Stevan Harnad wrote:
I think the House Appropriations Committee was less wise in going on to specify *where* grantees should self-archive their articles to make them OA (in PubMed). Surely it is enough to mandate that they should be made OA! For reasons discussed in an early posting in the American Scientist Open Access Forum (reproduced below), it no longer makes any difference where an article is self-archived, as long as the Archive is OAI-compliant. In this regard, the recommendations of the UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm which were released within a fortnight of the US recommendations were wiser (though otherwise very similar). The UK did not stipulate that funded research must be self-archived in a central OA Archive, only that it must be self-archived, hence OA. (In fact, they expressed a preference for Institutional Self-Archiving.)
I disagree entirely with this. I believe that central open-access archiving is far superior to distributed open access archiving. I have had this debate with many individuals including briefly off-line from this forum with Stevan. I know the OAI protocol allows search of distributed archives, but (a) its coverage is currently very poor, with no indication to me of how it will increase, (b) all current tools that have been proposed to me are hopeless in performance (quality and time) compared to Pubmed searching. The only useful articles I have found in repeated OAI searches in broad areas of molecular biology, bioinformatics and genomics have been in PMC (because they are gold or 6-month gold), and OAI searches have given them back poorly, encrusted with junk. Search is what matters. We learnt this lesson early with genomic data. The value of openly available sequence data is in having it powerfully searchable, and that happened when it was deposited centrally. Second, I keep hearing that gold is 5% and green 84%. But well under 5% of the articles in the 84% green articles are actually made open access, at least articles of interest to me in fields of interest to me. So currently, gold central archiving is more, not less successful than green OAI distributed archiving in terms of article coverage, and it looks more promising to me. Few of the 84% currently support central archiving (most restrict to author's "own" web site, which is reasonably interpreted as institutional). However, if NIH mandate conversion to central green I am told that the top journals that currently either are only local green or no-SA at all will have no problem converting to central green, and the others will follow. The interesting issue for them is whether they stop charging page charges and for colour figures, so as to preserve their 6 months grace period, or allow access from day one. The biological community is well on the way towards central archiving. Please Stevan and other idealists on this group, stop acting to derail this. Central self-archiving is what has succeeded for physics, not distributed self-archiving. Please don't use biology as a guinea-pig for a technology that as far as I can see has not yet proved itself for any discipline. I agree that green is somewhat better than nothing but central green is much much better than distributed green - gold is a simple way to get central green. So I appeal to everyone on this list to support central open access archiving for biology as the house recommends, and encourage the UK to go the same way with national or international archives, rather than promote a more distributed solution. Richard Durbin Head of Informatics, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute