[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Arthur Sale wrote: Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. My focus is on the papers. The text and images published in the peer reviewed journal literature. For that, but the whole of that (all subjects, all papers), I contend that institutional repositories, with deposit of the paper mandated by the institution and funders, is the quickest and simplest route to universal gratis OA. If we receive that before I clock out I can assure you that I will be involved in the push for expanding that openness, but I have yet to see a mechanism that scales to all fields better than institutional and funder mandates for IR-deposit (plus whatever data deposit individual discplines mandate, with simple cross-deposit of papers where feasible). For specific fields there are areas of highly structured data that could and should be put into disciplinary archives, and linked across to papers that use/refer to that data. These archives are best centrally-run by a non-profit scholarly body. Papers that reference data in that can easily be deposited locally and then the central data repository can either have the paper pushed to it or pull the meta-data and link back to the IR for the full-text (with access button request if needed by publisher embargoes). I do not disagree on this. However, the push for central discipline-specific repositories being the mandated locus of deposit for papers does not scale to all disciplines because not all disciplines have a need of a data repository, not all disciplines have a cohesive enough body to run one and many disciplines have very fuzzy edges. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
I seem to recall that, in various surveys, one of the features found most useful by readers was linking to other resources (particularly reference linking). Does this work in deposited versions of articles? When I was working as an editor, checking (and not infrequently correcting) citations and inserting the correct DOI was a time-consuming task. 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: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: 25 February 2013 08:18 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions Arthur Sale wrote: Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. My focus is on the papers. The text and images published in the peer reviewed journal literature. For that, but the whole of that (all subjects, all papers), I contend that institutional repositories, with deposit of the paper mandated by the institution and funders, is the quickest and simplest route to universal gratis OA. If we receive that before I clock out I can assure you that I will be involved in the push for expanding that openness, but I have yet to see a mechanism that scales to all fields better than institutional and funder mandates for IR-deposit (plus whatever data deposit individual discplines mandate, with simple cross-deposit of papers where feasible). For specific fields there are areas of highly structured data that could and should be put into disciplinary archives, and linked across to papers that use/refer to that data. These archives are best centrally-run by a non-profit scholarly body. Papers that reference data in that can easily be deposited locally and then the central data repository can either have the paper pushed to it or pull the meta-data and link back to the IR for the full-text (with access button request if needed by publisher embargoes). I do not disagree on this. However, the push for central discipline-specific repositories being the mandated locus of deposit for papers does not scale to all disciplines because not all disciplines have a need of a data repository, not all disciplines have a cohesive enough body to run one and many disciplines have very fuzzy edges. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Andrew Adams is so right, on every single points he made. In a few moments (noon UK time) I will post an embargoed proposal from HEFCE REF that proposes to require exactly what Andrew Adams is urging, for very much the same reasons. SH On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp wrote: Peter, You're talking about a very narrow subset of science here. I'm talking about all of academic scholarship that is published in journals. Yes, the stuff you're talking about is a small minority of academic research. A quick search seems to show that much of Crystallography is open access. That's great for crystallographers. They're on the ball, clearly. But so few others are! Would I like scholarship to be better done (including science)? Oh my word, yes. But I don't think we're going to get everyone quickly to revise their approaches. We've seen twenty years of trying to get other fields to sort themselves out as HE Physics did and as Crystallography appears to have done. How many other fields have done this? How many people are arguing for it in those fields, how many wasted years are we seeing? I run across basic barriers of access to my own research needs day in and day out, as do my students. What I primarily need access to is papers, not large datasets. Large datasets in my areas of research are limited and nowhere near as universal as the physical sciences (well-done crystallography data is only going to be superseded when better tools come along, but social science data sets are highly time and culture-dependent, while practical computer science results are often outmoded every eighteen months by Moore's Law). If I could get the ACM, the IEEE, the IET to open all their papers held in well-developed digital libraries, I would do so. I do argue for them to do so and they're slowly moving in this direction (ACM at least, the one I'm most involved with). But it's slow and they're only a minority (albeit a large one) of CS literature and that leaves out the psychology, sociology. It sounds to me like the reason that you keep arguing for better data mining access on papers is because in your field that actual access to the raw data and the individual's access to papers (a quick search on crystallography revealed few barriers, although since I'm at work I'm not sure how many are invisible to me because of my work IP address). You're in a privileged position if this is so. Partly because my work is so interdisciplinary, I see the access barriers every day. About half the papers on my hard drive are OA versions. I can access far fewer than half of the papers I'd like to see because they're neither open access nor inside a subscription that my university pays for. So, Peter, when was the last time you wanted personal access to a paper to read it (not so that you could data mine it, but so that you could just read it with your own eyeballs) and couldn't get it? How often does this happen to you? What proportion of the papers you'd like to read are unavailable to you? Has what the crystallographers done been good? From the looks of it, it's great. But I can't get other fields to do it, because I'm not inside them, and since very few of them are showing significant movements in the right direction, I'm persuaded that we have to come at this from a different angle - funders and institutions. If we can get them to work together, then we can get the majority of papers open. That7s the first step, but only the first step, you're right. But once that first step has been taken the rest, I believe, will become much much easier to take. Otherwise we're back to finding people passionate enough to push through openness in every single discipline and most disciplines are nowhere near as cohesive as HE Physics and Crystallography. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Hi Sally, I think what you are referring to is one of the value-adds that publishers provide to the literature. The more publishers provide this kind of interactivity with an article, the more useful the final published version is. It also distinguishes further between the 'static' pdf in a repository and the final published version. This is why allowing authors to put their version of work into a repository is not 'economic suicide' as John Wiley claimed when I asked him about Wiley's open access position at a talk he gave at the Australian National University late last year. Repositories are not a replacement for the publishing process. They merely make research (both published work and otherwise invisible grey literature) available for a wider audience. There is a move towards having material deposited in repositories be included in a format which allows full text mining. This would be welcome for many researchers but as a repository manager, obtaining the accepted version of articles (in whatever format) is difficult enough. The reality is that if publishers simply dropped their embargo periods, there would not be a tsunami of deposits into repositories. Repository managers still need the accepted version of the work, and the researcher still needs to be motivated enough to provide this version. And regardless, if having the static text file of articles in repositories does threaten the publishing model it does beg the question of what value-add publishers are offering to their readers in an instant and interconnected paradigm. Dr Danny Kingsley Executive Officer Australian Open Access Support Group http://aoasg.org.au -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: Monday, 25 February 2013 10:24 PM To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions I seem to recall that, in various surveys, one of the features found most useful by readers was linking to other resources (particularly reference linking). Does this work in deposited versions of articles? When I was working as an editor, checking (and not infrequently correcting) citations and inserting the correct DOI was a time-consuming task. 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: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: 25 February 2013 08:18 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions Arthur Sale wrote: Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. My focus is on the papers. The text and images published in the peer reviewed journal literature. For that, but the whole of that (all subjects, all papers), I contend that institutional repositories, with deposit of the paper mandated by the institution and funders, is the quickest and simplest route to universal gratis OA. If we receive that before I clock out I can assure you that I will be involved in the push for expanding that openness, but I have yet to see a mechanism that scales to all fields better than institutional and funder mandates for IR-deposit (plus whatever data deposit individual discplines mandate, with simple cross-deposit of papers where feasible). For specific fields there are areas of highly structured data that could and should be put into disciplinary archives, and linked across to papers that use/refer to that data. These archives are best centrally-run by a non-profit scholarly body
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 12:54 AM, Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp wrote: The first is that the primary means of achieving Open Access should be by deposit in either an institutional repository (for those researchers with an institutiona such as a research lab or a university) or in a single nominated general repository (preferably the OpenDepot: www.opendepot.org). Please do not encourage agencies to make the mistake of following the NIH which mandated direct deposit in BioMedCentral. By all means encourage automatic harvesting for relevant papers to relevant central or subject repositories such as BMC or even an agencies own. However, mandating deposit in an institutional repository encourages and reinforces institutions to maintain their own repositories and to mandate deposit of all research into that repository (not just federal funded research). BioMedCentral is an Open-Access for profit CC-BY publisher. As far as I know NIH has never mandated deposition in BMC. I suspect you meant PubMedCentral (PMC) or its European counterpart EuropePMC. (Disclaimer: I am on the project advisory board of EuroPMC). For the record I strongly advocate publishing science in domain-specific repositories. They already provide search interfaces which are heavily used unlike the 2000+ Institutional repositories where no scientist uses them as the first place to look. In some cases Google may have indexed some entries but it is patchy and unsystematic and has no non-textual search (e.g. sequences, chemical structures). In contrast the domain repositories are developing unified standardised search indexes. Until there is a single point search for repository content, perhaps on a country-wide basis, they won't get searched. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[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
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp wrote: Peter, Thank you for the correction. I mis-remembered the mandate from these (I think a bit confusingly named) systems. It's even more confusing with Medline, PubMed and PubMedCentral all from NIH. 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. This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to deposit sequences communally - and they do. The genome community requires genes deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require crsytal structures and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers... Scientists do not see their institutions as a natural place to deposit their output. It's easy enough to automatically harvest/cross-deposit, and then one gets the best of all worlds. If it's easy enough, why has it still not happened. We've been told for 10 years that if we deposit in IRs then we'll be able to discover all our deposited scholarship. I've been faithful to this vision and deposited 200,000 items in DSpace@cam. There is no algorithm to get them out except manually or writing my own programs. A simple question I've been asking for at least 5 years: Find me all chemistry theses in UK repos. It's impossible and I suspect will not happen in the next five years. Find me all chemistry papers in UK repos is even worse (mainly because there aren't any). Central deposit and then local harvest Why do we need local harvest? bioscientists search EuroPMC or ArXiV directly. They don't harvest into local repos - there is no point. 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. Deposit + indexing + search. At present we only have the first. And most green cannot be indexed because (a) some is only metadata (b) some is embargoed (c) we will be sued by the publishers. 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. Quite the reverse. There's good dialogue between the bio-repositories and arXiV. There's no problem if there is duplication. At least it will be easily discoverable. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
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 mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[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: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. Deposit locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than trying to mandate different deposit loci for the various authors in an institution. Peter Murray-Rust replied: This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to deposit sequences communally - and they do. The genome community requires genes deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require crsytal structures and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers... The community requires? How, exactly? I do not dispute that there are a smal number of subfields where OA of papers has been successful without mandates, and in some areas instead of in addition there is deposit of certain types of research data unmandated. However, they are a tiny minority of academia. Do you disagree with this assessment? The question then becomes how we get the rest of academia to do so. Despite the possibilities having existed for over twety years, the vast majority have yet to do so, despite it being in their interests. Who can require them to do so? Their employers and funders. What is the most efficient way for employers and funder to mandate deposit (a mandate requires at least some level of compliance checking otherwise it's really just a suggestion). Since: A. The funder alrady knows the institution of the researcher (in most cases the institution receives some funds as wlel as the individual) and virtually all funded research is to researchers within an institutional context. B. the institution knows who the researchers are and knows what grants they hold. C. Interdisciplinary research has no single natural home - does medical physics go to arXiv or PMC? Do we deposit in one and push to the other or deposit in both? D. There are other institutional benefits to local deposit (all local papers are acessible locally without worrying about embargoes; publication lists for projects, researchers, departments, and the whole institution can be automatically generated) which can't so easily be gained from local harvesting from diverse central repositories. From a mathematical standpoint central and local deposit and harvesting are functionally equivalent if the technology is sufficiently advanced. But this abstracts away the very practical issue that researchers have a known (and in the vast majority of cases singular) institutional affiliation which the research, institution and funder all know about already, whereas in a large number of cases disciplinary affiliations are murky and hard to define. It is entirely possible to set up a national repository instead of local ones with the log-in credentials of the researcher set to include their affiliation. This is very different from subject repositories and can easily be regarded as a set of institutional repositories sharing a back-end service. Discipline boundaries are too fuzzy to be efficient as a mechanism for mandating and monitoring mandate-compliance. THey are much better situated as overlays providing viewpoints on the data sets (whether holding the full-text or just the meta-data at this point is a minor issue, since the problem at present is not incoherence but lack of content). My published papers include references to, and/or publication in journals of computer science, mathematics, education, artificial intelligence, law, governance, history, psychology, sociology and others. What subject repository should I be depositing in? SHould my distance education papers be in both an educational and a computer science repository? Should my privacy papers be in law, sociology, psychology, economics and computer science? I have had three institutional affiliations and each paper was published when I was at one of another of these, giving clarity and a limit on where I should deposit. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Peter, You're talking about a very narrow subset of science here. I'm talking about all of academic scholarship that is published in journals. Yes, the stuff you're talking about is a small minority of academic research. A quick search seems to show that much of Crystallography is open access. That's great for crystallographers. They're on the ball, clearly. But so few others are! Would I like scholarship to be better done (including science)? Oh my word, yes. But I don't think we're going to get everyone quickly to revise their approaches. We've seen twenty years of trying to get other fields to sort themselves out as HE Physics did and as Crystallography appears to have done. How many other fields have done this? How many people are arguing for it in those fields, how many wasted years are we seeing? I run across basic barriers of access to my own research needs day in and day out, as do my students. What I primarily need access to is papers, not large datasets. Large datasets in my areas of research are limited and nowhere near as universal as the physical sciences (well-done crystallography data is only going to be superseded when better tools come along, but social science data sets are highly time and culture-dependent, while practical computer science results are often outmoded every eighteen months by Moore's Law). If I could get the ACM, the IEEE, the IET to open all their papers held in well-developed digital libraries, I would do so. I do argue for them to do so and they're slowly moving in this direction (ACM at least, the one I'm most involved with). But it's slow and they're only a minority (albeit a large one) of CS literature and that leaves out the psychology, sociology. It sounds to me like the reason that you keep arguing for better data mining access on papers is because in your field that actual access to the raw data and the individual's access to papers (a quick search on crystallography revealed few barriers, although since I'm at work I'm not sure how many are invisible to me because of my work IP address). You're in a privileged position if this is so. Partly because my work is so interdisciplinary, I see the access barriers every day. About half the papers on my hard drive are OA versions. I can access far fewer than half of the papers I'd like to see because they're neither open access nor inside a subscription that my university pays for. So, Peter, when was the last time you wanted personal access to a paper to read it (not so that you could data mine it, but so that you could just read it with your own eyeballs) and couldn't get it? How often does this happen to you? What proportion of the papers you'd like to read are unavailable to you? Has what the crystallographers done been good? From the looks of it, it's great. But I can't get other fields to do it, because I'm not inside them, and since very few of them are showing significant movements in the right direction, I'm persuaded that we have to come at this from a different angle - funders and institutions. If we can get them to work together, then we can get the majority of papers open. That7s the first step, but only the first step, you're right. But once that first step has been taken the rest, I believe, will become much much easier to take. Otherwise we're back to finding people passionate enough to push through openness in every single discipline and most disciplines are nowhere near as cohesive as HE Physics and Crystallography. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that there is a significant scope for specialized repositories. Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Andrew A. Adams Sent: Monday, 25 February 2013 11:24 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. Deposit locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than trying to mandate different deposit loci for the various authors in an institution. Peter Murray-Rust replied: This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to deposit sequences communally - and they do. The genome community requires genes deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require crsytal structures and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers... The community requires? How, exactly? I do not dispute that there are a smal number of subfields where OA of papers has been successful without mandates, and in some areas instead of in addition there is deposit of certain types of research data unmandated. However, they are a tiny minority of academia. Do you disagree with this assessment? The question then becomes how we get the rest of academia to do so. Despite the possibilities having existed for over twety years, the vast majority have yet to do so, despite it being in their interests. Who can require them to do so? Their employers and funders. What is the most efficient way for employers and funder to mandate deposit (a mandate requires at least some level of compliance checking otherwise it's really just a suggestion). Since: A. The funder alrady knows the institution of the researcher (in most cases the institution receives some funds as wlel as the individual) and virtually all funded research is to researchers within an institutional context. B. the institution knows who the researchers are and knows what grants they hold. C. Interdisciplinary research has no single natural home - does medical physics go to arXiv or PMC? Do we deposit in one and push to the other or deposit in both? D. There are other institutional benefits to local deposit (all local papers are acessible locally without worrying about embargoes; publication lists for projects, researchers, departments, and the whole institution can be automatically generated) which can't so easily be gained from local harvesting from diverse central repositories. From a mathematical standpoint central and local deposit and harvesting are functionally equivalent if the technology is sufficiently advanced. But this abstracts away the very practical issue that researchers have a known (and in the vast majority of cases singular) institutional affiliation which the research, institution and funder all know about already, whereas in a large number of cases disciplinary affiliations are murky and hard to define. It is entirely possible to set up a national repository instead of local ones with the log-in credentials of the researcher set to include their affiliation. This is very different from subject repositories and can easily be regarded as a set of institutional repositories sharing a back-end service. Discipline boundaries are too fuzzy to be efficient as a mechanism for mandating and monitoring mandate-compliance. THey are much better situated as overlays providing viewpoints on the data sets (whether holding the full-text or just the meta-data at this point is a minor issue, since the problem at present is not incoherence but lack of content). My published papers include references to, and/or publication in journals of computer science, mathematics, education, artificial intelligence, law, governance, history, psychology, sociology and others. What subject
[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions
Here is a message I sent to the US White House about the OATP Presidential mandate. First I would like to express my support and thanks for the announcement of the policy on open access to scientific literature announced by Dr John Holdren. This is an important expansion of themove towards open access globally and in all disciplines. THis is in no way a criticism, but a push to help ensure that the implementation of this policy achieves the best effect. There are two problems with the existing NIH policy which impede its effectiveness and I would urge that you consider these in communications with the relevant heads of agencies. The first is that the primary means of achieving Open Access should be by deposit in either an institutional repository (for those researchers with an institutiona such as a research lab or a university) or in a single nominated general repository (preferably the OpenDepot: www.opendepot.org). Please do not encourage agencies to make the mistake of following the NIH which mandated direct deposit in BioMedCentral. By all means encourage automatic harvesting for relevant papers to relevant central or subject repositories such as BMC or even an agencies own. However, mandating deposit in an institutional repository encourages and reinforces institutions to maintain their own repositories and to mandate deposit of all research into that repository (not just federal funded research). While the federal government cannot easily mandate the outputs of research it does not fund to be deposited, specifying institutional repositories as the locus of deposit of outputs from federally-funded projects helps to encourage institutional mandates, and reduces the complexity of complying with multiple funder mandates: researchers deposit in the institutional repository whichever funder or funders they work with (and by adding a funder field, any central harvesting can then be automatic, as can reports to the funder about compliance with the mandate - see next point). The second problem with the NIH mandate which should be avoided is related and is the oversight of compliance with the mandate. By specifying that the institution and the author(s) have the responsibility for deposit in their institutional repository, this allows quite simple checking of compliance with the mandate. In particular, the submission of future funding applications and reports on current/recently completed projects can then admit papers as evidence of track record/project success only if they are accompanied by a pointer to the deposit. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
