Re: [GOAL] Re : Re: SSRN Sellout to Elsevier
PURE does provide an optional repository function, which hasn't been as well developed as other bespoke repository platforms (as you can imagine). One of the interesting issues of PURE-as-CRIS is that it is often run from the Research Management Office, which has a business administration function. Their goals in running the system may be significantly at variance with those of the library - particularly regarding scholarly support and open access. Prof Leslie Carr Web Science institute #⃣ webscience #⃣ openaccess On 18 May 2016, at 14:44, David Prosser <david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk<mailto:david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk>> wrote: Isn’t there a distinction between the use of PURE as a CRIS system and PURE as a repository. I get the feeling the former is much more common than the latter and only the latter will appear in OpenDOAR. David On 18 May 2016, at 15:20, Ross Mounce <ross.mou...@gmail.com<mailto:ross.mou...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Jessica (et al.), I guess it depends which list you read. Elsevier's own list boasts over 200 PURE implementations at different institutions including 28 in the UK: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/pure/who-uses-pure/clients Even Elsevier's list isn't complete. I know for a fact that for instance that the University of Bath uses PURE http://www.bath.ac.uk/ris/pure/ and yet this doesnt appear on Elsevier's list, nor OpenDOAR. OpenDOAR is a registry run by people with close links to EPrints & DSpace. It's no surprise then that EPrints and DSpace are well registered within OpenDOAR. Time to remove the blinkers. PURE is much more prevalent than you'd think from a glance at OpenDOAR. On 18 May 2016 at 13:08, Jessica Lindholm <jessica.lindh...@chalmers.se<mailto:jessica.lindh...@chalmers.se>> wrote: Hi Ross (et al.), Out of curiosity I had to check the amount of Pure instances as you mentioned that many institutional repositories run on Pure. Checking openDOAR’s registry of repositories (http://www.opendoar.org/) I find 16 PURE-repositories listed, whereas e.g. Eprints has +400 instances and DSpace has +1300 instances. However I am not at all sure to what degree openDOAR is containing exhaustive data (or rather I am quite sure it doesn’t) -it is either lacking data about PURE instances – or if not, I do not agree that they are many.. Regards Jessica Lindholm From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>] On Behalf Of Ross Mounce Sent: den 17 maj 2016 22:54 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Re : Re: SSRN Sellout to Elsevier Elsevier have actually done a really good job of infiltrating institutional repositories too: http://rossmounce.co.uk/2013/01/25/elseviers-growing-monopoly-of-ip-in-academia/ They bought Atira back in 2012 which created PURE which is the software that many of world's institutional repositories run on. I presume it reports back all information to Elsevier so they can further monetise academic IP. Best, Ross On 17 May 2016 at 21:22, Joachim SCHOPFEL <joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr<mailto:joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr>> wrote: Uh - "the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide is not for sale"? Not so sure - the green institutional repositories can be replaced by other solutions, can't they ? Better solutions, more functionalities, more added value, more efficient, better connected to databases and gold/hybrid journals etc. - Mail d'origine - De: Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com<mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com>> À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Envoyé: Tue, 17 May 2016 17:03:18 +0200 (CEST) Objet: Re: [GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier Shame on SSRN. Of course we know exactly why Elsevier acquired SSRN (and Mendeley): It's to retain their stranglehold over a domain (peer-reviewed scholarly/scientific research publishing) in which they are no longer needed, and in which they would not even have been able to gain as much as a foothold if it had been born digital, instead of being inherited as a legacy from an obsolete Gutenberg era. I don't know about Arxiv (needless centralization and its concentrated expenses are always vulnerabe to faux-benign take-overs) but what's sure is that the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide is not for sale, and that is their strength... Stevan Harnad On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 8:03 AM, Bo-Christer Björk <bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>> wrote: This is an interesting news item which should interest the readers of this list. Let's hope arXiv is not for sale. Bo-Christer Björk Forwarded Message Subject: Messa
Re: [GOAL] Re : Re: SSRN Sellout to Elsevier
The software may change, but you can't sell off a distributed network of independent repositories. Prof Leslie Carr Web Science institute #⃣ webscience #⃣ openaccess On 17 May 2016, at 21:35, Joachim SCHOPFEL <joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr<mailto:joachim.schop...@univ-lille3.fr>> wrote: Uh - "the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide is not for sale"? Not so sure - the green institutional repositories can be replaced by other solutions, can't they ? Better solutions, more functionalities, more added value, more efficient, better connected to databases and gold/hybrid journals etc. - Mail d'origine - De: Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com<mailto:amscifo...@gmail.com>> À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Envoyé: Tue, 17 May 2016 17:03:18 +0200 (CEST) Objet: Re: [GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier Shame on SSRN. Of course we know exactly why Elsevier acquired SSRN (and Mendeley): It's to retain their stranglehold over a domain (peer-reviewed scholarly/scientific research publishing) in which they are no longer needed, and in which they would not even have been able to gain as much as a foothold if it had been born digital, instead of being inherited as a legacy from an obsolete Gutenberg era. I don't know about Arxiv (needless centralization and its concentrated expenses are always vulnerabe to faux-benign take-overs) but what's sure is that the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide is not for sale, and that is their strength... Stevan Harnad On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 8:03 AM, Bo-Christer Björk <bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>> wrote: This is an interesting news item which should interest the readers of this list. Let's hope arXiv is not for sale. Bo-Christer Björk Forwarded Message Subject: Message from Mike Jensen, SSRN Chairman Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 07:40:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Michael C. Jensen <ad...@ssrn.com><mailto:ad...@ssrn.com> Reply-To: supp...@ssrn.com<mailto:supp...@ssrn.com> To: bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi<mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi> [http://papers.ssrn.com/Organizations/images/ihp_ssrnlogo.png]<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421=4024=15740=http://www.ssrn.com> [http://static.ssrn.com/Images/Header/socialnew.gif] Dear SSRN Authors, SSRN announced today that it has changed ownership. SSRN is joining Mendeley<https://www.mendeley.com/?signout> and Elsevier<https://www.elsevier.com> to coordinate our development and delivery of new products and services, and we look forward to our new access to data, products, and additional resources that this change facilitates. (See Gregg Gordon’s Elsevier Connect<https://www.elsevier.com/connect/ssrn-the-leading-social-science-and-humanities-repository-and-online-community-joins-elsevier> post) Like SSRN, Mendeley and Elsevier are focused on creating tools that enhance researcher workflow and productivity. SSRN has been at the forefront of on-line sharing of working papers. We are committed to continue our innovation and this change will enable that to happen more quickly. SSRN will benefit from access to the vast new data and resources available, including Mendeley’s reference management and personal library management tools, their new researcher profile capabilities, and social networking features. Importantly, we will also have new access for SSRN members to authoritative performance measurement tools such as those powered by Scopus<https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus> and Newsflo<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421=4024=15740=http://www.newsflo.net> (a global media tracking tool). In addition, SSRN, Mendeley and Elsevier together can cooperatively build bridges to close the divide between the previously separate worlds and workflows of working papers and published papers. We realize that this change may create some concerns about the intentions of a legacy publisher acquiring an open-access working paper repository. I shared this concern. But after much discussion about this matter and others in determining if Mendeley and Elsevier would be a good home for SSRN, I am convinced that they would be good stewards of our mission. And our copyright policies are not in conflict -- our policy has always been to host only papers that do not infringe on copyrights. I expect we will have some conflicts as we align our interests, but I believe those will be surmountable. Until recently I was convinced that the SSRN community was best served being a stand-alone entity. But in evaluating our future in the evolving landscape, I came to believe that SSRN would benefit from being more interconnected and with the resources available from a la
[GOAL] Re: Master theses as preprints
The gap between a Masters level dissertation/thesis and a journal article should be quite considerable from the perspective of educational outcomes, let alone the more superficial editorial considerations of restructuring and rewriting. This should guarantee that the two documents are too dissimilar to raise any concerns by the journal reviewing process. — Les Carr On 30 Apr 2015, at 08:29, Longva Leif leif.lon...@uit.nomailto:leif.lon...@uit.no wrote: Question: How common is it that journals reject submitted manuscripts purely because the paper is already available as a preprint in some repository? At our institution (UiT The Arctic University of Norway), master students’ supervisors very often advice their students not to make their thesis available in our IR, because they intend to rewrite it into one or more journal article(s). At the time of finished thesis, they do not know where the paper version will be submitted. And they are afraid that having the thesis openly available in our IR will severely limit their choice of journals to submit to. I was attending the Emtacl15-conference in Trondheim last week, and there I heard about the effort to build a “preprint culture” at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And in response to my question the presenter said that there is no problem with journals not accepting manuscripts already freely available in their IR. So, to all our students and their supervisors, can we comfort them and say that there is no need to hold the theses back from our IR, and that they need not fear rejection? (The same fear is also common among doctoral students who often submit PhD theses that include papers not yet submitted to a journal.) This matter, whether an available preprint is acceptable or not for the journal editors, is not an information you find in Sherpa/RoMEO. In Sherpa/RoMEO you find what you may do with your pre- and postprint if and after it is accepted by the journal. Grateful for views on this. Yours, Leif Longva UiT The Arctic University of Norway ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.orgmailto: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
[GOAL] Re: Master theses as preprints
You can also get a PhD the same way, if you also provide sufficient context and explanation of the overall contribution of your (usually three) papers to satisfy examiners, but that is the opposite to what is being asked. (Submitting a publication for examination, rather than an examination script for publication.) I will admit to having no experience of the kinds of journals (or students) that can make such a ready exchange at Masters level, so I’ll just comment that in the distribution of “the literature” then you could expect to find cases as you describe. I’d want to consider whether they are existence proofs for relatively uncommon events, or sufficient evidence to support general policies that should be applied across the board. — Les Carr On 30 Apr 2015, at 09:34, Longva Leif leif.lon...@uit.no wrote: No, not always so. Some master theses are written in the journal article format. We even have examples of already published articles being submitted as master theses. So I am still keen on views on how common it is for journals to reject manuscripts if the preprint is already available in an IR. Leif -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr Sent: 30. april 2015 10:08 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Master theses as preprints The gap between a Masters level dissertation/thesis and a journal article should be quite considerable from the perspective of educational outcomes, let alone the more superficial editorial considerations of restructuring and rewriting. This should guarantee that the two documents are too dissimilar to raise any concerns by the journal reviewing process. — Les Carr On 30 Apr 2015, at 08:29, Longva Leif leif.lon...@uit.nomailto:leif.lon...@uit.no wrote: Question: How common is it that journals reject submitted manuscripts purely because the paper is already available as a preprint in some repository? At our institution (UiT The Arctic University of Norway), master students’ supervisors very often advice their students not to make their thesis available in our IR, because they intend to rewrite it into one or more journal article(s). At the time of finished thesis, they do not know where the paper version will be submitted. And they are afraid that having the thesis openly available in our IR will severely limit their choice of journals to submit to. I was attending the Emtacl15-conference in Trondheim last week, and there I heard about the effort to build a “preprint culture” at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And in response to my question the presenter said that there is no problem with journals not accepting manuscripts already freely available in their IR. So, to all our students and their supervisors, can we comfort them and say that there is no need to hold the theses back from our IR, and that they need not fear rejection? (The same fear is also common among doctoral students who often submit PhD theses that include papers not yet submitted to a journal.) This matter, whether an available preprint is acceptable or not for the journal editors, is not an information you find in Sherpa/RoMEO. In Sherpa/RoMEO you find what you may do with your pre- and postprint if and after it is accepted by the journal. Grateful for views on this. Yours, Leif Longva UiT The Arctic University of Norway ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.orgmailto: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 ___ 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
[GOAL] Re: The direction of travel for open access in the UK
Like Fred I found the whole event rather mystifying. The attitude to green OA by the publishers and societies is completely incompatible with their stated desire for time to adapt to the new OA realities. If they really are looking for time to adapt (as opposed to a perpetual prevarication), then green affords them a suitable breathing space as it can only lead subscription cancellation when compliance is close to 100%. The atmosphere in the Royal Society was thick with the sense of commercial entitlement. When a representative of the House of Lords asked what was the point of publishers when they could be replaced by repositories, Steve Hall from IOPP responded tetchily by asking what was the point of the House of Lords. I have less and less understanding why the government insists on consulting with the current commercial service providers. (Did it ask permission of Dell and HP PC manufacturers before the funding councils pursued new kinds of e-science cyberinfrastructure based in the cloud?) That was the basis of my question to the chair: why does the Finch report state that it is concerned about the sustainability of the complex ecology of research communication? Research communication itself is quite simple, it is the broader research ecosystem incorporating hundreds of thousands of researchers writing and reading millions of papers annually - that is the complex ecosystem in need of consideration. And it is not run for the benefit of publishing companies. Sent from my iPhone On 9 Mar 2013, at 17:10, Friend, Fred f.fri...@ucl.ac.ukmailto:f.fri...@ucl.ac.uk wrote: Open access in the UK is coming to a crossroads. Pointing in one direction are members of the political and scientific Establishment, working hard to convince the UK research community that a preference for APC-paid open access is the way to go, while wishing to travel down another road to open access are many senior people in universities and also many of the younger researchers, understanding the value in institutional repositories which the political and scientific Establishment refuse to support. Standing in the middle of the crossroads are many of the society publishers the Government wishes to protect, liking the Government’s policy in principle but not liking the uncertainties surrounding the implementation of that policy. A discussion and dinner held at the Royal Society one evening this week illustrated the determination of the political and scientific Establishment in the UK to force through an APC-preferred open access policy: · No supporter of the repository route to open access was invited onto the panel at the meeting and the few dissenters from the Government/RCUK policy invited to the meeting found it very difficult to catch the Chairman’s eye. · The repository route to open access was only mentioned as a threat to the publishing industry and not as opportunity to introduce an academic-friendly and cost-effective business model for scholarly communication. · Opposition to the Government/RCUK policy came from a society publisher, on the grounds that the UK Government has not fully-funded a policy that will enable the publishing industry to survive in an open access world. · The unwillingness of the UK Government to consult with supporters of open access repositories is also illustrated by a response received this week to an FOI Request asking for details of a meeting held by Minister David Willetts on 12 February 2013. This meeting was attended by 12 representatives from publishers and learned societies with publishing interests and only 4 representatives from Higher Education. · The UK Government bias towards consultation with publishers was first illustrated by the response to an FOI Request in 2005, which revealed that the then Minister Lord Sainsbury had more meetings on open access with publisher representatives than with research representatives. Most UK universities are continuing to support their institutional repositories and adding versions of research papers to those repositories. Universities unable to afford the cost of the Government/RCUK preferred policy may decide to use the RCUK’s promise that institutions will have discretion to choose for themselves between the various open access models and opt for more green than gold. The only beneficiaries from the Government’s preferred policy appear to be the high-profit STM publishers - who will continue to dominate both subscription and open access markets - and a small number of open access publishers with strong academic support. Amongst the losers may be the smaller society publishers without the breadth of support to secure a significant share of the open access publishing market. It is to be hoped that the promised monitoring of both the Finch Report Recommendations and the RCUK policy will take a broader view of open access and of the effect of policies than has been evident to date. Fred Friend
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
I assume that your problems with harvesting repositories are the publisher objections on the principle that the *author* is allowed to decide to deposit in the appropriate place, but that a third party does not have the right to make a deposit independently of the author's wishes. (For the purposes of this post I am ignoring the damage done to the concept of Open Access by this distinction.) Whatever reason, and I think that the huge variety of Web search engines and OAI-PMH services has shown that potentially hundreds of repositories is really no obstacle, the repository community has invested in the capability to make automated deposits on behalf of their users into centralised repositories such as PMC. The SWORD protocol has for several years been supported by arXiv and used internationally by EPrints, DSpace and Fedora institutional repositories. For more information, see Use Case 4 in SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios available from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january12/lewis/01lewis.html This means that a sustainable distributed network of institutional repositories, where local support and investment is provided for a local community of scientists and scholars, can support and supplement the centralised repositories which already exist. --- Les Carr On 24 Feb 2013, at 13:23, Kiley, Robert r.ki...@wellcome.ac.uk wrote: Andrew Even if deposit locally and then harvest centrally is easy (and I would argue that it makes far more sense to do it the other way round, not least as a central repository like Europe PMC would have to harvest content from potentially hundreds of repositories) the real problem is this content typically cannot be harvested (and made available) for legal reasons. So, by way of example, if you look at the Elsevier archiving policy (http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/green-open-access) you will see that archiving of the Accepted Author Manuscripts **is** permissible in IR's (and somewhat curiously in Arxiv), but not elsewhere, like PMC or Europe PMC. So, if we set out about harvesting content and then making it available, we would receive take-down notices, which we would be obligated to comply with. I use Elsevier in this example, but other publishers also monitor PMC/Europe PMC and issue take-down notices as they deem appropriate. A better approach, in my opinion, is to encourage deposit centrally, where, not only can we convert the document into a more preservation-friendly, XML format, but we can also have clarity as to whether we can subsequently distribute the document to the relevant IR. From April 2012, all Wellcome funded content that is published under a gold model will be licenced using CC-BY, and as such, suitable for redistribution to an IR (or indeed anywhere, subject to proper attribution). Regards Robert -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: 24 February 2013 12:18 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Murray-Rust, Peter Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions Peter, Thank you for the correction. I mis-remembered the mandate from these (I think a bit confusingly named) systems. Too late to send a correction to an organisation like the White House. Hopefully if anyone who understand it well enough for it to be useful actually reads it, they will also spot and discount the error. 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. It's easy enough to automatically harvest/cross-deposit, and then one gets the best of all worlds. Central deposit and then local harvest is the wrong workflow. It's trying to make a river flow upstream. Sure, you can do it, but why bother if all you need is a connection one way or the other. ALl the benefits you claim simply come from deposit, not direct deposit, in central repositories. Which would you recommend for medical physics, by the way? ArXiv or PMC? Both surely, but that's much more easily achieved if the workflow is to deposit locally then automatically upload/harvest to both, than two central deposits or trying to set up cross-harvesting from ArXiv to PMC. -- 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 This message has been scanned for viruses by Websense Hosted Email Security - www.websense.com
[GOAL] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke
Publishers are capitalists - I don't think they'd argue the point. The hostage metaphor really works for me and for many of my colleagues, as it involves elements of ENFORCED TAKING and subsequent DEPRIVATION tied to conditions of RANSOM. Eric's piece makes the really interesting and helpful point There are no Hitlers. There are no Mothers Teresa. There are just individuals and organizations looking out for their self-interest in a market complicated by historical baggage He's certainly right about Hitler, but only he made the comparison in the first place. (A search for Hitler and open access reveals a rather funny Downfall video about Hitler's attitude to peer review, but it's not really what Eric was concerned about.) He's absolutely on the nose about self-interested individuals and organisations, and this is rather the point of open access! The research publishing industry's self-interest need not be such an enormous problem to the self-interest of the research industry. Thanks to the Web, the research industry can regain a better balance in the scholarly ecosystem. Les Carr On 6 Nov 2012, at 04:32, Eric F. Van de Velde eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.commailto:eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com wrote: Publishers are manipulative capitalists who extort academia by holding hostage the research papers they stole from helpless scholars on a mission to save the world. This Hitler vs. Mother Teresa narrative is widespread in academic circles. Some versions are nearly as shrill as this one. Others are toned-down and carry scholarly authority. All versions are just plain wrong. To see how this ends, go to http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/hitler-mother-teresa-and-coke.html Comments welcome. --Eric. http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com Google Voice: (626) 898-5415 Telephone: (626) 376-5415 Skype: efvandevelde -- Twitter: @evdvelde E-mail: eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.commailto:eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.orgmailto: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
[GOAL] Re: Hat Tip: Let's not leave Humanities behind in the dash for open access
Is platinum effectively the same as green? Sent from my iPad On 26 Jul 2012, at 14:12, Beall, Jeffrey jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu wrote: I make the distinction between gold open-access and platinum open-access. Author fees + free to reader = gold open access No author fees + free to reader = platinum open access This discussion, I think, demonstrates that this distinction is significant and worthy of a separate appellation. Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian / Associate Professor Auraria Library University of Colorado Denver 1100 Lawrence St. Denver, Colo. 80204 USA (303) 556-5936 jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Reckling, Falk, Dr. Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 4:53 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Hat Tip: Let's not leave Humanities behind in the dash for open access I think there is still a misunderstanding with Gold OA. Running a OA journal does not necesserily mean to charges article fees! Take Economics as an example: meanwhile there are some good OA journals, most of them are new but with very prominent advisory boards (which is a good predictor of being successful in the long run) a) E-conomics (institutional funding): http://www.economics-ejournal.org/ b) Theoretical Economics (society based funding): http://econtheory.org/ c) 5x IZA journals published with SpringerOpen (institutional funding): http://journals.iza.org/ d) Journal of Economic Perspective (a former subscription journal but now society based funding): http://www.aeaweb.org/jep/index.php All of them are without APCs, and that model also works in many other fields. What is needed is a very good editorial board and a basic funding by an institution/society, or by a consortium of institutions or by a charity or ... Or why not considering a megajournal in the Humanities and apply a clever business model as PEERJ tries it right now in the Life Science?: http://peerj.com/ In the end, it is up to the community to develop models which fit their needs ... Best Falk Am 26.07.2012 um 12:09 schrieb l.hurt...@ed.ac.uk l.hurt...@ed.ac.uk: The question isn't whether they're free or not, but whether they play major roles as venues and outlets for important Humanities scholarship. And also it's still the case that traditional print journals involve long print cues and delays in publication. And also it's the case that university libraries paying ridiculous subscription charges for journals in the Sciences have less funding for monographs (still the gold standard in Humanities), and even put pressure on Humanities to cut their journals. Finally, there is the concern that the current move to gold OA with pages charges, etc., will adversely affect Humanities scholars. So, please, no snap and simple replies. Let's engage the problems. Larry Hurtado Quoting Jan Szczepanski jan.szczepansk...@gmail.com on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 22:53:06 +0200: Is more than sixteen thousand free e-journals in the humanities and social sciences of any importance in this discussion? http://www.scribd.com/Jan%20Szczepanski Jan 2012/7/25 l.hurt...@ed.ac.uk: Webster concisely articulates the concerns that I briefly mooted a few days ago. Larry Hurtado Quoting Omega Alpha Open Access oa.openacc...@gmail.com on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:03:30 -0400: Hat Tip: Let's not leave Humanities behind in the dash for open access http://wp.me/p20y83-no Nice article this morning by Peter Webster on the Research Fortnight website entitled Humanities left behind in the dash for open access. http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_newstemplate =rr_2colview=articlearticleId=1214091 Check it out. Webster observes that much of the current conversation around the growth of open access focuses on the sciences and use of an author-pays business model. He feels inadequate attention in the conversation has been given to the unique needs of humanities scholarship, and why it may be harder for humanist scholars to embrace open access based on the author-pays model. There is no Public Library of History to match the phenomenally successful Public Library of Science. . Your comments are welcome. Gary F. Daught Omega Alpha | Open Access Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com oa.openaccess @ gmail.com | @OAopenaccess ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal L. W. Hurtado, PhD, FRSE Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature Theology Honorary Professorial Fellow New College (School of Divinity) University of Edinburgh Mound Place Edinburgh, UK. EH1 2LX Office Phone:
An Overview of Open Access for Open Access Week 2010
ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories, is launching an Overview of Open Access (pictured below) that showcases open access material from repositories around the world. Picking one recent deposit at a time, the animated map cycles around the world's repositories showing a description of the deposit itself, together with a description and thumbnail of the repository's home page. Every few seconds another deposit is chosen from another repository, making what we hope is an interesting trip around the World of Open Access! The title of each repository and each deposit is linked from the display, allowing viewers to explore repositories and open access research from around the globe. To view the Overview of Open Access, go to http://roar.eprints.org/oaweek.html [ Part 2, Image/JPG (Name: OAWeekx.jpg) 30 KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 3: Attached Text ] The Small Print! This is an unfunded, temporary, experimental service provided by the ROAR/EPrints team at Southampton. We hope to develop it into a useful tool for advocacy: ultimately we would like to showcase your repository, your deposits and your institution in the context of the world's scientific research. Please bear with us if there are any early technical glitches! Any comments and suggestions should be directed to Tim Brody (t...@ecs.soton.ac.uk), whereas criticisms and complaints should be sent to Les Carr (l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk). ROAR (roar.eprints.org) is a service which tracks the growth of Open Access in almost 2000 repositories across the world. Together with our OpenDOAR partners (www.opendoar.org), we seek to catalogue, analyse and promote the adoption of Open Access services.
Re: Repository effectiveness
., but this tends to overlook the more fundamental problem of this question above. In fact, it is hard to measure the effectiveness of such aspects unless people are using them properly as intended. Nevertheless, my suspicion is that the usability of repository interfaces as a broad topic has been inadequately investigated and therefore, as also indicated in this thread, there may be weaknesses. A quick scan of Google Scholar reveals some work, but not an extensive list and not all recent. It's not clear if such weaknesses might affect all repositories, some repositories depending on software used, or - since repository interfaces are customisable - individual or local repositories. There may be scope for the current JISC projects on repository deposit, such as DepositMO, to look at this. Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, Building 32 School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 On 20 Sep 2010, at 12:56, Sally Morris wrote: I'm not sure Charles is right - certainly, in the study I carried out for the Bioscience Federation in 2007/8, of 648 who said they did not self-archive, only 42 said they didn't know how, or had no access to a repository or support for self-archiving, while a further 23 said they didn't have time.  'Too difficult' was not mentioned at all Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286 Email:  sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of C Oppenheim Sent: 20 September 2010 11:41 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am inclined to think it is a combination of the two;  on the one hand, it's not a high priority in the eyes of many researchers;  and on the other, they perceive (wrongly) that it is a chore to self-archive.  Indeed, the idea that it is a chore may be a convenient justification for failing to take the matter seriously.  Having, say, a librarian to take on the job of doing the self-archiving  helps, but doesn't totally overcome some academics' resistance. I also agree that for a mandate to be effective, there must be negative consequences if the academic does not co-operate. Charles From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris [sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk] Sent: 20 September 2010 11:36 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness I am not convinced that the primary obstacle is the difficulty of deposit. The impression obtained from the studies I did was that the majority of scholars did not know (or had a very vague and often inaccurate idea) about self-archiving, and most had no particular interest in depositing their own work A question of mote and beam, perhaps?! Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286 Email:  sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr Sent: 20 September 2010 10:21 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Repository effectiveness On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bj...@hanken.fi wrote: Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I
Re: Repository effectiveness
On 19 Sep 2010, at 16:09, bj...@hanken.fi wrote: Firstly I have recently uploaded my central 30 articles to our (D-Hanken) repository, In what I would consider best practice fashion. You can check the results at http://www.hanken.fi/staff/bjork/. This took me about one weekâs workload in all including finding the proper files, reformatting the personal versions, checking the copyright issues etc. The actual task of uploading, once I had everything ready, took perhaps the six minutes suggested, but all in my experience around an hour would be more appropriate. Thanks for providing some actual experience and feedback to the list. I have had a look at your user record in your institutional DSpace repository, (how is that related to your home page?, is the material automatically generated by the repository for inclusion in the home page?) and the 24 items that are available for public view (perhaps some are stuck in the editorial process?) appeared at the following times 3 items on 2010-Apr-28 5 items on 2010-Jun-01 8 items on 2010-Jun-17 5 items on 2010-Aug-12 3 items on 2010-Aug-16 DSpace does not reveal whether you submitted them in a single batch and the library processes batched them up, or whether you deposited them in batches and they were made available immediately. I think that the pattern of deposit is important in determining the overall impact of the workload on the author - and more importantly, on the psychological impact of the workload. It must be the case that depositing thirty articles seems like a substantial administrative task, especially when there are so many other activities demanded of an academic's daily time. Even five or six items a day is a substantial diary blocker! This is the backlog phenomenon - any new repository (or new user) has to face the fact that getting started is the hardest part of using a repository. Depositing a reasonable representation of your recent (or historical) output is A Huge Chore. However, once you have achieved that, then the incremental workload for depositing an individual paper when you have just written it seems trivial. Especially compared to the job of sorting out the references :-) This was certainly the case for our (school) repository in 2002, when we decided to mandate the use of EPrints for returning our annual list of research outputs to the University's admin office. (Stevan may remember this!) People whined, people complained, people dragged their heels, but ultimately they did it. But the following year, there were no complaints, just a few reminders sent out. And an incredibly onerous admin task (a month's work of 6 staff to produce the departmental research list) was reduced to a 10 minute job for one person (using Word to reformat the list that EPrints provided). And since then, we haven't looked back. There is a report available which details the study we did at that time to determine the effort involved in self-deposit: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ It includes all the data that we collected, and some visualisations of the Web activity that was involved in depositing several hundred records. That is where the 6 minute figure comes from, if you are interested. We are helping out some other key researchers at my school to upload and there are many non-trivial task. For instance researchers in Finance whose âpersonal versionsâ consist of text files and several tables which are provided to the publishers as sheets in excel files. There may be several hours of work to format a decent personal version of such a papers. Since some of best authors are very busy (dean and vice dean of the school) this has to be done by admin staff. You can make a Sunday best version of the papers and the spreadsheet tables, or you could just deposit the texct and the tables separately - if that is acceptable to the authors. (This is a common phenomenon in Open Educational Resources - people's teaching materials are never finalised, and there are always just one or two more adjustments to make to prepare them for public view. And so a desire for the best sometimes means that material is never shared.) Secondly the situation reseachers face in making the decision to upload a green copy resembles the situation faced by any individual deciding whether or not to take into use a new IT system. There is a large body of literature on this in Information Systems (my field) research and the UTAUT model :...I would suggest that using a model like these to model how rational scholars behave could be could quite fruitful, rather than staring from scratch. It would be interesting to analyse some of the Open Access experience from the last decade in terms of these models, but we are not starting from scratch in this area. The MIS models are very general, and the OA experience is very specific. Harnad, for example, maintains a list of 38 rationalisations that people
Re: Repository effectiveness (was: JAIRO (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online))
On 18 Sep 2010, at 21:59, Velterop wrote: o Make a repository easy to find (a Google search for University of X repository more often seems to produce a link to an article or press release about the repository than a link to the repository itself, at least on the first few pages of the search results â repositories often have names or acronyms that make them difficult to find if you don't know the name) o Draw attention, unambiguously and very clearly, on the repository home page, to the possibility of submitting a paper/manuscript (e.g. a brightly coloured submit now! button) o Make the deposit procedure very, very easy and intuitive. Involve UX experts where possible. o Make deposit the *prime* focus of the repository. Repositories and their contents can be searched in a variety of ways and via many routes, but submission of articles can only take place via the repository's own web site. I'd like to take this opportunity to mention the new JISC DepositMO project whose aim is to increase the ease of deposit into repositories chiefly by allowing direct deposit from word processors, office programs and the computer desktop (save as... and send to... directly into EPrints or DSpace). Although the repository's web interface should be a useful and advantageous environment for the author as well as the reader, the fact is that depositing is An Extra Thing to add to the author's workflow, and it might help to woo some recalcitrant professors if it appeared to be the same thing as saving a new copy and it could be achieved in the familiar interface of Microsoft Word. I don't think that technology changes alone will stimulate more Self Archiving (improve the repository! make it more friendly! make it faster! make it more useful!) There has to be a combination of social, management and technological advances all pressing in the same direction. Make Open Access policies mandatory, make open access practices a key part of your institutional business activities and make open access technology as useful as possible. --- Les Carr http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/depositmo/ PS Please note that the work of DepositMO (where MO stands for Modus Operandi) is building on the SWORD protocol for repository deposits and on Microsoft's Article Authoring Add-in.
Re: Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition
On 12 Jul 2010, at 06:25, Leslie Chan wrote: This is rather circular. The view that academic papers should be fixed in form and format is rather out of sync with the emergence of new forms of scholarly expression enabled by the web. I don't wish to argue that academic writing SHOULD BE fixed in format, merely to observe that IT IS predominantly so. Academics should be encouraged to explore a heterogeneous range of formats, reaching different audiences and finding new ways to write about research. When they do, we'll find a way to measure it :-) If you believe they are in a significant way, let's do it! I think this discussion raises a fundamental question about the design of IRs and their support for scholarship. IRs must do better to capture the diversity of scholarly contribution and formats, and make them count in meaningful way. I wholeheartedly concur. Do we really need more output based comparisons? We need a range of comparisons of many sorts to get as full a picture as possible. How should we define the most useful? Should download and other usage stats be taken into consideration, instead of only in-bound links? If we had access to those statistics, by all means lets use them. Why wait for Microsoft? What has the the open source community be doing on this front? What about OpenOffice? Any good open source NLM DTD conversion tools out there? Why has it taken so long? If there was something for open office then it would be trivial for repositories to apply it to Microsoft Word documents. -- Les Carr
Re: Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition
On 9 Jul 2010, at 08:12, Isidro F. Aguillo wrote: However perhaps you will like this page we prepared for the University rankings related to UK universities commitment to OA: http://www.webometrics.info/openac.html Thanks for preparing the page - it is very informative and helpful in answering questions about the interpretation of the IR ranking relating to the discrepancy between the relative ordering of institutions in the IR list and other (independent) research rankings. As you point out, much of the difference is explained by the relative openness of each institution's literature. Since 50% of the score is devoted to in-links, and there is little motivation to link to an empty bibliographic record, a high proportion of OA papers will tend to attract more links, more traffic and hence a more impactful repository. Some institutions have therefore benefited from their efforts to deposit OA papers, becoming more visible and hence more highly rated. Others are seeing the opposite effect - institutions that would normally be at the top of any research list are much lower down than expected. Some of these institutions don't have very effective repositories and some do but hide them behind firewalls. Either way the net effect is the same - not much visible public literature to attract links or traffic. I hope that the effect of this league table will be to encourage institutions to redouble their efforts in regard to Open Access. I also hope that it will be possible to have further public dialogue so that the process can be increasingly open and the community can better understand, verify and trust your metrics. Thanks again for your contribution! -- Les Carr On 9 Jul 2010, at 08:12, Isidro F. Aguillo wrote: Dear Stevan: A lot of interesting stuff to think about. We are already working on some of those proposals but it is not easy. However perhaps you will like this page we prepared for the University rankings related to UK universities commitment to OA: http://www.webometrics.info/openac.html Thanks for your useful comments, El 08/07/2010 18:34, Stevan Harnad escribió: On 2010-07-08, at 4:43 AM, Isidro F. Aguillo wrote: Dear Hélène: Thank you for your message, but I disagree with your proposal. We are not measuring only contents but contents AND visibility in the web. Dear Isidro, If I may intervene with some comments too, as this discussion has some wider implications: Yes, you are measuring both contents and visibility, but presumably you want the difference between (1) the ranking of the top 800 repositories and (2) the ranking of the top 800 *institutional* repositories to be based on the fact that the latter are institutional repositories whereas the former are all repositories (central, i.e., multi-institutional, as well as institutional). Moreover, if you list redundant repositories (some being the proper subsets of others) in the very same ranking, it seems to me the meaning of the ranking becomes rather vague. Certainly HyperHAL covers the contents of all its participants, but the impact of these contents depends of other factors. Probably researchers prefer to link to the paper in INRIA because of the prestige of this institution, the affiliation of the author or the marketing of their institutional repository. All true, but perhaps the significance and usefulness of the rankings would be greater if you either changed the weight of the factors (volume of full-text content, number of links) or, alternatively, you designed the rankings so the user could select and weight the criteria on which the rankings are displayed. Otherwise your weightings become like the h-index -- an a-priori combination of untested, unvalidated weights that many users may not be satisfied with, or fully informed by... But here is a more important aspect. If I were the president of INRIA I will prefer people using my institutional repository instead CCSD. No problem with the last one, they are makinng a great job and increasing the reach of INRIA, but the papers deposited are a very important (the most important?) asset of INRIA. But how much INRIA papers are linked, downloaded and cited is not necessarily (or even probably) a function of their direct locus! What is important for INRIA (and all institutions) is that as much as possible of their paper output should be OA, simpliciter, so that it can be linked, downloaded, read, applied, used and cited. It is entirely secondary, for INRIA (and all institutions), *where* their papers are OA, compared to the necessary condition *that* they are OA (and hence freely accessible, usaeble, harvestable). Hence (in my view) by far the most important ranking factor for institutional repositories is how much of their full-text institutional paper output is indeed deposited and OA. INRIA would have no reason to be disappointed if the
Re: Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition
On 8 Jul 2010, at 09:43, Isidro F. Aguillo wrote: Regarding the other comments we are going to correct those with mistakes but it is very difficult for us to realize that Virginia Tech University is faking its institutional repository with contents authored by external scholars. This (and the HAL-based problems) are interpretive issues that bedevil services that analyse repositories. If you assume that a repository is full of locally-authored research literature then you will find all sorts of counter-examples in one area or another. The Rich Media criterion goes some way to filtering out non-documents, but whether the items are scholarly or local or equivalent to those in other repositories is very difficult to ascertain. -- Les Carr El 07/07/2010 23:03, Hélène.Bosc escribió: Isidro, Thank you for your Ranking Web of World Repositories and for informing us about the best quality repositories! Being French, I am delighted to see HAL so well ranked and I take this opportunity to congratulate Franck Laloe for having set up such a good national repository as well as the CCSD team for continuing to maintain and improve it. Nevertheless, there is a problem in your ranking that I have already had occasion to point out to you in private messages. May I remind you that: Correction for the top 800 ranking: The ranking should either index HyperHAL alone, or index both HAL/INRIA and HAL/SHS, but not all three repositories at the same time: HyperHAL includes both HAL/INRIA and HAL/SHS . Correction for the ranking of institutional repositories: Not only does HyperHAL (#1) include both HAL/INRIA (#3) and HAL/SHS (#5), as noted above, but HyperHAL is a multidisciplinary repository, intended to collect all French research output, across all institutions. Hence it should not be classified and ranked against individual institutional repositories but as a national, central repository. Indeed, even HAL/SHS is multi-institutional in the usual sense of the word: single universities or research institutions. The classification is perhaps being misled by the polysemous use of the word institution. Not to seem to be biassed against my homeland, I would also point out that, among the top 10 of the top 800 institutional repositories, CERN (#2) is to a certain extent hosting multi-institutional output too, and is hence not strictly comparable to true single-institution repositories. In addition, California Institute of Technology Online Archive of California (#9) is misnamed -- it is the Online Archive of California http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ (CDLIB, not CalTech) and as such it too is multi-institutional. And Digital Library and Archives Virginia Tech University (#4) may also be anomalous, as it includes the archives of electronic journals with multi-institutional content. Most of the multi-institutional anomalies in the Top 800 Institutional seem to be among the top 10 -- as one would expect if multiple institutional content is inflating the apparent size of a repository. Beyond the top 10 or so, the repositories look to be mostly true institutional ones. I hope that this will help in improving the next release of your increasingly useful ranking! Best wishes Hélène Bosc - Original Message - From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2010 6:07 PM Subject: Fwd: Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition Begin forwarded message: From: Isidro F. Aguillo isidro.agui...@cchs.csic.es Date: July 6, 2010 11:13:58 AM EDT To: sigmetr...@listserv.utk.edu Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition The second edition of 2010 Ranking Web of Repositories has been published the same day OR2010 started here in Madrid. The ranking is available from the following URL: http://repositories.webometrics.info/ The main novelty is the substantial increase in the number of repositories analyzed (close to 1000). The Top 800 are ranked according to their web presence and visibility. As usual thematic repositories (CiteSeer, RePEc, Arxiv) leads the Ranking, but the French research institutes (CNRS, INRIA, SHS) using HAL are very close. Two issues have changed from previous editions from a methodologicall point of view:, the use of Bing's engine data has been discarded due to irregularities in the figures obtained and MS Excel files has been excluded again. At the end of July the new edition of the Rankings of universities, research centers and hospitals will be published. Comments, suggestions and additional information are greatly appreciated. -- === Isidro F. Aguillo, HonPhD Cybermetrics Lab (3C1) IPP-CCHS-CSIC Albasanz, 26-28 28037 Madrid. Spain Editor of the
Re: Funder mandated deposit in centralised or subject based
On 21 Feb 2010, at 13:55, Kiley ,Robert wrote: To give a very practical example there are some publishers (e.g. Elsevier) who allow authors to self-archive papers in an IR, but do NOT allow self-archiving in a central repository like PMC or UKPMC. To be clear, if such papers were harvested into UKPMC from an IR, then they would be subject to a formal take-down notice. If the metadata of the harvested article included the ISSN (or ISSNs) of the journal in question then (a) you would know what you were harvesting and (b) you would be able to filter appropriately In addition to the rights-management problem, there are other issues we need to address such as how a manuscript, ingested from an IR, could be attached to the relevant funder grant, It could include the id of the research grant. In view of these issues our preferred approach is to encourage researchers to deposit centrally, and then provide IR's with a simple mechanism whereby this content can be ingested into their repository. I can understand why a central deposit solution appeals to UKPMC. I would equally be able to understand if the 182 members of the UK Council of Research Repositories had a different perspective :-) However there is enough REF pressure in the system to encourage joined up thinking, so I hope that the UK repository community, the UK research funders and the repository platforms/developers can work together to see their way through this OA problem/opportunity. -- Les Carr
Re: Captured product vs. service
On 21 Feb 2010, at 20:56, Uhlir, Paul wrote: In response to your last question, yes, if the article is made available under an Attribution Only (ATT 3.0) Creative Commons license. This is the recommended license for open access journals and is already broadly in use. The advantage of this license is that it also allows various types of automated knowledge discovery. CC licenses are not without restrictions! By Attribution Only do you mean http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ ? --- Les Carr
Re: Facing up to fraud - China's exponential research growth could fuel fraud
On 19 Feb 2010, at 05:00, Dana Roth wrote: The January 25 issue of Chemistry Industry (issue 2, 2010) has a short article on research fraud which includes a sidebar on the situation in China (see below). This suggests that, contrary to Heather Morrison's suggestion, scholar led open access publishing is not a viable solution. Without a cadre of truly professional peer-reviewers, publication in Chinese journals will become increasingly suspect. I draw the reverse conclusion. The frauds were discovered precisely because the already-peer-reviewed-material was available in an open access form for subsequent analysis. See the IUCR editorial http://journals.iucr.org/e/issues/2010/01/00/me0406/ , and the 2004 presentation to the BCA Crystal Structure EPrints: Publication @ Source Through the Open Archive Initiative ( http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/1633/ ) -- Les Carr
Re: Is the request copy button good for OA?
On 17 Feb 2010, at 10:56, Jan Szczepanski wrote: Publishers are indispensible even today. Without researchers, academic journal publishers would have nothing to publish. Without publishers, researchers would still be very busy indeed doing research. They would probably also have worked out a way to use the Web to review and disseminate their research. -- Les Carr
Re: Is the request copy button good for OA?
On 17 Feb 2010, at 17:06, Dana Roth wrote: Isn't it more likely that researchers would be extra 'busy' trying to sort out what is relevant from everything else on the web? No. Are you suggesting that researchers are incapable of distinguishing research from everything else on the web? Without publishing companies, would we really be incapable of working out how to diseminate our work in high relevance, high visibility channels? Remember, the original question was are researchers parasitic on publishing companies or vice versa. I am not claiming that researchers wouldn't re-invent something that looked remarkably like peer review or scholarly journals. I am only claiming that we can do that without the publishers assistance, whereas they can't do the research without our assistance. It's a dog/tail, boot/foot, don't forget who is the service industry kind of argument. --- Les Carr PS Neither am I claiming that we wouldn't actually want to reinvent something that looked like publishing companies (shock horror) to offload the tedious business of the bulk management of the reviewing and dissemination processes. However, look at which way round that happens. If researchers disappear (and who knows what Peter Mandelson cuts will do in the UK!) then the publishing companies are not likely to create their own scientific research establishments in order to have a convenient source of research information to publish.
Re: AW: Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and Central-Service Issues
On 30 Nov 2009, at 21:15, Armbruster, Chris wrote: Any Internet 101 course will include plenty of examples where deposit, content and service are assembled within a single site (by one provider, company etc.) - the list is really very long, from ArXiv to Amazon, SSRN to Flickr, RePEc to Facebook and so on. Internet 101 theory will then elucidate why this is so an (e.g. network effects, economies of scale and so on). Creating thousands of little repositories was probably never a good idea (and seemingly based on the fundamental misunderstanding that the Internet may be conquered by political willpower alone...). No wonder the harvesting, searching and collecting has never worked. Nevertheless, we do have all those little and near empty repositories (more than 1000), and it is thus necessary and useful to consider how the situation can be improved and repositories given a purpose that will foster their acceptance by scholars. Acceptance comes through service. I think Chris is referring to a Web 101 course (such as I teach on Web Technology and Web science courses). The Web architecture is a distributed, decentralised information system consisting of a multitude of servers and services. As Chris points out, this list of servers is really very long indeed! But I am not sure how Chris can claim that harvesting and searching has never worked, since it is in fact the basis on which tens and hundreds of millions of people experience the Web on a daily basis. --- Les Carr
Re: Comparing repositories - subject-based, institutional, research and national repository systems
On 23 Nov 2009, at 17:22, Armbruster, Chris wrote: Four types of publication repository may be distinguished, namely the subject-based repository, research repository, national repository system and institutional repository. I'm not sure these distinctions are going to be very helpful. For example, some IRs are all-inclusive, whereas some Is have multiple Rs (for research outputs, research data, research students, taught students, learning objects, different colleges, longterm projects etc usw). So if your institution has a subject repository then your typology starts to get very involved! What about consortial repositories (multiple independent institutions share a repository)? And regional repositories? At the end of the day, a repository is just a piece of technology; the differentiation between the repositories will reflect the different social and organisational environments that they serve. How centralised is the institution? What is the relationship between the institution and the state? How well-organised is each (sub) discipline, what are its values, history and combined experience? And most of all, what points of leverage exist in the research context that allow changes of practice to be promoted and mandated. -- Les Carr
Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Noel, Robert E. rn...@indiana.edu wrote: Anyway, others have devoted much more time and energy to this topic than I have, but I'm skeptical of recommendations that bluntly reject other strategies from the outset. ... It's tantamount to engineers and scientists recommending to policy makers that solar and wind energy are viable alternatives that will reduce a country's dependence on oil, but research into biofuels, maglev trains, and clean coal is utter nonsense, and reducing individual energy consumption by changing lifestyles is a sham, and in fact counterproductive. Bob's analogy would be more accurate if it were expressed as one group of people recommending solar and wind energy versus another group of people campaigning for cheaper oil. Open Access is about a fundamental shift to non-toll-access literature made possible by the Web; others are simply petitioning for less extortionate tolls. -- Les
Re: Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself
On 31 Oct 2009, at 13:09, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote: Since when was solar and wind energy free (any more than quality- controlled and value-added research literature!)? On the contrary, sun and wind energy IS FREE. However, building the infrastructure to collect and distribute the energy ISN'T free, so what starts as free to energy utilities is quite costly to the consumer. The analogy with publishing is straightforward: scientific literature is donated free to publishers. The infrastructure to collect and distribute the literature HASN'T BEEN free, but the Open Access proposition is that the Web reduces the costs so drastically that the literature can become just as free to the consumers as it is to the publishers. Currently consumers pay extra for a premium, value-added product (research, not sunlight!) but those that can't afford it have recourse to the free Green OA copy in an institutional repository. --- Les Carr
Re: COPE, HOPE and OA
On 19 Sep 2009, at 12:25, Stevan Harnad quoted: the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) is a key initiative in the transition to open access. http://www.oacompact.org/ In these straitened times I wonder if it would be better for the HE sector to launch CORE, the Compact for Open Access Research Equity, replacing concerns about publishers with concerns about researchers: We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly RESEARCHERS, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for RESEARCHERS -- Les Carr
Re: Special OAIster Announcement from OCLC
On 21 Sep 2009, at 22:29, Charlotte Hess wrote: What I worry about is that these databases will use this as an excuse for not indexing OA journals along with the others. Has anyone researched this? They can't get reference lists from OAI-PMH, although the JISC Repository Infrastructure project is looking at approaches that would allow us to share citations freely. -- Les
REMINDER: Deadline for Repository Issue of NRIN Journal is 31st July 2009
Reminder! Two weeks until the deadline for submissions for The New Review on Information Networking (NRIN) special issue on Repository Architectures, Infrastructures and Services (31st July 2009). The aim of this issue is to further our understanding on how repositories are delivering services and capability to the scholarly and scientific community by marshalling resources at the institutional scale and delivering at the global scale. Considerable progress in this area has been achieved under the Open Access banner and this special issue aims to explore the technical aspects of facilitating the scientific and scholarly commons: open access to research literature, research data, scholarly materials and teaching resources. Topics for this special issue include (but are not limited to): - Repository architecture, infrastructure and services - Repositories supporting scholarly communications - Repositories supporting e-research and e-researchers - Integrating with publishing and publishing platforms - Repositories and research information systems - Integrating with other infrastructure platforms e.g., cloud, Web2 - Integrating with other data sources, linked data and the Semantic Web - Scaling repositories for extreme requirements - Computational services and interfaces across distributed repositories - Content metadata standards - OAI services - Web services, Web 2.0 services, mashups - Social networking, annotation / tagging, personalization - Searching and information discovery - Reference, reuse, reanalysis, re-interpretation, and repurposing of content - Persistent and unambiguous citation and referencing for entities: individuals, institutions, data, learning objects - Repository metrics and bibliometrics: usage and impact of scholarly and scientific knowledge Scope of the New Review on Information Networking = A huge number of reports has been published in recent years on the changing nature of users; on the changing nature of information; on the relevance of current organisational structures to generations apparently weaned on social networks. Reading this mass of literature, far less digesting it, then assimilating it into future strategy is a Sisyphean task, but one ideally suited to this journal. Individual services from Second Life to Twitter will no doubt wax and wane but we shall seek to publish those papers which address the fundamental underlying principles of the increasingly complex information landscape which organisations inhabit. Important dates === Submission of full paper: 31st July 2009 Notification deadline: 1st September 2009 Re-submission of revised papers: 15th September 2009 Publication: Autumn 2009 Submissions and Enquiries = Papers submitted to this special issue must not have been previously published or be currently submitted for journal publication elsewhere. Submissions should ideally be in the range of 3,500 - 4,000 words. Submissions and enquiries should be made by email to the editor of this special issue: Leslie Carr, University of Southampton, UK (l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk ) The official version of this Call for Papers is online at http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2009/06/special-issue-of-new-review-on.htm l
Re: Gold Fever: Read and Weep
[ The following text is in the WINDOWS-1252 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] This comment was reported in the independent daily student newspaper - so its record of the debate will probably not be totally accurate.But I would like to reassure Prof Moses about Open Access to Women's Studies. The following are listed as the two top journalsin women's studies: Gender and Society (Sage Publishing) and Signs (University of Chicago Press) and Sherpa Romeo lists both of these journals as allowing preprint deposit and postprint deposit with embargo.-- Les Carr On 25 Apr 2009, at 14:48, David Prosser wrote: Interestingly, the main objection against the policy as reported was: Open access will kill the journals you need during your career, women's studies professor and university senator Claire Moses said. It's as simple as that. That is not a gold/green OA misunderstanding. That?s just a misunderstanding. It is not clear to me that this would have been cleared-up if the Maryland resolution had removed all mention of journals ? some academics fear that green OA will destroy journals. I know that some feel that all the world?s ills can be layed at the door of gold OA, but this really doesn?t look like a case of so-called ?gold fever?. David David C Prosser PhD Director SPARC Europe Tel: +44 (0) 1865 277 614 Mobile: +44 (0) 7974 673 888 Web: www.sparceurope.org From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 24 April 2009 17:27 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Gold Fever: Read and Weep ** Apologies for cross-posting ** Those who still harbor any doubt that the mixing of talk about Gold OA publishing or funding with plans for Green OA self-archiving mandates causes anything but confusion, distraction, delay and failure to make progress toward universal OA: Please readPeter Suber's comments on this this latest fiasco at the University of Maryland -- and weep. And then please trust some sound advice from a weary and wizened but world-wise archivangelist: Disentangle completely all talk and policy concerning the requirement to self-archive refereed journal articles (the Green OA mandate) from any advice concerning whether or not to publish in Gold OA journals, and from any plans to help authors pay for Gold OA journal publishing charges, should they elect to publish in a fee-based Gold OA journal. Otherwise this mindless and thoughtless Gold Fever will just usher in yet another half-decade of failure to reach for what is already fully within the global research community's grasp: universal Green OA through universal Green OA self-archiving mandates adopted by universities and research funders worldwide. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum
Fwd: [SPARC-IR] irplus - Institutional Repository Software
[ The following text is in the WINDOWS-1252 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] If you're not on the SPARC IR list you won't have seen the IRPlus announcement from U Rochester. I sent the following in response to it. The subtext of my message is (a) IRPlus isn't doing aything new. (b) IRPlus is a bit limited - but what do you expect if you take the advice of 25 postgrads? (c) Did you make IRPlus because DSpace is crap? -- les Begin forwarded message: From: Leslie Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: 4 March 2009 13:11:41 GMT To: SPARC Institutional Repositories Discussion List sparc...@arl.org Subject: Re:[SPARC-IR] irplus - Institutional Repository Software On 4 Mar 2009, at 12:25, Sarr, Nathan wrote: The University of Rochester is pleased to announce the alpha version of its new institutional repository software platform named irplus. It contains the following features: This is an interesting new development, so II hope it is alright to ask a couple of questions on the list (a) How would you characterise IRPlus? It looks like DSpace + GoogleDocs + BibApp. Is that fair? (b) In your report you say that IRs may succeed is if they provide a better technology to meet users? real needs in clear and immediate ways, and the whole of the IRPlus development is described in the context of satisfying user needs. This seems to be a very good thing and should be much applauded! However, you produced IRPlus as a result of interviews with 25 graduate students, so is IRPlus just aimed at that specific kind of stakeholder? Or do you think it is also useful as a broad-spectrum Institutional Repository? (c) In the abstract to your report you said We conducted user research ... to support development of a suite of authoring tools to be integrated into an institutional repository, and yet the outcome is a new IR platform. What was the rationale behind that shift? Was it to do with control of the software development processes? Was it that owning your own platform increase your ability to innovate? -- Les Carr
Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...
[This message was posted on JISC-REPOSITORIES and is reproduced here on the request of the AMSCI moderator.] On 15 Feb 2009, at 19:56, Charles Oppenheim wrote on the JISC- REPOSITORIES mailing list: I agree that the publisher cannot demand destruction of copies made PRIOR to the assignment, but can rightly object to any subsequent copying by anyone, including the original author. Charles' contributions to this discussion are stark, but make it clear what the bottom line is in copyright law. If you have copyright, you have the automatic right to make copies. If you don't have copyright, you don't have the automatic right to make copies. From other contributors, we know that a literal and unyielding Status: O interpretation of this law would make digital and online activities impossible. We also know that publishing companies do not demand such draconian restrictions on authors' activities. The web has changed many things about the dissemination of information: the expectation of copying as a fundamental part of the transmission mechanism, the expectation of indexing and searching as a fundamental part of information provision, the expectation of open access to public funded information, the emergence of the knowledge commons. The law has not yet caught up with these changes in society. It hasn't even caught up with the personal computer revolution, let alone the Internet, the Web, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web or the cloud. That's an awfully big backlog of technology and emerging social practice to accommodate in our legislation, and frankly there just aren't enough legal minds on the job at the moment. Most legal positions in the online and digital arenas are compromises, fudges and emerging social agreements between parties. So it is inevitable that repository staff are going to encounter problems when faced with institutional managers who want definitive answers, cast- iron guarantees and legal certainties. What we can provide instead is the reassurance of a decade and a half of repository practice and case history, emerging (and emerged) institutional policy, custom and procedure. We (the repository community, JISC, funding councils and institutions) should continue to work together to agree reasonable practices that enable our own industry (the research industry) to flourish, develop and compete internationally while allowing its service industry (the primary and secondary publishing companies) the space to build appropriate businesses that will facilitate that aim. -- Les Carr Lecturer, Researcher, Repository Manager, Repository Developer, Open Access Advocate Co-Director of the UK EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science, set up to examine the impact of the Web on society and vice versa. But not a lawyer.
Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
On 6 Feb 2009, at 00:02, Thomas Krichel wrote: Arthur Sale writes I totally disagree that researchers should be free to deposit where they will. This one of the basic tennants of academic fredom. Academic freedom relates to a professor's freedom to choose to profess (ie teach and research) the topics that they choose. It is an academic freedom of speech - a duty to oppose censorship, not administrative procedures! -- Les
Re: ORBi, r�pertoire institutionnel de l'Universit� de Li�ge
On 2 Jan 2009, at 20:18, Klaus Graf wrote: I have given a legal analysis of ORBi in German at: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5420548/ The practice and legal framework is nonsense. And yet the practice embodies sufficient sense to be effective. I have no doubt that a more refined policy understanding will evolve as Liege (and similar institutions) acquire more experience from their continuing practice. --- Les Carr
Re: Zurich's Mandate doesn't work
On 8 Dec 2008, at 22:14, Stevan Harnad wrote: This is a configurational detail. EPrints can be configured to tally full-texts if desired. One of the basic EPrints health check scripts (cgi/counter) provides a very broad brush overview of the number of records and the number of full texts. The script reports 3508 fulltext documents for ZORA. Some of these documents will be in eprints that aren't visible in the public archive (e.g. in an editorial workflow, or still in the user's workarea), but it seems a not inappropriate overall figure. -- Les
Does Zurich's Mandate Work? Was: Zurich's Mandate doesn't work
On 8 Dec 2008, at 22:50, Klaus Graf wrote: Here are the numbers for journal articles in the ZORA December 5 sample: 30 journal articles (of 50 entries), free fulltext 7 A good way to do large samples of the repository is via a search. Search for (e.g.) all refereed items, and you will get back over 3000 eprints in pages of 20. Each of the 20 items will have a PDF icon next to it if it has a PDF full text with it. You can then count up very quickly the ratio of full-text-deposits to bare-metadata-records. I would avoid taking very recent samples (from the last 6 months) as they may represent items that have been submitted but not accepted for publication. In some repositories, and under some policy regimes, the author may choose to deposit their metadata but wait for acceptance until they deposit the full text. Each batch of 20 eprints (ie each page from the search results) that I have tested briefly comes up with around 14/20 full texts. -- Les
Re: Green Angels and OA Extremists
On 2 Dec 2008, at 15:47, Michael Eisen wrote: OF COURSE Elsevier can have objections to libraries assisting individuals in self-archiving their work, because Elsevier does not want self archiving to succeed! No-one wants to split unnecessary hairs, but there does seem to be a genuine distinction to be drawn between author-self-archiving and institutional-systematic-downloading. These at least were the terms to which Karen Hunter referred: As our longstanding policy permits authors to voluntarily post their own author manuscripts to their personal website or institutional repository, we responded that we would not object to an author downloading this version. However, our broader policy prohibits systematic downloading or posting. Therefore, it is not permitted for IR managers or any other third party to download articles ... and post them. Discussion on the other side of the fence (the library side), seems to indicate that there is little enthusiasm anyway for this kind of assistance (in Michael's terms) or systematic downloading (Elsevier's). I think that the library position is that they have no resources available to do this work for the author, even if it were acceptable to the publisher. -- Les Carr
Green Angels and OA Extremists
On 26 Nov 2008, at 21:08, Michael Eisen was goaded to write: I will proudly claim the mantle of an OA extremist No, I'm Spartacus! It seems to me that institutions have attempted Green Open Access through various means: (a) self-archiving - the individual author does all the work (b) proxy self-archiving - a personal assistant acts on behalf of the author, with the author's authority and at the author's instigation and with the author's full knowledge (in the same way that the assistant might buy plane tickets for the author on his/her credit card). There is no sensible way of telling the difference between (a) and (b). (c) mediated archiving - the author starts the deposit process by uploading or identifying the full text and entering some rudimentary metadata; the library finishes the process off. It seems that the process to which Elsevier are objecting is (d) bulk archiving - the library initiates the deposit process through access to bulk sources of full text material (publisher holdings). There are variations of this process, particularly (d2) imported keystrokes with catchup archiving - the library uses a third-party database to import bibliographic metadata into the repository and a full text is sought from (appropriately licensed) online sources or from the author's hard disk. Both (d) and (d2) are initiated by staff other than the authors. The first is content led, the second metadata led. Both of these approaches look attractive as a solution to the legacy problem (how to deposit the last decade of research output), especially in environments where there has been little progress towards addressing the current content problem (how to deposit today's research output). I think that the ultimate issue for achievable and sustainable OA is cultural change: how can individuals start to take responsibility for their intellectual assets in such a way as to maximise their visibility and (re)use for science, scholarship and learning as well as marketing and promotion (insert agenda here). The conclusion that our institutional repository team has come to after a number of years of mediated service is that any approach that sidesteps self-archiving works against the kind of cultural change that they are trying to engender and is ultimately self-defeating. HAVING SAID THAT, the library is in no way adverse to finding mechanisms that assist individuals and ease their tasks, and I guess that Elsevier can have no objections to that either! How about a notification email to be sent to authors of In Press papers that contains a Deposit this paper button that initiates the user's deposit workflow on the ScienceDirect Submitted Manuscript PDF. -- Les Carr
some background to the RSP Training Day
On 18 Nov 2008, at 12:32, Dominic Tate wrote: Aimed at librarians and repository staff using the open-source EPrints software, the morning sessions will cover the installation and visual customisation of EPrints, metadata schema design and the batch importing of legacy records. I'd just like to explain a bit more about what we want to achieve in the RSP Training day. In recent EPrints training courses we focused on simple facilities for adding metadata fields and for manipulating repository configuration files. This forthcoming training day allows us to go one step further by including easy-to-manage visual design for the repository, with direct updating via Dreamweaver or other HTML editors. We'd like to get the participants to install a 'vanilla' repository and then customise it with their own visual branding, extend it to accommodate their particular metadata requirements and fill it with some imported data without needing any technical or programming skills. One of our key aims in the development of EPrints 3 series is to enable non-technical repository managers to achieve as many repository management tasks as possible without recourse to their campus ICT services. We know that one of the urgent issues facing repositories in the UK is the lack of IT resources to keep up with the ongoing activities of the repository. We're really excited about this, and we hope that you will be too. The day should have something new, even for people who have been to a previous EPrints course. -- Les Carr EPrints Technical Director (returning from SPARC DR2008, at Washington Dulles airport)
Re: Liblicense-l: rules of the road
On 23 Oct 2008, at 12:09, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote: Here's a set of 'rules' for another email discussion forum, one which I personally think is moderated in an exemplary fashion I expect there are hundreds of other discussion forums whose charters and processes are indeed praiseworthy. To forestall a combinatorial explosion of admirable attributes, let me draw the attention of those who are interested to the following analysis of the diverse practices of mailing list moderation: Berge, Z.L. Collins, M.P. (2000). Perceptions of e-moderators about their roles and functions in moderating electronic mailing lists. Distance Education: An International Journal, 21(1), 81-100. http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/modsur97.html Given the range of practices represented above and the result of the recent vote, I propose that the status quo is admirable position to maintain. (Moderation-wise, not OA-wise!) -- Les Carr
Re: On Metrics and Metaphysics
On 21 Oct 2008, at 18:23, J.F.Rowland wrote: There is a real and valid point in Heather's message, and simply saying 'use other metrics' is vague, to say the least. Please specify what metrics might be used to provide a valid quality measure to the work of researchers who study minority subjects which will excite interest, and therefore usage, and citations, from only a few people worldwide. Perhaps I might be permitted to throw the ball back in your court. How would *you* (or Heather, or the author) know that a paper in the (narrow but important) field has excited the interest of anyone worldwide? Or even excited the interest of the right people? Once you can answer that, to the satisfaction of the author and their community, then Stevan (for you challenged him in particular) might be able to devise a metric for measuring it. Or, indirectly, devise a test for whether a proposed battery of metrics will act as a reasonable proxy for the judgement of experts in the field. -- Les Carr
Re: On Metrics and Metaphysics
On 21 Oct 2008, at 18:23, J.F.Rowland wrote: Stevan - You misunderstood Heather's point. She didn't say the researcher - the author of the current research article in question - was little- known. She said the literary author that (s)he was studying was little-known. Therefore, not many researchers will be interested in that literary author, so not many people will cite the article, however good it is. I think that the arguments that Heather put forward are not fundamentally directed at metrics per se. They are arguments about the distinction between research impact and research importance; it is the researchers, the societies, the funding councils and governments who need to answer these policy questions. There is a real and valid point in Heather's message, and simply saying 'use other metrics' is vague, to say the least. Yes, it is, isn't it. When someone has a more concrete idea of what we are measuring (quality? excellence? importance? impact?) then doubtless we can be make a reasonable attempt to be more specific. Please specify what metrics might be used to provide a valid quality measure to the work of researchers who study minority subjects which will excite interest, and therefore usage, and citations, from only a few people worldwide. I'll take my turn in prolonging the confusion by remarking that bibliographic items are only one kind of evidence that can be observed and measured. Everyone in the UK is familiar with the RAE's measures of esteem which supplemented the bibliographic submissions. Invited lectures, committee memberships, journal editorships and the like are all leaving auditable trails of evidence on the web which we can measure and use to moderate citation-only statistics. -- les Carr
Re: Tracking Open Access Institutional Repository Growth Worldwide
On 22 Oct 2008, at 16:46, c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: DSpace@Cambridge 192,000 items! presumably there is a story behind that amazing figure?? About 178,000 are chemical records (in CML format I believe) imported (and processed) from the US National Cancer Institute. They have been there for several years. Someone at the Unilever Centre at Cambridge will probably be able to shed some more light on the history. It provides an interesting example of why the gross size of a repository is a tricky number to interpret! -- Les Charles Professor Charles Oppenheim Head Department of Information Science Loughborough University Loughborough Leics LE11 3TU Tel 01509-223065 Fax 01509 223053 e mail c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 22 October 2008 16:34 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Tracking Open Access Institutional Repository Growth Worldwide (Thanks to Peter Suber and Charles Bailey for drawing attention to this item.) Repository Records Statistics Chris Keene This website provides data on the number of records in UK Institutional Respositories over time. The data was collected from late summer 2006, and has been collected weekly ever since. Since August 2008 is has collected data for Institutional Repositories worldwide. The data is from the excellent ROAR based at the University of Southampton (ECS). Where to start? Have a look at the table below (first link), it shows the number of records in each repository (registered in ROAR) for each week since July 2006. You can reorder the table, download the data (e.g. in to excel) and select individual repositories. Also check out the comparison page, which can be reached by first selectinig an IR on the right and then selecting an IR to compare with. Finally the info page is worth a read for details of what you are actually looking at, and issues with the data and presentation. * Table showing number of records in instiutional repositories over time (United Kingdom) * Click on one of the Repositories on the right, for info about that IR and the ability to compare it with others. (see an example here) * Table view of random guess at totals of full text items in UK IRs over time (very experiemental, i.e. rubbish). This table is still UK only. Read more: Introduction, details, help and more
Re: Tracking Open Access Institutional Repository Growth Worldwide
On 22 Oct 2008, at 18:59, Klaus Graf wrote: One of the largest German university repository Freidok http://freidok.uni-freiburg.de with 5166 records in OAIster has zero records in this statistics. This is'nt the only irritating thing. Apologies. Freidok didn't have its OAI-PMH interface registered with ROAR's metadata harvesting service. I have discovered the necessary URL through Google and passed it on to the service maintainer. -- Les Carr
Re: Google/Google Scholar merge?
On 17 Oct 2008, at 09:27, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote: Puzzled by Les's posting - Google Scholar already identifies 'green' sources of documents, doesn't it? What I mean is that (a) Google Scholar is a service that few people are using (just look at the stats for repository usage) (b) Google Scholar does a specific kind of search that returns a specific kind of resource (a subset of the scholarly literature) (c) it is possible that (a) and (b) are causally related By putting the Google Scholar (and Google Books) benefits into Vanilla Google then all the knowledge about a FRBR resource is concentrated into one place for the benefit of a very much larger audience. -- Les
Re: Google/Google Scholar merge?
This may be a small change in the user interface, but it is a large step in the convergence between green open access resources (repositories) and publisher resources. Now researchers will be able to find (together, in one place) the various for-free and for-pay manifestations of a publication, and then they can make informed decisions about whether the preprint, author's postprint or published version will satisfy their requirements. Of course, they could have done that through Google Scholar, but most researchers aren't using Google Scholar, and they would have to use two different services for different types of information. -- Les Carr On 16 Oct 2008, at 14:31, Frank McCown wrote: I haven't seen any formal announcements, but I think this is part of Google's larger strategy of merging results from multiple sources (news, images, etc.) into a single results page, what they call universal search. http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/universalsearch_20070516.html Regards, Frank On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 6:36 AM, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Leslie Carr lac -- ecs.soton.ac.uk Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:05:14 +0100 Subject: Google/Google Scholar merge? To: JISC-REPOSITORIES -- jiscmail.ac.uk I was just using Google to search for items in repositories when I noticed that some Google results have Google Scholar data associated with them - author name, year of publication, number of citations and links to the Google scholar records. See the following examples: (EPrints Soton) http://www.google.com/search?num=100hl=ensafe=offclient=safarirls=en -usq=site%3Aeprints.soton.ac.uk+%22institutional+repositories%22btnG=S earch (DSpace MIT) http://www.google.com/search?num=100hl=ensafe=offclient=safarirls=en -usq=site%3Adspace.mit.edu+%22digital+preservation%22btnG=Search I'm not aware of any announcements about this. Does anyone have any more information? On closer inspection, it seems that any of the versions of a paper that Google Scholar has identified will appear with the enhanced information - whether in a repository or on a publisher's website or an author's home page. The author names are sometimes somewhat awry - you will often see authors listed as Submission R because the paper is listed under Recent Submissions or similar. The vast majority of repository usage comes from Google, not Google scholar, and so this development is very welcome because it allows users to see some kind of scholarly perspective on top of Google's (and the Web's) model of individual document resources. -- Les Carr -- Frank McCown, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Computer Science Harding University http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/
Re: Explaining and Justifying a Mandate
On 12 Oct 2008, at 13:54, Andrew A. Adams wrote: The main driver for this seems to be the REF and the need to potentially track all the output of our researchers. At this stage our PVC(Research) is still somewhat unsure of the nature of the non-technical elements of an IR, i.e. about the language of and necessity for a deposit mandate. I therefore need to make a decisive pitch for a mandate. ... We have found the UK's REF to be a very powerful driver for IRs but it can drive itself in the wrong direction - at a tangent to OA - and can result in a repository full of metadata (a pseudo-CRIS) testifying to the facts of publication but denuded of the publications themselves. I'd like to use Andrew's pitch for OA IRs as an opportunity to recount the argument for OA from a solely REF/RAE perspective; all of Andrew's arguments are taken as read but the following is for managers/ administrators whose responsibility is focused on implementing research assessment. In my experience the pertinent issues that make OA relevant to research assessment are as follows (a) RAE / REF requires Universities to present a case for their excellence based on evidence - especially research outputs. (b) however, most University VCs, heads of department or even research group leaders (ie research managers) simply have very little idea about what research their staff are conducting. (c) most UK universities do not have anything approaching a comprehensive collection of (or even list of) the research outputs that they have produced (d) the reason for this is that we have outsourced our intellectual assets to the publishing industry (e) to obtain a list of our research outputs we can deal with one or other of the secondary publishers, but this source of information is both incomplete and difficult to interpret - and likely to become increasingly costly. (f) the only other alternative is to begin to collect information about our own research outputs and activities using an IR and a CRIS The REF now puts us in a crisis of institutional knowledge management. Either we buy our way out of the problem every year (a partial solution however much we pay) or we take responsibility for our own intellectual assets and start an IR and mandate everyone to enter all their research outputs and other pertinent evidence of research activities. The $64,000 question is why an IR with full texts instead of a CRIS? The key is that only with access to the texts can an institution run its own assessment procedures - appointing its own panels of experts to evaluate the performance of its departments and schools. This was a problem that we faced in preparing for the RAE - the national funding authority made its own licensing arrangements for its own processes but left institutions unable to prepare by running their own pilots. In my school, our repository provided the full texts we needed to pass on to our own expert review panels. Even though the REF is likely to make substantial use of metrics, it will not be possible to completely abstract away from the research outputs themselves. Of course, having a copy of the full texts for OA (or ID-OA) also serves many, many other purposes including improved scholarly communication, citation enhancement, publicity, profile raising, institutional marketing and teaching. - Consequence: all university procedures which involve publications should draw their information from the repository, particularly promotion and incentive procedures. I would like to particularly highlight this recommendation of Andrew's - I think it is a crucial and simple part of the enforcement of any mandate. I think it is the reason why the mandate for my school (ECS, Southampton) was so successful. I wonder how many of the mandates listed in ROARMAP come with such a clause? -- Les Carr
Re: Question re work on relationships between insitutional and disciplinary repositories.
On 3 Oct 2008, at 08:27, Muriel Foulonneau wrote: The HAL archive in France which hosts a number of institutional repositories has a similar system for several years with arXiv (researchers can tick a box and the paper is submitted to arXiv as well). Connections also exist with PubMed Central and ADS for instance. http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ Muriel Foulonneau I am interested in how this works in practice. HAL has historically been very arxiv-centric, so it is understandable that there is a close arXiv-HAL integration. But PMC is a very different beast, with much more comprehensive metadata requirements. How are both of these systems accomodated by HAL? --- Les Carr
Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates
On 29 Jul 2008, at 12:47, Talat Chaudhri [tac] wrote: When you say reduces, doesn't SWORD quite simply eliminate such competition if implemented widely enough? That is, one could theoretically deposit simultaneously in multiple repositories, whether IR or CR or both. With an appropriate service, users could already be subscribed to these repositories, making it all seamless. Perhaps I was just being conservative with my choice of words. There is a level of complication that comes in the deployment of (wielding of?) SWORD, and of keeping track of the multiple repositories that any particular deposit might appear in, but in the end those are just details rather than substantive problems. I know this depends on implementation, but SWORD is already with us, so please bear with me: the question that results from this inevitably is that this does seem to eliminate Stevan's difficulty with the locus of deposit. The requirement to deposit in a CR would no longer detract from deposit in an IR (because it would not require duplication of effort) or from efforts towards institutional mandates that can get us the rest of the content. Could this not at least help with Stevan's problem about the locus of deposit in the NIH mandate, if and when it is implemented appropriately? If we can get agreement between the parties, and if we can map the deposit requirements, then yes, I do see it as a solution to the locus problem. I would suggest that the IR would then be the best place for the initial deposit, simply because the library/repository editorial role can be called into play more effectively. -- Les
Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates
On 25 Jul 2008, at 17:58, FrederickFriend wrote: Oh dear! I have avoided contributing to this discussion because it has saddened me to see so much disagreement about the various ways to achieve OA when we are all working so hard to achieve OA by any means possible Most stakeholders in the scholarly communications field are of necessity limited to a fraction of all human knowledge (or the literature as we say in shorthand). Funders, projects, conferences, researchers, and institutions have a specific domain, whether thematic, geographical, organisational or a combination thereof. It is hardly surprising that when they make decisions in favour of Open Access, their actions are focused on gaining the best outcomes for their domain which (at the Green end of the spectrum) seems to inevitably end up as lets make/adopt a repository for our fundees/ investigators/colleagues/employees. After all, the bodies in question are usually unaware of the extent of the network of institutional repositories and the committee mind wants to avoid relying on someone else's (possibly non-existent) information system and (possibly incompatible) information processes anyway. Meanwhile, at the Federal OA level (e.g. this list) we have the opportunity to observe all these different activities, and the way that they overlap or compete with each other by multiple dealings with the same people wearing different (fundee/investigator/colleague/ employee) hats. I think that this is an important role of this forum - to critically assess and attempt to influence the Bigger Picture of how multiple pathways to (green) OA fit together. However, the relief in obtaining ANY increase in OA at all under ANY circumstances sometimes obscures this aim. As many have argued, we could settle for a laissez-faire approach, because from an information management perspective we can be confident that we will be able to sort everything out, post-hoc, with our clever programs. I find that approach very appealing, because I'm a computer scientist, and my immediate colleagues write those programs. However, that leaves us with a pre-hoc mess, where individuals are expected to contribute to two or three different repositories, and where institutional librarians are increasingly becoming implicated in the search for a solution. The responsibility for picking up the tab is falling on the institutions because that's where these researchers (and their piles of different hats) sit and work all day long. And the focus of this responsibility is the institutional library - because they have responsibility for the institutional repository and expertise of repository processes and OA in general. (All this talk of Repository and Responsibility sounds like a Jane Austen novel.) Arising from these nitty-gritty practical considerations, comes Stevan's question of optimality - how can we achieve OA behaviour from the scholarly communications system with as little delay/work/ disruption as possible. It is our library colleagues and repository managers who are trying to manage the implications of non-optimal solutions, of divergent repositories, clashing mandates and ultra- modest resourcing, and they need our help and leadership to make the system work. I do think that technology (specifically the SWORD protocol for automated deposits) will come to our aid in this case, but not by itself. First of all we have to get agreement from the CRs to adopt SWORD for this purpose - the major IR platforms have already added SWORD compatibility to their functionality. But this will be a not insignificant step as it requires CRs and IRs to acknowledge the mixed economy of repositories, and to carve out mutually supportive roles. --- Les Carr
Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates
On 25 Jul 2008, at 19:22, Michael Eisen wrote: And why is everyone assuming that the existence of an institutional archive requires double deposits for authors who are also under a funder mandate to submit to a central repository? Why can't authors just simply submit to their institutional archive and then have the archive pass on the paper to PMC along with the minimal extra meta- data required (grant codes, etc...)? This has become technically possible with the SWORD protocol for automated repository deposits. The SWORD development team (financed by JISC in the UK) is hoping to engage with PMC and with arXiv to make a standard way for IRs to pass relevant holdings onwards to other repositories. -- Les Carr
Re: Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse
On 20 Mar 2008, at 02:18, Thomas Krichel wrote: Stevan Harnad writes (7) University-external, subject-based self-archiving does not scale up to cover all of OA output space: it is divergent, divisive, arbitrary, incoherent and unnecessary. So, do you reccommend arXiv, RePEc, E-LIS, etc to close down? I would vote that they continue to do every thing that they can to promote open access! More papers! More data! We're very lucky to have them, and we thank our lucky stars for them. It's just that there just doesn't seem to be any way to make them multiply into other fields - and there are a lot of other fields! -- Les
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras
On 10 Mar 2008, at 09:11, Andy Powell wrote: Well, I hope that you are right... I certainly don't have the will or ability to fight a political and technical agenda that has become so entrenched worldwide and that says there is only one 'right' way of achieving OA. Those who are involved in Open Access lobbying will be interested to hear that they have gone from being an ignored, sidelined special interest group, to being an entrenched worldwide movement. Even those who shout loudest for institutional repositories are doing so not because of some predisposition towards dogma, but because they seem the favourite choice out of a number of practical alternatives. Saying that we want to build compelling scholarly social networks or surface scholarly content on the Web is just another way of restating a shared goal of Open Access. Saying that we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community is to confirm what happened five years ago when the difference between discipline-grounded and institutionally-grounded repositories was being thrashed out. You comment that social networks ... are largely independent of the institution, but that is only to take into account SOME facets of an researcher's social network - in particular it is to ignore the researcher's career development, promotion and contractual relationships. However, no-one who backs Open Access can afford to pish-tush any sound, practical and tested ideas about improving takeup, so bring them on! In fact, lay them down as part of the Developer Challenge in the forthcoming Open Repositories conference, and see if we can't get any of them prototyped for you. Web 2.0/social networks are taking up two sessions, so clearly repositories are already experimenting with these channels. But in the meantime, we have to recognise that titivating a user interface isn't go to turn anyone from a heads down, don't have time to do what you ask researcher into a grateful repository convert or even a Web 2.0 user! -- Les Carr
OR08 Repository Developer Challenge: Invitation to Participate
[ The following text is in the WINDOWS-1252 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Repository developers are invited to participate in a new Repository Challenge prize activity to produce demonstrations of novel repository capability during the OR08 conference. The Open Repositories conference annually attracts developers who working on a wide variety of repository-oriented platforms and projects from across the world. As well as providing a forum for discussion of the cutting edge of repository RD, this year's conference will run a rapid cross-platform repository integration challenge. The aim is to get delegates working in small teams to try to quickly pull together established platforms and services to demonstrate a glimpse of some real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services. The Repository Challenge will be based around small teams of developers trying to achieve goals set by the repository manager and user community. This all takes place in a scrapheap-code challenge [UK] / junkyard-code wars[US] atmosphere over the two days of the conference. An awards ceremony at the conference dinner will celebrate the achievements of the teams with cash prizes given to the best demos (first team prize £2,500 / $5,000 / ?3.350). The Repository Challenge is intended to provide concrete examples of the ideas raised at a recent Repository Unconference, an event run by the JISC Common Repository Interface Group (CRIG) to identify key issues that repositories need to address to make a genuine impact in Higher Education. These include bringing the repository closer to the researcher's working environment, automatically generating metadata, running multiple interfaces and taking advantage of Web 2.0 and utility computing services. To participate in the repository challenge, register for OR08 at http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ and email the Repository Challenge Chair: David Flanders (d.fland...@bbk.ac.uk). Comments are invited on the outputs of the Unconference (photos of the flipcharts) which are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/wocrig . Other CRIG discussion is available via blog planet: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jisc-crig . Background information on CRIG can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/CRIG . For more information on the challenge, contact the Repository Challenge Chair: David Flanders (d.fland...@bbk.ac.uk). -- Les Carr Open Repositories 2008 Conference Chair PS Although this is not an ostensibly Open Access technical challenge, the suggested improvements will improve OA provision by making document and metadata deposit easier. But such efforts will only be effective as part of balanced diet of OA policy and technical development!
On OA, Coercion and Just Getting Over Ourselves
On 27 Jan 2008, at 14:40, Stevan Harnad wrote: I would simply underscore that the number of authors who currently *do* want OA for their articles is low enough that Harnad and others recommend they be coerced to achieve the goal. (1) Coerced is a rather shrill term! (Is every rule that is in the public interest -- smoking bans? seatbelt laws? breathalyzer tests? taxes? -- coercion? Is academia's publish or perish mandate coercion?) In fact the first rule of academic life is not publish or perish, it is don't mess with Exam Board. Ignoring the former rebounds on you, ignoring the latter (by failing to set exams, return marks, undergo the necessary QA activities) severely impacts your colleagues and students. No-one refers to the examinations process as coercion or a mandate, it is just a part of our professional activities. Not to fulfill our duties is simply unacceptable when that's what we're paid for and so many people are depending on us. I don't think I'm making an inappropriate comparison when I say that Science, Research and Scholarship are collaborative ventures, with colleagues all over the world depending on us to provide them with some shoulders on which to stand. Being unusual, the language of mandate makes some people cry foul, but that is perhaps because we don't have an equivalent word for the process by which you force lecturers to attend Exam Board. An OA mandate isn't an unusual, invented and offensive concept, it is simply a realisation of our professional duty to our research colleagues. -- Les Carr
OR2008: Call for Posters
OPEN REPOSITORIES 2008: CALL FOR POSTERS http://www.openrepositories.org/2008 We invite developers, researchers and practitioners to submit 2-page poster proposals describing novel experiences or developments in the construction and use of repositories. Repositories are being deployed in a variety of settings (research, scholarship, learning, science, cultural heritage) and across a range of scales (subject, national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). The aim of this conference is to address the technical, managerial, practical and theoretical issues that arise from diverse applications of repositories in the increasingly pervasive information environment. A programme of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, user groups, tutorials and developer coding sessions will bring together all the key stakeholders in the field. Open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will also provide opportunities to advance and co-ordinate the development of repository installations across the world. IMPORTANT DATES AND CONTACT INFO Submission Deadline: Monday 4th February 2008 Conference: April 1-4, 2008. University of Southampton, UK. Enquiries to: Program Committee Chair (e.l...@ukoln.ac.uk) or General Chair (l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk) CONFERENCE THEMES The themes of the conference include the following: TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IN THE KNOWLEDGE WORKPLACE - Embedding repositories in business processes and individual workflow. - Change Management - Advocacy and Culture Change - Policy development and policy lag. PROFESSIONALISM AND PRACTICE - Professional Development - Workforce Capacity - Skills and Training - Roles and Responsibilities SUSTAINABILITY - Economic sustainability and new business models, - Technical sustainability of a repository over time, including platform change and migration. - Technical sustainability of holdings over time. Preservation. Audit, certification. Trust. Assessment tools. - Managing sustainability failure - when a repository outlives its organisation or its organisational commitment. LEGAL ISSUES - Embargoes - Licensing and Digital Rights Management - Mandates - Overcoming legislative barriers - Contractual relationships - facilitating and monitoring - International and cross-border issues SUCCESSFUL INTEROPERABILITY - Content standards - discipline-specific vs general - Metadata standards and application profiles - Quality standards and quality control processes - Achieving interchange in multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional environments - Semantic web and linked data - Identifier management for data and real world resources - Access and authentication MODELS, ARCHITECTURES AND FRAMEWORKS - Beyond OAIS - Federations - Institutional Models - uber- or multi-repository environments - Adapting to changing e-infrastructure: SOA, services, cloud computing - Scalability VALUE CHAINS and SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS - Multi-stakeholder value: preservation, open access, research, management, admninistratiion - Multi-agenda, multi-function, multi-purpose repositories - Usefulness and usability - Reference, reuse, reanalysis and repurposing of content - Citation of data / learning objects - Changes in scholarly practice - New benchmarks for scholarly success - Repository metrics - Bibliometrics: usage and impact SERVICES BUILT ON REPOSITORIES - OAI services - User-oriented services - Mashups - Social networking - Commentary / tagging - Searching / information discovery - Alerting - Mining - Visualisation - Integration with Second life and Virtual environments USE CASES FOR REPOSITORIES - E-research/E-science (e.g., data and publication; collaborative services) - E-scholarship - Institutional repositories - Discipline-oriented repositories - Scholarly Publishing - Digital Library - Cultural Heritage - Scientific repositories / data repositories - Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral repositories
Re: European Research Council Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving
On 19 Jan 2008, at 10:05, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote: One would think, then, that the language of the ERC statement could have been more precise: peer-reviewed publications is a general term that normally would be thought, in an academic context, to include all types of publications. Do ERC (or other short-term funders) research projects result in books? I am only an engineer whose gets a bit lost outside STM, but I thought that books were written independently by researchers and that funded research projects had papers (and similar low-investment texts) as explicit research outputs? NOTE I am not asking whether books count as research outputs (they do) but whether they are the outputs of funded projects. I'll confine the scope of the question to single-author books, rather than multi-author books or edited collections. -- Les
Re: What is the difference between the EC, the EC, and the ERC ?
On 11 Jan 2008, at 14:01, N. Miradon wrote: Could someone who understands these things explain to me what is the difference between the European Research Council, the European Council and the European Commission ? From the front page of the ERC website (erc.europa.eu) Status: O The creation of the European Research Council (ERC) by the common action of the political institutions of the European Union (the Commission, the Parliament and the Council of Ministers) represents a landmark event for science policy in our continent. By this action, Europe is taking a decisive step towards the formation of a common European Research Area. The ERC will be the first pan- European funding agency for frontier research in all fields of knowledge, from the Humanities and Social Sciences, to the Life Sciences and to the Physical and Engineering Sciences. -- Les Carr
Re: Cost of running an OA repository
On 8 Dec 2007, at 07:08, Hélène.Bosc wrote: I am sure that more details on this cost will be given by ECS Southampton. I can only speak about what we have at the moment, a simple OA repository that works for a single school. Not a whole institution, just our school. Setup costs for our school: a PC server, moderately equipped with hard disk (about 100Gb) and a good amount of memory (but nothing extraordinary). Total size of ECS school repository (12K records, 4K full texts) after 5 years = 5Gb. No reason to invest in huge amounts of hardware. If this were proportionately scaled up to our entire university (20 schools) then we might have to buy a second hard disk :-) Costs involved in running a school repository (steady state, after a mandate has been in place for several years): Computer support / maintenance / upgrades to operating system / backups : unaccounted as it is factored into the infrastructure support of the 250 web sites that our school runs. Technical support (programming, configuration, upgrade of the repository itself): about 1 day per month = 0.05 FTE Repository management (me! regularly reporting to Research Committee, answering emails): about 1 day per term = 0.01 FTE Advocacy: occasional emails - about 3 reminders per year Quality assurance: post hoc automatic emails sent warning of potential QA problems (missing full texts, items in press for more than 1 year etc) Self archiving: 700 new items are deposited into our repository every year. Each takes something less than 10 mins (see previous posting on Keystroke Economy), and that accounts for another 0.07 FTE. The server has been replaced every two - three years. I don't know the exact costs, but it was around 1K UKP - like I said, it really is not particularly high powered, despite the fact that it actually runs multiple repositories. The ECS repository serves about 30,000 full texts per month (ignoring spiders) and in total about 55Gb of data per month (including spiders). So for us, the headline cost per year is about UKP 300 in hardware plus UKP 6500 in manpower (assuming 1FTE = 50K with all on-costs and overheads). Round that up to 7K UKP or 10K Euro or 15K USD. And for that expenditure, what do we get? Testing our overall effectiveness against Web of Science this summer showed that 80% of our school output for 2006 is available as Open Access full text in eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk. Of course, anyone who knows anything about University budgets will realise that only the hardware is a real cost. All the personnel effort is just hidden into the job descriptions of existing personnel, and can be safely done so because it is so low. And that was one of the policy decisions that was behind the repository - we could have a repository, but it mustn't interfere with people's main task - research and research support. That's why we don't do QA like the library does for the Southampton Institutional Repository - we don't have anyone to do it. We rely on email warnings generated by automatic scripts (They've actually been very popular with the researchers who have asked for more of them, so they are likely to be a standard part of EPrints v 3.1). And we're saving a fortune on advocacy because of the mandate! So the takehome message is: Headline Cost of Repository: $15K / yr maximum. Actual Cost to School: $600 / year --- Les
Advocacy and Voluntarism WAS: Don't Just Advocate Keystrokes
On 28 Nov 2007, at 14:55, Talat Chaudhri [tac] wrote: My aim here is not to rely on voluntarism, but to build from it by trying to develop de facto mandates through conversations with departmental organisers and university management until proper mandates are in place. I rather like Talat's appropriation of the word voluntarism for Open Access. As has been discussed, advocacy and mandates are neither opposed to each other nor independent of each other, but the limitations of voluntarism were brought home to me yesterday in a conversation with the head of a research group in our school. The following is my recollection of his words to me - this part was a monologue, not a discussion. I include it because he spontaneously made an observation about our mandate which I hadn't foreseen. On Friday 30th November, a Head of Research Group in ECS said: I have seen all the benefits of using our repository in the four years since the mandate was developed. I remember how we used to get constantly asked for lists of publications for administrative purposes and how tedious and time-consuming it was to create a list of all my research last year, or a list of every publication on which I had collaborated with people inside the university but outside our school, or every publication which came from such and such a source of funding, or a list of my CV or a Web page. Now it's simple - you just say 'go and look in eprints'. Even the RAE. So the repository is really, really useful and well worth it... BUT having experienced all those benefits and with all that in mind, if the mandate wasn't in place I still wouldn't use the repository because I just don't do things. So it looks like the mandate was not only necessary to get him to start using the repository, but its continued existence is necessary to keep him using the repository, even when to stop using it would have significant personal disadvantages. I don't claim that this is a representative sample of the research community, it is just a single anecdote, but it seems to me (as a fellow academic) that his comment acknowledges the limitations on voluntarism for academics and researchers. Things don't happen unless they they are a required part of the job. Publish or perish. Attend exam board or be censured by the Head of School. Get research funding or be refused promotion. -- Les Carr
Reminder: 9th Dec deadline for Open Repositories 2008 CFP
OPEN REPOSITORIES 2008: Deadline 9th Dec 2007 for Papers Panels (Calls for Posters and User Group Participation to follow later) http://www.openrepositories.org/2008 We invite developers, researchers and practitioners to submit papers describing novel experiences or developments in the construction and use of digital repositories. Submissions of UP TO 4 pages in length are requested for review. See the CFP page at the conference site for submission instructions. Submissions for panel discussions are also requested. Repositories are being deployed in a variety of settings (research, scholarship, learning, science, cultural heritage) and across a range of scales (subject, national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). The aim of this conference is to address the technical, managerial, practical and theoretical issues that arise from diverse applications of repositories in the increasingly pervasive information environment. A programme of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, workshops, tutorials and developer coding sessions will bring together all the key stakeholders in the field. Open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will also provide opportunities to advance and co-ordinate the development of repository installations across the world. IMPORTANT DATES AND CONTACT INFO Paper Submission Deadline: Friday 7th December 2007 Notification of Acceptance: Monday January 21st 2008 Submission of DSpace/EPrints/Fedora User Group Presentations: TBA Submission of Posters: Monday 4th February 2008 Conference: April 1-4, 2008. University of Southampton, UK. Enquiries to: Program Committee Chair (e.l...@ukoln.ac.uk) or General Chair (l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk) CONFERENCE THEMES The themes of the conference include (but are not limited to) the following: TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IN THE KNOWLEDGE WORKPLACE - Embedding repositories in business processes and individual workflow. - Change Management - Advocacy and Culture Change - Policy development and policy lag. PROFESSIONALISM AND PRACTICE - Professional Development - Workforce Capacity - Skills and Training - Roles and Responsibilities SUSTAINABILITY - Economic sustainability and new business models, - Technical sustainability of a repository over time, including platform change and migration. - Technical sustainability of holdings over time. Preservation. Audit, certification. Trust. Assessment tools. - Managing sustainability failure - when a repository outlives its organisation or its organisational commitment. LEGAL ISSUES - Embargoes - Licensing and Digital Rights Management - Mandates - Overcoming legislative barriers - Contractual relationships - facilitating and monitoring - International and cross-border issues SUCCESSFUL INTEROPERABILITY - Content standards - discipline-specific vs general - Metadata standards and application profiles - Quality standards and quality control processes - Achieving interchange in multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional environments - Semantic web and linked data - Identifier management for data and real world resources - Access and authentication MODELS, ARCHITECTURES AND FRAMEWORKS - Beyond OAIS - Federations - Institutional Models - uber- or multi-repository environments - Adapting to changing e-infrastructure: SOA, services, cloud computing - Scalability VALUE CHAINS and SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS - Multi-stakeholder value: preservation, open access, research, management, admninistratiion - Multi-agenda, multi-function, multi-purpose repositories - Usefulness and usability - Reference, reuse, reanalysis and repurposing of content - Citation of data / learning objects - Changes in scholarly practice - New benchmarks for scholarly success - Repository metrics - Bibliometrics: usage and impact SERVICES BUILT ON REPOSITORIES - OAI services - User-oriented services - Mashups - Social networking - Commentary / tagging - Searching / information discovery - Alerting - Mining - Visualisation - Integration with Second life and Virtual environments USE CASES FOR REPOSITORIES - E-research/E-science (e.g., data and publication; collaborative services) - E-scholarship - Institutional repositories - Discipline-oriented repositories - Open Access - Scholarly Publishing - Digital Library - Cultural Heritage - Scientific repositories / data repositories - Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral repositories
Re: Should Institutional Repositories Allow Opt-Out From (1) Mandates? (2) Metrics?
On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Christian Zimmermann wrote: Re: whether download statistics should be put in CVs. I would not necessarily go that far (I do not put citation counts in my CV either), I ought to highlight the fact that you do (we all do) put citation counts on our CVs and publication lists and bibliographies. Granted we don't do it *explicitly*, but the Journal Impact Factor has become such an ingrained part of the scholarly system*** that simply naming the publishing journal is tantamount to a citation metric. An imprecise, aggregate metric, yes. But a clearly understood metric none the less. -- Les Carr *** usual disclaimers about discipline differences and book publishing apply
Prizes Offered for EPrints Call for Plugins
[This call is available at the EPrints website: http://www.eprints.org/software/cfp.php . Please excuse multiple postings. On the other hand, please feel free to distribute this call through your normal channels.] CALL FOR PLUGINS FOR EPRINTS REPOSITORIES Developers are warmly invited to create import and export plugins for the EPrints repository platform. EPrints is a mature repository platform that has a particular emphasis on interoperability. EPrints repositories operate in complex information environments consisting of mobile devices, user desktop applications, library environments, institutional databases and Internet services. EPrints is looking to increase its range of interoperability capabilities with more community-developed plugins. EPrints Services is offering prizes for new plugins submitted to the EPrints developers repository by January 31st 2008. EPrints Services is the repository hosting company that funds EPrints development. * First Prize: Apple iPhone plus contract * Second Prize: iPod Touch * Third Prize: iPod Nano [IMAGE] You are invited to develop an import or export plugin. You don't need to be an established EPrints developer to participate, anyone with some basic Perl programming skills can join in. To get started download an EPrints LiveCD, which boots up a running EPrints repository with training materials. Support can be obtained through the EP-Tech mailing list, the EPrints wiki and the EPrints website. EPrints has a growing list of plugins that can handle requirements as diverse as importing publications from PubMed or creating mashups using Google Maps. EPrints supports insitutional repositories, but it is also suitable for individual student projects and research environments, as its import and export features allow existing digital collections to be used and reused in innovative ways. For further information about this Call for Plugins, please see the Further Information Wiki page or email l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk. IMPORTANT LINKS EPrints Services http://www.eprints.org/services/ Call for Plugins http://www.eprints.org/software/cfp.php Further Information http://wiki.eprints.org/w/CallForPlugins EPrints Package Repository (Plugins) http://files.eprints.org/view/type/plugin.html EPrints Live CD http://wiki.eprints.org/w/Ubuntu_Live_CD_Help Lists of Standard EPrints Plugins Import plugins http://wiki.eprints.org/w/Perl_lib/EPrints/Plugin/Import/ and export plugins http://wiki.eprints.org/w/Perl_lib/EPrints/Plugin/Export/ Plugin Development Tutorial http://wiki.eprints.org/w/Contribute:_Plugins How To Create Export Plugins http://wiki.eprints.org/w/Create_Export_Plugins General Training Materials http://www.eprints.org/software/training/ (see the Customisation Training panel for developer training) General Documentation http://wiki.eprints.org/w/Documentation EPrints Orientation for New Users Demo Repository http://demoprints.eprints.org/ and Feature Overview http://www.eprints.org/software/training/users/overview.php [ Part 2.2, Image/JPEG 17KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]
Re: Re-Use Rights Already Come With the (Green) OA Territory
I feel sure that I must have missed something crucial that is being argued over, but I can't see what it is. We all seem to be agreed that Budapest/Bethesda/Berlin Open Access entails the broadest permission to reuse research articles. The problem seems to be that some publishers are using the term Open Access but withholding some of those permissions. So, it is asserted that to fix this state of affairs, we need to define acceptable reuse permissions - such as the UKPMC's Statement of Principle. But then we are creating a pseudonym for Open Access, one that could be misused in exactly the same way in the future. Why not just insist on sticking to the already-agreed Open Access principles, instead of making new ones? And where there is non- conformance, deal with the non-conformance, rather than retreating to a new position with different set of principles. --- Les Carr PS I find the UKPMC's definition a little worrying, as it only allows non-commercial use. Although this sounds all well and good, JISC (the UK funder that runs OA and repository-related activities) expects any service to be self-sustaining, and that means charging! What happens if you make a subscription-based service? To complicate matters, UKPMC go on to define commercial as something that a for- profit organisation does, not something that makes money in its own right. So perhaps I am allowed to charge enormous amounts of money for reusing this data, just as long as it remains a part of my poverty-stricken academic research group. Or perhaps not. I think I would have to find a lawyer. PPS About this commercial/non-commercial tangle. In his definition of Open Access http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/ overview.htm#definition Peter Suber comments that There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. And yet, none of the three sources of OA definitions that he cites (Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin) suggest that there should be any withholding of commercial rights. Rather they allow any responsible purpose. I agree that its hardly watertight, but I think our Founding Fathers' principles were clear!
Open Repositories 2008: CFP
OPEN REPOSITORIES 2008: CALL FOR PAPERS PANELS http://www.openrepositories.org/2008 Repositories are being deployed in a variety of settings (research, scholarship, learning, science, cultural heritage) and across a range of scales (subject, national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). The aim of this conference is to address the technical, managerial, practical and theoretical issues that arise from diverse applications of repositories in the increasingly pervasive information environment. A programme of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, workshops, tutorials and developer coding sessions will bring together all the key stakeholders in the field. Open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will also provide opportunities to advance and co-ordinate the development of repository installations across the world. We invite developers, researchers and practitioners to submit papers describing novel experiences or developments in the construction and use of repositories. Submissions of up to 4 pages in length are requested in PDF or HTML format. Detailed submission instructions will be made available from this page. Submissions for panel discussions are also requested. IMPORTANT DATES AND CONTACT INFO Submission Deadline: Friday 7th December 2007 Notification of Acceptance: Monday January 21st 2008 Submission of DSpace/EPrints/Fedora User Group Presentations: TBA Conference: April 1-4, 2008. University of Southampton, UK. Enquiries to: Program Committee Chair (e.l...@ukoln.ac.uk) or General Chair (l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk) CONFERENCE THEMES The themes of the conference include the following: TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IN THE KNOWLEDGE WORKPLACE - Embedding repositories in business processes and individual workflow. - Change Management - Advocacy and Culture Change - Policy development and policy lag. PROFESSIONALISM AND PRACTICE - Professional Development - Workforce Capacity - Skills and Training - Roles and Responsibilities SUSTAINABILITY - Economic sustainability and new business models, - Technical sustainability of a repository over time, including platform change and migration. - Technical sustainability of holdings over time. Preservation. Audit, certification. Trust. Assessment tools. - Managing sustainability failure - when a repository outlives its organisation or its organisational commitment. LEGAL ISSUES - Embargoes - Licensing and Digital Rights Management - Mandates - Overcoming legislative barriers - Contractual relationships - facilitating and monitoring - International and cross-border issues SUCCESSFUL INTEROPERABILITY - Content standards - discipline-specific vs general - Metadata standards and application profiles - Quality standards and quality control processes - Achieving interchange in multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional environments - Semantic web and linked data - Identifier management for data and real world resources - Access and authentication MODELS, ARCHITECTURES AND FRAMEWORKS - Beyond OAIS - Federations - Institutional Models - uber- or multi-repository environments - Adapting to changing e-infrastructure: SOA, services, cloud computing - Scalability VALUE CHAINS and SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS - Multi-stakeholder value: preservation, open access, research, management, admninistratiion - Multi-agenda, multi-function, multi-purpose repositories - Usefulness and usability - Reference, reuse, reanalysis and repurposing of content - Citation of data / learning objects - Changes in scholarly practice - New benchmarks for scholarly success - Repository metrics - Bibliometrics: usage and impact SERVICES BUILT ON REPOSITORIES - OAI services - User-oriented services - Mashups - Social networking - Commentary / tagging - Searching / information discovery - Alerting - Mining - Visualisation - Integration with Second life and Virtual environments USE CASES FOR REPOSITORIES - E-research/E-science (e.g., data and publication; collaborative services) - E-scholarship - Institutional repositories - Discipline-oriented repositories - Scholarly Publishing - Digital Library - Cultural Heritage - Scientific repositories / data repositories - Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral repositories
Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS
I think that Southampton** is quietly confident that if you can talk up Open Access while actually achieving the metadata deposits as an embedded institutional process, then the final stage of document deposit will be relatively painless to achieve. If you ask them whether they would have planned this as an OA strategy, the answer would be NO. But the opportunity of demonstrating the utility of a repository for ongoing research assessment / metrics / marketing was too good to miss, and it was decided to take the long way around to the goal of OA. If we hadn't taken that decision, the repository would have been marginalised and its institutional impact reduced. -- Les Carr EPrints Technical Director / University of Southampton **by Southampton I mean the library team who are doing all the hard work. I am merely sitting on the steering group and basking in reflected glory :-) On 3 Oct 2007, at 06:54, Arthur Sale wrote: As a matter of interest the Australian research assessment (RQF) refuses to allow its assessors to look at any metadata whatsoever, but insists that every assessable item must be in an institutional repository (even articles in open access journals), and assessors link direct to them. Someday, between the UK and Australia, they'll get it right. In the meantime we may have the better compromise here, since it encourages deposit, in which metadata is the by-product. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia -Original Message- So a better contemporaneous record for deposits, but you are unlikely to find a high percentage of full texts for those deposits because SOuthampton, like many repositories in the UK, is highly influenced by the National Research Assessment Exercise (whose cutoff date is next month). The processes imposed on the repository by the funding councils force high metadata quality, DOIs, ISSNs and submission of *printed outputs*, but eschews (to all intents and purposes) PDFs and all manifestations of electronic publication. The story is more complex than that, but the upshot is that UK repositories engaged in supporting the RAE have to concentrate on metadata deposit over and above full text deposit. Suffice to say that we are all looking forward to revisiting these deposits in the new year! -- Les Carr University of Southampton
Testing Success Rates vs Stimulating Them
It occurred to me that it is rather bizarre behaviour to go to the trouble of exporting ISI bibliographic metadata about my publications solely to measure the effectiveness or shortcomings of my repository. Much better by far to import that list into my repository to top up my missing articles and provide me with the basis on which to upload my own research papers. Then the very act of *checking* my own personal OA effectiveness ensure that its value is 100%. To that end I have created (with a lot of help from Chris Gutteridge) an ISI Import plugin for EPrints, so that anyone can use it to check and supplement their own self-archiving practices. It is in beta at the moment, but if anyone is interested in trying it out in their repository, please let me know. -- Les Carr
Re: Success Rate of the First of the Self-Archiving Mandates: University of Southampton ECS
On 2 Oct 2007, at 06:56, N. Miradon wrote: I thank Professor Harnad for his long and detailed reply. Meanwhile, I have received some results from a random spidering of staff publication lists at http://www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID= Here are the first three entries Prof. Mike McDonald ... 307 publications (17 in ePrints Soton) Prof. Chris Clayton ... 221 publications (14 in ePrints Soton) Prof. AbuBakr Bahaj ... 155 publications (25 in ePrints Soton) There are very different stories to tell about the School repository previously reported and the Institutional Repository for which my colleagues in the University Library are responsible. I hope that my comments do not err into 'spin', but give some genuine insight into the differences of the numbers that are seen here. The base numbers of publications reported are for the entire career history of the academics concerned - in Mike McDonald's case, going back to 1971. Perhaps we will eventually be concerned with backfilling all these valuable publications, but for the moment the repository is concentrating on something nearer to the present. If we take only smaller time slices, then Prof M lists three 2006 publications on his web page, only one of which is in eprints.soton.ac.uk . But in 2005 there are 4 papers, all of which are deposited in the repository. Prof Clayton has 3 of 5 publications deposited in 2006 and 2 out of 3 in 2005. Prof Bahaj has 4 of 6 in 2006 and 5 of 7 in 2005. So a better contemporaneous record for deposits, but you are unlikely to find a high percentage of full texts for those deposits because SOuthampton, like many repositories in the UK, is highly influenced by the National Research Assessment Exercise (whose cutoff date is next month). The processes imposed on the repository by the funding councils force high metadata quality, DOIs, ISSNs and submission of *printed outputs*, but eschews (to all intents and purposes) PDFs and all manifestations of electronic publication. The story is more complex than that, but the upshot is that UK repositories engaged in supporting the RAE have to concentrate on metadata deposit over and above full text deposit. Suffice to say that we are all looking forward to revisiting these deposits in the new year! -- Les Carr University of Southampton
Re: RCUK policy on open access
On 30 Jun 2005, at 22:43, Tim Gray, Libray Assistant, Homerton College, Cambridge wrote: Incidentally, what percentage of all UK peer-reviewed research is funded by RCUK? Would this percentage then be the percentage of *all* peer- reviwed UK research available via OA funded post 1st October 2005 (the proposed start date)? Is there a large number of other funders of peer-reviewed research - but not necessarily mandating an OA policy? I calculated this roughly (about 6 months ago) for a journalist. RCUK provided about 2.1 billion UK pounds (in 2003/4). Then there's research infrastructure funding across the UK which adds up to £1.4bn in 2004-5. Independent (chariites) then add perhaps another £0.7bn. In other words, the RCUK money is exactly half! What follows is the justification for my figures. You will notice that ther is a big hole in terms of EU and DTI funding, but I finesse that by claiming that the money is for near to market purposes and not real research. EVIDENCE--- (a) From Funding higher education in England: How HEFCE allocates its funds, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/hefce/2004/04_23/04_23.pdf Public research funds are provided under a dual support system. HEFCE provides funding to support the research infrastructure. Our funds go towards the cost of the salaries of permanent academic staff, premises, libraries and central computing costs. The Research Councils provide for direct project costs and contribute to indirect project costs. Our funding for research in 2004-05 is £1,081 million The funding mechanisms and processes are similar in Scotland, Wales. Only the figures differ (below). (b) From SHEFC Media release PRHE/02/04 (17 March 2004), http:// www.shefc.ac.uk/library/06854fc203db2fbd00fb39b63691/prhe0204.html Scottish higher education institutions (HEIs) will receive more than £800 million SHEFC funding [ this is mixed teaching and research headings of which about 230million seems to be equivalent to the English headings ] (c) From HEFCW Circular W04/18HE - Recurrent Grant 2004-05, http:// www.elwa.org.uk/elwaweb/doc_bin/he%20circulars/w0418he%20recurrent% 20grant%202004_05.pdf In Table 4, total research allocations appear to be about £61 million pounds. I cannot find any figures for Northern Ireland - lets assume the same as Wales. -- Other (Govt) funding resources? = There's DTI, MOD and EU which provide significant sums of money, but they are more along the D spectrum of RD. Of course we take their money and try to turn it into a research activity (often without their knowledge) but this still could reasonably be missed off a true blue sky, journal publishing scenario. Basically I'm stalling cos I don't have a clue how to find out these numbers, much less to divide them between Universities and Business :-) Other charitable research funding organisations: == Each organisation is listed with its latest declared annual funding figures. Leverhulme: £20million Nuffield: about £9 million Rowntree: about £5 million Wellcome Trust (Biomedical/medicine): £400million (however, the Wellcome Trust is one of 111 charities that form the AMRC who had a combined spend of £660M on a wide range of medical and health research activities in the UK in 2002/03.) Royal Society, British Council etc provide fellowships and bursaries but no direct research project grants. --- Les Carr
Re: BBC cites a preprint from arXiv
Usually it's New Scientist that picks these stories up (they have grown-up physicists working for them), and indeed the BBC ran a story based on an arxiv preprint (hep-th/0501068) in March 2005(http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4357613.stm) . So it's not the first, but I can't find any other examples. Paul Rincon, the journalist who produced this story, has about 22 stories based on Nature articles and 10 based on Science (if you take the results of a Google search for site:news.bbc.co.uk Paul-Rincon journal-Nature). --- Les Carr On 23 May 2005, at 22:03, Eric F. Van de Velde wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4564477.stm Is this a first? I.e., a major news organization uses unrefereed self-archived preprint as the basis of a news story. Although not a major hard-news story, it was posted on the main page of the BBC news web site. Does this point to the growing acceptance of Open Archives and/or of arXiv? Does it point to a growing disregard for peer review (at least, outside of the academy)? --Eric Van de Velde, Caltech.
Re: Comparing the Wellcome OA Policy and the RCUK (draft) Policy
On 21 May 2005, at 03:28, David Goodman wrote: I'm just commenting on one key part of the exchange, where I disagree with both parties: I think I disagree that we disagree! The life sciences have already moved beyond the need to read a word document on a local website I definitely agree with you! And more - it's not only the life sciences. It's all the experimental sciences. And engineering. And social sciences. The immediate problem is in fact still just: providing a Word [or other] document to be read on a ... web site. Absolutely. 100%. Top priority. Access is fundamental. I do not think this is a time to be diverted from that priority. Quite! Completely! Totally!! It would be foolish to be so diverted. Plain Old Open Access is still too far away to be taken for granted. None of our plans should divert attention from it nor should any of our implementations divert resources from it. Access is fundamental to anything else that anyone may wish to provide, so to put those extras IN THE WAY of POOA is to be counterproductive even for an Added Value Open Access agenda. Don't cut off the branch that you are sitting on! Don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg. etc. etc. BUT what about organisations, groups, individuals who do have an Added Value Open Access Agenda? How should they proceed or not? Should they stop and repent of their mixed message? Or should they make sure that they integrate with the OA infrastructure and current OA policies and activities, and provide their Added Value as a useful Added Feature to those who want it. The first step in research is to read the literature, and this is still not possible for all. hairsplitting type=severeBefore you can read an article you have to be able to find it, so that already presupposes some kind of service on top of the fundamental provision of access. But the service wouldn't be possible without OA./hairsplitting I do not think Welcome or RUCK or NIH should be adding features just yet. Nor would I delay for improved findability and preservation. So I disagree with the first sentence and agree with the second - I think they should add features and improvements to their hearts content, BUT I think they ought to take advantage of the technical infrastructure and do it in a way that is compatible with and adds value to the existing activities. For Wellcome to insist that papers from research that they have funded should be consigned to a different repository, at odds with the procedures and mandates emerging from the rest of the community is disappointing. I believe that it comes from the application of an outdated paradigm (you have to host and control the data that you use); since the Open Archives Initiative (or the subsequent development of Web Services) there is no need to control articles in that way! Yes, I'd love to have content tagged in XML that I can repurpose according to my own concepts. The point I was making about that was that XML is only really useful when you have some re-publishing scheme to support. For almost all other purposes (including all the advanced content and citation analyses you can name) PDF and Word will suffice. Yes, I'd love to be able to extract the data underlying a graph so I can analyze it. You should have a look at the work of the EBank project too then - it allows researchers to deposit their documents in a Plain Old Open Access Repository, and to deposit their accompanying scientific data in a Slightly Configured Open Access Repository which uses Plain Old OAI-PMH to provide scientific metadata to OAI services (both the Plain Old variety and Slightly Enhanced ones). And that's my point - we haven't usurped control. We have provided some more functionality for people who want to buy into it after they have done the job of providing Open Access to their bit of the Literature in their Institutional Repository.
Re: Comparing the Wellcome OA Policy and the RCUK (draft) Policy
it will be useful to do this in an OA context (e.g. representing papers for small, handheld devices), but that is providing an added value service on top of Plain Old Open Access. PMC already offers this functionality and that's vital to enhance the potential that the Internet offers. Please excuse my unfamiliarity with PMC - can you give an example of a PMC entry showing this integration (ie beyond listing supplementary materials)? The life sciences have already moved beyond the need to read a word document on a local website I definitely agree with you! And more - it's not only the life sciences. It's all the experimental sciences. And engineering. And social sciences. Institutional repositories may never offer the same degree of functionality until every single institution uses the same ingestion and storage system You are thinking in terms of monolithic and centrally controlled software. In the web-based, distributed and interoperable environment in which we find ourselves, I could easily deposit my research articles inside my Plain Old Institutional Repository and my research data inside my Learned Society's Advanced Chemistry-Aware Repository, and have the scientific record seamlessly and automatically tied together. Document and data. Measurement, analysis and interpretation, all interoperable, all open for scrutiny and use. OAI only links the metadata to files that might be in Word or PDF which may be unreadable in the years to come. There is indeed no constraint within OAI on the formats in which its items are to be provided. However, PDF documents could only become unreadable if all the public PDF specifications were systematically destroyed. (And no-one had bothered to create a translation program from PDF to the majority formats of the day.) There is a lot of work being undertaken in these topics by various projects. The JISC-funded E-Bank project (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ projects/ebank-uk/) of which UKOLN and Southampton are partners, are producing the kind of integration between data and document that you are describing, precisely for supplementing Institutional Repositories. In particular, the project is taking the view that the data format must be well-understood, and that i must be exposed to harvesters to allow chemistry-specific searching. The new JISC Digital Repositories programme will soon have a raft of related data- based repository work. Despite my comments about PDF and Word, I agree with Robert that repositories should be managed with an understanding of preservation! Our repository has a cheap policy of including at least one safe format whereas Wellcome has a relatively expensive conversion process in place. In the end we disagree about which formats are, practically speaking, safe. I applaud Wellcome for putting their money where their mouth is and providing a service. BUT, that service could easily be made to work within a network of institutional repositories. ALSO, the data integration could be made to work within a network of institutional repositories. So we're back to strategy, because there is no technical barrier against Wellcome's policy working with Institutions. Finally, I hope that Robert will accept an invitation to visit the EBank project and to discuss the nature of scientific communication and the advantage that our respective repositories can offer scientists. --- Dr Leslie Carr Eprints Technical Director EBank Project partner
Re: Which Will Be the First Open Access Country?
Are you forgetting Scotland? All of the Universities have signed up to OA there. The only issue is whether Scotland is a country, a state or a nation. I used to know once :-) -- Les PS I think a country is geographically defined, so Scotland may well count. On 14 May 2005, at 23:09, Stevan Harnad wrote: Here are some statistics you might find interesting, ranking countries on their number of registered OA Archives (absolute and relative to population size, counting only countries with 4 or more Archives): Sources: Population size: http://www.geohive.com/global/world.php OA Archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse Country Archs pop(M) ratio rank USA (127) 293.1M 43 UK (54)60.3M 90 3rd/M* Germany (38)82.4M 46 Canada (28)32.5M 86 4th/M France (19)60.4M 32 Brazil (18)184.1M 10 Italy (16)58.1M 28 Austral.(16)19.9M 80 5th/M Netherl.(16)16.3M 98 2nd/M** Sweden (12)7,5M160 1st/M*** India (7) 1B 1 Belgium (5) 10.4M 48 Portug. (5) 10.5M 48 Finland (4) 5.2M77 6th/M Denmark (4) 5.4M75 7th/M So Afr. (4) 42.7M 9 Hungary (4) 10.0M 40 Spain (4) 40.3M 10 Japan (4) 127.3M 3 Top 12 for number of OA archives per million population: (1) Sweden (2) Netherlands (3) UK (4) Canada (5) Australia (6) Finland (7) Denmark (8) Belgium (9) Portugal (10) Germany (11) US (12) Hungary Top (and only) 6 for Registered Self-Archiving Policies (1) France (2) Germany (3) UK (4) Australia (5) Portugal (6) US Policy Registry: http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php Country ranks for number and ratio of self-archived articles (15% worldwide): Partial data for Biology and Social Sciences available here: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/analyse_pays.htm -- --- Current national tally of members of American Scientist Open Access Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open- Access-Forum.html Not counted: 98 COM (International) 62 ORG (International) 12 NET (International) By country: 134 EDU + 10 GOV (United States) 129 UK (United Kingdom) 47 CA (Canada) 31 DE (Germany) 22 AU (Australia) 21 FR (France) 17 IT (Italy) 11 IN (India) 10 CH (Switzerland) 10 CN (China) 10 NL (Netherlands) 8 JP (Japan) 8 PT (Portugal) 8 SE (Sweden) 6 BR (Brazil) 6 FI (Finland) 4 BE (Belgium) 4 ES (spain) 3 DK (Denmark) 3 IL (Israel) 3 ZA (South Africa) 2 AT (Austria) 2 HU (Hungary) 2 IE (Ireland) 2 MX (Mexico) 2 NZ (New Zealand) 2 SG (Singapore) (19 other countries, 1 each)
Re: Poynder on Digital Rights Management and Open Access
On 23 Apr 2005, at 20:48, Stevan Harnad wrote: Richard Poynder has written an -- as always -- thoughtful and informative article: Richard Poynder, The role of digital rights management in Open Access, Indicare, April 22, 2005. http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=93 http://poynder.blogspot.com/2005/04/role-of-digital-rights-management- in.html I find it significant that Richard defines DRM as a two-part phenomenon: metadata and services (ie a layer of 'rights' metadata and a layer of software that enables appropriate activities given the correct interpretation of the metadata). Note that this conforms to the Open Archives Initiative model of data and service providers communicating through sharing metadata about digital items. DRM is just one example of many publication-related issues that can be dealt with in such a way - preservation, data archiving, version control, classification, certification (all taken from a brief scan of the Self-Archiving FAQ http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/). Open Access, a simple phenomenon whose implications are well understood by researchers, librarians, administrators, managers, funders and politicians, provides the technical infrastructure, the community of users and the service environment which will underpin new solutions for all these issues. Increasingly large amounts of OA material will generate large numbers of OA services, supporting new ways of using the literature which in turn will bring new requirements for the DRM community to support. Now that funders can see the output from their projects appearing online as OA material, they can start to specify what they want to do with it (as services providers) and what extra information needs to be collected by the data providers. Now that research administrators see output from their institutions appearing online in the OA institutional repositories, they can start to work out how they want it analysed, and what metadata needs to be associated with it. My conclusion is patterned on Richards, except that where Richard's puts the OA community in hock to the DRM community, mine reverses this as follows: Until there is a lot more Open Access content available for researchers (and other stakeholders) to use to their benefit, the DRM movement (and many other movements) may struggle to make significant progress in understanding the nature of rights, responsibilities and opportunities involved in digitally-mediated scientific and scholarly research. Increasingly it appears that only by engaging with this simple issue can the [DRM] movement hope to achieve its objectives. --- Les Carr
Re: Ann Okerson on institutional archives
On 29 Mar 2005, at 06:09, Leif Laaksonen wrote: Working for an IT organisation (CSC) that is supporting (computational) research work and the Finnish university library computer system, it always makes me smile when when someone makes the claim that an IT service does not need more than a cheap computer and somebody looking after it once in a while. The technical costs are not significant. The labour through hardware and software maintenance are the most significant. Then you should add the infrastructure for long time backup and user support. The service that Stevan described is just one service/server that forms a small part of the technical infrastructure of our School/University. Compared to providing web servers/maintaining the Web site/running a compute service it is a fairly insignficant operation. The backup requirements are real, but almost trivial - and just form an overall part of the institution's backup strategy. Similarly for hardware support - buy a new machine every ?3 years. There are a lot of organizations like CNRS and CSC that can give you all an accurate picture of the costs involved. CNRS have various economies of scale, but many more resposnisbilities, which is why I posted a request for information from them. We see a lot of ad hoc services popping up in the academia, created just as Stevan Harnad described. These services are mostly supported by one or two scientists. I can imagine the kind of services that you are thinking about, but an Institutional repository (by definition) is not one of these. Long time time and well supported services are and will be also in the future expensive! Duration and expense are relative terms. If you compare the expense of running an IR with the expense of running any other business-critical service, you should find that it compares quite favourably. At least, that is the experience that people are reporting. The real expense (unsurprisingly) seems to be coming from Marketing and Managing Institutional Change. --- Les Carr ___ SI mailing list s...@wsis-cs.org http://mailman.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/si
Re: Ann Okerson on institutional archives
To be fair to Ann Okerson, she did not state that institutional archives (or repositories) are likely to be expensive, only that respondents to her survey were concerned that was the case. Very little of her article address Institutional Repositories, and the paragraphs that did only suggested that IR's could have a role for OA. Clearly, Dr Okerson believes that IRs began with some other role and may be adapted towards Open Access and not vice versa. (This may be down to the change in nomenclature from Institutional Archives to Institutional Repositories - I for one would be quite interested to see a definitive etymology). I think that her article should be read as an American voice (hence the title reflections from the United States) in a wider discussion, some of which (mainly UK) is represented in the other articles in this issue of Serials. The article does seem at variance with accepted definitions of Open Access (e.g. Open Access is defined as concerning the research literature not administrative reports of the funded projects; also self-archiving in repositories has always been recommended as an Open Access strategy) but I do not know whether this is a national, institutional, professional or personal difference of views. --- Les Carr On 26 Mar 2005, at 04:09, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, 26 Mar 2005, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: Friends: Ann Okerson weighs the pros and cons of OA for US research libraries, noting that institutional repositories are likely to be expensive, and their focus in the U.S. is likely to be on locally produced scholarly materials other than articles. Consequently: It is unlikely that under this kind of scenario in the US, scattered local versions of STM articles would compete effectively with the completeness or the value that the publishing community adds. She also suggests that library cost savings resulting from OA journals are unlikely, unless substantial production cost reductions can be realised by many categories of publisher. - in Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community 18(1)(2005). Why does Ann Okerson, a respected and knowledgeable US academic librarian, think that institutional repositories will be expensive? What are the facts? Will leading institutions that have set up institutional archives tell her and others how much does it cost to set up archives and run them. Arun The facts are all contrary to what Ann Okerson states. Not only are institutional archives not *likely* to be expensive, those that actually exist are de facto not expensive at all (a $2000 linux server, a few days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year maintenance). Their focus in the US and elsewhere is likely to be exactly on what university policy decides it should be (and the Berlin 3 recommendation, likely to be widely adopted now, is that the focus should be on university article output). And the purpose of self-archiving is not and never has been to compete effectively with the completeness or the value that the publishing community adds. It is to provide access to those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the journal's official version. Stevan Harnad --- Les Carr
Re: Ann Okerson on institutional archives
On 26 Mar 2005, at 15:14, Franck Laloe wrote: We now have a goood experience of this question at CCSD, since we have run an archive for the CNRS (a French research institution) for a few years. Actually, the cost of running an archive is not much; one salary is needed to pay someone to check that the documents which are uploaded are OK for the archive; the price of the buyiung and manitaining the hardware is comparable or less. What costs more money, on the other hand, is to write new software. We constantly improve ours (it is now significantly different from ArXiv, although it remains compatible with it), and we pay three engineers for this. I would say that for a whole (medium size) country like France, a centralized system for all disciplins would cost about 10 salaries; this is of course an extremely small fraction of the research budget of the country. This is very interesting and important information. Would you be able to give an indication of the kinds of changes that you have had to build on the base software (I assume from your message that you began with arxiv)? With all of these systems, the devil (and the expense) is in the details, but the precise details differ from one situation to another. It would be a terrific insight to have an Institutional Repository costing data-point at the National end of the spectrum! --- Les Carr
Latest on Berlin 3: Streaming Videos now available
The Berlin3 conference videos have now been edited and converted into streaming MP4 format, suitable for the latest version of RealPlayer. All media from the conference are available from http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/program.html As well as the reports from CNRS, DFG, CERN, INSERM, JISC and other organisations, the videos of the following speakers from the satellite session should be noted for their usefulness for Open Access advocacy ideas and experience. Title: Researchers Open Access Survey Speaker: Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd Video: rtsp://shaka.ecs.soton.ac.uk:554/berlin3/02-AlmaSwan.mp4 PowerPoint: http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt Title: Open Access - Developing a National Information Strategy in Scotland Speaker: Derek Law, University of Strathclyde Video: rtsp://shaka.ecs.soton.ac.uk:554/berlin3/01-DerekLaw.mp4 PowerPoint: http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/01-DerekLaw.ppt Title: Open Access Institutional Repositories in UK Universities Speaker: Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Video: rtsp://shaka.ecs.soton.ac.uk:554/berlin3/03-BillHubbard.mp4 PowerPoint: http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/03-BillHubbard.ppt --- Les Carr
Re: Scottish Declaration on Open Access
On 15 Mar 2005, at 12:11, Michael Fraser wrote: Just in case it's of interest, the Guardian has a short but effective piece on the Scottish Declaration on Open Access (http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm) -- 16 universties committed to institutional repositories (or a jointly-developed central repository) and some considering mandating academics to self-archive. This is very good news indeed! Derek Law (who is quoted in the article) gave a very rousing talk about the development and background to the Scottish Declaration at the recent Berlin-3 conference. His slides and a video of his presentation are available from the conference website at http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/program.html . Although the video is large, I thoroughly recommend waiting for it to download as Derek talks very convincingly about the emerging rationale behind forming an institutional and national consensus on Open Access. The Declaration itself is a somewhat mixed-up document, conflating OA publishing, OA archiving library economics and the revolution of scholarly publishing systems, however it ends with a remarkably focused and effective set of actions directed at funders, institutions and government. Institutions (in particular) are enjoined to (a) set up a repository, (b) encourage AND WHERE PRACTICAL MANDATE researchers to deposit their output and their students' PhD theses and (c) to review intellectual property policies to ensure that researchers have the right and duty to provide open access to their research. What is particularly notable is that there is no institutional action relating to publishing in OA journals, despite the fact that OA publishing is well represented in the text of the declaration and in the funders' actions. I would be interested to hear the reasons for this - was it difficult to overcome researchers' reluctance to change their publishing habits? --- Les Carr
Re: Proposed update of BOAI definition of OA: Immediate and Permanent
On 13 Mar 2005, at 21:10, Stevan Harnad wrote: Open Access is provided *by* researchers *for* researchers (and for research progress and benefits). Open Access, by this criterion, applies to Research Outputs (or Researcher Outputs). As a Computer Scientist, I automatically read peer reviewed journal as peer reviewed (journal/conference/workshop/symposium), because that's the convention of my discipline, where a conference/workshop/symposium is a peer review service provider. I believe that Stevan does not mean to bar this reading, as he himself used it in public at the Berlin-3 conference. On Sun, 13 Mar 2005, Jean-Claude Guedon wrote: And, by the way, what does publishing really mean? We can philosophize or even legalize about that if we like. Oh good. Let's take this back to researchers again. Since we know that they must publish or perish we might be able to say that publishing is an activityt that will make a researcher somewhat less likely to perish. In some disciplines putting a working paper on the Web will suffice, in others getting a full page peer-reviewed spread in Nature is needed to stay the executioner's hand. --- Les Carr
Re: Bethesda statement on open access publishing
On 14 Mar 2005, at 04:16, David Goodman wrote: What remains is the literally academic distinction you mention: it cannot be listed on one's academic CV as published. This is now as archaic as the structure of the academic world itself. But it is that world (and no other) in which we are working. QED. --- Les Carr Archaic Senior Lecturer University of Southampton
Southampton Workshop on UK Institutional OA Repositories Jan 25-26 2005
[Best wishes for a Happy New Year] Institutional Open Access Archives: Leadership, Direction and Launch 25-26 January 2005 at the University of Southampton, UK http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ 2005 is poised to be a breakthrough year for open access and, in particular, institutional open access archives in the UK: - JISC is set to announce a major call for projects on Institutional Open Access Archives (IAs) - research councils in the UK are considering their next moves on how to make research publications open access To help forward-thinking institutions embrace these exciting opportunities, the University of Southampton is offering two free one-day workshops. ** Day 1 (January 25th): a practical meeting for archive administrators and those offering technical support for archives This meeting will involve hands-on practical sessions on building and configuring repositories and attracting content. There will also be sessions on integrating the role of IAs with RAE reporting, e-science, marketing, education and training. ** Day 2 (January 26th): a strategic meeting for Pro Vice Chancellors, senior librarians, archive managers and researchers This meeting will feature speakers from RCUK, the British Library and the Wellcome Trust and others who are influential in, and have key insights into, forthcoming UK policy developments. The day will end with a research colloquium (Research Repositories: The Next Ten Years) held jointly with the EPSRC's Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC. Demand for places will be high so please register now to ensure your institution is represented at one or both of the meetings. If you are unable to attend, please recommend it to someone else in your team who would be appropriate. There will be no charge for participating. FOR FURTHER DETAILS including registration instructions, please visit the meeting website at http://www.eprints.org/jan2005 The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, the most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and the JISC TARDis project, which has been investigating the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround institutional repositories. --- Leslie Carr On Behalf of GNU EPrints and JISC TARDis project teams
Re: Self-Archiving vs. Self-Publishing FAQ
On 13 Nov 2004, at 06:54, Rick Anderson wrote: Look, obviously we're proceeding from a different set of definitions here. indubitably My point is simply that the word publish has a real-world definition that is far different from the artificially narrow one created by the OA establishment. It may have many real-world definitions or uses, and in fact the OED lists several (1) To make publicly or generally known; to declare or report openly or publicly; to announce; to tell or noise abroad; also, to propagate, disseminate (2) To announce in a formal or official manner I really do not think that the OA establishment (establishment? what establishment?) has coined a new definition, rather that it is trying to work with the definitions used by other people (establishments, if you will). Hence the academic and scholarly establishment have a clear idea (or rather clear ideas) of what constitutes a formal and official manner of announcing new research results- usually peer reviewed journal or conference articles. This is the most pertinent meaning of publish that OA has to address, and it is why to propagate/disseminate, although a perfectly good interpretation of publish in most of the real world is actually inaccurate and misleading within this part of the real world - the part that researchers inhabit. If using the Berlin Declaration definition helps you do your work, fine. The Berlin use (again, not a new meaning) helps us communicate about our work. But don't yell at (or condescend to) the rest of the world when it insists on using the real-world definition. The rest of the world needs informing when it makes miscomments and promulgates misunderstandings. I hope that this isn't, of itself, a condescending position, but it is a rather necessary one as journalists, politicians, commentators and even researchers get themselves tied up in knots when they start to reason using the wrong definitions. --- Les Carr
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
On 7 Oct 2004, at 12:38, Brian Simboli wrote: But: why not cut to the chase? Why stumble over some pocket change en route to picking up the one thousand dollar bill that lies ahead on the sidewalk? Why not directly engage in infrastructural initiatives that will concurrently resolve access, affordability, preservation, and any number of other interwoven issues? If you haven't got enough money for a cup of coffee, pick up the change - if you haven't got enough access (or impact) start self-archiving now!!! I see this issue (and the recent discussions on this forum) as actually being a manifestation of the Research vs Development argument. There are some things that we know how to do, and we should do now to improve our world. There are other things that we don't quite know how to do yet, and we should research into those things. We should get funding to put the former into practice and funding to find out how the latter could be put into practice. (We might get these monies from different funding bodies with different agendas.) Self archiving is easy. We know how to do it. We have developed more than enough interoperable software platforms to make a really big impact on the literature and the way we can use it. We should be paid to install these systems and start using them! Preservation is difficult. No-one knows how to solve all its problems. We should be paid to examine how this could be achieved, and think about the various roles of the creators and funders and managers of digital resources and speculate about their future relationship to intellectual property. But it must be a fundamental tenet of RD that no practical, useful service should ever be harnessed to or held hostage by speculative, research code - not until the issues are well understood and it ceases to be a matter of research and intellectual enquiry. We should do the research, we should ask the questions, we MUST find the answers, but we should not delay or degrade our useful developments with our unfinished research. --- Les Carr University of Southampton
Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
It was very interesting to see some publishers' reactions to OA 1 2 at a meeting I attended recently. The discussion I was present for came down clearly on the side of Open Archives as a preferable (and stable) way forward, even describing it as a safety valve on an overheated system. My impression was that it may 'buy enough time' to allow publishing practices and business models to adapt (and compete!) on a more realistic time scale than those dictated by artificial solutions from funding organisations. There was also discussion about librarians and academics changing their assumptions and expectations, and whether institutional librarians may have to relinquish collections management in the serials world. Les Carr
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
On 18 Nov 2003, at 13:28, Stevan Harnad wrote: What is the actual percentage of withdrawals in the 12-years span of 250,000 papers self-archived in http://www.arxiv.org And what actually was the reason behind there withdrawals? Below is a manual analysis of the 399 which depends on my interpretation. I looked at everything that said withdrawn in the comments field to see what reasons people were giving for removing articles. 1 Embargo on data 4 Administrative problem with archive usage 8 Archivists suspect misdoing 10 This is the Replacement of a withdrawn article 18 Edited to withdraw some sections 23 Plagiarism 31 A New paper subsumes the results of this paper 33 Temporarily Withdrawn (for fixing errors) 37 This article is Corrected by another deposit 70 Incorrect results or interpretation 164 Withdrawn without explanation If you look at Copyright in the entries, there are 4 withdrawals and one 'tweaking' to avoid copyright. --- Les Carr
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
On 17 Nov 2003, at 20:42, Stevan Harnad wrote: I have to admit that this is the first I've ever heard of any papers being removed from Arxiv for copyright reasons. Me too. There are 11 entries across the whole *physics* archive which have any comments about copyright: 9 are mentions of copyright, 2 are indicating problems (#3, #4 below). 3. astro-ph/0301194 [abs, ps, pdf, other] : Title: The little galaxy that could: Kinematics of Camelopardalis B Authors: Ayesha Begum, Jayaram N. Chengalur, Ulrich Hopp Comments: Accepted for publication in New Astronomy. For copyright reasons this version is slightly different from the accepted version, although the differences are minor Journal-ref: New Astron. 8 (2003) 267-281 4. physics/0202004 [abs, src] : Title: Electron excitation and 'cascade' ionisation of diatomic molecules with ultra-short pulses of strong IR lasers Authors: A.I. Pegarkov Comments: Removed by arXiv admin as author submitted a version for which he does not hold copyright Subj-class: Optics; Chemical Physics Journal-ref: Chem. Phys. Lett. V. 343, 642-648 (2001) However, if you look for the word withdrawn, there are 399 records returned. Almost all of these (for which a reason is given) are either due to plagiarism or the discovery of errors in the paper. The list of comments appears below: - (NOTE: PAPER IS INCORRECT AND IS WITHDRAWN) (Paper is being withdrawn: original conclusion is incorrect for the nonabelian case. For a correct treatment, see M. Asorey, S. Carlip, and F. Falceto, hep-th/9304081.) (Section 7 on the Massive Case and some references have been withdrawn). To the Memory of Laurent Schwartz. Report-no: CPT-2002/P.4462 (This paper replaces our earlier, withdrawn, paper, hep-th/9712178.) Minor typos corrected (Withdrawn due to error. See D. Lowe, L. Susskind and J. Uglum, hep-th/9402136, for correct treatment.) (Withdrawn: This paper turns out incomplete and even misleading. I must apologize to all of the recipients.) (no figures) This paper is being withdrawn (ssar...@ua1vm.ua.edu) (withdrawn) (withdrawn) *withdrawn* 0, plain tex, This paper is incorrect, and has been withdrawn by the Author 1 postscript figure, uses revtex.sty This paper has been withdrawn, as further work has shown that an atom laser as described by the model herein *does not have a steady state*, so it doesn't matter much what it would look like 2 uuencoded figures, WITHDRAWN PENDING REVISION 2e, title changed, section 2 withdrawn and one reference added. To appear in Phys.Lett.B 6 pages; Withdrawn at author's request Mon, 30 Oct 95 ; Claims in connection with disordered systems have been withdrawn; More detailed description of the simulations; Inset added to figure 3 After a 3.5 month refereeing delay, withdrawn and submitted to ApJL, where it is now in press An observation from the previous version has been withdrawn and a new proof added. Submitted for publication in PRA An uncorrectly justified claim about adding Einstein Rosen bridges withdrawn Certain speculations introduced in Part III of the original paper have been withdrawn. Additional (minor) comments have been made Criticism of results by Nagao and Slevin withdrawn Errors corrected, section 4.1 withdrawn and title changed. A more complete treatment will appear in a forthcoming paper Hence, the original version of this paper has been withdrawn Hence, the original version of this paper has been withdrawn Hence, the original version of this paper has been withdrawn II, and is hence withdrawn Manuscript withdrawn by the authors Manuscript withdrawn; see below Original version was submitted to MNRAS on 13, Jan, 2003, which was withdrawn. After heavey revison, its essence was resubmitted to ApJL on 18 Aug. 2003. 2nd revision. Paper Withdrawn Paper Withdrawn. Some aspects of the RG calculation have to be reconsidered. It will be rewritten Paper contains an error and is withdrawn for now Paper has been withdrawn Paper has been withdrawn for major repairs Paper has been withdrawn; see cond-mat/0301499 Paper is withdrawn and superseded by EFI-94-36 which will appear shortly with the new hep-th number hep-th/9407111 Paper is withdrawn pending lifting of data embargo Paper is withdrawn. See quant-ph/9812019 Paper temporarily withdrawn for remodeling Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn Paper withdrawn after reanalysis of data. Paper no longer available for download Paper withdrawn because its principal conclusion is proably wrong Paper withdrawn by authors, due to crucial omission of higher resonances Paper withdrawn by the authors for reasons explained in the relacement Paper withdrawn due to a crucial algebraic error in section 3 Paper withdrawn due to errors Paper withdrawn due to incorrect results Paper withdrawn pending major revisions Paper withdrawn pending resolution of this problem Paper
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
[This message contains some long quotes. Please bear with me!] At 10:20 16/02/2003 -0500, Dempsey,Lorcan commented on Les Carr's comment: The Open in OAIS comes from the fact that the standard is open (the archives may be closed), whereas OAI and BOAI assume open distribution of metadata and open access to texts (respectively). thus: This is misleading. The open in OAI is explained in the OAI FAQ on the OAI website as follows: --- What do you mean by Open? Our intention is open from the architectural perspective - defining and promoting machine interfaces that facilitate the availability of content from a variety of providers. Openness does not mean free or unlimited access to the information repositories that conform to the OAI-PMH. Such terms are often used too casually and ignore the fact that monetary cost is not the only type of restriction on use of information - any advocate of free information recognize that it is eminently reasonable to restrict denial of service attacks or defamatory misuse of information. --- This is available from http://www.openarchives.org/documents/FAQ.html The protocol is agnostic about the business or service environment in which it is used. The RDN www.rdn.ac.uk for example uses OAI to gather metadata from its contributing partners in a closed way. Absolutely. I apologise for the ambiguity that remained in my comments. I deliberately used access for BOAI and the weaker dissemination for OAI, but failed to communicate my meaning. In OAI, the access is open not in the economic sense, but in the architectural sense - OAI-PMH is designed for disseminating metadata between system- and organisational- boundaries. In that sense, it increases openness, because unrelated systems MAY (if permitted), participate in metadata dissemination and processing activities (hence the OAI terms data provider and service provider). Nothing about OAI addresses whether the DATA itself (e.g. documents) may be shared and processed. I think I was correct about the O in OAIS (see section 1.1 of the standard document), but more to the point, the architecture diagrams which are contained in the standard seem to lack any mechanism for sharing between Archives or Archives and other distributed computational entities (harvesters, agents, semantic web spiders etc). In fact, I now see (in the tutorial you refer to below) that federated archives are supported by the standard (I guess they are a simply a different class of consumer), so that is a step in the right direction. I'd like to emphasise that the mission of the OAI is to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content (quote from FAQ). Interestingly enough, the enormously sucessful High Energy Physics archive became the problem that OAI was established to solve - it was an ISOLATED archive. Building an archive is a great step forward if you don't have a stable environment from which to share your data or documents, but a planetful of individual, isolated, unco-operative archives (part of the so-called deep web) is a solution to one kind of problem (scholarly storage), but the foundation of another kind of problem (scholarly communication). There are at least two of these kinds of archives available right now, and we think it's hugely important to maintain the momentum in encouraging a planetful of scientists and scholars to use one or other of them!! It is worth noting that the scenarios given in OAIS are without exception data archives - enormous collections of database records comprising government forms or scientific measurements. In contrast, scholarly papers are documents, not data; their purpose is communication rather than processing. It is perhaps unsurprising that the users of these documents require something different from their archives, accounting for Stevan's emphasis on immediacy and access. This is again misleading. If you look at the following tutorial on the OAIS website by Don Sawyer and Lou Reich (dated October 2002) http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/presentations/oais_tutorial_200210.ppt you will see several examples of document-related scenarios. My comments applied to the set of illustrative scenarios that were published in the standards document itself. Thanks for drawing my attention to this helpful tutorial which expands on the role of the standard. Perhaps there is an unavoidable tension here - for a librarian, an article about Cognitive Science can only be an object to be curated, whereas for a Cognitive Scientist it is a message to be interpreted and used. Well ... I would argue that this is also again misleading. Curation and use are intimately connected: libraries engage in curatorial practices to support use. A librarian wants to make sure that what was written yesterday is available for you to use today. A librarian wants to make sure that an article you write today is available for somebody else to read tomorrow. I doubt whether you really only want to read today's
Re: UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review
The latest paper (with many of the prior citations) appears to be Use of citation analysis to predict the outcome of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise for Unit of Assessment (UoA) 61: Library and Information Management available at http://informationr.net/ir/6-2/paper103.html Les Carr --- From: Charles Oppenheim c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk Organization: Loughborough University Subject: Re: UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review There have been many studies over the years (primarily authored by one C. Oppenheim, but also by others) demonstrating a statistically significant correlation between citation counts by academics returned for the RAE and their department's eventual RAE scores. These studies cover hard science, soft science and humanities; not sure if any studies have been done in engineering subjects though. Professor Charles Oppenheim Department of Information Science Loughborough University Loughborough Leics LE11 3TU
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
At 15:57 26/07/2002 +0100, Tim Chown wrote: ...what's the best way to get the institutions engaged? You may be interested in the TARDIS project we are just starting up at Southampton. Funded by JISC in the UK, its objective is to examine ways of achieving cultural and institutional change in order to get academics self-archiving. Using a multidisciplinary institutional archive for Southampton University as the focus, we are looking at various carrot-and-stick ideas to get archives in general filled. Fronted by librarians calling on our technical resources, we are looking at various forms of assisted self-archiving as well as technical and administrative 'inducements'. Six departments across the institution are being targetted; at one end of the spectrum we are undertaking advocacy campaigns, at the other end we intend to simply sit down with hundreds of individuals, help them fill out the eprints forms and answer their questions. Although our website isn't ready yet you can see the project details at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/TARDIS/ Les Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 594-479 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/
Re: Nature launches web debate Future e-access to the primary literature
On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Declan Butler wrote: As metadata are expensive to create - it is estimated that tagging papers with even minimal metadata can add as much as 40% to costs For what purpose is the metadata? Minimal retrieval metadata (title, author, date) is different from minimal bibliographic metadata (journal, volume, issue, page range) which is certainly different from minimal 'ontological' metadata (effective, community-agreed vocabularies of subject descriptors). The 40% is estimated by whom? And 40% of which costs, precisely? Self-archivers are used to adding their own metadata at minimal inconvenience. Automatic extraction and analysis tools allow more bibliographic and reference metadata to be extracted, as we can all see from ResearchIndex http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs as well as our own OpCit project http://opcit.eprints.org/ . There are issues concerning quality and maintenance, but these apply to the literature as well as the metadata, and have well-rehearsed solutions. OAI is developing its core metadata as a lowest common denominator to avoid putting an excessive burden on those who wish to take part. My memory of the OAI minimalist decision http://www.openarchives.org/meetings/SantaFe1999/sfc_entry.htm was that a lowest common denominator was necessary to allow realistic interoperability: ie it was all we could reasonably expect people to agree on at that stage of the game! Don't make things more complicated than they need to be to get something simple working NOW. This is in the sprit of the Los Alamos Lemma: http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/pipermail/ups/1999-November/48.html Of course this can be seen in an economic context (little funding and little time) but not the economic context invoked in the Nature essay. Not all papers will warrant the costs of marking up with metadata, nor will much of the grey literature, such as conference proceedings or the large internal documentation of government agencies. Of course there is a metadata trade off between what you are willing to put in and what you expect to get out. However, it is precisely the grey literature (so-called) which needs effective retrieval mechanisms, for much of this forms the cutting edge of research communication. Our own studies of arXiv.org indicate that the majority of unpublished preprints go directly on to become journal articles, and the majority of the remainder are presentations and reports that are reworked as subsequent journal articles. http://opcit.eprints.org/opcitresearch.shtml We hope that our ongoing analyses of what is really happening in Open Archives will help inform us (and funding agencies) about what is truly valuable and therefore what materials are worth the effort (and cost) of marking up with metadata. As to the documentation of government agencies, I leave that for another day (but I believe a similar argument will apply). Les Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 594-479 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/
