Re: Interview with Professor Robert Darnton About Harvard's Open Access Mandates
Back to old points, but I cannot let them pass. Jean-Claude guédon -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Wed 10/28/2009 10:54 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Interview with Professor Robert Darnton About Harvard's Open Access Mandates ** Apologies for Cross-Posting ** Full Hyperlinked version of this posting: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/645-guid.html [snip] Professor Darnton's podcast is highly recommended. Just a few (minor) points of clarification: 1. Public Access. Although worldwide public access to universities' refereed research output is a desirable and welcome side-benefit of OA and OA mandates, a lot of research is, as Prof. Darnton points out, "esoteric," intended for and of direct interest only to specialists. It is the scholarly and scientific progress that this maximized peer-to-peer access makes possible that confers the primary public benefit of OA. Pubic access and student/teacher are secondary bonuses. Research may be esoteric at times (and depending on the discipline), but this is not its fate to be limited to researchers. In other words, the base line for research results is the whole of humanity. De facto, a good share of it may be accessible to only a few specialists, but this is a defacto, not a de jure, point. One could add that that the advent of open access is going to push back the expert/vulgus distinction and bring us back to a continuum of knowledge compeetence. This has great implications for the future of education and science popularization. [snip] 4. Journal Article Output vs. Book Output. The Harvard OA mandate covers journal article output, not book output. It would of course be a welcome outcome if eventually OA mandates made it possible for universities to save money on journal subscriptions, which could then be used to purchase books. But it must be clearly understood that not only does the OA mandate not touch books, but the economics of book publication are very different from the economics of journal publication, so even an eventual universal transition to Gold OA journal publication does not entail a transition to Gold OA book publication. I beg to differ here again. We aare speaking about the results of research and the "books" targeted here are "research monographs". They often are the result of research supported by public money. Books have to be considered alongside journal articles. Not doing so is equivlent to exluding all the humanities and a good share of the social sciences. [snip] 6. Proxy Deposit By Journals. It is splendid that Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication is providing help and support for Harvard authors in understanding and complying with Harvard's mandate, including depositing papers on authors' behalf. I am not so sure it is a good idea to encourage the option of having the journal do the deposit by proxy on the author's behalf (after an embargo of its choosing) as a means of complying with the mandate. Best keep that in the hands of the author and his own institutional assigns... I fully agree with the last point Jean-Claude Guédon
COAR establishes a global knowledge infrastructure
PRESS RELEASE COAR establishes a global knowledge infrastructure The international Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) was launched in Ghent on 21 October, during Open Access Week 2009. The aim of the organisation is the networking of over 1000 global scientific repositories comprising peer reviewed publications under the principle of Open Access. This will be achieved by means of common data standards and the co-ordination of scientific research policy development. Coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the Berlin Declaration to provide free and unrestricted access to sciences and human knowledge representation worldwide, COAR takes responsibility for the execution of this vision in bringing together scientific repositories in a wider organisational infrastructure to link confederations across continents and around the globe in support of new models of scholarly communication. "The networking of online publications and research data sets will open new opportunities for research and the teaching of all disciplines in the 21st century", said the founding Chairperson, Dr Norbert Lossau, Director of the State and University Library of Goettingen, emphasising the significance of COAR. "As proven managers of information, libraries are working hand in hand with information specialists, computer scientists and researchers to lend reality to a world-wide network of scientific repositories." COAR emerged from the European DRIVER project, (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), funded by the EU Commission under the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes for e-Infrastructures. Among the 28 founding members of COAR, 23 organisations are based in 13 European countries; others in China (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Japan (National Institute of Informatics and the Digital Repository Federation), Canada (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) and the USA (University of Arizona for the Global Registries Initiative). As the membership continues to grow, interest in COAR is reflected in numerous related organisations, such as the SURF Foundation, JISC, SPARC Europe and eIFL.net, as well as OCLC and Microsoft Research, all of whom support of a common strategic objective to make research findings freely accessible to science and society. The early bird membership fee of EURO 100 is valid until 31 December 2009, open to not-for-profit organisations engaged in higher education, as well as individuals who support the aims of the Association. To register your own interest in becoming a member of COAR, please contact Dr Dale Peters (pet...@sub.uni-goettingen.de CC: los...@sub.uni-goettingen.de) -- Dr D Peters Scientific Technical Manager DRIVER II State and University Library of Goettingen pet...@sub.uni-goettingen.de Tel: +49 551 39 5242 Fax: +49 551 39 5222 Mobile:+49 (0)160 989 67663 -- http://www.driver-repository.eu/ http://www.driver-support.eu/en/ --
Unethical harvesters
I write to draw the list's attention to unethical behaviour by a national harvester - the Australian Research Online gateway. This gateway, operated by the National Library of Australia, has rejected the OAI-PMH standard and has announced a local variant. This sort of behaviour by harvesters must be firmly stamped on as soon as possible. International standards are to be complied with, not modified for budgetary convenience. Responsibility It is the responsibility of any OAI-PMH harvester such as ARO, ADT, ROAR, OpenDOAR, OAIster, etc to harvest correctly from all OAI-PMH-compliant repositories that exist in the wild and which it regard as its target group. Please examine that sentence carefully: the responsibility is with a gateway (which ARO is) to harvest from any compliant OAI-PMH interface, and not to misrepresent the data. The National Library fails on both counts. Remember that international standards such as OAI-PMH are designed to permit global interchange of metadata. Any harvester that insists on some individual or local restriction of the international standard is irresponsible. I did not expect this of the National Library of Australia. So far it seems to be globally unique in this behaviour. Why does it fail? In a nutshell, possible hubris and probable laziness. As to hubris, the NLA has produced a set of requirements for harvesting to which expects repositories to comply. Requiring each repository to comply with its "requirements" rather than National Library of Australia (NLA) harvesting properly: · multiplies the work as each Australian repository has to adapt its interface or opt-out (rather than the NLA doing the job properly once), · introduces the chance of breaking an existing harvesting arrangement if the repository changes its interface, and · would be absolutely fatal to the whole global enterprise if another harvester came up with incompatible requirements. In the case of my university it would definitely break our in-house one-on-one harvesting for Government data reporting and would be likely to have similar flow on effects for our national PhD thesis harvesting at the very least. If all harvesters were to come up with idiosyncratic requirements, the world would be in a real mess and harvesting, not to mention search engines, would be infeasible. Just imagine if Google were to behave the same way in the html world! At most these ARO "requirements" constitute a set of suggestions. The probable laziness comes from programmers. It is trivially easy to do a proper harvest from all the repositories that exist in Australia (there are not that many and even fewer softwares). I can think of at least two strategies, neither of which would take more than an hour of a competent programmer's time. ADT and the rest of the world's OAI harvesters can do it, why can't the NLA? "Best Practice" I hesitated to write this section because some will think it is important. It isn't. The main issue is the one above. However, it is bound to be raised by the NLA to justify their so-called "requirements". This is the argument that their harvesting "requirements" are good practice. In fact it is not difficult to mount a case that the GNU EPrints scheme is better practice than the ARO scheme. Consider these quotes from the Dublin Core Initiative (the red is mine): "4.14. Identifier Label: Resource Identifier Element Description: An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. Recommended best practice is to identify the resource by means of a string or number conforming to a formal identification system. Examples of formal identification systems include the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) (including the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and the International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Guidelines for content creation: This element can also be used for local identifiers (e.g. ID numbers or call numbers) assigned by the Creator of the resource to apply to a particular item. It should not be used for identification of the metadata record itself." [Using Dublin Core - The Elements, http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml] "3. Element Content and Controlled Vocabularies Each Dublin Core element is optional and repeatable, and there is no defined order of elements. The ordering of multiple occurrences of the same element (e.g., Creator) may have a significance intended by the provider, but ordering is not guaranteed to be preserved in every user environment." [Using Dublin Core, http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/] The NLA "requirements" specify that the relevant metadata must be in a dc:identifier field contrary to thes
Interview with Professor Robert Darnton About Harvard's Open Access Mandates
** Apologies for Cross-Posting ** Full Hyperlinked version of this posting: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/645-guid.html Professor Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard has done a JISC podcast interview about Harvard's historic success in achieving faculty consensus on the adoption of an Open Access (OA) mandate in a number of Harvard's faculties. Professor Darnton's podcast is highly recommended. Just a few (minor) points of clarification: 1. Public Access. Although worldwide public access to universities' refereed research output is a desirable and welcome side-benefit of OA and OA mandates, a lot of research is, as Prof. Darnton points out, "esoteric," intended for and of direct interest only to specialists. It is the scholarly and scientific progress that this maximized peer-to-peer access makes possible that confers the primary public benefit of OA. Pubic access and student/teacher are secondary bonuses. 2. NIH Compliance Rate. Prof. Darnton referred to the very low (4%) rate of compliance with the NIH public access policy: That figure refers to the compliance rate during the first two years, when the NIH policy was merely a request and not a requirement. Once the NIH policy was upgraded to a mandate, similar to Harvard's, the compliance rate rose to 60% and is still climbing. (Achieving consensus on mandate adoption and achieving compliance with mandate requirements are not the same issue; nor is the question of which mandate to adopt.) 3. Covering Gold OA Publication Fees. As Prof. Darnton notes, the Harvard mandate (a "Green OA" mandate to deposit authors' final drafts of articles published in any journal, whether a conventional subscription journal or a "Gold OA" journal) is about providing OA to Harvard's research output today, not about converting journals to Gold OA -- although Prof. Darnton anticipates that in perhaps a decade this may happen too. He and Professor Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's successful consensus on adoption, both feel that it helps win author consensus and compliance to reassure those authors who may be worried about the future viability of their preferred journals, to make some funds available to pay for Gold OA publication fees, should that be necessary. (This policy is just fine for a university, like Harvard, that has already mandated Green OA, but if Harvard's example is to be followed, universities should make sure first to mandate Green, rather than only offer to subsidize Gold pre-emptively.) 4. Journal Article Output vs. Book Output. The Harvard OA mandate covers journal article output, not book output. It would of course be a welcome outcome if eventually OA mandates made it possible for universities to save money on journal subscriptions, which could then be used to purchase books. But it must be clearly understood that not only does the OA mandate not touch books, but the economics of book publication are very different from the economics of journal publication, so even an eventual universal transition to Gold OA journal publication does not entail a transition to Gold OA book publication. 5. Compliance Rate With Opt-Out Mandates. It is important to understand also that the compliance rate for OA mandates with opt-out options, like Harvard's, compared to no-opt-out mandates is not yet known (or reported). (My own suggestion would still be that the best model for an OA mandate is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access [ID/OA] mandate, which allows opt-out from OA, as the Harvard mandate does, but not from immediate deposit itself; ID/OA allows the institutional repository's "email eprint request" button to tide over user access needs during any publisher embargo period by providing "Almost OA" to Closed-Access deposits [what Prof. Darnton called "dark" deposits] during any publisher embargo.) 6. Proxy Deposit By Journals. It is splendid that Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication is providing help and support for Harvard authors in understanding and complying with Harvard's mandate, including depositing papers on authors' behalf. I am not so sure it is a good idea to encourage the option of having the journal do the deposit by proxy on the author's behalf (after an embargo of its choosing) as a means of complying with the mandate. Best keep that in the hands of the author and his own institutional assigns... Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
RoMEO Survey
"Centre for Research Communications released a major upgrade to the SHERPA service RoMEO on the 22nd October. If you have not already received the announcement, you can find details of the improvements at: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/news/romeo09.html. We are continuing our work to improve RoMEO. However, in addition to our own ideas, we would like to develop RoMEO in line with the needs and priorities of users such as you. We would therefore like to hear from as many interested parties as possible - Authors, Repository Staff, Repository Management, Funders, Publishers, University management, Journal Editors, and Developers, to name a few. To aid us in this, we have set up a quick online survey that we would like you to complete. Feel free to forward the URL to anyone you know who may be interested in contributing. Please take a look at RoMEO to familiarise yourself with the changes (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo). Then complete our survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=wtrWYRJFbXHFHZKrm3zPIQ_3d_3d Further information about the suggestions mentioned in this survey, please see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/suggestions200910.html The survey will run until 6th November 2009. If you have problems accessing the survey, please contact us: ro...@sherpa.ac.uk" Regards Jane H Smith B.Sc (Hons) M.Sc MCLIP SHERPA Services Development Officer SHERPA - www.sherpa.ac.uk SHERPA/RoMEO - www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php OpenDOAR - www.opendoar.org Juliet - www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet Nottingham E-Prints - http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/ Centre for Research Communications Greenfield Medical Library University of Nottingham, Queens Medical Centre Nottingham NG7 2UH Phone: 0115 951 4341 Fax: 0115 823 0549 This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.
Fwd: Winner of the SHERPA Haiku "Spirit of Open Access" competition
Bill Hubbard has announced the winner of the SHERPA "Spirit of Open Access" competition: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/Haiku.html Set your research free As flowers offer nectar To the passing bee Miggie Pickton, University of Northampton, UK (My own (losing!) entries, submitted under the pseudonym of "Matt Bashore," are at: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/643-guid.html ) -- Forwarded message -- From: Bill Hubbard List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 7:48 AM Subject: Winner of the SHERPA Haiku "Spirit of Open Access" competition To: JISC-REPOSITORIES -- jiscmail.ac.uk Dear Colleagues, We are pleased to announce the winner of the SHERPA Haiku "Spirit of Open Access" competition! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Set your research free As flowers offer nectar To the passing bee Miggie Pickton of the University of Northampton. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ We thought this was witty, well structured and evoked a strong and positive impression of the spirit of open access and a well-deserved winner. We were delighted with the response - well over 100 entries from around the world. Our thanks go to all that entered! We very much enjoyed reading through these, which varied from the witty, through the descriptive, to the quite strange :-) Our thanks also to those who sent left-field entries not for competititon, but for the fun of it. All of the entries were read and considered in a blind judgement by the SHERPA Team at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham, who voted for the winning entry: Miggie will be getting her Winner's Certificate from us and a SHERPA goody bag. We hope that the Haiku will amuse and inspire others! In addition there were many runners-up! The standard of entries was very high: we have a web page which includes some which particularly appealed to us - do take a look! http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/Haiku.html All of the entries were invited under a CC by-nc-sa licence, so do feel free to use any of the Haiku, with attribution and in line with the licence, in any advocacy work that you do. Regards, Bill -- Bill Hubbard JISC Research Communications Strategist Head of Centre for Research Communications SHERPA - www.sherpa.ac.uk RSP - www.rsp.ac.uk RoMEO - www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo JULIET - www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet OpenDOAR - www.opendoar.org Centre for Research Communications Greenfield Medical Library University of Nottingham Queens Medical Centre Nottingham NG7 2UH UK Email crc -- nottingham.ac.uk Tel +44(0) 115 846 7657 Fax +44(0) 115 846 8244 * * * * * * * *
