On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, David Goodman wrote: > If we were able to achieve both a network of discipline based repositories, > and one > of IRs (thus accommodating all preferences), would it not be better for the > items to be > mirrored, rather than just linked and harvested? The virtue of mirroring would > be the provision of multiple copies as an automatic byproduct and immediately > providing truly reliable archiving not under the control of a single > institution.
Mirroring (and back-up, caching, and other valuable features) are not an *or*, in place of linking and harvesting, they are an *and*, as a safeguard, and for speed and efficiency. > As for the rest of the NIH policy, it does have one really good feature that > you did not mention. It would be very easy to improve on it next year. > The embargo can be shortened, all the way to zero. The material can improve to > the pdf's. The "requested," which is being read by all those with NIH grants > as > meaning "required, unless you want to gamble with your career" can change to > "required." One can always improve on a flawed policy. But meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and valuable usage and impact are being needlessly lost, while people do wait-and-see apologetics for a needlessly flawed policy -- and one that runs the risk of being cloned and copied in its present flawed form, just because of where it comes from. Not to mention the Publisher Back-Sliding (like Nature's) that this flawed policy (inadvertently) encourages, and continues to encourage as long as it remains in place, thereby slowing things even further. As I said, though, other, far better models are out there, and on the ascendant. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php (And moving from authors' postprints to publishers' PDFs is not necessarily an improvement!) 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 (1998-2005) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.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-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/