* refereed journal publications does make sense, but in and of itself it has nothing directly to do with the buy-in problem. (2d) Courseware: There is also the sense that these repositories could house the university's growing online courseware content, either to make it open-access or to cash in on it (e.g., through toll-access distance-education revenue). (2e) Maximizing the Research Impact of Institutional Research Output by Making it Open-Access (pre- and post peer review and publication). (This is really the only coherent, focused, motivated agenda so far for Institutional Repositories. The rest is just a hodge-podge.) The last of these (2e) is the only institutional repository agenda that is pertinent to this Forum. It is irrelevant that some universities have vague, wide-eyed notions of becoming in-house online publishers at the moment: For the published papers in the institutional Eprint Archives for their own refereed research output are *by definition* published by *another publisher* and have nothing whatsoever to do with the institution's inchoate yearning to become an online publisher! Each paper in question is published by whichever of the 20,000 peer-reviewed journals it appeared in. The only content in a university's Eprint Archive is its *own* research output. This neither constitutes a university publication (merely a means of providing open-access to its published output) nor does it repackage the contents of a publisher's journal: Any University Eprint Archive holds only its own vanishingly small contribution to the contents of any of the 20,000 journals. Stevan Harnad ************************************************************************* Free exhibition at the British Library Galleries : Magic Pencil : Children's Book Illustration Today (to 31 March) original graphic work of 13 contemporary artists ************************************************************************* The information contained in this e-mail is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended for the addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete this e-mail and notify the [email protected] : The contents of this e-mail must not be disclosed or copied without the sender's consent. The statements and opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the British Library. The British Library does not take any responsibility for the views of the author. *************************************************************************
