Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Peter Suber reports in Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_03_14_fosblogarchive.html#a107979070605922309 DSpace Federation now open to all The DSpace Federation http://www.dspace.org/ is now open to everyone. The federation welcomes new members who can contribute through programming, testing, debugging, writing and reviewing documentation, or participating in any of the new domain-specific Special Interest Groups it is launching. For more detail see MacKenzie Smith's summary http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dspace-general/2004-March/000140.html of last week's meeting http://dspace.org/conference/index.html of the DSpace user community. Meanwhile, Eprints has not been idle either! The following is some shameless promotion of Eprints, which lacks the promotional funding of DSpace. But please note that there is no real competition between DSpace and Eprints! Neither project is selling anything, and both are giving their software away. (In fact, Les Carr of Eprints and MacKenzie Smith of DSpace are discussing how the two projects can collaborate and coordinate their efforts.) Although both softwares are open-source and free, and both can do roughly the same things (and both were even initially designed by the same person!), Eprints' focus is much more targetted and specific: Eprints is dedicated primarily to the self-archiving of universities' peer-reviewed journal article output. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php DSpace is intended for a variety of institutional uses, which also include digital content management, digital preservation, online courseware and electronic publishing. Eprints, which started two years earlier and is the most widely used OAI archive-creating software worldwide, is giving first, second and third priority to promoting Universities' Open Access Provision to their peer-reviewed research output. Toward that end, here are the main Eprints milestones: The GNU Eprints software itself, with Chris Gutteridge's continuous upgrades incorporating features requested by the user community http://software.eprints.org/ Eprints runs an Institutional Archives Registry (not just for Eprints Archives) http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php It currently lists 143 archives (11 of them Dspace, 123 of them Eprints) Please come and register your Archives too! Eprints has also created an Eprints Handbook (funded by the Open Society Institute) to help universities create OAI Archives and to develop procedures and policies for filling them: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/ Eprints also created and hosts the BOAI self-archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ as well as the BOAI Forum http://www.eprints.org/boaiforum.php Eprints's Steve Hitchcock and other Eprints staff and students have generated the many OpCit projects and papers on citation linking and analysis, self-archiving users surveys, etc. http://opcit.eprints.org/ Eprints' Tim Brody's citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/ is a citation-link-based "google" for the OA literature, ranking papers and authors by citation impact or download impact. The download/citation correlator/predictor can also predict eventual citations from today's downloads: http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php Eprints deposited in Eprints accordingly focus on the article's reference lists and citation linking. Mike Jewell has created paracite which seeks the full-text of cited articles on the web. http://paracite.eprints.org/ Eprints has also developed models for university self-archiving policy that universities can consider adopting along with the Eprints software: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php as well as the model Tardis project http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html Eprints's Mike Jewell has also created a standardized OAI CV that universities and research funders can use in research evaluation and performance assessment: http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ Eprints's Tim Brody has also created Celestial, a software that harvests metadata from OAI-compliant repositories and re-exposes that metadata to other services http://celestial.eprints.org/ as well as an oai-perl library http://oai-perl.sourceforge.net/ Eprints staff have contributed to many conferences and workshops to promote self-archiving in general (and Eprints in particular), e.g.: http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html Eprints runs three mailing lists for users: EP-General, EP-Tech and EP-Underground http://software.eprints.org/maillist.php as well as a demonstration server in which potential adopters can try out the features of Eprints: http://software.eprints.org/demo.php Eprints provides powerpoints to be used for the promotion of self-archiving and Open Access Provision: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt Eprints is conducting an extensive series of digitometric studies to measure and document the dramatic deg
Re: The Harvards, the Have-Nots, and Open Access
>sh> [A]lthough the Harvards are somewhat better off than the Have-Nots >sh> in their institutional access, *no* institution (or institutional >sh> consortium) has remotely enough money to afford toll access to all >sh> or even most of the planet's 24,000 serials: only to a small and >sh> shrinking minority of them. >sh> >sh> Nor is open access merely a matter of making tolls more affordable: >sh> Even if all 24,000 journals were sold at-cost (zero profit) it would >sh> still remain true of every article published that most of its would-be >sh> users could not access it, because most institutions worldwide still >sh> could not afford most journals, even at-cost... Anonymous comment: > I expect that at least one library, namely Harvard's, could afford all these > journals, even with the publisher profits. But your statement would surely > be correct if you changed "no institution" to "almost no institution." I am happy to amend the statement to "almost no institution," But let me also add these data: According to the Ulrich/Bowkers Serials listing at http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ "The 'Ulrich's Universe' consists of the approximately 175,000 active status titles that are included in the Ulrich's database. The Ulrich's Universe does not include ceased or suspended titles, or titles that are "forthcoming" titles (such as those announced for publication or announced but never published)." Of those 175,000 serials, Ulrichs says it has about 24,000 "refereed serials": "As used by Bowker in the Ulrich's database, the term refereed is applied to a journal that has been peer-reviewed. Refereed serials include articles that have been reviewed by experts and respected researchers in specific fields of study including the sciences, technology, the social sciences, arts and humanities." According to the excellent ARL statistics at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats the *total* (refereed and unrefereed) serials holdings of the top and bottom 15 of their 115 US/Canada research universities are: Mean31983.4652 Median 28454.50 Std Deviation 17103.5302 Std Error Mean 1594.91242 100% Max106869.0 99% 90707.0 95% 69218.0 90% 53934.0 75% Q3 38121.0 50% Median 28454.5 RankInstitution Total Current Serials 1 HARVARD 106869. 2 ILLINOIS, URBANA90707. 3 CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY83089. 4 CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 79552. 5 YALE69664. 6 MICHIGAN69218. 7 CORNELL 62077. 8 INDIANA 60019. 9 PENNSYLVANIA STATE 56270. 10 VIRGINIA55843. 11 COLUMBIA54958. 12 TORONTO 53934. 13 NORTH CAROLINA STATE52769. 14 STANFORD50056. 15 TEXAS 50014. ... 100 CASE WESTERN RESERVE 17506. 101 SOUTHERN ILLINOIS 17467. 102 VIRGINIA TECH 16679. 103 GEORGE WASHINGTON 16638. 104 QUEEN'S 16109. 105 MISSOURI16073. 106 LOUISVILLE 16028. 107 MASSACHUSETTS 15260. 108 WATERLOO15251. 109 TULANE 14998. 110 KENT STATE 14605. 111 DELAWARE13541. 112 HOWARD 13102. 113 GUELPH 12637. 114 SASKATCHEWAN11261. 115 MANITOBA9865. So Harvard, which is one standard deviation above the next richest university (and over 4 standard deviations above the mean) still purchases only 60% of the Ulrich's total. Now this could have various explanations. (Maybe 40% are junk, with no academic interest.) And the 24,000 refereed journals are only 13% of the Ulrichs total and 23% of the Harvard total. And one has no idea what the priorities are. But the stats do suggest that even Harvard's budget is not omnipotent -- and that it is a statistical order of magnitude higher than the next richest (and 4 SDs above the mean). I often speak about the "Harvards" vs. the "Have-Nots" in discussing access and impact effects, pointing out that even if the Harvards are somewhat better off in terms of access to the research output of the Have-Nots, the impact of their own research output is still diminished by the fact that the Have-Nots (which are in the vast majority) cannot access it! http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#29.Sitting But I'm happy to add the qualifier "almost" if it is still warranted in the light of these stats. (The zero-profit conditional is, after all, counterfactual!) What is important, I think, is to dissociate the access/impact problem from the affordability problem, rather than to focus on how many universities might be able to afford how much. "The Affordable-Access (AA) Problem and The Open-Access (OA) Problem Are Not the Same" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3483.html Stevan
Nature Web Debate on Open Access
Hi Stevan fyi; the first of the focus week went live tonight; updated weekly; will run to around mid-May http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/ Best Declan
