Steven, Doesn't it depend on the institution: it particular upon the institution's reliability, its commitment to self-archiving and OA in general, and its general orientation towards digital access and preservation?
I will certainly agree with you that every academic and research institution should have such responsibility and commitment; I also agree that if an institution does have it, then it is a satisfactory place for use self-archiving. However desirable, however urgent, this is not now the case. In my academic career, I have been formally associated with six institutions. One of the six properly understands of the issues, and should always have the relatively small funds to support it. A second certainly has money, but its commitment to archival preservation of any sort of faculty record, including digital, has been remarkably irresponsible; a third has the understanding, but the nature of its funding over the last few decades has been so problematic that nobody could or does trust it for anything of a permanent nature; a fourth has repeatedly demonstrated lack of understanding as well as lack of financial support, and the other 2 are variable in these respects. I may have been unfortunate in my sample, and so I do not name the institutions. The proper approach is to upgrade the institutions; I suggest that an appropriate technique is for funding agencies to require that a university has such a capacity, not just for post-print self-archiving, but for all the other important uses of an institutional repository. However strong your argument for action is, it would be reliance upon speculation to count on it as a short term development. For people at such institutions, such as myself, the policy of some otherwise "green" publishers leaves only personal home pages. In the unreliable institutions, their commitment to the maintainance and accessibility of these pages is similarly irresponsible. I am not aware of any that has a formal commitment to maintain such pages, or even provide for referral of their ip addresses, when a faculty member leaves; I am not aware of any that has a policy to maintain them when a faculty member retires or dies. (If there are enlightened exceptions, I would be glad to know it.) Unfortunately, none of the above is speculation--I know of instances of them all. To foresee one's eventual decease is not speculative. For independent scholars, for whom OA is a real boon as users, there is no alternative at all for them as authors but personal pages maintained upon personal or commercial servers--the extreme of instability. While your arguments are correct for what should be the case, in the real world the institutional basis for them is lacking, at least in the US. (In the UK, the current proposal properly provides for the use of the British Library as an archive for instances not covered by an institutional archive; although I do not know the details, they may prove sufficient.) Any reliance upon institutional archives in the US would also need such a facility. A similar argument could be constructed for the use of institutional archives as a back up for centralized facilities; the NIH has proven of superb responsibility over several decades, but it too is subject to politics. What do I mean by permanent? the lifetime of papers in a self-archive must extend at least for the period of copyright, which is what permits toll access--life plus 75 years. After this period the maintenance of accessibility is the same problem of OA and for toll-access. Yours, Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor, Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University, Brookville, NY dgood...@liu.edu -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2004 8:17 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: > While OAI compliance is a sine qua non condition of some measure of > inter-operability, it does not (yet?) ensure the kind of ease of > retrieval that other forms of archiving can provide, including some > form of central archiving. This is incorrect. This erroneous view that central archiving is somehow better or safer than distributed/institutional archiving is exactly analogous with older views that on-paper publication is somehow better or safer than on-line publication. The latter papyrocentric habit and illusion has happily faded, thanks mainly to the force of the example and experience with the growing mass of on-line content and usage. (But this obsolete thinking did not fade before it managed to delay progress for several years; nor has it faded entirely, yet!) The instinctive preference for central over distributed archiving is a remnant of that same papyrocentric thinking ("the texts are safer and more tractable when they are all be in the same physical place") and will likewise fade with actual experience and more technical understanding. The trouble is that the preference (in both cases) is invariably voiced in contexts and populations that lack both the technical expertise and the experience with the newer, untrusted modality. And it always appeals to an uninformed audience that is a-priori more receptive to what more closely resembles the old and familiar than what resembles the new and less familiar, and that bases its sense of what is "optimal" not on objective experiment and evidence, but on subjective habit. The place to voice any doubts of uncertainties on technical questions like this is among technical experts with experience, such as the OAI technical group, not in the wider populace that is still naive and leery about the online medium itself, archiving, and open access. > Let us not forget that OAI-compliance may also lead to a mixing of > various levels of documents, for example some peer-reviewed, others > not. The Eprints software includes the tag "peer-reviewed" and "not peer reviewed". This means documents can be "de-mixed" according to the metadata tags, as intended. In addition, the journal-name tag is an indicator. The old idea that physical location is the way to de-mix is obsolete in the distributed online era that the Web itself so clearly embodies. Moreover, the mixing of types of documents is a function of the archiving policy, not of the archive-type (institutional or central) or location. Lastly, the inclusion of both peer-reviewed journal articles *and* both preprints and post-publication revisions and updates is a desirable complement, and can likewise be handled by various forms of pre- and post-triage using both the metadata and meta-algorithms based on metadata and full-text (de-duplication, dating and versioning at the harvester level). > because of this, the perception of archives that are only > OAI-compliant may not be entirely favorable. Scientists/scholars may > not make much or even any use of these sources simply because they > consider them as too "noisy" or worse. Are we then to recommend policy not on the basis of the actual empirical and technical facts, but on the basis of the prevailing "perception"? If we had adopted that strategy, we would have renounced the online medium itself a-priori, and renounced also the notion of Open Access! We are here to promote what is in fact optimal, not what is *perceived* to be optimal, according to existing habits and practices. (Moreover, what is specifically at issue here is what form of self-archiving to *mandate* -- institutional or central for erstwhile non-self-archivers. This is an opportunity to guide and shape habits, rather than to be held back by them.) > Central (OAI-compliant) archiving is not mutually exclusive with > distributed, OAI-compliant archives; it simply completes and > reinforces the archival system that is being presently explored and > experimented with. That is entirely correct, and is one of the premises of OAI-compliance and interoperability: *All* forms of archiving are in fact forms of distributed archiving and are made interoperable and equivalent by OAI-compliance. So no one has said central archiving lacks any of the functionality of institutional archiving. The reason I (and others) are coming out so strongly in favour of institutional archiving is hence not *functional*, since we fully understand how and why both forms of archiving are functionally equivalent (and indeed it is the advocates of central archiving that often fail to grasp this, and argue on the basis of putative functional advantages of central archiving that do not in fact exist). The reason I (and others) are coming out so strongly in favour of institutional archiving has to do with the probability of OA content-provision itself, i.e., the probability that the OA archives will be filled, rather than lie fallow, as well as the closely connected probability that archive-filling will propagate across fields and archives, rather than be restricted to just one field and archive. (It also has a little to do with distributing the archiving burden and costs, but that is not the primary reason.) The authors of the annual 2.5 million articles that we would all like to see self-archived as soon as possible are virtually all affiliated with institutions of their own (universities or research institutions). They also each have disciplines, but author/institution is the relevant pair here, not author/discipline: not just because disciplines are nebulous entities or because few disciplines have central archives and creating and maintaining them is a much more nebulous matter, but because it is authors and their respective institutions (not authors and their disciplines), that share a common stake in maximizing the access to and impact of their (joint) research output -- not authors and their respective disciplines (which are, if anything, a locus of competition for impact, rather than being its joint co-beneficiaries). Moreover, institutions (particularly universities) also share most or all of the disciplines. So when a self-archiving policy or practice is adopted by an institution at all, the probability is very high that it will also propagate across all of that same institution's disciplines. Moreover, as institutions (and not disciplines) are in competition with one another for visibility and impact, the probability is also high that if some institutions adopt the policy and practice of self-archiving, this will also propagate across (competing) institutions. In addition, institutions, being the employers of their researchers and the co-beneficiaries of research impact, are in a position to mandate, monitor and reward compliance with an institutional self-archiving policy (through employment, salary, promotion, tenure, etc.). Disciplines have neither the interest nor the wherewithal to mandate, monitor and reward central self-archiving. Neither do Learned Societies. The one prominent and valuable non-institution-based exception is research-funders, whether discipline-based or national/international and pan-disciplinary: Research-funders too have an interest in maximizing the access to and impact of the research they fund, and are hence in a position to mandate, monitor and reward self-archiving. However -- and this is a critical point, particularly with the US/NIH self-archiving mandate -- research-funders can mandate, monitor and reward self-archiving either way: They can mandate central self-archiving, as the current version of the US/NIH recommendation does, or they can mandate institutional self-archiving, as the UK recommendation does. The effect, for the specific funded research itself, is exactly the same. The critical difference is in the probability of propagation *beyond* the specific funded research in question, toward the 100% OA that we are all seeking. Having established that institutional and central archiving are functionally equivalent, and that research-funders can equally well mandate, monitor and reward self-archiving on either a central or an institutional basis, the only relevant question is: Which of these otherwise completely equivalent means is more likely to yield more OA? And the answer is unequivocal: mandating institutional self-archiving, according to the UK recommendation, rather than central self-archiving, according to the US recommendation. Yes, there is some probability that discipline-based central-archiving mandates by research-funders will propagate across disciplines and research-funders too (and they no doubt will). But that propagation is just as likely (and will in fact occur far more readily of its own accord) if each discipline and research-funder does not need to create and fund and maintain a central archive of its own, but can distribute that load on the institutional OAI-archiving network, which is already growing because of the self-archiving mandates of both prior research-funders and of institutions themselves, and is already propagating across the disciplines within each institution, and across institutions. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php (Institutional self-archiving, by the way, is actually distributed locally too, with departments administering and monitoring compliance in their own sectors: that is part of the beauty and functionality of OAI-interoperability -- as well as of the modular OAI-compliant software: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse#type "Institutional" self-archiving should really be called "Institutional-Departmental" self-archiving.) A forthcoming analysis by Rowland & Swan commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has come out decisively in favor of distributed institution-based self-archiving over central self-archiving, for a variety of reasons, including both functional and economic ones based on efficiency, cost and ease of implementation and monitoring, as well as strategic reasons based on institutional research culture and probability and ease of compliance. (I will circulate the URL of that report as soon as it is released.) > Consequently, it does not make much sense to focus on this issue. > Simply let archives flourish wherever they may and in whatever form. On the contrary, it makes a great deal of sense to focus on this issue, to try to understand it, and to try to guide policy and implementation in the direction that is likely to maximise the propagation of OA self-archiving across disciplines and institutions, rather than to minimize it: The US central self-archiving mandate will certainly generate OA for NIH-funded biomedical research. But why not, for the same money and mandate, generate so much more OA, by simply dropping the stipulation that the self-archiving must be central (in PubMed Central), and instead let the self-archiving propagate naturally across institutions and their disciplines? This OA maximization is attainable at no functional cost or sacrifice whatsoever. All it requires is a small parameter change that will confer huge benefits. > If some institutions seem to feel more at ease with the presence of > some centralized archives, so be it, so long as they do not object to > the parallel development of institutional, disciplinary or even > individual archives. I could not follow the logic of this. (It seems to confound two senses of the word "institution"). As far as I know, no one has spoken about what institutions do or not feel "at ease" with (and most individual sentiments of "ease" here are more about ease with what individuals are accustomed to, rather than about what is actually optimal, either for the individuals, their institutions, or OA). The issue concerns what form of mandated OA self-archiving is likely to generate the most OA, soonest. The concerned parties seem to be the following: (1) NIH, which is a central (national) research-funding agency, which is also associated with (2) NLM, which has a superb and invaluable central index for abstracts and links across all of biomedicine, PubMed, and which also has associated with it a small but useful and growing central OA Archive, PubMed Central (PMC). The US Congress is considering making it law that NIH should mandate the self-archiving of all NIH-funded research in PMC. The self-archiving mandate for NIH-funded research is extremely desirable and welcome. The point under discussion here is that by changing one small parameter in the mandate -- namely, to require only that the research be self-archived in an OAI-compliant OA archive, without stipulating that it must be PMC -- the very same NIH mandate can and will generate far, far more OA, naturally propagating of its own accord across institutions and their disciplines. The functionality will be identical (and PMC can easily and automatically harvest all the NIH-funded institutional metadata if it wishes, as well as to serve as a backup OAI archive for the full-texts if an author's institutions does not yet have an OAI archive). http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&db_id=cp108&r_n=hr636.108&sel=TO C_338641& The UK mandate (if/when implemented) is already optimal in this regard. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/ 39903.htm Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-For um.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml