Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 sanjay.kata...@jiit.ac.in wrote: I want to take an initiative to design develop the Institutional Repository but I have some queries: 1. There are a number of open source softwares for the development of an Institutional Repository which one is most user-friendly The softwares are largely equivalent. See the BOAI Guide to Institutional Repository Software, the SPARC resource guide and the Archives Registry: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/ http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse#version It is not the choice of which software to adopt that is important but the adoption of a systematic institutional self-archiving policy, targeting the intended content and content-provision by faculty. Without an effective, focussed policy, the institutional archives will remain empty, regardless of which software is adopted: Developing a Policy http://software.eprints.org/handbook/policy.php http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html 2. What is the guarantee for upgrading of the software from the source organization? Each of the major softwares is being upgraded and maintained to keep it compliant with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and make all the OA Archives interoperable and harvestable. Upgrade-guarantees are not the problem: Institutional archive-filling policy is. http://www.openarchives.org/ 3 Data Security / Permission on LAN or WAN Environment Not an issue. Self-archiving is for the purpose of providing Open Access to a university's or research institution's published journal article output -- for those would-be users at other institutions webwide whose institutions cannot afford the subscription version. 4. What about Copy Right Issue or Intellectual Property Right Issues? There are no copyright or intellectual property issues. 92% of journals have given their green light to self-archiving. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php For what to do about the remaining 8% see: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 The only issue is implementing an effective, targeted, archive-filling policy. 5. What skills are required to operate or customized the software What Skills Do You Need To Run The Archive? http://software.eprints.org/handbook/managing-background.php 6. What type of infrastructure required / Preplanning for Hardware or software, scanner etc. http://software.eprints.org/requirements.php http://www.dspace.org/technology/system-docs/ 7. Which format should be used to save the data, for easy search The problem is not data-format or easy-search but archive-filling policy. The reason OA archives are OAI-compliant is so they can be harvested by and jointly searched with OAI search engines such as OAIster, which currently harvests 3,701,820 records from 363 institutions. http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ Lately scholar-google is providing yet another way to search them: http://scholar.google.com/ The challenge is not search but archive-filling. At least one of the stored versions of the full-text, however, should be screen-readable and harvestable for inversion by google. 8. Other technical aspects we should keep in mind before starting? See: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/ http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html http://software.eprints.org/handbook/ 9. Kindly mention the Role of the librarian, Role of the faculty, Role of the institute http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#researcher/authors-do http://software.eprints.org/handbook/libraries.php http://software.eprints.org/handbook/universities.php Thanks Regards ==*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=* Sanjay Kataria Learning Resource Centre Jaypee Institute of InformationTechnology (Deemed-to-be-University) A-10, Sector-62, Noida (UP) 201307 India Ph. 0120-2400973 to 978 Ext. 251 09810503341 (Mobile) E-mail: lib_scho...@rediffmail.com, katariasanjay2...@yahoo.com, sanjay.kata...@jiit.ac.in Website: www.jiit.ac.in
Re: Eprints, Dspace, or Espace?
On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Philip Hunter wrote: The focus of each of the OAI-compliant archive-creating softwares is different, as you acknowledge, since some are designed to archive digital objects in general, not just eprints. The functionality of the different softwares differs on this account, and therefore there is a choice to be made between softwares. There is indeed. But Philip seems to have missed the point: This is an Open Access Forum, not an Institutional Digital Asset Management Forum. Institutional Digital Asset Management is indeed an important and worthy issue. So is Research Funding, Public Health and World Hunger. But those are not what the Open Access Initiative is about! The Open Access Initiative is about providing toll-free, online, full-text access to the 2.5 million articles that appear annually in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals in order to make them accessible to all their would-be users worldwide -- irrespective of whether their institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which each article appears -- and thereby maximising the research impact of each article, its author, its author's institution, and its author's research funder. It is not about Institutional Digital Asset Management. Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles... An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be... My reply to the student's inquiry about which OAI archive-creating software to use was based entirely on the fact that the inquiry was addressed to me (and in the context of the American Scientist Open Access Forum). I am not, and never have been, a spokesman for Institutional Digital Asset Management (though I of course have nothing against that project, only the highest admiration for it). Nor was the GNU Eprints OAI-archive-creating software -- the first and most widely used of the OAI archive-creating softwares -- written for the sake of institutional digital asset management (although it can certainly be used for that purpose too). It was written for the sake of institutional Open Access self-archiving. And it was with respect to that objective that I told the student that all the softwares he listed were equivalent, and that what really mattered was the institution's adopting an effective policy for the self-archiving of all of its authors' journal article, so as to provide Open Access to it. http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 I would add only -- though it is but a hypothesis -- that an institutional self-archiving policy that successfully generates Open Access to 100% of institutional journal article output is probably the single most important step an institution can take toward an eventual successful Institutional Digital Asset Management policy too, but I make no strong claims about this, as it is not my area of expertise, experience or interest. http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php So, to repeat, although any of the OAI archive-creating softwares can indeed also be used for Institutional Digital Asset Management too, it is not their functional equivalence with respect to that application on which I was commenting, particularly, but their functional equivalence with respect to institutional Open Access content-provision, which is the theme of this Forum, and the goal of the Open Access Initiative. All deposited papers have the same metadata tags? Your definition of an eprint is not up to speed. The Open Archives site FAQ reminds us that the metadata harvesting protocol supports the notion of multiple metadata sets, allowing communities to expose metadata in formats that are specific to their applications and domains. The technical framework places no limitations on the nature of such parallel sets, other than that the metadata records be structured as XML data, which have a corresponding XML schema for validation. http://www.openarchives.org/documents/FAQ.html The Open *Archives* Initiative (OAI) (not
Re: Eprints, Dspace, or Espace?
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: Hello my name is [deleted], a student at [deleted] university. I am currently writing a final year project on a possible repository for [deleted] university library. As part of this report I need to compare and choose a suitable software for a repository. I have decided to discuss ARNO, CDSware, DSpace, Eprints, and Fedora. I am finding information on these and was wondering if you could help me. Could you briefly discuss each one in terms of suitability for a university? I already know I am going to choose Eprints but I need to explain why this software is most appropiate. The answer is very simple: It doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is that it should not be ESpace (Empty-Space); in other words, there has to be a policy that ensures that the university archives are filled with the intended content. All the main OAI-compliant archive-creating softwares are functionally equivalent, because after all, what they do is quite simple: They make sure that all deposited papers have the same metadata tags, the obvious ones: author-name, article-title, date, journal-name, etc., so that they are interoperable as well as harvestable by OAI service providers: http://www.openarchives.org/ Eprints was the first of the institutional archive-creating softwares, written in 2000, initially by converting the already existing 1997 CogPrints Archive http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ into an OAI-compliant one, and then converting the OAI-compliant version into generic archiving software, Eprints, which any university could then use to create and fill its own OAI-compliant OA archives. http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 The original CogPrints software had been written in 1997, according to my specs, modelled partly on the Physics ArXiv, by a Southampton ECS doctoral student, Matt Hemus. It was then made OAI-compliant and generic in 2000 by another ECS doctoral student here, Rob Tansley, again according to my specs (and OAI's). After GNU Eprints was made open-source and public, Rob Tansley was poached by MIT and Hewlett Packard to write DSpace, according to MIT/HP's specs. The result was of course something very much like Eprints, but for a much more diffuse agenda: Eprints had been designed specifically for the purpose of providing Open Access (OA) to all of an institution's peer-reviewed journal article output. It could be used for a lot else too, but that was not its primary objective: OA was. With DSpace (and SPARC) grew the institutional repository movement, and many more archive softwares, most of which have only loose ties with the OA movement, and are really intended for the showcasing and management of all of a university's digital holdings, not only, or especially, research journal articles and OA. As a consequence, institutional repositories (IRs) are (slowly) filling today with all kinds of material, very little of it being OA articles! And IRs tend to be focused more on the preservation and curation of university digital holdings than on providing immediate OA to all university research output so as to maximise its research impact, which is what OA is for. Meanwhile, another Southampton doctoral student, Chris Gutteridge, has taken over and has been updating and upgrading the GNU Eprints software to keep up with developments in the OAI protocol as well as OA since 2001. So the difference among the available archiving softwares is clearly not functionality but *focus.* Eprints has a very specific agenda, and that agenda is only realized if the institution fills the archive with 100% of its research article output. Eprints has worked hard on providing OA policy guidance: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm as well as OA impact measurement/evaluation tools: http://citebase.eprints.org/ http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi http://opcit.eprints.org/ resources for monitoring OA growth: http://archives.eprints.org/ http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php http://eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php and evidence on the impact-enhancing effects of OA: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/~stamer/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/OA_NOA_biologie.gif So, to repeat: it doesn't *matter* which of the archive-creating softwares a university uses: What matters is adopting and implementing a policy that will *fill* its archives, as soon and full as possible, with the university's own journal article output. Eprints, Dspace, or Espace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html It looks as if that all-important policy will now come in the form
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Publishing and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) PALS Conference 04 - Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Publishing http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/palsconference04 Institutional repositories-web-based, institution-focused archives of scholarly content-have been receiving increasing attention recently. They are seen by some advocates of self-archiving as a more promising route to open access than subject-based archives, although the latter have been very successful in a few disciplines. Their contents, which are generally freely available, can include journal article eprints (both preprints and postprints), theses and dissertations, technical reports, working papers and other grey literature, datasets and other digital material. A number of significant developments, such as the launch of MIT's DSpace in the autumn of 2002, as well as the University of California's eScholarship and the growth of repositories based on the University of Southampton's EPrint software, have brought the issue of institutional repositories increasingly to the fore. Topics include: Case studies from leading institutional repositories Attendees include: Senior university/college administrators interested in the policy implications of institutional repositories --- Here is a list of Institutional Archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse Sites with more than 1000 records use a different scale under records and are highlighted red instead of blue.
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. [Moderator's Note: Below is the notice for a joint open-source/open-access conference at University of Toronto. Eprints is again prominent for its absence: only Dspace is featured, but it looks like a worthwhile event anyway. See also the prior topic thread in this Forum: On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2967.html ] Stevan, We're holding an open source conference here: May 9-11th -- very cross-disciplinary, and an amazing array of speakers. One morning is devoted to issues of open access. I'd very much appreciate if you would send this flyer out to your mailing lists to help promote the event. Hope to see you here. Gale Moore Director University of Toronto's Knowledge Media Design Institute Bahen Centre for IT 40 St. George St. TORONTO +416-978-4655 http://kmdi.utoronto.ca Open Source and Free Software: Concepts, Controversies, and Solutions Sun. May 9 - Tues. May 11, 2004 University of Toronto http://osconf.kmdi.utoronto.ca
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Prior Topic Thread: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html 2 Open Access News Posting by Garrett Eastman: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_04_11_fosblogarchive.html#a108179305530712543 Skeptical eye on Google repository searching Henk Ellermann, Google Searches Repositories: So What Does Google Search For?, http://eepi.ubib.eur.nl/iliit/archives/000479.html -=(In Between)=-:, April 12, 2004. Ellermann puts the brakes on enthusiasm for Google's proposed federated repository searching, reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Friday, April 9 (see earlier OAN posting: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_04_04_fosblogarchive.html#a108152131781448637 .) His questions relate to the actual number of documents concerned; press accounts have said the 17 repositories hold an average of 1000 documents, but Ellermann's calculations show a number considerably smaller. He maintains that the repository movement has a long way to go to attract and index content and provide reliable access, that there be something for Google users to search and find. Google partners with universities to mine invisible academic literature http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_04_04_fosblogarchive.html#a108152131781448637 Jeffrey R. Young, Google Teams Up with 17 Colleges to Test Searches of Scholarly Materials, Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Update, April 9, 2004. http://chronicle.com/free/2004/04/2004040901n.htm MIT and 16 other institutions are collaborating with Google, who, pending the success of the test project, will activate a feature that enables searching of online repositories such as DSpace. MacKenzie Smith of MIT is quoted. A lot of times the richest scholarly literature is buried in search-engine results, said Ms. Smith. As more and more content is on the Web, it's harder and harder to find the high-quality stuff that you need. The universities extensive use of metadata and OCLC's involvement in developing a search configuration for the test promise a highly useful search tool across multiple collections. --- Google searches repositories: so what does Google search for? http://eepi.ubib.eur.nl/iliit/archives/000479.html Henk Ellerman The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Google has ' teamed up' with a number of DSpace using universities to develop and add-on to Google's advanced search option. The add-on will consist of a search through the contents of Institutional repositories. Although it is not stated in the article, rumor has it that the search will be on the full text as well as on the metadata. Within a few months Google therefore will offer their users an option to restrict searches to an intellectual zone. That is the official message and it sounds good. The only problem is that the official message is based on a -how to put it nicely?- distorted view on reality. It is stated for instance that the participants in this pilot have repositories containing on the average a 1000 documents. Is that so? let's count. The following list shows how many documents there are (currently) in the repositories of the participating institutions. MIT 3565 (but not all are available to all) Australian National University34050 (but 0 texts) Cornell University41 Cranfield University 49 European University Institute - internal error- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology986 Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis 27 Minho University 311 Ohio State University -cannot be reached- Parma University 29 University of Arizona 1 University of Calgary 135 University of Oregon 106 University of Rochester 138 University of Toronto 819 University of Washington 1772 (of which at least 962 pictures and most documents not accessible outside UW) University of Wisconsin 21 Now 1000 documents on the average? Don't think so. But it is not only the quantity. Even when documents are available it does not mean that they are available to everyone. And if it's available to anyone, you still can't be sure that the system is running... What we badly need is a continuous and authoritative review of existing Institutional Repositories. The criteria to judge the repositories would have to include: * number of documents, (with breakdown per document type) * percentage of freely accessible documents * up-time It is great that Google becomes part if the Institutional Repositories effort, but we should learn to give fair and honest about what we have to offer. It is is actually not that much at the moment. We can only hope that what Google will expose is more than just the message amateurs at work. --- Dspace is but one part of eprint-space Stevan Harnad One of the reasons why Henk
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
[2 Postings: (1) L. Waaijers; (2) T. Brody] (1) Leo Waaijers (SURF, Netherlands) Stevan Harnad wrote: By the way, the real OAI google is OAIster, and it contains over 3 million pearls from nearly 300 institutions http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ but many are not journal articles (and even if they all were, that still wouldn't be nearly enough yet!): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif And -- as of March 10 -- Yahoo searches OAIster! See http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0304/Mar08_04/07.shtml Leo Waaijers (2) Tim Brody (ECS, Southampton): Henk Ellermann, Google Searches Repositories: So What Does Google Search For?, http://eepi.ubib.eur.nl/iliit/archives/000479.html But it is not only the quantity. Even when documents are available it does not mean that they are available to everyone. And if it's available to anyone, you still can't be sure that the system is running... What we badly need is a continuous and authoritative review of existing Institutional Repositories. The criteria to judge the repositories would have to include: * number of documents, (with breakdown per document type) * percentage of freely accessible documents * up-time It is great that Google becomes part of the Institutional Repositories effort, but we should learn to give fair and honest [data] about what we have to offer. There is actually not that much at the moment. We can only hope that what Google will expose is more than just the message amateurs at work. I would agree with Henk that the current -- early -- state of 'Institutional Repositories' (aka Eprint Archives) is not yet the promised land of open access to research material. Institutional research archives (and hence the services built on them) will succeed or fail depending on whether there is the drive within the institution to enhance its visibility and impact by mandating that its author-employees deposit all their refereed-research output. Then, once it achieves critical mass, the archive can support itself as part of the culture of the institution. The archive is the public record of the best the institution has done. So those archives that Henk refers to, with their patchy, minimal contents, need to look at what is going into this public record of their research output, and must decide whether it reflects the institution's achievements. As a technical aside, DP9 was developed for exposing OAI things to Web crawlers some time ago: http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/about.jsp I would be surprised if Google were to base any long-term service on only an archive's contents. Without the linking structure of the Web a search engine is left with only keyword-frequency techniques, which the Web has shown fails to scale to very large data sets. For my money, Google-over-Citebase/Citeseer-over-Institutional Archives is much more interesting (the Archive gives editorial management, Citebase/Citeseer the linking structure, and Google the search wizardry). Stevan Harnad: Eprints, for example, has over 120 archives worldwide of exactly the same kind, with over 40,000 papers in them: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=analysis I have revised the description on that page to say that a *record* is not necessarily a full-text. And of course a full-text is not necessarily a peer-reviewed postprint. It would help bean-counters like myself if repository/archive administrators would tag in an obvious place what their content types are (i.e. what type of material is in the system), and how the number of metadata records corresponds to publicly accessible full-texts. Tim Brody Southampton University http://citebase.eprints.org/
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Peter Suber reports in Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_03_14_fosblogarchive.html#a107979070605922309 DSpace Federation now open to all The DSpace Federation http://www.dspace.org/ is now open to everyone. The federation welcomes new members who can contribute through programming, testing, debugging, writing and reviewing documentation, or participating in any of the new domain-specific Special Interest Groups it is launching. For more detail see MacKenzie Smith's summary http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dspace-general/2004-March/000140.html of last week's meeting http://dspace.org/conference/index.html of the DSpace user community. Meanwhile, Eprints has not been idle either! The following is some shameless promotion of Eprints, which lacks the promotional funding of DSpace. But please note that there is no real competition between DSpace and Eprints! Neither project is selling anything, and both are giving their software away. (In fact, Les Carr of Eprints and MacKenzie Smith of DSpace are discussing how the two projects can collaborate and coordinate their efforts.) Although both softwares are open-source and free, and both can do roughly the same things (and both were even initially designed by the same person!), Eprints' focus is much more targetted and specific: Eprints is dedicated primarily to the self-archiving of universities' peer-reviewed journal article output. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php DSpace is intended for a variety of institutional uses, which also include digital content management, digital preservation, online courseware and electronic publishing. Eprints, which started two years earlier and is the most widely used OAI archive-creating software worldwide, is giving first, second and third priority to promoting Universities' Open Access Provision to their peer-reviewed research output. Toward that end, here are the main Eprints milestones: The GNU Eprints software itself, with Chris Gutteridge's continuous upgrades incorporating features requested by the user community http://software.eprints.org/ Eprints runs an Institutional Archives Registry (not just for Eprints Archives) http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php It currently lists 143 archives (11 of them Dspace, 123 of them Eprints) Please come and register your Archives too! Eprints has also created an Eprints Handbook (funded by the Open Society Institute) to help universities create OAI Archives and to develop procedures and policies for filling them: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/ Eprints also created and hosts the BOAI self-archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ as well as the BOAI Forum http://www.eprints.org/boaiforum.php Eprints's Steve Hitchcock and other Eprints staff and students have generated the many OpCit projects and papers on citation linking and analysis, self-archiving users surveys, etc. http://opcit.eprints.org/ Eprints' Tim Brody's citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/ is a citation-link-based google for the OA literature, ranking papers and authors by citation impact or download impact. The download/citation correlator/predictor can also predict eventual citations from today's downloads: http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php Eprints deposited in Eprints accordingly focus on the article's reference lists and citation linking. Mike Jewell has created paracite which seeks the full-text of cited articles on the web. http://paracite.eprints.org/ Eprints has also developed models for university self-archiving policy that universities can consider adopting along with the Eprints software: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php as well as the model Tardis project http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html Eprints's Mike Jewell has also created a standardized OAI CV that universities and research funders can use in research evaluation and performance assessment: http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ Eprints's Tim Brody has also created Celestial, a software that harvests metadata from OAI-compliant repositories and re-exposes that metadata to other services http://celestial.eprints.org/ as well as an oai-perl library http://oai-perl.sourceforge.net/ Eprints staff have contributed to many conferences and workshops to promote self-archiving in general (and Eprints in particular), e.g.: http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html Eprints runs three mailing lists for users: EP-General, EP-Tech and EP-Underground http://software.eprints.org/maillist.php as well as a demonstration server in which potential adopters can try out the features of Eprints: http://software.eprints.org/demo.php Eprints provides powerpoints to be used for the promotion of self-archiving and Open Access Provision: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt Eprints is conducting an extensive series of digitometric studies to measure and document the dramatic
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
This topic thread: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html Peter Suber reported the following in Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_01_11_fosblogarchive.html#a107394650955511367 Outsell http://www.outsellinc.com/index.html has released 13 predictions for the information content industry in 2004. http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_viewnewsId=20040112005739newsLang=en Here's prediction #6: The Open Access movement in scholarly and scientific publications will gain legitimacy. In a separate, downloadable report to accompany the predictions, http://www.outsellinc.com/subscribe/freebriefsOutlook.htm Outsell says this about open access (p. 9): The Open Access movement in scholarly and scientific publications will gain legitimacy as it transforms from a loose collection of disjointed initiatives into a new model backed by major universities and institutions worldwideAcademic institutions and the scholarly publishing world have been at loggerheads for years over the increasing cost of journal subscriptions. The irony is that most scholarly content is created by individuals employed by universities, who are then required to pay for it again in the form of published works. The new Public Library of Science is only the most prominent in a series of open-access challenges to the scholarly publishing industry, which finds itself in a real crisis situation as users and the organizations they work for start to revolt. As steam gathers under institutional archiving initiatives like DSpace, the infrastructure will be in place to support peer-to-peer from the get-go. Where there is a will, there is a way, and technology is providing the 'way' to enable creative new solutions for distribution, access, and sharing of scholarly content. Watch for even more radical and flexible knowledge-sharing initiatives in this space that will increasingly call into question the structure of an entire publishing sector. I only want to add that if steam is to gather under institutional archiving initiatives like DSpace then they need to get their act together and focus it specifically on the institutional self-archiving of peer-reviewed research output. Right now, DSpace, like EPrints, offers software, but unlike EPrints, DSpace offers absolutely no guidance or focus on what the software should be used for (i.e., how it is that institutions should go about designing and implementing a self-archiving policy). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ Archiving is a big word, and means (far too) many things to (too) many people. Having MIT behind the self-archiving movement looked promising initially, but until and unless they get it into focus, DSpace will just continue to be a magnet for software downloads that generate everything except open-access peer-reviewed research output! (Having said that, I have to add that the EPrints archives so far are mostly near-empty too: http://software.eprints.org/archives.php 125 archives containing only 33,259 papers still averages only 250 papers per archive -- which is a far cry from each institution's annual peer-reviewed research article output! And in reality, even this is misleading, as there are a few EPrints archives with a lot of output and most of the rest with far less than 250! So even the focussed approach could stand to be more forceful!) This is not to say that open-access publishing (the golden road to open access) is doing any better! It is in fact providing far *less open access annually than the green road of self-archiving (about one third as much). But it is at least operating nearer capacity (1000 out of 24,000 journals http://www.doaj.org/ is about 5%). Self-archiving could be providing the other 95% already. But the research community is passively waiting for imminent radical transitions to the golden publishing model -- they are alas not happening: the actual data are nothing like the chatter -- instead of taking matters into their own hands and providing open access overnight by self-archiving. What is needed is some vision, guidance and leadership: and a focused institutional open-access provision policy. That's not going to come from Outsell's financial prognostications. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Neil Beagrie wrote: the final version of the report by Maggie Jones from the e-journal archiving study is now available in pdf on the jisc website at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ejournalsfinal.pdf This report has useful information for those who are interested in licensed toll-access journal content and in the preservation (archiving) of such licensed content, but it unfortunately misunderstands the relation between the archiving concerns for such licensed (i.e., bought-in) toll-access content and the concerns and purposes of the self-archiving of researchers' own institutional research output (mostly also published in toll-access journals). The report is right that this is a *parallel* form of archiving, but it is in error about what is actually paralleling what! The relevant passages are: E-Print Repositories: The rapid escalation of e-print repositories has been regarded by some of its champions as a potential replacement for more traditional scholarly communication provided by licensed e-journals. All kinds of things have no doubt been said by all kinds of champions and challengers, but the standpoint of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) on self-archiving is quite clear: Self-archiving in eprint archives is an alternative way of providing access -- *open access* -- to the *very same articles*, i.e., the articles that authors have published in toll-access journals. Hence eprint archives are not *replacements* (substitutes) for the journals but *supplements* to them, intended to allow authors to provide access to their articles for all those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the tolls for the toll-access version. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ The emphasis to date has been on encouraging scholars to deposit content into the archives, rather than on preservation requirements. Indeed some proponents of e-print repositories argue against considering preservation requirements at this stage as being largely irrelevant for the time being and something which can be considered later (if at all). Once it is at last understood that the self-archived versions in the eprint archives are supplements to rather than substitutes for the toll-access versions, it will perhaps also be at last understood that the primary preservation burden is not on those supplements, self-provided only to maximise access and impact. The primary preservation burden is on the proprietary toll-access versions. Those are the ones that publishers sell and those are the ones that libraries buy; and as long as that buying and selling goes on, those are also the parties responsible for the permanence of the proprietary product, *not* the authors (and their institutions), who are only providing a supplementary version in order to provide access for those would-be users who cannot afford the proprietary version. Yes, the self-archivers are interested in providing open-access to their work not only today, but tomorrow, and after-tomorrow. And they are doing so. The work self-archived in the Physics Arxiv in 1991, for example, is still alive and well, fully useable and used, in 2003, thank you very much, and was even successfully retro-fitted for OAI-compliance in 1999. And all this self-archived work will continue to be kept openly accessible by researchers and their institutions. And some day, possibly, if and when the access-tolls are no longer being paid at all, and all archiving is offloaded on the network of OAI-compliant eprint archives, *then* the eprint archives can take over the primary burden of archiving too. But for now, they are only a parallel form of *access-provision* to the very same literature, and they are not the ones that have, or should worry about, the primary preservation burden. Nor are they alternatives to the journals; they are just alternative forms of access. If/when the golden option prevails, and all journals convert to open-access, covering costs from author/institution submission fees, per paper, instead of reader/institution toll-access fees, per journal, then these archives will be poised to assume the preservation burden. But at no time will this mean that eprint archives replace journals: It merely means that open-access journals will become essentially peer-review service providers and certifiers rather than the providers of a paper or online text. Short form: Access-provision will become unbundled from publication (for the refereed research literature). Publication will mean having been accepted as meeting the established peer-review quality standards of a journal. Authors provide the research and the text. The journal provides the peer-review (and editing) service. And the network of OAI-interoperable institutional eprint archives provides the access. As these repositories will be expected to contain valuable scholarly resources, it is to be hoped that
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
William Nixon says the question most frequently asked of the DAEDALUS project is 'Why are you using both EPrints and DSpace? His admirably thorough and practical Ariadne article DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/nixon/#16 goes only some way to answering the question. What it shows is that both EPrints and DSpace are well suited to building institutional eprint archives, and illustrates those features that will help administrators choose between the two. Where the article isn't convincing is in its conclusion that EPrints and DSpace enable a twin-track approach. DAEDALUS has used GNU EPrints software for published and peer-reviewed papers and chosen to swap DSpace into the mix for the pre-prints and grey literature service. This strange decision has at least one unfortunate consequence: By default EPrints deals with the existence of preprint (and postprint) versions very elegantly and provides both backward and forward links to different versions automatically. Our decision to split the location of the preprint from the final version has meant that we could not take advantage of this excellent feature. It is extremely helpful to have this comparative experience. The real lesson here seems to be: choose one software that suits the needs of your institutional eprint archive, set it up with confidence because it will work, and start filling the archive. The good news from another article in the same issue of Ariadne Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff by Theo Andrew http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/andrew/ is that work performed for the Theses Alive! and SHERPA projects found over 1000 peer-reviewed journal articles online in the ed.ac.uk domain, and that they will be contacting the pre-existing self-archiving authors and gathering initial content: The material is already out there; we just have to look for it. Steve
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
I'm doing a Mastes Degree in Library and Information Science at the Cologne Technical University (Fachhochschule Koeln). I'm writing a thesis about non-commercial publication models of scholastic writings. Your distinction between pre- and postprint and the definition of eprints as all of them is clear. However, I think that they also differ from each other not only because one is refereed and the others are not( yet), but because the preprints could never be accepted by the referees and therefore be notprints. What I find very important and even more essential is your distinction between RES and PRES, but I think that there is some inconsistancy in saying that preprints are not publications and try then to apply peer review (something typical for publication) to them. In my opinion it would be better to make no distinction in scholastic writings. Preprints and postprints should be put together without thinking of peer reviews. They could be distinguished at the research output through ranking, depending of whether the autor is member of a University, or the eventual publication. Peer reviews should then be used in other contexts, like a publication platform at a University server. Thank you and Regards Maurizio Grilli
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Maurizio Grilli wrote: I'm doing a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science at the Cologne Technical University (Fachhochschule Koeln). I'm writing a thesis about non-commercial publication models of scholastic writings. I know of no non-commercial models for research journal publication, only the traditional toll-access model (subscription, site-license or pay-per-view) versus open-access models (no toll to users, costs covered in advance by author's institution or grant). Both kinds of models can be (and are being) implemented by both commercial and non-commercial (i.e., nonprofit, or learned-society) publishers. Hence commercial/non-commercial is the wrong dichotomy. Your distinction between pre- and postprint and the definition of eprints [ http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint ] [ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0661.html ] as all of them is clear. However, I think that they also differ from each other not only because one is refereed and the others are not (yet), but because the preprints could never be accepted by the referees and therefore be notprints. I cannot follow you: All papers are preprints before they are accepted for publication, whether they are self-archived publicly online or merely sent as a single hard copy to the publisher to be refereed. Are you perchance referring to the Ingelfinger Rule, which was the (now obsolescent) policy of a tiny minority of journals to refuse to consider for publication a preprint that had been previously posted on the Internet? That policy is well on the way out and need not be considered as a relevant factor in current discussions of open access: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm What I find very important and even more essential is your distinction between RES [open access to self-archived institutional research output] and PRES [digital preservation of institutional digital holdings] [ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html ] but I think that there is some inconsistency in saying that preprints are not publications and try then to apply peer review (something typical for publication) to them. No inconsistency whatsoever. In research and in professional academic life, the criterion is publish or perish. One most do research, and publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals, if one is to be employed as a researcher and one's research is to be funded. Publication in this sense accordingly means *peer-reviewed journal publication.* One cannot present one's unrefereed preprints to one's university or one's research-funder by way of betokening having published one's research! Until it has met, and been certified as having met, a journal's established peer-review standards, a paper is merely an informal, unpublished manuscript (and the rule for would-be users is well-known to the research community: Caveat emptor -- use unrefereed results only at your own risk!). May I suggest that in your masters dissertation you not attempt -- as so many others have done -- to invent a hypothetical and untested alternative to a peer-review system that has nothing wrong with it *except that its fruits [refereed articles] are not freely accessible to all would-be users?* What research needs is to be freed from access-tolls, not from peer-review. Be careful not to conflate these two completely different agendas. Garfield: Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2239.html The Invisible Hand of Peer Review. http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html Peer Review Reform Hypothesis-Testing http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0479.html A Note of Caution About Reforming the System http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1169.html In my opinion it would be better to make no distinction in scholastic writings. Preprints and postprints should be put together without thinking of peer reviews. Not warn potential users about what has and has not been reviewed by qualified experts? Whyever not? (Should certified and uncertified eggs likewise be freely intermixed, for the hapless consumer?) They could be distinguished at the research output through ranking, depending of whether the autor is member of a University, or the eventual publication. If the author's rank -- whether based on his titles, his prior publications, his institution, or even a public opinion poll -- were enough to serve as guide to the research community as to what research is and is not sound and safe to try to build further research upon, peer-review would have been abandoned as a costly and time-consuming waste of time well before the online age. But it is not. And if the research community were foolish enough to abandon peer review in favor of this
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Probably of interest to readers of this list: http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030616/03 Jan Velterop BioMed Central Middlesex House 34-42 Cleveland Street London W1T 4LB UK T. +44 (0)20 7323 0323 www.biomedcentral.com
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Bob Parks wrote: sh There is no need to generate PDF. All the Eprint archives require is sh one text version, screen-readable and harvestable by full-text inverters. Well, then it is on US to be sure that the requirements are known, and that they are easy requirements, and that Eprint software requirements are known. They are in the Eprints documentation. Every Eprints Archive need only inform its depositor community. http://software.eprints.org/docs/php/configarchive.php?printable=1 The ``document'' dataset By default eprints requires at least one of ps, pdf, ascii or html to be uploaded before an eprint is valid. You may change this list in ArchiveConfig.pm - any more complicated conditions will have to be checked in the eprint validation subroutine. For example, where is it written that the document must be full-text invertible? That need not be written anywhere. All that need be written is that there must be a screen-readable text version. If old versions of Word are a problem, then WE (the preachers) ought to remove those impediments to getting it into archives. WE preachers are few, whereas THEY (authors) are many (about 2,000,000 peer-reviewed journal articles are published annually). I will offer to convert any Word or WordPefect document, up to 10 per month. This is very generous of Bob, but alas neither realistic (how many articles are there in economics worldwide, annually?) nor scaleable. MS-Word-generated HTML might not be available (if the Word version is old enough), and I suspect that this author would worry about formatting problems in the ASCII version (or even the HTML version). Surely this problem can be offloaded on the authors and their institutions. Perhaps their university's digital librarians are the ones who could help: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do Stevan Harnad
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
I suspect that it would be a good idea to incorporate such a service, or even point to such services. There already exists many such services. We provide one at CERN at http://doc.cern.ch/Convert/. And you will also find from there links to a few other similar servers... Regards, JY CERN Document Server ** http://cds.cern.ch/ ** cds.supp...@cern.ch Room: Bldg 510-1-011 ** Voice: +41-22-7674745 ** Fax: +41-22-7678142 There is no need to generate PDF. All the Eprint archives require is one text version, screen-readable and harvestable by full-text inverters. Well, then it is on US to be sure that the requirements are known, and that they are easy requirements, and that Eprint software requirements are known. For example, where is it written that the document must be full-text invertible? If old versions of Word are a problem, then WE (the preachers) ought to remove those impediments to getting it into archives. I will offer to convert any Word or WordPefect document, up to 10 per month. Simply email the document as an attachment to b...@parks.wustl.edu and put 'please help convert to pdf' as the subject. Indicate in the body of the text the archive in which you will place the converted pdf. Hence MS-Word-generated HTML or even ASCII (text-only) is sufficient. As long as you archive one version like that, you can also archive the MS Word document for those who can use it, and wish to. Well, MS-Word-generated HTML might not be available (if the Word version is old enough), and I suspect that this author would worry about formatting problems in the ASCII version (or even the HTML version). E.g., footnotes are problematical in older versions of Word. Remember, self-archiving is a *supplement* to peer-reviewed journal publication, not a *substitute* for it; it is intended to provide immediate open access to your peer-reviewed research output (vanilla version) for those whose institutions cannot afford toll-access to the official publisher's version, in order to maximize the impact of your research: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm YEP!! Next... Bob -- *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* # Economics Working Paper Archive # # http://econwpa.wustl.edu/wpawelcome.html # #gopher econwpa.wustl.edu # # # # Send a mail message (empty body) # # To: econ...@econwpa.wustl.edu # # Subject: get announce # *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Always remember: inertia has no effect on the ultimate steady state solution. NEVER remember: Keynes said in the long run we are all dead. *--* | Bob Parks Voice: (314) 935-5665 | | Department of Economics, Campus Box 1208 Fax: (314) 935-4156 | | Washington University| | One Brookings Drive | | St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 bpa...@wuecona.wustl.edu| *--*
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Steve, you have the numbers right but the implications backwards: If old versions of Word are a problem, then WE (the preachers) ought to remove those impediments to getting it into archives. WE preachers are few, whereas THEY (authors) are many (about 2,000,000 peer-reviewed journal articles are published annually). The conclusion I would draw from it is that it is easier to get the few preachers to change, than the many authors. .. similarly, They are in the Eprints documentation. Every Eprints Archive need only inform its depositor community. And this attitude is, as every librarian knows, unrealistic. We have devoted enormous effort to making sure that users read documentation. Almost none of them do. The sort that do, become librarians. It is up to the professionals running the systems to make sure they work for the ordinary users, ignorant as they may be of what is important to us. Stevan Harnad Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Publish or Perish: Self-Archive to Flourish Stevan Harnad It is becoming apparent that our main challenge is not creating institutional repositories, but creating policies and incentives for filling them. Universities' publish or perish policies are intended to encourage and reward researchers for doing research and for making their findings public to all would-be users. It is a natural extension of publish or perish to encourage and reward researchers for maximizing the impact of their research output by maximizing would-be user access to it. An article on how this can be done through national and university research accessibility and assessability policies (with the UK as a model) will appear in THES Friday, June 6. It will be a condensed version of the following short article: Enhance UK research impact and assessment by making the RAE webmetric http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/thes.html The institutional-repository movement would also benefit greatly from clearly separating the 5 quasi-independent aims that currently constitute its very mixed agenda. All 5 aims are worthwhile and important, but only the first is urgent, and it is the heart of the challenge for filling institutional repositiories with university research output for the sake of maximizing its impact by maximizing access to it: The 5 distinct aims for institutional repositories I. (RES) self-archiving institutional research output (preprints, postprints and theses) II. (MAN) digital collection management (all kinds of digital content) III. (PRES) digital preservation (all kinds of digital content) IV. (TEACH) online teaching materials V. (EPUB) electronic publication (journals and books) As long as we keep blurring or mixing these 5 distinct aims, the first and by far the most pressing of them, RES -- the filling of university eprint archives with all university research output, pre- and post-peer-review, in order to maximize its impact through open access -- will be needlessly delayed (and so will any eventual relief from the university serials budget crisis). Perhaps the two most counterproductive of the conflations among these five distinct aims has been that between I and III (research self-archiving, RES, and digital preservation, PRES) and that between I and V (research self-archiving, RES, and electronic publication, EPUB). The RES/PRES mix-up, much discussed in the American Scientist Forum, can easily be seen to be a needless and misleading conflation when we recall that insofar as the peer-reviewed research literature is concerned, the current preservation burden is on its primary corpus, which is the published literature (online and on paper). The much-needed filling of university research-output archives is a *supplement* to this primary corpus, for the purpose of maximizing its impact by maximizing access to it; it is not a *substitute* for it. It is simply a mistake and a needless retardant on the filling of the university research output archived to imply that there are preservation problems to solve before they can be filled. The RES/EPUB mix-up is really two mixups. The first is the conflation of self-archiving with self-publishing: The urgent archive-filling challenge, RES, concerns the self-archiving of peer-reviewed, *published* research output. Again, this is a *supplement* to publication, for the purpose of maximizing its impact by maximizing access to it; it is not a *substitute* for it. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 The second RES/EPUB mix-up has to do with university e-publishing ambitions (perhaps along the lines of High-Wire Press-Hopes!). It is fine to have these ambitions, but they should not be conflated in any way with the completely independent and urgent aim of self-archiving the university's peer-reviewed, *published* research output. Most of this is discussed in the thread: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html This is also the source of the slowness in archive-filling lamented by Michael Day in the article below. The remedy, again, is clearly distinguishing RES from any other institutional repository aims, and drafting national and institutional research self-archiving policies and incentives, as soon and as systematically as possible. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/studies/impact/ Michael Day, Prospects for institutional e-print repositories in the United Kingdom, a paper from the ePrints UK project. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ Abstract: This study introduces ePrints UK, a project funded as part of the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme. It first introduces the project and the main features of the FAIR programme as it relates to e-print repositories. Then it provides some general information on open-access principles, institutional repositories
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
with the completely independent and urgent aim of self-archiving the university's peer-reviewed, *published* research output. Most of this is discussed in the thread: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html This is also the source of the slowness in archive-filling lamented by Michael Day in the article below. The remedy, again, is clearly distinguishing RES from any other institutional repository aims, and drafting national and institutional research self-archiving policies and incentives, as soon and as systematically as possible. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/studies/impact/ Michael Day, Prospects for institutional e-print repositories in the United Kingdom, a paper from the ePrints UK project. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ Abstract: This study introduces ePrints UK, a project funded as part of the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme. It first introduces the project and the main features of the FAIR programme as it relates to e-print repositories. Then it provides some general information on open-access principles, institutional repositories and the technical developments that have made their development viable. There follows a review of relevant repositories in the UK and an indication of what impact ePrints UK might have in supporting learning, teaching and research. This is followed by a discussion of perceived impediments to the take-up of institutional repositories, including both practical and cultural issues. A final section investigates the development of ongoing evaluation criteria for the project. Source: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html See: Enhance UK research impact and assessment by making the RAE webmetric http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/thes.html Stevan Harnad -- Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University e-mail: dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, David Goodman wrote: I can testify personally to one of the strong disincentives, though it sounds trivial. I work in an old version of MS Word... The version I use does not automatically make pdfs... ...the pdfs produced this way do not have full functionality... I would as soon change my preferred word processing program as my browser or my email. Any commercial publisher will gladly take my .doc files and convert them. ArXiV and similar OAI programs will not. It is more important to me to write conveniently than to support a particularly inconvenient version of archiving. I'll contribute to OAI archives when they accommodate me. To the best of my knowledge, a great many people in the academic world feel the same. This is indeed trivial, but I suspect that all of the kind of things holding people back from self-archiving are equally trivial. There is no need to generate PDF. All the Eprint archives require is one text version, screen-readable and harvestable by full-text inverters. Hence MS-Word-generated HTML or even ASCII (text-only) is sufficient. As long as you archive one version like that, you can also archive the MS Word document for those who can use it, and wish to. Remember, self-archiving is a *supplement* to peer-reviewed journal publication, not a *substitute* for it; it is intended to provide immediate open access to your peer-reviewed research output (vanilla version) for those whose institutions cannot afford toll-access to the official publisher's version, in order to maximize the impact of your research: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm Next...
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Stevan Harnad writes: On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, David Goodman wrote: I can testify personally to one of the strong disincentives, though it sounds trivial. I work in an old version of MS Word... The version I use does not automatically make pdfs... ...the pdfs produced this way do not have full functionality... I would as soon change my preferred word processing program as my browser or my email. Any commercial publisher will gladly take my .doc files and convert them. ArXiV and similar OAI programs will not. It is more important to me to write conveniently than to support a particularly inconvenient version of archiving. I'll contribute to OAI archives when they accommodate me. To the best of my knowledge, a great many people in the academic world feel the same. This is indeed trivial, but I suspect that all of the kind of things holding people back from self-archiving are equally trivial. Having spent 10 years helping people with similar problems (submitting to EconWPA), I don't think this is so trivial. At EconWPA, if an MS-Word or WordPerfect file is submitted, I convert it to a pdf format, myself, by hand. I suspect that it would be a good idea to incorporate such a service, or even point to such services. There is no need to generate PDF. All the Eprint archives require is one text version, screen-readable and harvestable by full-text inverters. Well, then it is on US to be sure that the requirements are known, and that they are easy requirements, and that Eprint software requirements are known. For example, where is it written that the document must be full-text invertible? If old versions of Word are a problem, then WE (the preachers) ought to remove those impediments to getting it into archives. I will offer to convert any Word or WordPefect document, up to 10 per month. Simply email the document as an attachment to b...@parks.wustl.edu and put 'please help convert to pdf' as the subject. Indicate in the body of the text the archive in which you will place the converted pdf. Hence MS-Word-generated HTML or even ASCII (text-only) is sufficient. As long as you archive one version like that, you can also archive the MS Word document for those who can use it, and wish to. Well, MS-Word-generated HTML might not be available (if the Word version is old enough), and I suspect that this author would worry about formatting problems in the ASCII version (or even the HTML version). E.g., footnotes are problematical in older versions of Word. Remember, self-archiving is a *supplement* to peer-reviewed journal publication, not a *substitute* for it; it is intended to provide immediate open access to your peer-reviewed research output (vanilla version) for those whose institutions cannot afford toll-access to the official publisher's version, in order to maximize the impact of your research: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm YEP!! Next... Bob -- *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* # Economics Working Paper Archive # # http://econwpa.wustl.edu/wpawelcome.html # #gopher econwpa.wustl.edu # # # # Send a mail message (empty body) # # To: econ...@econwpa.wustl.edu # # Subject: get announce # *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Always remember: inertia has no effect on the ultimate steady state solution. NEVER remember: Keynes said in the long run we are all dead. *--* | Bob Parks Voice: (314) 935-5665 | | Department of Economics, Campus Box 1208 Fax: (314) 935-4156 | | Washington University| | One Brookings Drive | | St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 bpa...@wuecona.wustl.edu| *--*
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
-- Forwarded message -- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 15:05:29 +0100 From: NA Jacobs, Learning and Research Technology neil.jac...@bristol.ac.uk To: oai-epri...@fafner.openlib.org Subject: [OAI-eprints] dspace / eprints Does anyone have any practical (tech / non-tech) experience of interfacing between Dspace and Eprints servers? I realise, of course, that they should interface perfectly using OAI, but I wonder whether anyone is, say, building an institutional archive from departmental OAI-compliant servers that use both eprints and dspace? Thanks Neil -- Dr Neil Jacobs, Information Officer (Regard) Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH, UK phone: +44 (0)117 9287057 fax: +44 (0)117 9287112 email: neil.jac...@bristol.ac.uk ___ OAI-eprints mailing list oai-epri...@lists.openlib.org http://lists.openlib.org/mailman/listinfo/oai-eprints
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Dear Dr Jacobs, The University of Glasgow's Open Archives project DAEDALUS, funded by the JISC FAIR Programme is looking at both the Southampton GNU EPrints software and the MIT/H-P DSpace software. DAEDALUS will establish a range of OAI-compliant Digital Collections at the University of Glasgow. These collections will include: * Published and peer reviewed academic papers [using the EPrints software] * Pre-prints and grey literature [using DSpace] * Theses [using the Virginia Tech ETD-db software] The intention is to gain experience both of the technical [and metadata] issues inherent in the implementation of these services but also, and more critically to engage our academic community through Advocacy activities to ensure that content is deposited. These Advocacy activities, which include presentations to faculty, attendance at University committees and so forth are crucial to ensure that our repositories don't end up in ESpace or, Empty Space. In many respects, the choice of repository software may be an academic one and at the moment the real key is the content and the activities to garner that content. The rich collection of software now available (Eprints, DSpace as well as the CERN Document Server Software) provide us with an opportunity, within the project to gain experience about Eprints and DSpace which we will be able to disseminate to the wider community. In the latter stages of DAEDALUS we will also build a local OAI harvester service for Glasgow which will search across these individual repositories. Further information about DAEDALUS can be found at: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus I would be very happy to discuss this work with you further. Best wishes, William J Nixon Project Manager: Service Development [DAEDALUS] -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: 14 April 2003 16:53 To: lis-e...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? -- Forwarded message -- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 15:05:29 +0100 From: NA Jacobs, Learning and Research Technology neil.jac...@bristol.ac.uk To: oai-epri...@fafner.openlib.org Subject: [OAI-eprints] dspace / eprints Does anyone have any practical (tech / non-tech) experience of interfacing between Dspace and Eprints servers? I realise, of course, that they should interface perfectly using OAI, but I wonder whether anyone is, say, building an institutional archive from departmental OAI-compliant servers that use both eprints and dspace? Thanks Neil -- Dr Neil Jacobs, Information Officer (Regard) Institute for Learning and Research Technology University of Bristol 8-10 Berkeley Square Bristol, BS8 1HH, UK phone: +44 (0)117 9287057 fax: +44 (0)117 9287112 email: neil.jac...@bristol.ac.uk
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: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 15:50:42 + From: Leslie Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org DS How much do either [EPrints or DSpace -- or http://cdsware.cern.ch/] DS conform to the OAIS reference model? SH How much do they *need* to (and why?), in order to provide many years SH of enhanced access and impact to otherwise unaffordable research, *now*? Quite. OAIS http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/overview.html is an unfortunate acronym in that the O (open) and the A (archive) clash quite rudely with the same letters in OAI http://www.openarchives.org and BOAI http://www.soros.org/openaccess/. 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). The emphasis on Archive in OAIS is a safe place to keep your data; in OAI and BOAI a place to distribute your data/metadata from is of paramount importance. 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. 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. In fact this tuturial notes that the OAIS model adopted terminology that crosses various disciplines and enumerates these as traditional archivists, scientific data centers, and digital libraries. 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 articles, or to have your own work unavailable to somebody else tomorrow. And finally, this is a response to the specifics of Les's note; it does not comment on the wider discussion of which it is a part. Lorcan Dempsey, VP, Research, OCLC http://www.oclc.org/research/
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Robert Spindler wrote: This exchange... illustrates the difficult tension archivists feel these days between preservation and access. The scholarly research community has profound opportunities to improve the speed and availability of very current research results through electronic publishing and self-archiving. These things benefit the scientific community in very direct and immediate ways... This is a fair statement of the current situation regarding digital content in general. But it misses the point about the basic fact that the refereed-research corpus (20,000 refereed journals-full) is a *toll-access* proprietary corpus today. *That* is the corpus with the access problem, and it is also the corpus with the preservation problem. The institutionally self-archived corpus is merely a *duplicate* of a small portion of the above corpus -- a partial backup, if you like, for immediate use. It makes no sense to slow the momentum for providing this immediate back-up, now, by saddling it with the preservation concerns that should be addressed to the primary (toll-access) corpus! (This is the token that has not yet dropped for the well-meaning digital library/preservation community -- with respect to the very special case of the self-archiving of the refereed research literature.) Having said that, one must add that it is very likely that the growing self-archived backup secondary-content may actually drive and accelerate the momentum toward the preservation of the primary corpus. For as researchers come to rely more completely for their daily access on the open-access versions (all linked by their OAI-compliance and interoperability), they will not brook any loss of access, for any reason, not for a moment. The collective eyes of the research community will be relentlessly trained on this precious resource of theirs, and corpus-wide access-failure alerting systems will no doubt be created, to act on the first sign of access-failure. But none of this can come until self-archiving occurs, and generates the open-access versions of the toll-access content, and research-community reliance on them. Until then, the preservation community should focus its attention on the (real) preservation problems of the primary, toll-access corpus, and not do or say anything to slow or discourage the growth of its self-archived back-up in any way. On the other hand there's the back end of research replication, criticism and revision, citation tracking/analysis and the history of science. Archivists think about this stuff quite a bit, perhaps more than the scientific community does at this time since perhaps they have not experienced significant/relevant loss so far. Researchers think about and practise replication, criticism and revision, citation tracking/analysis and the history of science, plenty! There is no trade-off between steps taken to secure immediate open-access through self-archiving and all these other benefits. They are additive (perhaps even multiplicative). And new benefits, once savored, tend to become entrenched... We used to think about catastrophic loss events, we know now that loss is likely to be more subtle - the gentle corruption of over time from software incompatibilities, character set incompatibilities, loss of formatting, addressing failures (its out there but in a place you can't find), linkage failures (between digital images and their metadata for example), hidden viruses. Clifford Lynch has noted that our tools for detecting corruption are very blunt. The subtlety of loss makes preservation advocacy very difficult because loss is not catastrophic until it reaches a critical mass. The critical mass that is needed is a critical mass in self-archived, open-access content, duplicates of the existing toll-access content of the 20,000 refereed journals. That critical mass of content will in turn generate a critical mass of users (most of them both the authors and the self-archivers of the literature itself and also one another's readers). It is the daily usage and vigilance of that critical mass of increasingly reliant users that will drive the real preservation efforts, not the fragmented initiatives on the fragmented literature today, most of it inaccessibly behind proprietary toll-booths. But for this to happen, it must not be rendered still-born by insisting on preservation before content-provision! The content is already there, behind the toll-booths. Focus preservation efforts on that for the time being, while giving its self-archived open-access backup the chance to reach critical mass! One of the things I've been trying to pay attention to in this environment is: What advice should we be giving to document creators to help them minimize the potential for loss? Can we influence the process of document creation to maximize the potential for *real* archiving without slowing the dissemination of research? The OAIS reference model is very
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Don't forget CERN Document Server Software (CDSware) http://cdsware.cern.ch/ At 12:42 11/02/03 +, vous avez écrit: It is rather ironic that a choice between two free self-archiving softwares should lately be holding up self-archiving! Should I use http://www.eprints.org/ or http://www.dspace.org/ as my Institutional Self-Archiving Software? The short answer is: It doesn't matter! Use either one! EPrints and DSpace are both free, both open-source, both OAI-compliant, both interoperable, both equivalent in the functionality relevant to self-archiving, and even both written initially by the same programmer (Southampton's Rob Tansley)! The two free software packages are of comparable complexity, both built using established technologies. So choose one http://software.eprints.org/#sites or the other http://dspace.org/people/early-adopt.html and start self-archiving! (And if you should change your mind about the software, you can switch and migrate your archive's content from one to the other later.) Because the real 1st, 2nd, and 3rd priority today is not software-choice but *content*: *filling* those institutional archives as soon as possible with all your institution's refereed research output, so as to maximise its potential research impact http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html -- which is otherwise being needlessly lost, daily. Thus the only option to be avoided at all costs is ESpace: an empty or non-existent institutional archive! The best way to ensure the filling of your institutional refereed research archives is to adopt an institutional self-archiving policy http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling such as http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html or even a national one: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.doc The California Institute of Technology http://library.caltech.edu/digital/ is developing an institutional self-archiving strategy for its Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA) -- a strategy other institutions may find worth emulating http://library.caltech.edu/evdv/CODA.ppt So please do take your choice of the two free softwares; the differences are trivial. And then get on to the far more important part: Filling those archives, by self-archiving all your institutional research output! Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the self-archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ Helene Bosc Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6073 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours 37380 Nouzilly France http://www.tours.inra.fr/ TEL : 02 47 42 78 00 FAX : 02 47 42 77 43 e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
I want to add to Stevan's remark that the free availability of many different software for self-archiving is intended to boost the OA movement, not to slow it down ! And if CERN has also released last year its document server as GNU (from http://cdsware.cern.ch), it is with the idea that it may fit well the needs of some large institutions willing to start self archiving in a similar way as it is done at CERN - and not at all to compete with eprints.org. I do hope that more and more OAI-compliant software will emerge in the coming years and that they will offer a large range of solutions among which institutions can freely choose ! JY Le Meur. CERN Document Server Project Leader ** http://cds.cern.ch/ ** cds.supp...@cern.ch Room: Bldg 510-1-011 ** Voice: +41-22-7674745 ** Fax: +41-22-7678142 On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote: It is rather ironic that a choice between two free self-archiving softwares should lately be holding up self-archiving! Should I use http://www.eprints.org/ or http://www.dspace.org/ as my Institutional Self-Archiving Software? The short answer is: It doesn't matter! Use either one! EPrints and DSpace are both free, both open-source, both OAI-compliant, both interoperable, both equivalent in the functionality relevant to self-archiving, and even both written initially by the same programmer (Southampton's Rob Tansley)! The two free software packages are of comparable complexity, both built using established technologies. So choose one http://software.eprints.org/#sites or the other http://dspace.org/people/early-adopt.html and start self-archiving! (And if you should change your mind about the software, you can switch and migrate your archive's content from one to the other later.) Because the real 1st, 2nd, and 3rd priority today is not software-choice but *content*: *filling* those institutional archives as soon as possible with all your institution's refereed research output, so as to maximise its potential research impact http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html -- which is otherwise being needlessly lost, daily. Thus the only option to be avoided at all costs is ESpace: an empty or non-existent institutional archive! The best way to ensure the filling of your institutional refereed research archives is to adopt an institutional self-archiving policy http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling such as http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html or even a national one: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.doc The California Institute of Technology http://library.caltech.edu/digital/ is developing an institutional self-archiving strategy for its Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA) -- a strategy other institutions may find worth emulating http://library.caltech.edu/evdv/CODA.ppt So please do take your choice of the two free softwares; the differences are trivial. And then get on to the far more important part: Filling those archives, by self-archiving all your institutional research output! Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the self-archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
Apologies for failing to mention CERN's wonderful self-archiving software http://cdsware.cern.ch/ (and many thanks to Helene Bosc and JY Le Meur for promptly pointing out my error!). Yes, all software for facilitating institutional research self-archiving is eagerly and gratefully welcomed! The only thing to avoid at all costs is being held back from self-archiving still longer than we have alas already been, because, like Buridan's Donkey, we are now paralysed contemplating the free-software options -- instead of picking one and getting on with it! Chrs, Stevan On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Jean-Yves Le Meur wrote: I want to add to Stevan's remark that the free availability of many different software for self-archiving is intended to boost the OA movement, not to slow it down ! And if CERN has also released last year its document server as GNU (from http://cdsware.cern.ch), it is with the idea that it may fit well the needs of some large institutions willing to start self archiving in a similar way as it is done at CERN - and not at all to compete with eprints.org. I do hope that more and more OAI-compliant software will emerge in the coming years and that they will offer a large range of solutions among which institutions can freely choose ! JY Le Meur. CERN Document Server Project Leader ** http://cds.cern.ch/ ** cds.supp...@cern.ch Room: Bldg 510-1-011 ** Voice: +41-22-7674745 ** Fax: +41-22-7678142 On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote: It is rather ironic that a choice between two free self-archiving softwares should lately be holding up self-archiving! Should I use http://www.eprints.org/ or http://www.dspace.org/ as my Institutional Self-Archiving Software? The short answer is: It doesn't matter! Use either one! EPrints and DSpace are both free, both open-source, both OAI-compliant, both interoperable, both equivalent in the functionality relevant to self-archiving, and even both written initially by the same programmer (Southampton's Rob Tansley)! The two free software packages are of comparable complexity, both built using established technologies. So choose one http://software.eprints.org/#sites or the other http://dspace.org/people/early-adopt.html and start self-archiving! (And if you should change your mind about the software, you can switch and migrate your archive's content from one to the other later.) Because the real 1st, 2nd, and 3rd priority today is not software-choice but *content*: *filling* those institutional archives as soon as possible with all your institution's refereed research output, so as to maximise its potential research impact http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html -- which is otherwise being needlessly lost, daily. Thus the only option to be avoided at all costs is ESpace: an empty or non-existent institutional archive! The best way to ensure the filling of your institutional refereed research archives is to adopt an institutional self-archiving policy http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling such as http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html or even a national one: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.doc The California Institute of Technology http://library.caltech.edu/digital/ is developing an institutional self-archiving strategy for its Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA) -- a strategy other institutions may find worth emulating http://library.caltech.edu/evdv/CODA.ppt So please do take your choice of the two free softwares; the differences are trivial. And then get on to the far more important part: Filling those archives, by self-archiving all your institutional research output! Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the self-archiving FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, D M Sergeant raises some frequently-raised points that I think it is important to confront head-on: The digital library community is very much concerned with preservation, which is both commendable and a traditional responsibility of the library community. But there are two things about the rationale for the self-archiving of refereed research that the library community keeps overlooking or failing to understand, and as a result, the well-intended preservation concerns of librarians are proving to be (unintentional) retardants to self-archiving, instead of helping to speed it on its way. The two things that librarians keep forgetting or overlooking are these: (1) In the first instance, and for the time being, the self-archiving of refereed research publications is not a *substitute* for existing forms of publication and preservation, it is merely a *supplement* to them. To put it more explicitly, the papers that researchers need to self-archive (in order to maximise their research impact *now*) are all still appearing, in parallel, in the traditional print journals and their associated online editions. The librarians' preservation concerns and initiatives should be focused on *those* continuing, primary, persistent channels of publication. *That* is virtally where all the literature -- both in analog and digital form -- is. Their preservation concerns should not be directed at the efforts to supplement those continuing, primary, persistent channels of publication, through institutional self-archiving. The primary purpose of research self-archiving today is to remedy the needless daily, cumulative research-impact loss that is occurring because of toll-barriers that block access to this research for potential researcher/users whose institutions cannot afford to pay the tolls to access it: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html Call that filling the current access-gap. I hope this now makes it more obvious that it is not the already-overdue supplementary measures, intended to fill the current access-gap, that should be waiting for preservation-problems to be solved, with self-archiving continuing to be held back while we shop for future-proof self-archiving software! Which brings us to the second point: (2) If self-archiving had been held back -- pending digital future-proofing -- by the physicists in 1991, then physics would have lost the 12 years of access and impact provided by ArXiv during that time. http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions For the 200,000 papers in ArXiv are still here today in 2003, still being widely and openly read and used. ArXiv has since successfully upgraded to OAI-compliance, and will no doubt continue upgrading its contents to further usability standards as time goes on. Yet it is all the other disciplines -- the ones that have *not* been self-archiving for over a decade as the physicists have, the ones that have needlessly lost another decade of potential research impact -- that are now being enjoined by the well-meaning library community to pause [still longer] and consider that: the wrong [software] choice may lead to a failure in the preservation. Other material is ergo being needlessly lost while ever it is not being preserved. The library community is worrying about the needless loss of nonexistent content -- content that (if only it had been self-archived!) would have been but a supplement to its persistent primary incarnation, which is today still in its publishers' proprietary analog and digital form and not the object of any of this discussion -- while the research community is still needlessly losing more years of potential research impact. I would say that there was a certain incompatibility here between the desiderata of the library community and the research community! Yet it is all so simply resolved, if we simply remind ourselves that we are talking here about immediate *supplements* to publication and existing forms of preservation, not *substitutes* for them. Note that the emphasis is on immediate rather than delay -- including delays for the sake of future-proofing. How much do either [EPrints or DSpace -- or http://cdsware.cern.ch/] conform to the OAIS reference model? How much do they *need* to (and why?), in order to provide many years of enhanced access and impact to otherwise unaffordable research, *now*? It is unlikely that either [EPrints or DSpace] will be able to provide the full solution. The full solution for what? The library community's *possible* long-term concerns, or the research community's *certain* (and long overdue) immediate ones? Stevan Harnad
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
SH On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, D M Sergeant raises some frequently-raised points SH that I think it is important to confront head-on: SH SH The digital library community is very much concerned with preservation, SH which is both commendable and a traditional responsibility of the SH library community. Actually, the concern with preservation should primarily belong to the creator of the digital object. (In your case, the research community that is producing valuable documents.) Fortunately the digital library community is concerned with preserving what others neglect. SH But there are two things about the rationale for the self-archiving SH of refereed research that the library community keeps overlooking or SH failing to understand, and as a result, the well-intended preservation SH concerns of librarians are proving to be (unintentional) retardants to SH self-archiving, instead of helping to speed it on its way. Retardants to self-archiving from the retard library community? Did you mean to be so harsh? SH (1) In the first instance, and for the time being, the self-archiving of SH refereed research publications is not a *substitute* for existing forms SH of publication and preservation, it is merely a *supplement* to them. SH SH To put it more explicitly, the papers that researchers need to SH self-archive (in order to maximise their research impact *now*) are all SH still appearing, in parallel, in the traditional print journals and their SH associated online editions. The librarians' preservation concerns and SH initiatives should be focused on *those* continuing, primary, persistent SH channels of publication. *That* is virtally where all the literature -- SH both in analog and digital form -- is. Their preservation concerns SH should not be directed at the efforts to supplement those continuing, SH primary, persistent channels of publication, through institutional SH self-archiving. SH SH The primary purpose of research self-archiving today is to remedy the SH needless daily, cumulative research-impact loss that is occurring SH because of toll-barriers that block access to this research for potential SH researcher/users whose institutions cannot afford to pay the tolls to SH access it: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html SH SH Call that filling the current access-gap. I hope this now makes it SH more obvious that it is not the already-overdue supplementary measures, SH intended to fill the current access-gap, that should be waiting for SH preservation-problems to be solved, with self-archiving continuing to SH be held back while we shop for future-proof self-archiving software! So preservation should focus on tolled publications, and not self-publications? Self-archiving systems cannot have a preservation component? SH Which brings us to the second point: SH SH (2) If self-archiving had been held back -- pending digital SH future-proofing -- by the physicists in 1991, then physics would have SH lost the 12 years of access and impact provided by ArXiv during that time. SH http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions SH SH For the 200,000 papers in ArXiv are still here today in 2003, still SH being widely and openly read and used. ArXiv has since successfully SH upgraded to OAI-compliance, and will no doubt continue upgrading its SH contents to further usability standards as time goes on. Yet it is all SH the other disciplines -- the ones that have *not* been self-archiving for SH over a decade as the physicists have, the ones that have needlessly lost SH another decade of potential research impact -- that are now being enjoined SH by the well-meaning library community to pause [still longer] and SH consider that: SH SH the wrong [software] choice may lead to a failure in the preservation. SH Other material is ergo being needlessly lost while ever it is not being SH preserved. So really this ArXiv self-archiving initiative is an example of preservation. This is a good thing. And surely it is a good thing that the library community is beginning to preserve other research disciplines. Not having the correct software is no rationale for loosing digital material. Surely it is best to build software that does as good a job as can be done. Yes, the job still needs to be done. SH The library community is worrying about the needless loss of nonexistent SH content -- I thought that it was you who suggested that a whole decade of (nonexistent) research had been lost needlessly! SH content that (if only it had been self-archived!) would have SH been but a supplement to its persistent primary incarnation, which is SH today still in its publishers' proprietary analog and digital form and SH not the object of any of this discussion -- while the research community SH is still needlessly losing more years of potential research impact. Ditto. SH I would say that there was a certain incompatibility here between the SH desiderata of the library community and the research community! Yet it SH is
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, D M Sergeant wrote: DS So preservation should focus on tolled publications, and not DS self-publications? Self-archiving systems cannot have a DS preservation component? (1) Self-archiving is self-archiving, not self-publication. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 (2) Self-archiving is intended to provide open-access to what is otherwise only available by toll-access. Preservation should focus on the locus classicus of *publications* -- which is currently tolled -- not on the attempts to *supplement* them with free access. (The tolled literature in question here is the planet's 20,000 refereed journals, both their paper and their online editions, which are both proprietary products of their publishers.) Of course self-archiving can have a preservation component: It does. And as it gets more content, the preservation component will get more attention. DS [T]he wrong [software] choice may lead to a failure in the DS preservation. Other material is ergo being needlessly lost DS while ever it is not being preserved. DS So really this ArXiv self-archiving initiative is an example of DS preservation. This is a good thing. And surely it is a good thing DS that the library community is beginning to preserve other research DS disciplines. DS Not having the correct software is no rationale for losing digital DS material. Surely it is best to build software that does as good DS a job as can be done. Yes, the job still needs to be done. Derek, you seem to be systematically missing the point. The right self-archiving software today is the software that self-archives and provides open-access today, and tomorrow, and after tomorrow, as ArXiv has been doing for over 12 years. The free self-archiving software under discussion here does everything ArXiv has been doing, and more. It is *you* [see DS above] who were raising questions about whether it is sufficiently preservational, and I was replying that there is no reason whatsoever either to worry about or to be held back by that now. The library community can only preserve the self-archived research of other research disciplines to the extent that other research disciplines self-archive it. Those other disciplines are not doing nearly enough self-archiving yet. Needless worries about whether the self-archiving software is correct enough is one of the things holding them back. So the question arises: does the library community wish to help accelerate self-archiving or help hold it back? If the answer is the former (as I assume, on reflection, it will prove to be), then it would be helpful not to keep raising unnecessary and irrelevant concerns about preservation in the context of either choosing self-archiving software or doing full-speed self-archiving, now. Without content, there is no content to preserve. And a growing mass of content is the best guarantor that any eventual preservation needs will be addressed. Virtually all the content in question here (that 20,000 refereed-journals-worth) is currently proprietary toll-access content: Let preservation worries be focussed on that toll-access corpus for now. And let researchers meanwhile go ahead and supplement it with open-access versions of their own publications that they self-archive in their own institutional Eprint Archives, using today's perfectly adequate self-archiving software. SH The library community is worrying about the needless loss of SH nonexistent content -- DS I thought that it was you who suggested that a whole decade of DS (nonexistent) research had been lost needlessly! Could the misunderstanding underlying all this run so deep that even those words of mine were misconstrued? I said that the physicists had been self-archiving open-access versions of their toll-access content for 12 years, whereas other disciplines had not (and in part because of groundless worries about its preservation!) -- at the cost to those other disciplines of the loss of 12 years of access to and impact of their (non-existent) open-access content! (Meanwhile, the toll-access versions in all disciplines have been carrying on as usual.) And even the physicists' open-access content -- recklessly self-archived despite the preservation hazards! -- is still here to tell the tale, 12 years hence... SH I would say that there was a certain incompatibility here between the SH desiderata of the library community and the research community! Yet it SH is all so simply resolved, if we simply remind ourselves that we are SH talking here about immediate *supplements* to publication and existing SH forms of preservation, not *substitutes* for them. DS I cannot even remember raising the banner of the library DS community. My desire is that nothing digital is lost DS inadvertently. This means effort on someone's part to decide what DS to preserve, and to preserve it. That's the banner! Today the effort that is needed is the effort to self-archive researchers'
