Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable.
In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. Arthur Sale -----Original Message----- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Monday, 25 February 2013 11:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions >> On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. >> Deposit locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than >> trying to mandate different deposit loci for the various authors in >> an institution. Peter Murray-Rust replied: > This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to > deposit sequences communally - and they do. The genome community > requires genes deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require > crsytal structures and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers... "The community requires"? How, exactly? I do not dispute that there are a smal number of subfields where OA of papers has been successful without mandates, and in some areas instead of in addition there is deposit of certain types of research data unmandated. However, they are a tiny minority of academia. Do you disagree with this assessment? The question then becomes how we get the rest of academia to do so. Despite the possibilities having existed for over twety years, the vast majority have yet to do so, despite it being in their interests. Who can require them to do so? Their employers and funders. What is the most efficient way for employers and funder to mandate deposit (a mandate requires at least some level of compliance checking otherwise it's really just a suggestion). Since: A. The funder alrady knows the institution of the researcher (in most cases the institution receives some funds as wlel as the individual) and virtually all funded research is to researchers within an institutional context. B. the institution knows who the researchers are and knows what grants they hold. C. Interdisciplinary research has no single natural home - does medical physics go to arXiv or PMC? Do we deposit in one and push to the other or deposit in both? D. There are other institutional benefits to local deposit (all local papers are acessible locally without worrying about embargoes; publication lists for projects, researchers, departments, and the whole institution can be automatically generated) which can't so easily be gained from local harvesting from diverse central repositories. >From a mathematical standpoint central and local deposit and harvesting >are functionally equivalent if the technology is sufficiently advanced. But this abstracts away the very practical issue that researchers have a known (and in the vast majority of cases singular) institutional affiliation which the research, institution and funder all know about already, whereas in a large number of cases disciplinary affiliations are murky and hard to define. It is entirely possible to set up a national repository instead of local ones with the log-in credentials of the researcher set to include their affiliation. This is very different from subject repositories and can easily be regarded as a set of institutional repositories sharing a back-end service. Discipline boundaries are too fuzzy to be efficient as a mechanism for mandating and monitoring mandate-compliance. THey are much better situated as overlays providing viewpoints on the data sets (whether holding the full-text or just the meta-data at this point is a minor issue, since the problem at present is not incoherence but lack of content). My published papers include references to, and/or publication in journals of computer science, mathematics, education, artificial intelligence, law, governance, history, psychology, sociology and others. What subject repository should I be depositing in? SHould my distance education papers be in both an educational and a computer science repository? Should my privacy papers be in law, sociology, psychology, economics and computer science? I have had three institutional affiliations and each paper was published when I was at one of another of these, giving clarity and a limit on where I should deposit. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
