Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
First, our goal was to get all peer-reviewed research journal articles (2.5M annually, published in 25K journals) deposited in an OA IR, so all potential users could access them. Now we are talking about instead reforming the entire research publication and communication system. Could we complete the smaller task first, please? It just might facilitate the bigger one too. Then we can move on to eliminating world hunger, disease, conflict and injustice. (But, please, let's not try to do that first either!) A Note of Caution About Reforming the System (2001) http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1154.html Stevan Harnad On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Matthew J. Dovey wrote: Since everyone seems in a mood to debate and challenge the status quo, I'd like to raise the debate up a level of abstraction. Personally (take that as a hint this is a personal view which may not necessarily reflect any JISC policy), I feel that the current scholarly communications methodology places too much emphasis on the research paper being the end deliverable of the research process, rather than being just a means of communication during the research process. I feel that this is a relatively new phenomenon (some may argue reinforced and artificially induced by the various assessment mechanisms) - Newton's or Einstein's correspondence (etc.) is regards as an important contribution to the research areas as any of their papers. I have read philosophical papers which are really letters debating a matter to and fro but published in a public media (indeed almost blogging). I'd really like pose the questions: whether and how we get the scholarly comms process back to being a communications mechanism during the research process - rather than the paper being the end goal and final objective of the process; whether and how we make this a continuous process of discourse, rather than a discrete process with the paper being the quantum; and whether I'm completely off the track here ;-) I feel that some of the Web 2.0 social community/networking stuff may provide some of the answer here - but also realise that this raises real challenges, fears (not all unfounded) and possibly entrenchment from researchers, those attempting to assess research and the publishing community as a whole. Thoughts? Matthew
RE: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras
Well, I hope that you are right... I certainly don't have the will or ability to fight a political and technical agenda that has become so entrenched worldwide and that says there is only one 'right' way of achieving OA. And just to be clear, I think we share the same aim - 100% OA to research output - my concern lies only with whether we are getting there most effectively. And, like you I guess, I'm frustrated by lack of progress. I think the *total* financial spend on the IR-based OA solution is pertinent... though, as I said, I have no way of assessing how much is being spent worldwide (by funding bodies, institutions and others) on IRs. What if we took all that money, gave it to someone like Brewster Kahle (assuming he was interested) and said, here, we want to work with you to build a single global repository for all scholarly research output worldwide? To suggest such a thing even 2 or 3 years ago would have been laughable. But to suggest it now would be completely in line with what is happening elsewhere on the Web. Well, I guess it might be laughable for other reasons... but whether it is or not is largely irrelevant because we appear to have so much political investment in the IR solution that I'm not convinced we are willing to give serious consideration to any other approach. Andy -- Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk +44 (0)1225 474319 -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 09 March 2008 13:09 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andy Powell wrote: You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true. I'd settle for a substantive reply to the substantive points, empirical and logical (however repetitive they may be)... Despite who knows how much funding being pumped into IRs globally (can anyone begin to put a figure on this, even in the UK?), Plenty of figures have been posted on how much money institutions have wasted on their (empty) IRs in the eight years since IRs began. People needlessly waste a lot of money on lots of needless things. The amount wasted is of no interest in and of itself. The relevant figure is: How much does it actually cost to set up an OA IR and to implement a self-archiving mandate to fill it. For the answer, you do not have to go far: Just ask the dozen universities that have so far done both: The very first IR-plus-mandate was a departmental one (at Southampton ECS) but the most relevant figures will come from university-wide mandated IRs, and for that you should ask Tom Cochrane at QUT and Eloy Rodrigues at Minho. And then, compare the cost of that (relative to each university's annual research output) with what it would have cost (someone: who?) to set up subject-based CRs (which? where? how many?) for all of that same university annual research output, in every subject) willy-nilly worldwide, and to ensure (how?) that it was deposited in its respective CR. (Please do not reply with social-theoretic mantras but with precisely what data you propose to base your comparative estimate upon!) most remain largely unfilled and our only response is to say that funding bodies and institutions need to force researchers to deposit when they clearly don't want to of their own free will. We haven't (yet) succeeded in building services that researchers find compelling to use. We haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish of their own free will: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to publish, we review and reward their research performance for publishing (publish or perish). We also haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish research that is important and useful to research progress: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to maximise their research impact, we review and reward research performance on the basis not just of the number of publications, but publication impact metrics. Mandating that researchers maximise the potential usage and impact of their research by self-archiving it in their own IR, and reviewing and rewarding their doing so, seems a quite natural (though long overdue) extension of what universities are all doing already. If we want to build compelling scholarly social networks (which is essentially what any 'repository' system should be) then we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community - social networks that are largely independent of the institution. Some of us have been thinking about these social
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras
On 10 Mar 2008, at 09:11, Andy Powell wrote: Well, I hope that you are right... I certainly don't have the will or ability to fight a political and technical agenda that has become so entrenched worldwide and that says there is only one 'right' way of achieving OA. Those who are involved in Open Access lobbying will be interested to hear that they have gone from being an ignored, sidelined special interest group, to being an entrenched worldwide movement. Even those who shout loudest for institutional repositories are doing so not because of some predisposition towards dogma, but because they seem the favourite choice out of a number of practical alternatives. Saying that we want to build compelling scholarly social networks or surface scholarly content on the Web is just another way of restating a shared goal of Open Access. Saying that we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community is to confirm what happened five years ago when the difference between discipline-grounded and institutionally-grounded repositories was being thrashed out. You comment that social networks ... are largely independent of the institution, but that is only to take into account SOME facets of an researcher's social network - in particular it is to ignore the researcher's career development, promotion and contractual relationships. However, no-one who backs Open Access can afford to pish-tush any sound, practical and tested ideas about improving takeup, so bring them on! In fact, lay them down as part of the Developer Challenge in the forthcoming Open Repositories conference, and see if we can't get any of them prototyped for you. Web 2.0/social networks are taking up two sessions, so clearly repositories are already experimenting with these channels. But in the meantime, we have to recognise that titivating a user interface isn't go to turn anyone from a heads down, don't have time to do what you ask researcher into a grateful repository convert or even a Web 2.0 user! -- Les Carr
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that there is something very fundamentally wrong with the hypothetical cost comparison that Andy Powell is contemplating (below): It is rather like asking whether it would be cheaper to offload all storage and auditing of a corporation's assets onto a global auditing entity rather than storing and auditing them locally: Especially in the online age, when all we are talking about is bits, it seems odd to be thinking in this way. Brewster Kahle may have the disk space, but if his is to become the global database, then why should individuals have local websites at all? They could all set up shop in the Global Wayback Machine -- or, for that matter, store directly in Google, saving it the trouble of having to harvest! Apart from going directly against the spirit and success of distributed networking in the online digital era, it seems to me that such global centralism would even carry risks. Not to mention that with the plummeting cost and skyrocketing power of local computation and disk storage capacity, globalism of anything but the most virtual (i.e., harvested) kind seems to be a distinct anachronism today, both financially and functionally: We don't need one real global digital collection in the sky. A harvested, virtual one (or many) is enough. I too have a hypothesis: I think Andy is basically still thinking of IRs and CRs as being essentially for the sake of archiving and preservation. They are not! OA IRs are for immediate and ongoing online access- provision. And their persistent emptiness is a problem of motivation, not money. The interests and incentives are all there -- research usage and impact -- and they are all local (and competitive). Those interests and incentives simply need to be mobilized, at long last, through the adoption of a sensible institutional policy that explicitly capitalizes upon and caters for them. Universal (local) university self-archiving mandates, tied to research performance review, are that sensible policy. Brewster Kahle's global Internet Archive (invaluable as it is for digital preservation) has absolutely nothing to do with it. Stevan Harnad On 10-Mar-08, at 5:11 AM, Andy Powell wrote: Well, I hope that you are right... I certainly don't have the will or ability to fight a political and technical agenda that has become so entrenched worldwide and that says there is only one 'right' way of achieving OA. And just to be clear, I think we share the same aim - 100% OA to research output - my concern lies only with whether we are getting there most effectively. And, like you I guess, I'm frustrated by lack of progress. I think the *total* financial spend on the IR-based OA solution is pertinent... though, as I said, I have no way of assessing how much is being spent worldwide (by funding bodies, institutions and others) on IRs. What if we took all that money, gave it to someone like Brewster Kahle (assuming he was interested) and said, here, we want to work with you to build a single global repository for all scholarly research output worldwide? To suggest such a thing even 2 or 3 years ago would have been laughable. But to suggest it now would be completely in line with what is happening elsewhere on the Web. Well, I guess it might be laughable for other reasons... but whether it is or not is largely irrelevant because we appear to have so much political investment in the IR solution that I'm not convinced we are willing to give serious consideration to any other approach. Andy -- Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk +44 (0)1225 474319 -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 09 March 2008 13:09 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andy Powell wrote: You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true. I'd settle for a substantive reply to the substantive points, empirical and logical (however repetitive they may be)... Despite who knows how much funding being pumped into IRs globally (can anyone begin to put a figure on this, even in the UK?), Plenty of figures have been posted on how much money institutions have wasted on their (empty) IRs in the eight years since IRs began. People needlessly waste a lot of money on lots of needless things. The amount wasted is of no interest in and of itself. The relevant figure is: How much does it actually cost to set up an OA IR and to implement a self-archiving mandate to fill it. For the answer, you do not have to go far: Just ask the dozen universities that have so far done both: The very first IR-plus-mandate was a departmental one (at Southampton ECS
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
I too have a hypothesis: I think Andy is basically still thinking of IRs and CRs as being basically for the sake of archiving and preservation. Again, just for the record... No, I absolutely do not think in that way. Indeed, I suspect it is *because* of our continued confusion between the need to surface content on the web and the need to preserve it that many people conflate the two into an institutional solution. This is a confusion I want us to move away from. My suggestion of approaching someone like Brewster Kahle has nothing to do with his involvement in the Internet Archive and nothing to do with preservation. It has only to do with the need to consider the social networking benefits of globally concentrated solutions. Building a viable scholarly social network is the key to the success of repository movement IMHO. Whilst I would naturally tend to agree with your assertion that distributed solutions should work better than centralised solutions, I think we are seeing little or no network effect from our current approach. Now, in part that is because we have adopted a technical solution (the OAI-PMH) that works against the Web architecture (contrast this with the blogsphere which has adopted a technical solution (RSS/Atom) in line with the Web architecture), so my argument for a globally concentrated solution may well be spurious. But it is absolutely not based on an argument around preservation. Andy -- Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk +44 (0)1225 474319
RE: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Franklin Consulting Steve, You suggest that The interests and incentives are all there -- research usage and impact -- and they are all local (and competitive). Those interests and incentives simply need to be mobilized. If those interests were real then people would be doing it already. If it would help with RAE or REF then a very large number (those who are, or would like to be, research active) would get involved and do it. They cannot see the benefit when there are far more important things that they have to do. People are not going to institutional repositories to find papers; they use abstract indeces, references, google etc. Indeed, I very much doubt that people will go to institutional repositories in any number (Oh, I need some information on genetic dooh dah in the development of chickens; I wonder what there is in the University of Wigan's institutional repository). They might go to something like Intute Repository Search or to web of science or to their favourite journal. If my intuition is correct then the purpose of the IR is to provide a potentially free alternative source to journals for published papers and possibly access to the raw data (presumably linked from the paper). If that is correct then it would seem to me that the real purpose of IRs is to drive a change in the publishing model to move from pay for journal to pay for publication (author pays) and have free downline access to the results. IF (and I accept that it is a big if that it is either people's reason for this or that it will make it happen) then what is the current benefit to the academic? it is too remote, to unlikely so they will do all those urgent tasks they have instead. Secondly, even if academics were motivated are IRs the way they would want to do it? I keep hearing that academics have stronger loyalty to the subject than the institution, so why would they be interested in putting the stuff in an IR? And if they are interested can they deposit it correctly? see for instance http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm regards Tom. Tom Franklin Franklin Consulting 9 Redclyffe Road Withington Manchester M20 3JR email:t...@franklin-consulting.co.uk phone: 0161 434 3454 mobile: 07989 948 221 skype: tomnfranklin web: http://www.franklin-consulting.co.uk/ blog: http://tomfranklin.blogspot.com/ -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 10 March 2008 09:56 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving I may be wrong, but it seems to me that there is something very fundamentally wrong with the hypothetical cost comparison that Andy Powell is contemplating (below): It is rather like asking whether it would be cheaper to offload all storage and auditing of a corporation's assets onto a global auditing entity rather than storing and auditing them locally: Especially in the online age, when all we are talking about is bits, it seems odd to be thinking in this way. Brewster Kahle may have the disk space, but if his is to become the global database, then why should individuals have local websites at all? They could all set up shop in the Global Wayback Machine -- or, for that matter, store directly in Google, saving it the trouble of having to harvest! Apart from going directly against the spirit and success of distributed networking in the online digital era, it seems to me that such global centralism would even carry risks. Not to mention that with the plummeting cost and skyrocketing power of local computation and disk storage capacity, globalism of anything but the most virtual (i.e., harvested) kind seems to be a distinct anachronism today, both financially and functionally: We don't need one real global digital collection in the sky. A harvested, virtual one (or many) is enough. I too have a hypothesis: I think Andy is basically still thinking of IRs and CRs as being basically for the sake of archiving and preservation. They are not! They are for immediate and ongoing online access-provision. And their persistent emptiness is a problem of motivation, not money. The interests and incentives are all there -- research usage and impact -- and they are all local (and competitive). Those interests and incentives simply need to be mobilized, at long last, through the adoption of a sensible institutional policy that explicitly capitalizes upon and caters for them. Universal (local) university self-archiving mandates, tied to research performance review, are that sensible policy. Brewster Kahle's global Internet Archive (invaluable as it is for digital preservation) has absolutely nothing to do with it. Stevan Harnad On 10-Mar-08, at 5:11 AM, Andy Powell wrote: Well, I hope that you are right... I certainly don't have the will or ability
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Tom Franklin wrote: If those interests were real then people would be doing it already. If it would help with RAE or REF then a very large number (those who are, or would like to be, research active) would get involved and do it. Southampton did that, and it was very successful... but it takes a lot of commitment at lots of levels to make it work: - Diktat from the top of the university - Hearts and minds encouragement at a personal level - Support staff on hand to help and guide depositors If my intuition is correct then the purpose of the IR is to provide a potentially free alternative source to journals for published papers and possibly access to the raw data (presumably linked from the paper). An IR is like any other web page: it is there to promote. An IR is specifically to promote the research done at an Institution - after all, researchers want to work at good/successful research institutions and institutions want to have well-known researchers working for them. An IR is all about selling the corporation: some can view it as selling The University of Trumpton, others more as selling Professor Pugh... either way, it's a symbiotic relationship: one needs the other. and the big advantage of the openly accessible repository is that google *does* search it; Yahoo *does* search it; local.live *does* search it; and, yes, the Intute Repository Search will do too. IR's, as a concept, are here to stay. The problem is, as people are saying, how to fill them. -- Ian Stuart. Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team, EDINA, The University of Edinburgh. http://edina.ac.uk/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Tom Franklin wrote: [Harnad suggests] that The interests and incentives are all there -- research usage and impact -- and they are all local (and competitive). Those interests and incentives simply need to be mobilized. If those interests were real then people would be doing it already. If it would help with RAE or REF then a very large number (those who are, or would like to be, research active) would get involved and do it. Apparently not. Apparently the (real) causal link between OA and research impact (and its rewards) is too distant and delayed to be directly perceptible by researchers in their own individual cases (despite the generic statistical evidence for it). IRs, which will not only provide immediate cumulative feedback on impact metrics for the author, but also for the performance evaluations that feed back on the author's salary and funding, will make this causal link more salient... http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14418/ They cannot see the benefit when there are far more important things that they have to do. Correct: Authors cannot see the (real) benefit of doing the few extra keystrokes per paper that self-archiving entails because they have other priorities that appear more important. (Indeed that's what Alma Swan's author surveys showed.) Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/ So the (real) benefits of OA self-archiving (and the costs of not self-archiving) must be made more immediately palpable to the researcher. That's what mandates and metrics will do, directly and perceptibly coupling the causes (research access) to the effects (research impact and its rewards). http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ People are not going to institutional repositories to find papers; they use abstract indices, references, google etc. Of course not. Researchers are not being asked to *find* papers in IRs; they are being asked to *deposit* them in IRs -- so Citebase, and Citeseer, and OAIster and Google Scholar and Google can find, harvest and index them, so that users can then search, find and use them. (By the way, there's no point finding a paper in an index if the paper is behind a toll-access barrier that your institution cannot afford.) Indeed, I very much doubt that people will go to institutional repositories in any number (Oh, I need some information on genetic dooh dah in the development of chickens; I wonder what there is in the University of Wigan's institutional repository). They might go to something like Intute Repository Search or to web of science or to their favourite journal. Vide supra. This is a misunderstanding of deposit and harvesting from interoperable OAI-compliant IRs. If my intuition is correct then the purpose of the IR is to provide a potentially free alternative source to journals for published papers and possibly access to the raw data (presumably linked from the paper). Your intuition is right (and the direct IR consultation was a red herring). If that is correct then it would seem to me that the real purpose of IRs is to drive a change in the publishing model to move from pay for journal to pay for publication (author pays) and have free downline access to the results. Definitely not (though publishing reform and a transition to Gold OA publishing may well turn out to be an eventual side-effect of the real purpose of OA IRs, which is to provide immediate supplementary free access (Green OA) for all would-be users who cannot afford toll-access, in order to maximise research uptake, usage, impact and progress.) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399w e152.htm On the contrary, those who wrongly imagine that the primary or sole purpose of OA is to induce a transition to Gold OA have actually been slowing the progress and obscuring the purpose of Green OA (hence OA) by conflating the research accessibility problem and the journal affordability problem (connected, but far from identical, both as problems and solutions). http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#31.Waiting IF (and I accept that it is a big if that it is either people's reason for this or that it will make it happen) then what is the current benefit to the academic? it is too remote, to unlikely so they will do all those urgent tasks they have instead. The purpose of Green OA self-archiving mandate by universities and research funders is to make the actual causal contingency between access-provision and research-impact (and its rewards) less remote and more salient, so researchers can
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
[ The following text is in the WINDOWS-1252 character set. ] [ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Everyone seems to be miscounting: dividing by the wrong denominator (or not counting at all) The only relevant question is What percent of annual institutional OA target output (i.e. refereed postprints) is being made OA in the various different ways: (1) Anywhere online, unmandated (2) In an IR, unmandated (3) in a CR, unmandated (4) In an IR, mandated (5) In a CR, mandated Note that absolute numbers are of no interest in any of these cases: only percentages of institutional annual postprint output are. Note that the denominator for CRs is far bigger: The number of postprints deposited must be divided by all the postprints from all the IRs producing the CR content. The baseline to beat is about 5-15% (the spontaneous unmandated OA self-archiving rate.) No happy stories about how researchers take to social networking like fish to water answer any of these questions, or provide any of these figures. These are not bullets, they are just methodological and logical criteria for drawing meaningful conclusions from objective data. Stevan Harnad On 08-03-10, at 13:31, Antony Corfield [awc] wrote: Andy, we should indeed look outside the narrow IR mandated bunker even if there a few bullets flying!-) The fact remains that academics aren't exactly jumping over themselves to self archive using the (possibly outdated) model that is being pushed by many here. Unless of course we beat them with a stick. Why is it that people, academics included, are happy uploading and tagging content on social sites? It doesn't really matter why, the fact is that it?s hugely popular and you don't need to force people to do it. So wouldn't it be useful to look at that and find new ways of engaing academics and encouraging OA? Hell, we could still beat them with a stick but just for fun! Regards, Antony -- Antony Corfield ROAD Project http://road.aber.ac.uk tel. 01970 628724 -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC- repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Andy Powell Sent: 10 March 2008 13:16 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving Hmmm... the fact that you have never, ever, ever heard anyone refuse to use our institution's timetabling software because the user interface isn't good enough rather misses the point - or my point at least. This is not a discussion about whether the user-interface of each IR is good enough or not. It's a discussion about what makes one or more repositories grow into a viable scholarly social network. The UI is a small facet of that... what I'm suggesting is that the 'social networking' aspect is more important and that we need to understand that aspect rather better than we do now in order to understand why repositories remain unfilled. Take something like Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) as a case study - albeit one with significant differences to the scholarly repositories space in terms of content, responsibilities and the surrounding political landscape of scholarly publishing. But bear with me nonetheless... Ask yourself what makes Slideshare such a successful repository of presentation-like material - i.e. such a compelling place to surface that sort of content on the Web? Yes, part of the answer lies in UI type issues. But more fundamentally the answer lies in the network effects of a globally concentrated service. Could the functional equivalent of Slideshare have emerged by getting people to put their presentations on the Web in a distributed manner and then harvesting them into a central service? I don't think so. Ditto Flickr, ditto YouTube, ditto ... Having said that, I accept that the blogsphere is a good counter case study... because the blogsphere does give us an example of a healthy social network built on a distributed based of content, using globally concentrated services (Technorati, et al.) that harvest that content into multiple single places. The interesting question is what makes these approaches work (or not) and what we can learn from them to help fill our repositories (centralised or distributed) without relying solely an a thou must deposit type approach. But as I said on eFoundations... imagine a world in which every institution mandated to their academics that they must only blog using an institutional blogging service - would that support or hinder the development of a vibrant academic blogging environment? And before you ask, I wouldn't mandate that people deposit in a globally concentrated service either - for me, the only mandate that matters for OA is one that says that scholarly output must be surfaced openly on the Web
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Stephen Downes wrote: My own preference has always leaned toward personal repositories. So did mine -- way back in 1994: http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/i-overture-the-subversive-proposal.shtml The ensuing years -- and mutating strategies -- came and went, however, without substantial progress, until mandated IRs finally proved to work. Time now to apply that lesson, rather then keep waiting for one's preferences to prevail... Stevan Harnad
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
I think there is some talking at cross purposes going on here. The term `central repository' or CR is a misnomer and has led you astray, because even so-called CRs are distributed repositories in the context of global scholarly work. Better to talk about `subject repository' or SR, to make it clear that the discussion is simply about whether the world is divided up by subject or by institution (or at the moment by both and neither). Second point: a consortium of universities (even a whole country) can establish a repository, which retains its IR characteristic of being multi-disciplinary. It is an IR in style, and subject to exactly the same benefits and disadvantages as a single institution IR. There are many examples worldwide including Australia and the UK, so I hope that this disposes of the small university problem cited in India. Such repositories are collaborative IRs. There is no problem with establishing such collaborative IRs. The key issue in the discussion between SRs and IRs is that (a) Subjects and disciplines do not provide a unique partitioning of world research. Categories overlap and are blurred. The domain is confused. (b) SRs in general have no secure funding source. (c) SRs have no possibility of mandating deposit in that discipline. If it occurs, great. If it doesn't, wring your hands. (d) IRs of all types have mandatory mechanisms available to them. (e) IRs of all types have secure access to the quite low level of funds required to run them. (f) IRs do not in general overlap, because they are defined by discrete entities. If the few thousand research universities in the world had access to an IR, the world's research could be 100% captured. Summary - Any successful CR is to be applauded. However CRs do not provide a scalable model for open access. Only IRs do. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Atanu Garai/Lists Sent: Sunday, 9 March 2008 3:51 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Central versus institutional self-archiving Thanks Stevan. These are key points that are coming to my mind. Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: Dear Colleagues This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions? Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh those of CRs on every count: This forum must have discussed this issue. Also, the objective of posing this question should be made clear, so that you can find it in the right context and spirit. At one point of time and still now, we wanted to have disbursed information platforms and database. But with the emergence of large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the advantages of having a centralised global databases are becoming obvious. A choice between 'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy decision for a university or group of universities and such a decision is driven by number of factors. Again, the question is what are the sequence of events and rationale that led the open access community to select IRs as primary archiving mechanism over CRs. Institutions should be able to make a choice of their own, but if you want to advise the institutions what should be the key criteria to advise them to go for own IRs, over the CRs. (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide network of independent research institutions (mostly universities). (2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.) http://roar.eprints.org/ http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/ Points 1 and 2 are essentially
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true. Despite who knows how much funding being pumped into IRs globally (can anyone begin to put a figure on this, even in the UK?), most remain largely unfilled and our only response is to say that funding bodies and institutions need to force researchers to deposit when they clearly don't want to of their own free will. We haven't (yet) succeeded in building services that researchers find compelling to use. If we want to build compelling scholarly social networks (which is essentially what any 'repository' system should be) then we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community - social networks that are largely independent of the institution. Oddly, to do that we might do well to change our thinking about how best to surface scholarly content on the Web to be both 1) user-centric (acknowledging that individual researchers want to take responsibility for how they surface their content, as happens, say, in the blogsphere) and 2) globally-centric (acknowledging that the infrastructure is now available that allows us to realise the efficiency savings and social network effects of large-scale globally concentrated services, as happens in, say, Slideshare, Flickr and so on). Such a change in thinking does not rule the institution out of the picture, since the institution remains a significant stakeholder with significant interests... but it certainly does change the emphasis and direction and it hopefully stops us putting institutional needs higher up the agenda than the needs of the individual researcher. Andy -- Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk +44 (0)1225 474319 -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 08 March 2008 21:15 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Andy Powell wrote: This topic may well have been discussed since 1999 - unfortunately much of that discussion (at least at a technical level) has not acknowledged that the Web has changed almost immeasurably between then and now. Web 2.0, social networks, Amazon S3, the cloud, microformats, Google sitemaps, REST, the Web Architecture, ... I could go on. The technical landscape is now so completely different to what it was when the OAI-PMH was first discussed that it makes no sense to apply a 1999 design approach to the space, which is effectively what we are doing. The Web has alas progressed a lot more since 1990 than OA target content on the Web has done. And none of the changes in the Web are relevant to the issue of whether the locus of direct deposit of OA content should be convergent -- in researchers' own IRs or divergent, in thematic CRs. The bottom line is that OA content should be deposited directly where we can ensure that all of it will indeed be speedily and systematically deposited at long last -- and that locus is each authors' own university IR, because universities (and research institutions) worldwide are the providers of all that OA content, both funded and unfunded, across all disciplines and themes -- the ones with the both interest and the means to mandate, monitor and co-benefit from storing and showcasing their own research output. The rest -- including all Web 2.0 etc. benefits -- are all there for the having at the harvester level. IRs are for direct deposit. How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/1/nihx.html Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open- Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: with the emergence of large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the advantages of having a centralised global databases are becoming obvious. Google books is actively scanning books and paying for it. No OA CR is doing that for OA content: We are talking about author/university *self*-archiving! And other the special case of Google Books is certainly not replacing the distributed harvesting norm for Google Scholar and Google itself. A choice between 'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy decision for a university or group of universities and such a decision is driven by number of factors... For universities which produce a high number of research papers annually, creating IRs may be sensible but there are universities in India that are producing only a handful of research papers. As Arthur Sale pointed out, A consortial IR for a group of small universities is still an IR. It doesn't scale to all universities, nor does it need to. (And the only relevant policy decision for a university is to mandate Green OA self-archiving...) And an arbitrary networking of (direct-deposit) subject-based CRs not only does not scale but is incoherent (whereas any subject-based central *harvesting* from IRs is perfectly feasible and coherent). For full text data, interoperability is challenged by copyright restrictions. These dilemmas are avoided intrinsically in CRs. The copyright constraints are far bigger on external, 3rd-party direct-deposits than they are on institutional self-archiving. large scale CRs are having the opportunity to make full text search and retrieval feasible. The most powerful and effective full text search and retrieval service provider is Google, a central harvester... Volatility of harvested metadata from IRs is avoided with the implementation of CRs. Getting the OA full-text content trumps metadata stability many times over (Citeseerx generates its own metadata from harvested full-text.)... Self-archiving and mandate is not a technological issue, it is a regulatory one - hence, it can be done in IRs and/or CRs. (This sounds like the confusion of consortial IRs with subject-based CRs again.) Please consider how a university can mandate that all of its research output, in all disciplines, must be self-archived in external subject-based CRs. (Which CRs? Which subjects? How many? How maintained and financed? How does each university monitor and audit compliance?) Could/would a university mandate that, say, various credit card companies should do the university's expense accounting in place of its own internal record-keeping? Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Just a suggestion: have a look at the website of Songza. It's a web searcher that plays (I think) anything that is available on the web, free, but not downloadable. It's an interesting form of open access to which nobody could possibly object.
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andy Powell wrote: You can repeat the IR mantra as many times as you like... it doesn't make it true. I'd settle for a substantive reply to the substantive points, empirical and logical (however repetitive they may be)... Despite who knows how much funding being pumped into IRs globally (can anyone begin to put a figure on this, even in the UK?), Plenty of figures have been posted on how much money institutions have wasted on their (empty) IRs in the eight years since IRs began. People needlessly waste a lot of money on lots of needless things. The amount wasted is of no interest in and of itself. The relevant figure is: How much does it actually cost to set up an OA IR and to implement a self-archiving mandate to fill it. For the answer, you do not have to go far: Just ask the dozen universities that have so far done both: The very first IR-plus-mandate was a departmental one (at Southampton ECS) but the most relevant figures will come from university-wide mandated IRs, and for that you should ask Tom Cochrane at QUT and Eloy Rodrigues at Minho. And then, compare the cost of that (relative to each university's annual research output) with what it would have cost (someone: who?) to set up subject-based CRs (which? where? how many?) for all of that same university annual research output, in every subject) willy-nilly worldwide, and to ensure (how?) that it was deposited in its respective CR. (Please do not reply with social-theoretic mantras but with precisely what data you propose to base your comparative estimate upon!) most remain largely unfilled and our only response is to say that funding bodies and institutions need to force researchers to deposit when they clearly don't want to of their own free will. We haven't (yet) succeeded in building services that researchers find compelling to use. We haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish of their own free will: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to publish, we review and reward their research performance for publishing (publish or perish). We also haven't (yet) succeeded in persuading researchers to publish research that is important and useful to research progress: So instead of waiting for researchers to wait to find compelling reasons to maximise their research impact, we review and reward research performance on the basis not just of the number of publications, but publication impact metrics. Mandating that researchers maximise the potential usage and impact of their research by self-archiving it in their own IR, and reviewing and rewarding their doing so, seems a quite natural (though long overdue) extension of what universities are all doing already. If we want to build compelling scholarly social networks (which is essentially what any 'repository' system should be) then we might be better to start by thinking in terms of the social networks that currently exist in the research community - social networks that are largely independent of the institution. Some of us have been thinking about these social networks since the early 1990's and we have noted that -- apart from a very few communities where they formed spontaneously early on -- most disciplines have not followed the examples of these few communities in the ensuing decade and a half, even after repeatedly hearing the mantra (Mantra 1) urging them to do so, along with the empirical evidence of its evidence beneficial effects on research usage and impact (Mantra 2). Then the evidence from the homologous precedent and example of (a) the institutional incentive system underlying publish-or-perish as well as (b) research metric assessment, was reinforced by Alma Swan's JISC surveys that found that (c) the vast majority of researchers report that they would not do it spontaneously of their own accord if their institutions and/or funders did not require it (mainly because they were busy with their institutions' and funders' other priorities), 95% of them would self-archive their research if their institutions and/or funders were to require it -- and over 80% of them would do so *willingly* (Mantra 3). And then Arthur Sale's empirical comparisons of what researchers actually do when such requirements are and are not implemented fully confirmed what the surveys said that the research (across all disciplines and social networks worldwide) had said they would and would not do (Mantra 4). So I'd say we should not waste another decade and a half waiting for the fabled social networks to form spontaneously so the research community can at last have the OA that has already been demonstrated to be feasible and beneficial to them. Oddly, to do that we might do well to change our thinking about how best to surface scholarly content on the Web to be both 1) user-centric (acknowledging that individual researchers want to take responsibility for how they surface their content, as happens, say, in the
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, R. Stephen Berry wrote: Just a suggestion: have a look at the website of Songza. It's a web searcher that plays (I think) anything that is available on the web, free, but not downloadable. It's an interesting form of open access to which nobody could possibly object. OA means available on the web, free. Songza plays whatever is available on the web, free. The OA problem is what is *not* yet available on the web, free (rather than just finding or playing what is already OA). Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving: 6 Mantras
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Ian Stuart wrote: The cost to install a bog-standard EPrints or DSpace application, and pass a bylaw that says thou shalt deposit is dead easy. There is a minimal cost (say 5% of a sysadmin's time) Add to the bylaw: And the IR will henceforth be the sole source of all publication data for research assessment and performance review. If, on the other hand, you want to personalise the interface; A few parameters to configure. (The important thing is the IR, the mandate, and the assessment contingency. The cosmetics are secondary. The EPrints default configuration will do.) tie it into a universities campus-wide authentication system; Why? Let the journals authenticate with peer review, and then, having enjoined your researchers to deposit, trust your researchers and the assessment contingencies)! (The OA problem is not bogus deposits, it's no deposits!) http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#2.Authentication provide some form of reviewing/cataloguing of the deposits; etc, Why? Let the journals do the peer review, and let the IR metadata be the catalogue. (The OA problem is not unreviewed/miscatalogued deposits, it's no deposits!) then it needs more time, meaning more resources... Why? It seems to me the only thing we've needed more of, all along, has been deposits. And the only ones who solved that problem were those who mandated deposit. Also, most of the repository managers I have spoken to had said that 80% of their content is actually deposited by the repository staff themselves, not the authors. You're referring to unmandated deposits (and that's nowhere even yielding 15% deposit of annual full-text output). What's needed is mandated deposit. (And the jury is out on whether librarians are really needed to do the few keystrokes involved on the author's behalf.) Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ The problem I have with [mandating deposit] is that the current system we have is tacked onto the end of the process: the researcher has already done the work and moved onto the next interesting project by the time we ask her to deposit. Try mandating deposit immediately upon acceptance for publication (the natural point in the researcher's research+publication workflow). And for researchers who still have some motor command of their fingers, try letting *them* (or their students or assistants) do the mandated keystrokes! Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html We can certainly make rules and regulations, but humans are bad at following rules. The dozen universities and departments that have so far adopted self-archiving mandates all seem to have managed to get the rules followed (with the possible exception of Zurich, which stated their mandate but does not yet seem to have implemented it). http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php And the funder mandates are growing too, reinforcing the university mandates: How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html The best way, surely, to get people to do what you want is to let them think it was their idea, or that it is something they get for nothing. The demand for OA *is* their (researchers') idea: http://www.plos.org/cgi-bin/plosSigned.pl http://www.ec-petition.eu/ Trouble is that they seem to prefer signing petitions and waiting for publisher reform rather than doing the few keystrokes is takes to provide OA (for next to nothing). So that's what the mandates are for. Besides, they've already *told* us they won't self-archive until/unless their institutions and/or funders mandate it, but that if/when their institutions/funders do mandate it, they will self-archive (95%), most of them willingly (81%). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/ And if/when mandated (with contingencies), they do. http://fcms.its.utas.edu.au/scieng/comp/project.asp?lProjectId=1830 I'm not sure that they have actually *seen* that it /is/ feasible and beneficial It's enough that those unmandated self-archivers and those OA-mandating institutions who have seen and done it have seen and done it. That's the existence and feasibility proof. The rest is down to mandating it (and implementing the contingencies). I think we want to have an IR, but we need to consider how it is populated Consider no further: Your university need merely mandate deposit -- and make it clear that the publication data for all annual review, performance assessment and RAE returns will henceforth be drawn exclusively from what is deposited in the IR. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: Dear Colleagues This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions? Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh those of CRs on every count: (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide network of independent research institutions (mostly universities). (2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.) http://roar.eprints.org/ http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/ (3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed institutions' repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or data) can all be harvested into multiple central collections, as desired, and searched, navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed archiving is also important for mirroring, backup and preservation.) (4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes institutionally or centrally, so there is no difference there; but researchers normally have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The only global CR is Google, and that's harvested.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ (5) The distributed costs of institutional self-archiving are certainly lower than than maintaining CRs (how many? for what fields? and who maintains them and pays their costs?), particularly as the costs of a local IR are low, and they can cover all of an institution's research output as well as many other forms of institutional digital assets. (6) Most important of all, although research funders can reinforce self-archiving mandates, the natural and universal way to ensure that IRs (and hence harvested CRs) are actually filled with all of the world's research output, funded and unfunded, is for institutions to mandate and monitor the self-archiving of their own research output, in their own IRs, rather than hoping it will find its way willy-nilly into external CRs. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ This topic has been much discussed since in the American Scientist Open Access Forum. See the topic threads Central vs. Distributed Archives (since 1999) and Central versus institutional self-archiving. See also: Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/ Harnad, S. (2008) Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/ Harnad, S. (2008) How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
-- Forwarded message -- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:46:26 +0200 From: Hussein Suleman hussein -- cs.uct.ac.za To: Atanu Garai/Lists atanugarai.lists -- gmail.com, oai-implementers -- openarchives.org Subject: Re: [OAI-implementers] local/distributed vs global/unified archives hi Atanu this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory ... in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world (like arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they were run by poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the owners of data trying to provide services as well) and the model simply did not replicate to all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of poster child repositories) ... in some senses, this crisis in subject repositories led to the Santa Fe meeting of the OAI. to address especially the sustainability problem, open access advocates began to recommend institutional repositories rather than subject repositories because scholarship is a primary function of institutions and if anything will be here hundreds of years from now it will be the institutions of higher learning. the core idea of OAI-PMH was therefore to bridge between sustainable repositories (e.g., IRs, although the term did not exist back then) and high quality service providers (e.g., those hosted by scholarly societies) so OAI-PMH is supposed to give us the best of both worlds. it is tempting to believe that global subject repositories will be a better model, but this did not work in the 90s. maybe it will work now (maybe scholarly societies, research agencies, etc. have deeper pockets now) - we dont know for sure - but who is willing to invest a lot of money and many years on redoing an experiment that failed in many instances not too long ago? ttfn, hussein = hussein suleman ~ hussein -- cs.uct.ac.za ~ http://www.husseinsspace.com = Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: Dear Colleagues This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions? Thank you for reflecting on this issue. Best *Atanu Garai *Online Networking Specialist Globethics.net /International Secretariat: /150, route de Ferney CH-1211 Geneva 2 Switzerland Tel: 41.22791.6249/67 Fax: 41.22710.2386 /New Delhi Contact: /Tel: 91.98996.22884 Email: garai -- globethics.net mailto:garai -- globethics.net atanu.garai -- gmail.com mailto:atanu.garai -- gmail.com Web: www.globethics.net http://www.globethics.net/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
hussein suleman writes this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory ... in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world (like arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they were run by poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the owners of data trying to provide services as well) and the model simply did not replicate to all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of poster child repositories) ... in some senses, this crisis in subject repositories led to the Santa Fe meeting of the OAI. Your memory is indeed fading. The Santa Fe meeting was informed by work of a group of authors: Herbert Van de Sompel, Thomas Krichel, Michael L. Nelson, Patrick Hochstenbach, Victor M. Lyapunov, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Mohamed Kholief, Xiaoming Liu, and Heath O'Connell, The UPS Prototype project: exploring the obstacles in creating across e-print archive end-user service, Old Dominion University Computer Science TR 2000-01, February 2000. This is the full version. There is a censored version of it that apeared in D-LIB magazine, but the above is the full version, I still have a copy at http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/upsproto.pdf The project looked at building a user service uniting contents from the following archives: arXiv, CogPrints, NACA, NCSTRL, NDLTD and RePEc. Out of these NCSTRL is out of business, it was NSF funded, as soon as the funding stopped, it was dropped, bascially. Thus http://dlib.cs.odu.edu/publications.htm has a link to the full version, but it's a dead link to a server at Cornell where NCSTRL services lived. But all the others are still in business. but who is willing to invest a lot of money and many years on redoing an experiment that failed in many instances not too long ago? I would be interested in seeing a list of these many instances. There is indeed a problem of grant-funded digital libraries failing when the grant expires. This continues to be a serious problem. But I don't think this was the impetus for the OAI work. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
This topic may well have been discussed since 1999 - unfortunately much of that discussion (at least at a technical level) has not acknowledged that the Web has changed almost immeasurably between then and now. Web 2.0, social networks, Amazon S3, the cloud, microformats, Google sitemaps, REST, the Web Architecture, ... I could go on. The technical landscape is now so completely different to what it was when the OAI-PMH was first discussed that it makes no sense to apply a 1999 design approach to the space, which is effectively what we are doing. Andy -- Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk +44 (0)1225 474319 -Original Message- From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 08 March 2008 12:07 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: Dear Colleagues This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions? Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh those of CRs on every count: (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide network of independent research institutions (mostly universities). (2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.) http://roar.eprints.org/ http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/ (3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed institutions' repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or data) can all be harvested into multiple central collections, as desired, and searched, navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed archiving is also important for mirroring, backup and preservation.) (4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes institutionally or centrally, so there is no difference there; but researchers normally have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The only global CR is Google, and that's harvested.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ (5) The distributed costs of institutional self-archiving are certainly lower than than maintaining CRs (how many? for what fields? and who maintains them and pays their costs?), particularly as the costs of a local IR are low, and they can cover all of an institution's research output as well as many other forms of institutional digital assets. (6) Most important of all, although research funders can reinforce self-archiving mandates, the natural and universal way to ensure that IRs (and hence harvested CRs) are actually filled with all of the world's research output, funded and unfunded, is for institutions to mandate and monitor the self-archiving of their own research output, in their own IRs, rather than hoping it will find its way willy-nilly into external CRs. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ This topic has been much discussed since in the American Scientist Open Access Forum. See the topic threads Central vs. Distributed Archives (since 1999) and Central versus institutional self-archiving. See also: Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/ Harnad, S. (2008) Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally. http
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Andy Powell wrote: This topic may well have been discussed since 1999 - unfortunately much of that discussion (at least at a technical level) has not acknowledged that the Web has changed almost immeasurably between then and now. Web 2.0, social networks, Amazon S3, the cloud, microformats, Google sitemaps, REST, the Web Architecture, ... I could go on. The technical landscape is now so completely different to what it was when the OAI-PMH was first discussed that it makes no sense to apply a 1999 design approach to the space, which is effectively what we are doing. The Web has alas progressed a lot more since 1990 than OA target content on the Web has done. And none of the changes in the Web are relevant to the issue of whether the locus of direct deposit of OA content should be convergent -- in researchers' own IRs or divergent, in thematic CRs. The bottom line is that OA content should be deposited directly where we can ensure that all of it will indeed be speedily and systematically deposited at long last -- and that locus is each authors' own university IR, because universities (and research institutions) worldwide are the providers of all that OA content, both funded and unfunded, across all disciplines and themes -- the ones with the both interest and the means to mandate, monitor and co-benefit from storing and showcasing their own research output. The rest -- including all Web 2.0 etc. benefits -- are all there for the having at the harvester level. IRs are for direct deposit. How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/1/nihx.html Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Thanks Stevan. These are key points that are coming to my mind. Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: Dear Colleagues This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions? Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh those of CRs on every count: This forum must have discussed this issue. Also, the objective of posing this question should be made clear, so that you can find it in the right context and spirit. At one point of time and still now, we wanted to have disbursed information platforms and database. But with the emergence of large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the advantages of having a centralised global databases are becoming obvious. A choice between 'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy decision for a university or group of universities and such a decision is driven by number of factors. Again, the question is what are the sequence of events and rationale that led the open access community to select IRs as primary archiving mechanism over CRs. Institutions should be able to make a choice of their own, but if you want to advise the institutions what should be the key criteria to advise them to go for own IRs, over the CRs. (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide network of independent research institutions (mostly universities). (2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.) http://roar.eprints.org/ http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/ Points 1 and 2 are essentially dealing with the notion of self-archiving mandate that the institution may or may not invoke for its researcher. From an institutional point of view, the choice of CR and IR will primarily be driven by management, impact and effectiveness of the repositories. For universities which produce a high number of research papers annually, creating IRs may be sensible but there are universities in India that are producing only a handful of research papers. My understanding is that for such universities maintaining own repositories are less effective, even if we take cost considerations alone. The issue of a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output does not conflict with the choice of having a CR (or rather global repository). Independent institutions can have both mandated self-archiving and archiving, evaluating, showcasing, maximizing the usage etc. in CRs as well. (3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed institutions' repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or data) can all be harvested into multiple central collections, as desired, and searched, navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed archiving is also important for mirroring, backup and preservation.) (4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes institutionally or centrally, so there is no difference there; but researchers normally have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The only global CR is Google, and that's harvested.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ Technology is not a constraint in making metadata
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
In the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Tony Delamothe has written a useful and welcome report about important progress in the Open Access (OA) self-archiving of the UK medical research literature. Initiative could give free access to UK medical research BMJ 2005;330:1043 (7 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7499.1043-a http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/330/7499/1043-a The report contains one ambiguity, however, that in fact turns on what is (in my own view) an extremely important strategic error about *where* articles should be self-archived. (Optimal policy: in either the author's own institutional repository or a central repository like PubMed Central, but *preferably* the former, subsequently harvested by the latter.) the consortium [led by the Wellcome Trust] will... set up a UK mirror of PubMed Central, the free online archive of life science literature administered by the US National Library of Medicine... to allow the ingestion of [UK] peer reviewed articles arising from research funded by the consortium partners. It is fine to set up more OA archives to ingest OA articles, but where should authors, from all disciplines, self-archive? They don't all do medical research, they don't all have central funders, and they don't all have central archives. What they all do have is their own universities (or research institutions), which employ them, and are in a position to mandate, monitor, reward and co-benefit (along with their researchers) from the self-archiving of their own institutional research output, in their own Institutional Repository (IR). And an increasing number of these universities and research institutions are currently setting up their own Institutional Repositories (IRs), which cover their own research output across all their disciplines (and, distributing the self-archiving load across all institutions, are an incomparably less expensive proposition than central archives). http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse The most general and natural way to self-archive all research output, in all disciplines, is to self-archive it in the researcher's own Institutional Repository (IR). All the IRs are OAI-compliant, hence completely interoperable. Their metadata can be harvested centrally so the contents of all IRs can be seamlessly searched as if they were all in just one global archive: http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ Central, subject-specific archives are of course OAI-compliant too, hence also part of the global OAI virtual archive. This means that in principle it doesn't matter where an article is self-archived -- in the author's own IR, or a central archive like PMC, or both. But whereas it does not matter where articles are self-archived, it does matter that most articles (85%) published annually today are *not* self-archived at all: http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm Hence for a self-archiving *requirement* by a research funder to have maximum capacity to generate self-archiving, it should be preferentially aimed at the most general means of self-archiving, the one that is applicable to all disciplines at all institutions, rather than only to the central archive of one research funder's subject-matter. Research funders can mandate self-archiving. So can research institutions. But to maximally encourage institutions to mandate self-archiving of *all* their research output, what better way do research funders have than to mandate that their fundees self-archive their research preferentially in their own institutional IRs? For this reason (and many others), the specific recommendation of the JISC report on UK self-archiving was to self-archive institutionally and then harvest centrally: Swan, Alma; Needham, Paul; Probets, Steve; Muir, Adrienne; Oppenheim, Charles; O'Brien, Ann; Hardy, Rachel; Rowland, Fytton; Brown, Sheridan (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1): 25-40. http://cogprints.org/4120/ Swan, Alma; Needham, Paul; Probets, Steve; Muir, Adrienne; O'Brien, Ann; Oppenheim, Charles; Hardy, Rachel; Rowland, Fytton (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Report. http://cogprints.org/4122/ The Wellcome Trust has already announced that it is making deposition of the author's final accepted (peer reviewed) manuscript in an open access archive a condition of funding, and the Research Councils UK looks set to follow their lead (BMJ 2005;330: 923[Free Full Text], 23 Apr). A study commissioned by a committee of the UK's further and higher education funding bodies found that only 3% of authors would not comply with such a request from their funders. But the Wellcome Trust (like NIH) specified that the deposit should be in a central archive
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: Friends, especially friends in India: Here is a very useful exchange. Can we in India think of a centralised archive similar to the one run by CCSD in France for all research councils and departments of the Central Government (CSIR, ICAR, DAE, Dept of Space, ICMR, etc.)? Will it be better than each individual laboratory having its own archive in the long run? I welcome your views. Arun, I'm afraid you may have misunderstood my message. The point was that unless a country already has a national, centralised research mega-institution distributed all over the country, as France does (CNRS), a national central archive is not a very practical proposition. In most countries, research institutions are independent local entities (mainly Universities or Labs). National research councils may fund their research, to be sure, but the entity that *provides* the research is the local institution, and it is that local institution that has the direct stake in maximising the usage and impact of its own research output by maximising its visibility and accessibility. The best way research councils and government departments can help is by mandating that all funded research must be self-archived (and providing the funds to do so, if/when they are needed); further providing a central OAI-compliant archive (for those researchers whose local institutions cannot for some reason provide a local institutional one of their own) would be useful too. But the lion's share of the initiative for providing, monitoring and maintaining open access to their own local research output must come from the local research-provider institutions. OA is rather like the Internet itself in that respect. Please see the study of Swan et al., which analyses this matter in some depth: Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and O'Brien, Ann and Oppenheim, Charles and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Report. http://cogprints.org/4122/ Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and Oppenheim, Charles and O'Brien, Ann and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing. http://cogprints.org/4120/ Stevan Harnad Arun Original Message Subject: Re: [SI] Ann Okerson on institutional archives From:Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Date:Mon, March 28, 2005 8:14 pm To: s...@wsis-cs.org Cc: Leslie Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk --- I have to point out that the information from Franck Laloe about CNRS's HAL is correct and very helpful but risks being extremely misleading about the cost of distributed institutional archiving. Here are the pertinent points: (1) France is unique in having a national research mega-institution, the CNRS. This consists of CNRS researchers in just about all scholarly and scientific disciplines (not just those we call science) distributed all over the country, either in independent CNRS unit or in CNRS units that are administratively associated with local universities. (2) I am not sure what percentage of the researchers and research output of France the CNRS comprises, but it is considerable, and if we add in the three other CNRS-like national research institutes (INSERM in medicine, INRA in biology and INRIA in information/computer science, which are all collaborating with CNRS in self-archiving their research output in HAL), that covers the great majority of French research output. (3) Because of this unified national mega-institution and mega-archive, France is in a position to take a huge step forward toward making 100% of French research output OA, thereby setting an example for the rest of the world. The total cost of this is very low, because of the economies of scale that come with having all national research output centralized in this way. (4) Most important of all, because all four of these institutions are indeed institutions, with the status of employer (and, I am not sure about this, but I believe also the status of research funder in some cases), CNRS, INSERM, INRIA and INRA are in a position to adopt a unified self-archiving policy at a national level, and to ensure that the policy is implemented in the whole country, by just about all of its researchers, for just about all of French research output, all at once. (5) Now the misinterpretation of all this: (5a) Few if any other countries are in a position to adopt and implement a
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
At 14:03 Sat, 19 Mar 2005, Stevan wrote: In a comment added to Richard Poynder's new online column on OA http://poynder.blogspot.com/2005/03/time-to-walk-talk.html Bill Hubbard of SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ has corrected an important (though intentional!) omission from my own summary of the outcome of the Berlin 3 conference on implementing the Berlin Declaration: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march05/harnad/03harnad.html . (b) It is institutions (not disciplines) that share with their own researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own joint research output. I strongly disagree. Disciplines do share with their own researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their research output. Progress in any discipline stands to gain when research results are quickly shared with other researchers in that discipline. Lee Miller . ~ Lee N. Miller phone: (607) 255-3221 Editor Emeritus Ecological Society of America 127 West State Street, Suite 301 Ithaca, NY 14850 USAemail: l...@cornell.edu
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 Lee Miller wrote: sh (b) It is institutions (not disciplines) that share with their own sh researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility, usage sh and impact of their own joint research output. I strongly disagree. Disciplines do share with their own researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their research output. Progress in any discipline stands to gain when research results are quickly shared with other researchers in that discipline. Please keep in mind what is at issue here: Where and how should articles be self-archived? Institutions (universities) are physical entities; disciplines are not. Institutions (universities) produce research; disciplines do not. Institutions (at a stretch) have interests: disciplines do not (although their learned/professional societies might). Institutions can require and reward the self-archiving of their own research output (as a condition for employment and advancement); disciplines cannot (though research funders can, to an extent). Institutions are enduring entities with an interest in archiving their own research output; disciplines are not. (Learned/professional societies perdure, but they are not the research-providers; funders are partial providers of the research, but they are not a discipline either.) A discipline is more like a metadata tag than a physical entity or place. Yes, Chemistry shares with chemists and their universities an interest in the visibility, usage and impact of chemical research -- but only in a figurative sense, since Chemistry is not an entity like a chemist or a university; moreover, the American Chemical Society has so far shown far more interest in maximising its revenue streams from the sale of its journals than in maximizing the visibility, usage and impact of the research output of its membership, or of Chemistry in general. And (a fine point): whereas chemists, their own institutions and their discipline may all have a common stake in *access* to and *progress* in chemical research, chemists and their institutions are actually in *competition* with other chemists and their institutions insofar as visibility, usage and impact are concerned! Yet maximizing the research impact of a researcher's own research is the principal rationale for providing open access to it -- by self-archiving it. So neither disciplines nor progress are entities with interests: researchers, their employers and their funders are. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Lee Miller wrote: I strongly disagree. Disciplines do share with their own researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their research output. Progress in any discipline stands to gain when research results are quickly shared with other researchers in that discipline. But who (or what) are 'disciplines' exactly? Who is it that is sharing the interest of researchers in maximising their research visibility, etc? Who is it that can deliver a self-archived literature for that discipline? The best stab at defining a discipline for this purpose is that it is composed of a collection of learned societies, professional bodies and research funders (which happily exist within some disciplines). In other words, a 'discipline' is a NON-entity - just a collection of various parties around a subject area. Whilst these may all have the furtherance of the subject and the maximisation of research visibility at heart (may do; look at the current evidence and decide for yourself) they are still unlikely to be anywhere near as effective at implementing successful open access archives as individual employing institutions, which cover all disciplines and all researchers within those institutions - funded or not, society members or not, professionally-affiliated or not. Alma Swan Key Perspectives Ltd Truro, UK
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
In a comment added to Richard Poynder's new online column on OA http://poynder.blogspot.com/2005/03/time-to-walk-talk.html Bill Hubbard of SHERPA http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ has corrected an important (though intentional!) omission from my own summary of the outcome of the Berlin 3 conference on implementing the Berlin Declaration: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march05/harnad/03harnad.html (I deliberately left out points on which full consensus had not been reached.) Bill Hubbard points out that there was definitely some convergence (though not yet complete agreement) reached on the important issue of central, discipline-based versus distributed institution-based self-archiving. What everyone agreed on was: (1) Central and institutional self-archiving are complementary (2) Both are valuable and to be encouraged (3) OAI-compliance makes all archives interoperable and equivalent (4) Redundancy in archiving is always desirable What was new was the recognition (by many, but not all) Berlin-3 delegates that institutional self-archiving nevertheless has a functional *primacy*, for the following 5 reasons: (a) It is institutions (not disciplines) that are the actual content-providers. (Researchers are employees of, and do research at, their institutions -- not their disciplines, nor their learned societies, nor even their research-funders.) (b) It is institutions (not disciplines) that share with their own researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility, usage and impact of their own joint research output. (c) It is *institutions* (not disciplines) that are in a position to implement policies requiring the self-archiving of their own research output, in all disciplines, thereby propagating the self-archiving practice across all disciplines (and institutions). (A research-funder can require this too, but only in its own discipline, and only for the research it funds, and only if a suitable central archive exists and is maintained.) (d) In the interoperable, OAI-compliant era, central *harvesting* (not central depositing) is the natural way to create a central subject-based collection (including any enhancing of its the metadata). (e) Local institutional self-archiving, being the most congruent with institutional and researcher culture and commonality of interests, is also the most likely to propagate quickly to 100% OA. Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and O'Brien, Ann and Oppenheim, Charles and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Report. http://cogprints.org/4122/ Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and Oppenheim, Charles and O;Brien, Ann and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing. http://cogprints.org/4120/ It was accordingly agreed (by many, but not all) delegates, that both central and institutional self-archiving are to be encouraged, but that direct institutional self-archiving should be regarded as the default option, the one that has natural primacy, as the content-provider. And that the natural harvesting direction is from distributed institutional archives to central collections, and not vice-versa. In particular, Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ppts/wellcome.ppt who chaired the all-important Session 4, where the Berlin-3 implementation recommendation was drafted, agreed that although the Wellcome Trust (like the NIH) is committed to central archiving of all research it funds , in collaboration with PubMed Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ this can be done either by direct central depositing, or by institutional self-archiving and subsequent harvesting -- and that institutional self-archiving is the *default option*. (This is progress indeed, and it would be wonderful if this understanding propagated also to NIH!) A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4091.html Stevan Harnad Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Central vs. Distributed Archives (1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html PubMed and self-archiving (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2973.html Central versus institutional self-archiving (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3205.html AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at:
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
The article below is now published in the January 2005 issue of Learned Publishing: Alma Swan, Paul Needham, Steve Probets, Adrienne Muir, Anne O'Brien, Charles Oppenheim, Rachel Hardy, Fytton Rowland and Sheridan Brown (2005). Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content for UK higher and further education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1), 25-40. http://caliban.ingentaselect.com/vl=8704979/cl=83/nw=1/rpsv/cw/alpsp/0953151 3/v18n1/s5/p25 and is also available at: www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Eprints_LP_paper.pdf Prior AmSci Topic Threads: Central vs. Distributed Archives (1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html PubMed and self-archiving (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2973.html Central versus institutional self-archiving (2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3205.html
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
[Moderator's Note: This welcome initiative from Medlars-India provides a back-up central OAI-compliant archive for any biomedical researchers worldwide who do not yet have local OAI archives to self-archive in at their own institution. Such central back-ups mirrors and harvesters will become more numerous in the OAI-interoperable OA age -- as will, of course, the primary local institutional OAI archives that will be the main feeders to global OA. Local institutions are the direct primary providers of the journal article output itself, as well as the co-beneficiaries, with their own researchers, of the enhanced research impact that comes from making it OA by self-archiving it. But these central back-up archives will be a great help in hastening 100% OA. -- S.H.] Stevan, FYI. Barbara - Original Message - From: na...@hub.nic.in To: hif-...@who.int Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 4:34 PM Subject: [HIF-net at WHO] Open access archiving Dear Friends, We at the Indian MEDLARS Centre, New Delhi are in the process of launching an Open Archive of Biomedical Literature which would have free submission of papers from India as well international papers. This archive would be launched by end January 2005 or beginning of February 2005. We have developed and tested the prototype using EPrints software (developed by Southampton University). MeSH vocabulary terms have been incorporated into this (broad terms only). Once launched, this archive would definitely improve access to health information in developing countries. Our Centre also has a database of Indian biomedical journals (bibliographic) with full-text of 27 journals. This serves as a very important access point to Indian literature. The database is available at http://indmed.nic.in Naina Pandita [HIF-net at WHO profile: Naina Pandita is Technical Director of the Indian MEDLARS Centre, National Informatics Centre, New Delhi,India. She is interested in health/biomedical information especially digital resources and open access initiatives. The centre has developed a bibliographic database of peer reviewed Indian biomedical journals (IndMED) which is accessible free of cost from our site http://indmed.nic.in. na...@hub.nic.in] [Note from moderator. The message above is a response to a HIF-net message (Health information for all by 2015? 21) on 18 November 2004, from Subbiah Arunachalam, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, India; Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Bioline International, Canada; Barbara Kirsop, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK; and F. O. Okonofua, Editor, African Journal of Reproductive Health, Nigeria.] ___ 'HIF-net at WHO': working together to improve access to reliable information for healthcare providers in developing and transitional countries. Send list messages to hif-...@who.int. To join the list, send an email to hea...@inasp.info with name, organization, country, and brief description of professional interests.
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Thomas Krichel wrote: Stevan Harnad writes: citeseer is not OAI-compliant. Wrong. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/oai.html That's good news. I knew it was coming but not that it had already come. And citeseer's new face-lift in its presentation format is very becoming too! Bravo to Lee Giles. Disciplines do not count an author's publications, weigh their impact, and employ and fund him accordingly. His institution does (and to a certain extent his research funders do too). I see two problems with this reasoning: (1) While institutional administrators make the final decisions, they rely on discipline-specific advice. They can't do without it. (2) A crucial argument for a university administrator to pay Prof. X better, is that otherwise she may be hired away to University Y. The opportunity for Prof. X arises through a discipline-specific valuation scheme. I am not sure what point Thomas is making. Of course when a university is evaluating an employee for promotion/tenure it consults qualified peers at other universities for their judgment, and both the employee and the consultants are usually in the same department, hence discipline, at their respective universities. That has nothing to do with the fact that it is in his *own* university (department) that the employee is being evaluated, it is for the research impact of *that* university that he is being rewarded, it is *that* university that co-benefits from the impact (and the research) income: not the other university, and not the discipline. So it is the employee's own university that has the interest in maximizing its employees' impact, showcasing it, monitoring it, measuring it, and mandating that all of that university's research output should be self-archived in order to maximize it -- not the other university, nor the discipline. Nor am I sure what Thomas's point is about a discipline-specific valuation scheme? What does that mean? That universities have departments, and typically hire and promote (and consult outside experts) at the departmental, hence also disciplinary level? I agree. But that has nothing to do with the question of whether it is the local university/departmental self-archiving or remote central/disciplinary self-archiving that is more likely to grow and spread to 100% OA across all disciplines. I can only repeat (and I don't think Thomas disagrees) that it is the researcher and his own university/department that share the benefits of maximizing their joint research impact, not the researcher and his discipline, or any remote 3rd-party entity (with the exception of the research funder, like NIH, but even there, the funder gains just as much from mandating institutional self-archiving, and OA as a whole, within and across disciplines gains a good deal more). Even Physics, at Arxiv's present linear growth rate, unchanged since 1991, will not be 100% OA for at least another 10 years). I will let you calculate how long it takes for the remaining disciplines to become open access at the speed that institutional archives are filling at this time. I guess it will 100 years or more. Without a self-archiving mandate, I agree. That is why self-archiving mandates are necessary, both from the employer and the funder. But the optimal locus for the self-archiving practice to propagate across disciplines within the same university and across universities is local institutional/departmental self-archiving -- mandated, maintained and monitored locally, but harvested remotely -- rather than remote central self-archiving. Again, I don't think Thomas is advocating central archiving either, so I am not sure what the disagreement is about. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Not to oversimplify, and recognizing the differences in academic and research organization between countries, if the UK does own way and the USanother, we will have what is usually called a natural experiment. I too would have prefered they had left it to individual choice, but if they don't, lets get at least the benfit of the resulting information. Maybe even within the the first year the operational differences will become clear. I at least do not feel able to confidently predict which it will be, and my personal view and preferences do not affect the issue. --David Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Fri 11/5/2004 11:48 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Research publishing and Open access - Latest developments On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, David Goodman wrote: The relative merits [of central vs institutional self-archiving] are not known... and both models are worthy of experimentation. a scientist... requires evidence before conclusions. It would be hard to get evidence to test the relative merits of central vs institutional self-archiving if the NIH and Wellcome Trust were to prejudge the outcome and mandate only central, rather than either/or (as I and others have recommended): A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4091.html Stevan Harnad Subbiah Arunachalam wrote: The Wellcome Trust deserves praise for its continuing support to the Open Access movement. The Trust would do well to accept the recommendation of Prof. Stevan Harnad and decide to support authors depositing their papers in their own institutional archives rather than just a centralised archive. The relative merits are now well known.
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Just a very brief response to Stevan's note: - Stevan says: Fewer keystrokes, more self-archiving. Accepted. But now can we talk about the vast, sluggish majority that does *no* self-archiving at all? That's why the self-archiving mandate is needed. For what it's worth, in CS, my anecdotal impression is that almost all papers that I want to get are freely available on the web (typically in citeseer or on author's home pages or both; occasionally on CoRR; the CS part of the arXiv; hardly ever on departmental archives; never, as far as I can recall, on university archives). So it seems that, at least in CS, the vast, sluggish majority are self-archiving somehow. This is not to say that it's not worth encouraging similar behavior in other fields though! - Stevan says: (8) What is certain is that if OAI-compliant self-archiving is to be mandated, it is institutions that are in the natural position to implement the mandate and monitor compliance (probably at the departmental level), for it is institutions (and not disciplines) that share with their own researchers the benefits of maximising research impact, and the costs of losing research impact. I agree that if there is going to be mandate then it will have to come from either the universities or from funding agencies. My guess is that it will be even more effective coming from funding agencies, but that is not an argument against having universities mandate it as well. (I have actually been trying to convince the NSF to impose just such a mandate -- unsuccesfully so far.) If there is to be a mandate at all, my distinct preference would be that it be to archive on *some* OAI-compliant server, and not necessarily to archive on the university server. - Stevan says: (4) Logically and practically, if there existed a central, OAI-compliant archive for each discipline (and some central entity to foot the costs and maintain the entire disciplinary archive in each case, as the Physics ArXiv does today), then it would make absolutely no difference whether authors self-archived in their disciplinary OAI archive or their institutional archive. I disagree with this, at least the way things stand currently. In the case of many subfields in physcis, the real publication of a paper (in the sense of making public) happens when it is posted on the arXiv. Posting a paper on an institutional archive has a very different effect (in terms of the paper being noticed) than posting in on the arXiv. Maybe at some point it won't make a difference (when all archives are linked into a centralized virtual archive), but now it does. - Stevan says: (2) What functionality does Joe think an individual OAI archive can provide for users (I am not speaking about depositing authors) that an OAI harvester and service provider could not provide, and better? I'm perhaps not imaginative enough to come up with lots of examples, but the type of thing that I had in mind was that an art history archive might provide particularly good ways of relating reproductions that would be important for art historians. Similarly, a genomics/computational biology archive might include gene sequencing data and ways of accessing it. Clearly, both examples involve going beyond just a repository of papers, but an archive of papers in a field might well evolve in the direction of providing more than just a collection of papers. - Stevan, responding to Tom Wilson, says: Perhaps, also, the various disciplinary archives may vary in what they accept What they accept? It is journals that accept, and the target of OA is the postprints accepted by the journals. The preprints are another matter and not central to OA. For me as a CS researcher, I'm often interested in the preprints that haven't yet been accepted by journals. (The situation is more complicated in CS because conference papers are often never published in journals.) And the arXiv definitely does have policies on what is acceptable, and it varies by discipline. For example, the policy on CoRR is to accept any paper with CS content, even if it's blatantly incorrect. The physics arXiv tries to be (a teeny bit) more selective. -- Joe From har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Nov 1 22:20:26 2004 X-UIDL: P[Y!!3TA!!~KX!!8~!! List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 03:20:23 + (GMT) From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk To: BOAI Forum boai-fo...@ecs.soton.ac.uk cc: Joseph Halpern halp...@cs.cornell.edu Subject: Re: What's happening in open archives? MIME-Version: 1.0 X-MailScanner-Information: Please contact helpd...@ecs.soton.ac.uk for more information X-ECS-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-MailScanner-From: har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk On Sun, 31 Oct 2004, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote: Quoting Joseph Halpern halp...@cs.cornell.edu: jh My
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Joe Halpern, and I have no serious disagreement at all. These points are really just about the fine-tuning: On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Joseph Halpern wrote: For what it's worth, in CS, my anecdotal impression is that almost all papers that I want to get are freely available on the web (typically in citeseer or on author's home pages or both; occasionally on CoRR; the CS part of the arXiv; hardly ever on departmental archives; never, as far as I can recall, on university archives). So it seems that, at least in CS, the vast, sluggish majority are self-archiving somehow. This is not to say that it's not worth encouraging similar behavior in other fields though! Joe may well be right about this, and it is very good news from the discipline that invented the Internet itself (CS: Computer Science)! - Stevan says: (8) What is certain is that if OAI-compliant self-archiving is to be mandated, it is institutions that are in the natural position to implement the mandate and monitor compliance (probably at the departmental level), for it is institutions (and not disciplines) that share with their own researchers the benefits of maximising research impact, and the costs of losing research impact. I agree that if there is going to be mandate then it will have to come from either the universities or from funding agencies. My guess is that it will be even more effective coming from funding agencies, but that is not an argument against having universities mandate it as well. (I have actually been trying to convince the NSF to impose just such a mandate -- unsuccesfully so far.) If there is to be a mandate at all, my distinct preference would be that it be to archive on *some* OAI-compliant server, and not necessarily to archive on the university server. I agree! The mandate should be OAI-compliant self-archiving. But because Joe is in a happy field, CS, where most authors already self-archive, he will perhaps not be as aware that for the sluggish majority of disciplines, both institutional OAI-compliant servers and central disciplinary OAI-compliant servers are still few. Joe will, however, appreciate that it is far cheaper and easier to create and maintain a local institutional OAI-compliant server, for local institutional self-archiving, than to create and maintain a central disciplinary OAI-compliant server, for self-archiving discipline-wide and worldwide. So that is the first reason for mandating self-archiving in any OAI-compliant server -- but expressing a preference for an institutional/departmental server. The second reason for preferring institutional/departmental servers is that institutions host all of their own disciplines, can mandate and monitor compliance locally, and can encourage the propagation of the practice of self-archiving across all of its disciplines and departments. None of this is true of central disciplinary servers. Most important of all: It doesn't matter, functionally, as both local institutional/departmental OAI-compliant archives and central disciplinary OAI-compliant archives are completely interoperable. sh (4) Logically and practically, if there existed a central, OAI-compliant sh archive for each discipline (and some central entity to foot the costs sh and maintain the entire disciplinary archive in each case, as the sh Physics ArXiv does today), then it would make absolutely no difference sh whether authors self-archived in their disciplinary OAI archive or their sh institutional archive. I disagree with this, at least the way things stand currently. In the case of many subfields in physcis, the real publication of a paper (in the sense of making public) happens when it is posted on the arXiv. Posting a paper on an institutional archive has a very different effect (in terms of the paper being noticed) than posting in on the arXiv. Maybe at some point it won't make a difference (when all archives are linked into a centralized virtual archive), but now it does. Agreed that in Physics, which today has a successful, long-standing central archive (ArXiv), containing a substantial portion of the discipline, a paper is more visible there than in a local institutional archive. But this is not true of the rest of the disciplines -- the sluggish majority. It is not even true of Joe's discipline, CS, where *priority* (not publication: both physics and CS still publishes in refereed journals and refereed conference proceedings) and immediate access is provided by self-archiving both preprints and postprints locally, and relying on citeseer (and google) to harvest them and make them accessible globally. Joe will agree that google is not the solution for navigating and searching the research literature as a whole, and that just as central OAI archives are rare and costly to create and maintain (ArXiv, CERN, SPIRES and PhysDoc, all in Physics, are the only
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sun, 31 Oct 2004, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote: Quoting Joseph Halpern halp...@cs.cornell.edu: jh My guess is that CS researchers will typically not put their jh papers on university servers unless required to do so, simply because of jh laziness. It is true of just about *all* researchers that they will typically not put their papers on any server unless they are required to do so (laziness). If the problem of achieving 100% OA were merely the problem of getting those who already self-archive in some way or other (i.e., those who are not lazy) to do it in some other way (be it central disciplinary server, institutional server, departmental server, or home page) then we would not need a self-archiving mandate at all, and we be almost there! It is important to keep this reality in mind in what follows, otherwise all we are doing is meditating on our favorite way to self-archive, rather than solving the problem of getting the non-self-archivers to self-archive, so we can reach 100% OA. I would suggest setting aside for the moment those who already self-archive, and how they do it, and focussing on those who do not (the lazy ones). jh There's less overhead in putting a paper on your home page jh than there is in putting it on a university server and authors know that, jh once it's on citeseer, their paper is easily accessible (and, I would jh guess, more likely to be seen than on a university server). (1) The number of keystrokes it takes to self-archive a paper on one's home-page may be a few (not many) fewer, but that is not the point: The real problem (and the relevant laziness) is that of those who are *not* doing those keystrokes *at all*, not that of those who are doing too few! (2) Since the advent of the OAI protocol (1999), OAIster and citebase, there is no difference whatsoever in either ease of accessibility or likelihood of being seen, between a paper in an OAI archive (whether institutional, disciplinary, or departmental) and a paper harvested by citeseer. If anything, the advantage is the other way (because citeseer is not OAI-compliant). (3) Let us not mix up (i) the fact that citeseer is a (harvested) central disciplinary archive that happens to be quite *populated* with (ii) other facts about citeseer (such as that it is central, disciplinary, or in the CS field). (4) The salient feature of citeseer is that it is *harvested*. If citeseer trawled for self-archived full-texts in physics or biology -- or even (surprisingly!) social science -- instead of computer science, it would be populated too. (Possibly not as populated as in computer science, but one can't be sure of that either.) Our webwide trawls for OA full-texts using ISI-based citations in Biology and Social Science are currently generating a hit rate of 10-15%. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm (5) Hence what is really being compared here is not institutional versus disciplinary archives, but harvested versus non-harvested (full-text) archives. (6) So let us not compare apples and oranges: The right comparison is whether the probability (and rate) of reaching 100% OA is higher (a) if authors do fewer keystrokes and we instead design more full-text trawlers and harvesters like citeseer, or (b) if authors do a few more keystrokes (to make their full-texts OAI-compliant) and then OAIster (etc.) can just harvest their metadata, as they were designed to do. (7) And this is entirely independent of whether self-archiving needs to be mandated in order to ensure that we reach 100% OA soon enough. (8) What is certain is that if OAI-compliant self-archiving is to be mandated, it is institutions that are in the natural position to implement the mandate and monitor compliance (probably at the departmental level), for it is institutions (and not disciplines) that share with their own researchers the benefits of maximising research impact, and the costs of losing research impact. Tom Wilson replies (to Joe Halpern) ...perhaps loyalty to a discipline is stronger than loyalty to an institution, which can vary over an academic career. And your comment, unless required to do so chimes in with my earlier point about academic authors needing some motivation to submit to institutional archives. I'm afraid that several factors are again being mixed up here: (1) Loyalty to a discipline is an abstraction, and an irrelevant one, here: Disciplines do not count an author's publications, weigh their impact, and employ and fund him accordingly. His institution does (and to a certain extent his research funders do too). If an author elects to self-archive so as to maximize his research's visibility, access, usage and impact, this is primarily for the sake of his research itself, and his own career, for which all the carrots and sticks are in the hands of his institution (and funder), not his discipline. (So much for
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Dear Stevan, In the Brody et al. studies, the effect of OA in enhancing visibility and use for many of the earlier papers studied, lasts for much longer than two years. I refer you to your own group's data and Brody's graphs. The citation half life for almost all journals even in the fastest-moving fields is considerably more than 2 years. According to JCR, the average citation half life of the 10 highest impact factor journals in nuclear physics (excluding review journals) is 5.8 years; in neurosciences it is 4.64. Some publishers do only charge for recent material. Some do just the opposite. An example is Elsevier Web Editions -- a paper subscriber gets free electronic access to the most recent 12 months only; if it wants more, it must purchase at considerable extra cost the Science Direct or Elsevier Electronic Subscription versions. This publisher clearly considers the data of value for an extended period. The generalization that only the most recent year or two matters is thus proven false from three independent lines of data. It does not rule out the speculation that it might be correct in some instances for some users, Yours, Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Sun 10/3/2004 1:03 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving ON THE PRESERVATION NON-PROBLEM FOR SELF-ARCHIVED OA SUPPLEMENTS On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, David Goodman wrote: Doesn't it depend on the institution: in particular upon the institution's reliability, its commitment to self-archiving and OA in general, and its general orientation towards digital access and preservation? What is the it in question? The desirability and benefits of self-archiving? The greater probability of self-archiving propagating across disciplines and institutions with an institutional self-archiving mandate rather than a central self-archiving mandate? Sure the institution has to cooperate, but that cooperation is mandatory under a mandate (if the institution wants to receive the research funding!) And a department or even an individual can set up an institutional OAI Eprints Archive. And preservation is the biggest and most persistent (well-preserved!) red herring that besets the sluggish progress of self-archiving. How many times does it need to be repeated that self-archiving is a *supplement* to the publisher's version, provided in order to provide immediate maximized access and maximized impact? The preservation problem concerns the publisher's official version, not the self-archived supplements (even though the latter manage to preserve themselves quite well too, thank you very much!) The growth region in many fields is the first 6 months to two years from publication. That is when results are used, applied, built-upon, cited. Publishers are well aware of this, and it is for this reason that there is far more willingness to agree to provide access after an embargo period of 6 months to two years. Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3277.html That, however, is not OA, which must be immediate. OA self-archiving provides that immediate OA. Now why are we beclouding that clear, huge benefit by worrying needlessly about how long the self-archived version will be preserved? To a first approximation, by the time the author and his institution stop caring about it, the publisher will have long stopped caring about it too. So focus preservation efforts on the publisher's proprietary version, and by the time that preservation problem is solved, that preserved version can be made OA too. Meanwhile, let the immediate OA supplement, self-archived by the author, do the immediate work it was designed to do, which is to guarantee that the research is accessible online to all of its would-be users, regardless of whether or not their institutions can afford to pay for the publisher's official version! I will certainly agree with you that every academic and research institution should have such responsibility and commitment; I also agree that if an institution does have it, then it is a satisfactory place for use self-archiving. However desirable, however urgent, this is not now the case. No, we don't really agree, David. The commitment needs to be to access-provision, not particularly to preservation. (Having said that, there is no reason to worry that the self-archived supplements won't be with us for many, many years to come anyway!) The proper approach is to upgrade the institutions; I suggest that an appropriate technique is for funding agencies to require that a university has such a capacity, not just for post-print self-archiving, but for all
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
David, all I can do is repeat that you are trying to count your citation-chickens before the OA-eggs are even laid; and the counting exercise delays the egg-laying even further! Right now, I believe it is a huge strategic mistake to focus time and energy on worrying about the longevity of still mostly non-existent OA contents! What needs *all* of our time and energy, is generating 100% OA self-archiving, now. When that looks to be unstoppably on the way, *then* is the time to redirect some time and energy to preservation matters. In fact, then the very presence of all that OA content will be the single strongest driver for preservation. Now, in contrast, preservation angst and citation half-life-counting is just another one of the many, many factors that keep distracting and detering us from just going ahead and self-archiving! Stevan On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, David Goodman wrote: Dear Stevan, In the Brody et al. studies, the effect of OA in enhancing visibility and use for many of the earlier papers studied, lasts for much longer than two years. I refer you to your own group's data and Brody's graphs. The citation half life for almost all journals even in the fastest-moving fields is considerably more than 2 years. According to JCR, the average citation half life of the 10 highest impact factor journals in nuclear physics (excluding review journals) is 5.8 years; in neurosciences it is 4.64. Some publishers do only charge for recent material. Some do just the opposite. An example is Elsevier Web Editions -- a paper subscriber gets free electronic access to the most recent 12 months only; if it wants more, it must purchase at considerable extra cost the Science Direct or Elsevier Electronic Subscription versions. This publisher clearly considers the data of value for an extended period. The generalization that only the most recent year or two matters is thus proven false from three independent lines of data. It does not rule out the speculation that it might be correct in some instances for some users, Yours, Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Sun 10/3/2004 1:03 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving ON THE PRESERVATION NON-PROBLEM FOR SELF-ARCHIVED OA SUPPLEMENTS On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, David Goodman wrote: Doesn't it depend on the institution: in particular upon the institution's reliability, its commitment to self-archiving and OA in general, and its general orientation towards digital access and preservation? What is the it in question? The desirability and benefits of self-archiving? The greater probability of self-archiving propagating across disciplines and institutions with an institutional self-archiving mandate rather than a central self-archiving mandate? Sure the institution has to cooperate, but that cooperation is mandatory under a mandate (if the institution wants to receive the research funding!) And a department or even an individual can set up an institutional OAI Eprints Archive. And preservation is the biggest and most persistent (well-preserved!) red herring that besets the sluggish progress of self-archiving. How many times does it need to be repeated that self-archiving is a *supplement* to the publisher's version, provided in order to provide immediate maximized access and maximized impact? The preservation problem concerns the publisher's official version, not the self-archived supplements (even though the latter manage to preserve themselves quite well too, thank you very much!) The growth region in many fields is the first 6 months to two years from publication. That is when results are used, applied, built-upon, cited. Publishers are well aware of this, and it is for this reason that there is far more willingness to agree to provide access after an embargo period of 6 months to two years. Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3277.html That, however, is not OA, which must be immediate. OA self-archiving provides that immediate OA. Now why are we beclouding that clear, huge benefit by worrying needlessly about how long the self-archived version will be preserved? To a first approximation, by the time the author and his institution stop caring about it, the publisher will have long stopped caring about it too. So focus preservation efforts on the publisher's proprietary version, and by the time that preservation problem is solved, that preserved version can be made OA too. Meanwhile, let the immediate OA supplement, self-archived by the author, do the immediate work it was designed to do, which is to guarantee
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
How does this follow? ...the very presence of all that OA content will be the single strongest driver for preservation. Brian Simboli [MODERATOR'S NOTE: In the interest of speed and traffic control, here is my reply: Because the incentive to preserve contents that exist is far greater than the incentive to preserve contents that do not exist. Because as OA moves closer to 100% than to 0%, and daily expectancy of and reliance on it moves closer to 100% than to 0%, the concern will be to guarantee that it does not go away. Right now the concern is getting it to come, not getting it to not go away. Attention and energy focussed on getting it to not go away are merely distracting and deterring from efforts to get it to come. In short: OA Preservation Efforts are grotesquely premature; it is OA Provision Efforts that are needed today. OA Provision Efforts alone. Any preservation efforts today should be directed at their proper targets -- the journals' official proprietary versions of 100% of published articles -- not at the 10-20% of them that are already blessed with an author self-archived OA supplementary version -- S.H.]
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Here we go... On Sat October 2 2004 08:16 am, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: While OAI compliance is a sine qua non condition of some measure of inter-operability, it does not (yet?) ensure the kind of ease of retrieval that other forms of archiving can provide, including some form of central archiving. This is incorrect. It is entirely correct. Distributed archiving is bound by the limitations put on the OAI protocol; a centralized archive is not bound by such limitations. It is, therefore, easier for a centralized archive to make retrieval easy, in any case easier than with a distributed system. Just so I am not misread, I am not saying this to claim that we should forget about distributed archives; I am saying this to respond to Stevan's misgivings about some institutions or individuals supporting centralized archiving. In the end, it does not really matter. This erroneous view that central archiving is somehow better or safer than distributed/institutional archiving is exactly analogous with older views that on-paper publication is somehow better or safer than on-line publication. The latter papyrocentric habit and illusion has happily faded, thanks mainly to the force of the example and experience with the growing mass of on-line content and usage. (But this obsolete thinking did not fade before it managed to delay progress for several years; nor has it faded entirely, yet!) I have only argued that retrieval could be made easier in a centralized archive than in a distributed archive by virtue of the simple fact that a protocol such as OAI has to be kept simple. Therefore, compromises have to be made which a centralized archive does not have to deal with. This has nothing to do with papyrocentric - incidentally, I have never used papyrus myself, only paper which, at worst, would make me paperocentric... - habits, illusions or obsolete thinking. The instinctive preference for central over distributed archiving is a remnant of that same papyrocentric thinking (the texts are safer and more tractable when they are all be in the same physical place) and will likewise fade with actual experience and more technical understanding. The trouble is that the preference (in both cases) is invariably voiced in contexts and populations that lack both the technical expertise and the experience with the newer, untrusted modality. This has strictly nothing to do with my argument. And it always appeals to an uninformed audience that is a-priori more receptive to what more closely resembles the old and familiar than what resembles the new and less familiar, and that bases its sense of what is optimal not on objective experiment and evidence, but on subjective habit. Ditto. The place to voice any doubts of uncertainties on technical questions like this is among technical experts with experience, such as the OAI technical group, not in the wider populace that is still naive and leery about the online medium itself, archiving, and open access. Ditto Let us not forget that OAI-compliance may also lead to a mixing of various levels of documents, for example some peer-reviewed, others not. The Eprints software includes the tag peer-reviewed and not peer reviewed. This means documents can be de-mixed according to the metadata tags, as intended. In addition, the journal-name tag is an indicator. The old idea that physical location is the way to de-mix is obsolete in the distributed online era that the Web itself so clearly embodies. So this means an extra-step in the retrieval technique and it must rely on some degree of trust in all the registered depositories... Thank you, Stevan, for demonstrating my point so clearly. As for the rest of the paragraph, it is irrelevant. Moreover, the mixing of types of documents is a function of the archiving policy, not of the archive-type (institutional or central) or location. Exactly what I said above: how do you trust the institutions to have the same policies or the same rigor in applying them, if they are the same. Lastly, the inclusion of both peer-reviewed journal articles *and* both preprints and post-publication revisions and updates is a desirable complement, and can likewise be handled by various forms of pre- and post-triage using both the metadata and meta-algorithms based on metadata and full-text (de-duplication, dating and versioning at the harvester level). True because of this, the perception of archives that are only OAI-compliant may not be entirely favorable. Scientists/scholars may not make much or even any use of these sources simply because they consider them as too noisy or worse. Are we then to recommend policy not on the basis of the actual empirical and technical facts, but on the basis of the prevailing perception? If we had adopted that strategy, we would have renounced the online medium itself a-priori, and renounced also the notion of Open
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: While OAI compliance is a sine qua non condition of some measure of inter-operability, it does not (yet?) ensure the kind of ease of retrieval that other forms of archiving can provide, including some form of central archiving. Ease-of-retrieval advantages are no more inherent in centralised archives than in any other type of open archive. Ease of retrieval is dependent upon the quality of article metadata, upon the functionality of the search engine used, and upon the retrieval skills of the inquirer (especially if fulltext is searched), and all of these are irrespective of where articles are archived. Our recent study, carried out in partnership with the Universities of Loughborough and Cranfield on behalf of JISC, produced a recommended model for the delivery, management and access of eprints (both pre- and post-prints)in UK further and higher education communities. We deliberated on the relative merits of central versus institutional archiving and came down firmly on the side of the latter. The reasons for this were several - both technical and cultural - and are set out in detail in our full report, which will be published by JISC within the few days [Swan,A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., O'Brien, A., Oppenheim, C., Hardy, R., and Rowland, F (2004) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education]. (www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/E-prints_delivery_model.pdf) Here is a quote from the executive summary of our report: This study identified three models for open access provision in the UK In considering the relative merits of these models, we addressed not only technical concerns but also how e-print provision (by authors) can be achieved, since without this content provision there can be no effective e-print delivery service (for users). For technical and cultural reasons, this study recommends that the centralised model should not be adopted for the proposed UK service. This would have been the costliest option and it would have omitted the growing body of content in distributed institutional, subject-based, and open-access journal archives. Moreover, the central archiving approach is the 'wrong way round' with respect to e-print provision since for reasons of academic and institutional culture and so long as effective measures are implemented, individual institution-based e-print archives are far more likely to fill (and fill quickly) than centralised archives, because institutions and researchers share a vested interested in the impact of their research output, and because institutions are in a position to mandate and monitor compliance, a position not enjoyed by centralised archives. One of the critical aspects of our decision was that any model for delivering eprints must operate in, and help to create, the arena most likely to provide the maximum amount of eprint material to deliver. Two things (only) have a bearing on this - archives being available for authors to use, and authors actually archiving their articles. From the evidence we looked at - existing archives - it was clear to us that even when archives are available there is still precious little peer-reviewed material being deposited, ergo it is author behaviour that is at the very root of the matter. How may authors be 'encouraged' to self-archive? The evidence shows that whilst a carrot approach produces some success, 'encouragement' would best take the form of a stick - by someone, somewhere, mandating self-archiving. Why authors need such a mandate can be debated at length by those with the inclination for such things. The fact is that when there is a mandate by some authority that has clout, authors will comply. There are few examples of such mandates in operation as yet (though where they exist, they are working), but plenty of promise for those to come. KPL's recent, separate, study on open access publishing (also commissioned by JISC) produced clear evidence that authors have, in general and in principle, no objection to self-archiving and will comply with a mandate to do so from their employer or research funder. Our findings were that 77% of authors would comply with such a mandate. Only 3% said they would NOT comply. [Swan, A and Brown, S (2004) Report of the JISC/OSI journal authors survey. pp 1-76. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf; Swan, A and Brown, S (2004) Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing, 17 (3), 219-224. www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/Authors_and_open_access_publishi ng.pdf The recent government-level recommendations in the US and the UK on mandating self-archiving are therefore perfectly on target to address the issue most critical to open access provision. Scholars will self-archive if told to do so. Employers and research funders have the authority to do the telling, but they tell authors to do what, and which
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
greetings - Stevan Harnad wrote: Perhaps it would be a good idea if OSI subsidized authors from disadvantaged countries and institutions to provide OA to their articles by self-archiving them in their institutional archives: Then the subsidy might generate more OA articles from the same author and institution for the same amount of subsidy money! Once an institutional repository has been set up, the cost for self-archiving on a per-item basis is virtually nil; it takes perhaps 10-15 minutes of the author's time, using server capacity already developed. If the desire is to provide funding to set up institutional repositories, my suggestion is that this makes most sense on a systemic (e.g. JISC, the CARL Institutional Repository Program in Canada) or at minimum institutional basis, rather than a per-article basis. There are many roads to Open Access, and in my opinion, this is a very good thing. There are many different disciplines, countries, institutions, etc., in the world. The best approach in one field or region will not necessarily be the best approach for all. To get Open Access going quickly - around the world - likely means somewhat different flavors of Open Access. It's easier to adjust OA models to local circumstances than it is to adjust local circumstances (such as whether advanced education is public or private, and if, public, coordinated at national or provincial/state levels) to OA. Kudos to JISC and OSI for these important initiatives. Heather G. Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network Phone: 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: heath...@eln.bc.ca Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
There are (at least) three, interrelated, problems: (1) Not every researcher deposits his or her research articles in an open repository/archive; (2) Not every institution has an open repository/archive; (3) Not every funder mandates -- or even encourages -- open access publishing and/or open access provision via self-archiving. I'm not sure that exchanges about what is best, what is bester, and what is bestest is very helpful in solving these problems. Ad (1): Calling researchers that don't yet provide open access to their papers irrational (or worse) is not likely to work that well; presenting arguments may be slightly better; relentlessly showing the examples of what's in it for them, such as improved citations, is likely to work best. What is being done about that? How many active scientists read the postings on the AMSCI list? Wide spread is needed. Spread, spread, spread. Ad (2): Pretending that all institutions already have open repositories and that every researcher can self-archive his/her articles if only he/she wants it, as a basis for building a convincing argument, is a waste of energy. From all the signals I get, it seems that the majority of institutions don't. This is where central archives, such as PubMed Central really would help. Ad (3): Funders' (be they government or not) mandate of open access is paramount. Requiring deposit in a central or in distributed archives is secondary. There's little milage in distributed-central thinking, so to speak. The likelihood of the NIH plan succeeding or not has everything to do with their willingness to mandate; nothing with their focus on PubMed Central. Besides, depositing in a central open archive precludes in no way depositing in an institutional one as well (or just linking from the institutional one to the central one). Sorry, I realise that this must be a dissapointlingly short message, not in keeping with the list's tradition, but I have no time for more; off to work again, getting the message to authors (we aim at trying to reach several tens of thousands each week), institutions (we call them all on the phone), and funders. I'm afraid it's hard work without quick fixes. Jan Velterop -Original Message- From: Jean-Claude Guédon To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: 04 October 2004 12:59 Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving Here we go...
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
ON THE PRESERVATION NON-PROBLEM FOR SELF-ARCHIVED OA SUPPLEMENTS On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, David Goodman wrote: Doesn't it depend on the institution: in particular upon the institution's reliability, its commitment to self-archiving and OA in general, and its general orientation towards digital access and preservation? What is the it in question? The desirability and benefits of self-archiving? The greater probability of self-archiving propagating across disciplines and institutions with an institutional self-archiving mandate rather than a central self-archiving mandate? Sure the institution has to cooperate, but that cooperation is mandatory under a mandate (if the institution wants to receive the research funding!) And a department or even an individual can set up an institutional OAI Eprints Archive. And preservation is the biggest and most persistent (well-preserved!) red herring that besets the sluggish progress of self-archiving. How many times does it need to be repeated that self-archiving is a *supplement* to the publisher's version, provided in order to provide immediate maximized access and maximized impact? The preservation problem concerns the publisher's official version, not the self-archived supplements (even though the latter manage to preserve themselves quite well too, thank you very much!) The growth region in many fields is the first 6 months to two years from publication. That is when results are used, applied, built-upon, cited. Publishers are well aware of this, and it is for this reason that there is far more willingness to agree to provide access after an embargo period of 6 months to two years. Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3277.html That, however, is not OA, which must be immediate. OA self-archiving provides that immediate OA. Now why are we beclouding that clear, huge benefit by worrying needlessly about how long the self-archived version will be preserved? To a first approximation, by the time the author and his institution stop caring about it, the publisher will have long stopped caring about it too. So focus preservation efforts on the publisher's proprietary version, and by the time that preservation problem is solved, that preserved version can be made OA too. Meanwhile, let the immediate OA supplement, self-archived by the author, do the immediate work it was designed to do, which is to guarantee that the research is accessible online to all of its would-be users, regardless of whether or not their institutions can afford to pay for the publisher's official version! I will certainly agree with you that every academic and research institution should have such responsibility and commitment; I also agree that if an institution does have it, then it is a satisfactory place for use self-archiving. However desirable, however urgent, this is not now the case. No, we don't really agree, David. The commitment needs to be to access-provision, not particularly to preservation. (Having said that, there is no reason to worry that the self-archived supplements won't be with us for many, many years to come anyway!) The proper approach is to upgrade the institutions; I suggest that an appropriate technique is for funding agencies to require that a university has such a capacity, not just for post-print self-archiving, but for all the other important uses of an institutional repository. However strong your argument for action is, it would be reliance upon speculation to count on it as a short term development. I again completely disagree. What needs to be mandated is access-provision to all peer-reviewed journal output, *not* all of the other conceivable functions of an institutional digital repository (IR)! Please let us not lose sight of the real goal. It is because the IR movement is headed off in all directions that it is getting nowhere. Please let us not saddle the focussed OA self-archiving mandate with that same indirection! EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html For independent scholars, for whom OA is a real boon as users, there is no alternative at all for them as authors but personal pages maintained upon personal or commercial servers--the extreme of instability. There are plenty of friendly central OA archiving hosts such as Arxiv and CogPrints. But independent scholars are the exception, not the rule. Let us not take them as the pretext for adopting the suboptimal form of self-archiving for the self-archiving mandate. While your arguments are correct for what should be the case, in the real world the institutional basis for them is lacking, at least in the US. (In the UK, the current proposal properly provides for the use of the British Library as an archive for instances not covered by an institutional archive; although I do not know the details, they may prove sufficient.) Any
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, David Goodman wrote: You say, it does not matter which archive has the article. surely the the logical consequence is that it does not matter if it is the NIH/BMC archive that has the article. I said exactly why it does not matter at all for full OA *functionality* which OAI-compliant archive an article is self-archived in, but I gave 3 reasons why it *does* matter for OA *growth* within and across disciplines and institutions whether Congress mandates PMC self-archiving specifically or (as in the recommended amendment) merely mandates self-archiving itself, without specifying PMC (and preferably recommending the author's own institutional OA archive): The 3 reasons (again) in order of priority were: (1) Institutional self-archiving will propagate the effects of the mandate and resulting practise across institutions and all their disciplines; PMC-self-archiving will restrict its effects to NIH-funded funded biomedical research. (2) Because all OAI-compliant OA archives are interoperable, nothing is lost if the PMC-stipulation is dropped, as the metadata can be harvested into PMC anyway, if desired. (3) One needless obstacle with publishers will be removed, because 3rd-party central self-archiving will not be needlessly stipulated. Why should we concern ourselves with previous publishers contracts: the point of regulatory action is that they will all to have to compy with the new standard. If we had had to negotiate library by library and publisher by publisher, it would have been a problem. Nut we don't. If publishers were trying to block self-archiving altogether, then there would necessarily be a conflict between them and the proposed mandate. But they are not trying to block self-archiving altogether and indeed 92% of journals have already given it the green light -- but in the form of institutional rather than 3 central self-archiving. So since central self-archiving is not necessary for 100% OA, and since unnecessary conflict can only retard, not facilitate OA, it would seem reasonable to drop the stipulation that the full-text must be self-archived in PMC. (I have said in other postings that I think publishers' worries about central self-archiving and free-riders are groundless and based on a misunderstanding of the online medium and OA, but even groundless misunderstandings can slow the progress of OA. Moreover, I repeat that the concern about publishers' policy on central self-archiving (3) is *not* the main reason for the recommended amendment: the propagation of the effects of the self-archiving mandate across institutions and their disciplines is. I have no doubt that if publisher worries about 3rd-party free-riding were the only reason for not stipulating PMC specifically, a PMC-specific agreement could easily be arrived at with publishers. So, to repeat, that needless complication is neither the 1st nor the 2nd reason for recommending the amendment.) There are some other things in the agreement that you have previously said you disliked, particularly the provision for embargo periods. Do they no longer bother you? I replied to you on this point in this same Forum when you first raised it: Of course the embargo is not necessary (and I have recommended that the Bill use the language at most 6 months, with no specification of the rationale for the embargo, which it is unnecessary to state). But the embargo will shrink naturally; the mandate, however, if it stipulates OA, will not spread naturally. I would not have included the embargo; and the UK recommendations recommended immediate self-archiving (within a month of acceptance). But if the US legislators feel it will make their Bill pass more quickly and surely, it is far better to mandate self-archiving within a maximum of a 6-month delay than not to mandate self-archiving at all. The same could be said of the mandate stipulating PMC: It is far better to mandate PMC self-archiving than not to mandate self-archiving at all. But the difference is that in the case of the 6-month delay, the stipulation was introduced to diminish potential opposition from publishers, whereas in the case of stipulating PMC, it is a constraint that both goes against the interests of OA growth *and* is (mildly) opposed by publishers! Moreover, it is unnecessary and serves no real purpose. Remembering the way you used to express it, anyone who claims to favor OA and does not accept the UK and US mandates as regulatory starting points to be adopted now and improved with experience, is not helping OA. The mandates are not yet law, hence they can still be improved by amendment. The amendments I propose are extremely minor, but they can help OA growth if they are made. To amend is to make better, not to reject. Our opponents are still alive, and kicking very fiercly. Shall we argue with each other over what exact form is best, or shoud we work all together to accept a reasonably good immediately acheivable arrangement?
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Heather Morrison wrote: hi Stevan, Is there any chance you might consider sending a strong, clear signal to the effect that you support the NIH proposal, just as it is? Sure, here's a strong, clear signal: I strongly support the House/NIH proposal to mandate the self-archiving of NIH funded research. I have suggested a small amendment that would make the proposal even stronger and more effective (drop the PMC stipulation and just mandate self-archiving). To (try to) amend is not to oppose but to (try to) ameliorate. I hope that small amendment will be adopted, but even if it is not, I strongly support the House/NIH proposal, as it is. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:H.R.5006: Stevan Harnad
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
The 5 objections below from the letter to Dr. Zerhouni, Director of NIH, by Drs. Brodsky, Crawford, and Frank of the American Institute of Physics, Wiley, and the American Physiological Society http://www.pspcentral.org/committees/executive/Open%20Letter%20to%20Dr.%20Zerhouni.doc are predictable and are mostly the consequence of an unnecessary (and easily corrected) stipulation in the otherwise very welcome and desirable recommendation to mandate that fundees must provide Open Access (OA) to all articles resulting from NIH-funded research by self-archiving them. http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/congress.html Mandating that articles resulting from NIH-funded research must be self-archived in the fundee's own institutional archive would have been quite enough to achieve the full objectives and benefits of OA. Further specifying that they must be self-archived in NIH's own central archive, PubMed Central (PMC), is unnecessary and in counterproductive conflict with many publishers' objections to 3rd party self-archiving. It is especially important to note that all three publishers represented by the three authors of the letter (American Institute of Physics, John Wiley Sons, and American Physiological Society) have already given their official green light to author self-archiving in their own institutional archives: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#7 http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#45 http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php#11 So their objection cannot be to mandating the self-archiving per se. It is the mandated *central* self-archiving that goes beyond both their official policies and (even more important) the needs of OA. (See their objections 1-3 at the bottom of this message,) The unnecessary and counterproductive stipulation to self-archive centrally in PMC should be removed, not only in order to eliminate the needless conflict with the existing policies of the many publishers that have already demonstrated themselves to be progressive enough to give their official green light to author self-archiving, but also in order to make it far more likely that the self-archiving mandate will propagate beyond just the NIH-funded research that is within its immediate remit: Institutions house all disciplines, and if the NIH-funded research is self-archived in the fundee's own institutional archives, the likelihood is far greater that the same practise will carry over to the institutions' other disciplines. Moreover, all OAI-compliant institutional archives are interoperable. Hence it makes no difference where the full-text articles themselves are self-archived: Their metadata can all be harvested into one virtual meta-archive (as well as into PMC!) so that they can all be searched and retrieved seamlessly. The publishers' other two objections (after 1-3 concerning central self-archiving in PMC) are groundless and can very easily be shown to be so: (4) The reason for mandating OA self-archiving is not only (or even primarily) so that the lay public may have access to NIH research output. Most NIH research output will be specialized and technical and of little interest to the general public anyway. The main reason for mandating self-archiving is to make that research accessible to all its would-be users among *researchers*, so as to maximise its uptake, usage and impact. That is the way to maximize the return on the tax-payer's investment in funding the research in the first place: And maximizing that is not something any publisher can raise any justifiable objection to. (5) The self-archiving mandate is not a mandate to publish in OA journals; it has nothing whatsoever to do with which cost-recovery model is used by the journal in which an NIH author publishes. It is merely a mandate to do the very same thing that the publishers themselves have already given their official green light to their authors to do: The authors' self-archived OA versions of their articles are not *substitutes* for the publishers' toll-access versions: They are merely *supplements* to them, intended for those would-be users whose uptake and contribution would otherwise be lost merely because their institution happened to be unable to afford the access-tolls for the journal in which the article was published. So the solution is simple: Drop the PMC stipulation; make it optional. Then the NIH mandate becomes immune to any justifiable objections, and becomes instead a very natural and justifiable condition on the receipt of the tax-payer funding in the first place -- an obvious online-age update of the basic and longstanding mandate to publish the findings resulting from funded research at all! Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3905.html Stevan Harnad To: Elias Zerhouni, The National Institutes of Health From: Marc Brodsky, The American Institute of Physics brod...@aip.org Brian D. Crawford, John Wiley Sons, Inc. brian.crawf...@wiley.com Martin Frank
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Heather Morrison wrote: as we move towards global sharing of information, there probably is no one model that will fit either all disciplines, or all countries. Within the next few years, I fully expect that universities around the world will have created their institutional repositories or archives. For now, however, many of these projects are still in the planning. However, with PubMedCentral, we can have OA right away. Agreed about the mix of both. (OAI moots the difference.) But the number of institutional archives is growing much faster worldwide than the number of central archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse And there is a good reason for this: Institutional archives, being local, and simpler, are incomparably easier and cheaper to create and maintain. Moreover, institutions share in the motivation for and the benefits of OA with their own institutional researchers. Central archives do not. If we have learned anything from network ecology, it is that online information growth and development are distributed and anarchic, not central and uniform. Meanwhile, the OAI protocol provides all the uniformity needed to make all the distributed OAI archives -- institutional and central -- interoperable, as if they were all one global virtual-archive. Researchers in France (and soon, the UK) who have good institutional repositories to work with, in the event they are recipients of NIH funding, should submit identical copies of their papers to both PubMedCentral and the local IR. But if there is one thing we have learned from the sluggish history of OA so far, it is that if you wait for authors to self-archive spontaneously (i.e., to do what they should -- even when the should is strongly in their own interests), then you have a long wait ahead of you! That is why it has become evident that a self-archiving mandate from authors' institutions and research-funders -- a natural extension of their existing publish-or-perish mandate -- is needed in order to get authors to do the right thing for themselves (and their institutions and funders, and for research itself). So that's why it's important to get the mandate right: The more powerful and general mandate, the one that will propagate across all institutions and disciplines, is the UK Mandate: Institutional self-archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm Yes, central archives can (and should!) harvest the metadata, the full-texts, or both, form those institutional archives. But that would all follow quite naturally from an Institutional self-archiving mandate. The reverse, however, is not true: Mandating central self-archiving for particular funded research in a particular discipline and archive will *not* propagate across disciplines and institutions. It will cover all and only its own mandate. Nor is the process of distributed institutions harvesting their own content back from central archives as natural or straightforward as central archives harvesting from distributed ones (though with OAI, either is possible). But the main point is that mandated institutional self-archiving will *drive* the spread of self-archiving across disciplines and institutions, whereas mandated central discipline-specific self-archiving will not. If the US keeps its mandate central, it will be a much bigger opportunity lost for OA (but of course still far better than no self-archiving mandate at all!) I see no reason why harvesting of documents themselves, not just metadata, could not be automated in the very near future, to facilitate this process. It can, will, and is being! But the natural direction to harvest is from the distributed local institutional archives to global, central ones, not vice versa. Even more important, the way to propagate the practise across disciplines is to do it within universities (institutions), because universities have all the disciplines, and having done it in one, they will naturally do it in the others too. Central discipline-based archives are monads, and their individual practises do not propagate across disciplines. Plus, of course, centralized search tools, whether OAIster or PubMed, can search documents that are archived in a distributed fashion. That too. All that's wanting is that 100% OA corpus. So let's not put the central cart before the distributed horse! Stevan Harnad
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
One of Richard Durbin's points which I think is particularly important and bears repeating, is that Pubmed (Medline) is a superior search tool. Although, in my opinion, OAIster is an excellent search tool, and distributed archiving a needed approach, when it comes to searching, no general tool can match a searching indexing tool that is developed to meet the particular needs of a discipline. A search that begins with Pubmed and leads the individual to the fulltext provided through OA - regardless of where the article is archived - is the best means of connecting the user as directly as possible with exactly the information they need, in the medical arena. If the articles are housed in a central server, then ideally they would also be able to be searched via OAIster as well - that way, users who are looking for other kinds of information besides the strictly medicine-based, will find what they need as well. May I also suggest that central vs. distributed archiving, with OA, is not an either-or proposition? An OA article housed at Pubmed can be easily included in an institutional archive and the author's own website as well. Given that the most basic of technology issues regarding the archiving and preservation of material in electronic format have yet to be worked out, the safest approach, and the one I would recommend, is all of the above (central plus institutional plus author's own website). This would fit with the LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe) principle. It also seems to me that there is no reason why there needs to only one approach to OA. One approach might be more suitable for one discipline or sub-discipline than another. For example, if there is any group where the tendency to publish is relatively small because that particular discipline does not place quite the same emphasis on publish-or-perish as other disciplines, then perhaps publishing could have lower costs due to lower submission rates leading to lower rejection rates. Physics seems to do doing well with preprints, whereas in other areas it might be more important to ensure that readers looked at the corrected postprint. As long as the results are OA, the details of where and how things are published don't really matter, do they? Therefore, I would second Richard's suggestion that those who advocate for OA should be unanimous in our support for the NIH proposal. cheers, Heather Morrison
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Prefatory note: I strongly support the House/NIH proposal to mandate self-archiving of NIH-funded research, but I think it is important to get it amended so it gets it right. It now has to go to the Senate, and it needs more thought to make it viable and optimal. Re: Mandating OA around the corner? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3851.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3854.html AAU misinterprets House Appropriations Committee Recommendation http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3892.html For what it's worth, I support the Sabo Bill too, in principle, but that too needs work to make it viable, and I and many others have suggested what needs to be done to make it work. Public Access to Science Act (Sabo Bill, H.R. 2613) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2977.html It would not have been a service to OA to support either of these Bills unreservedly and verbatim: Bills are written to be improved and optimized through informed feedback. -- The two Bills (Sabo and House/NIH) should probably be combined into one now, if possible, simply replacing Sabo's public domain with self-archived and replacing the House's self-archived in PubMed Central OA Archive with self-archived in the Author's Institutional OA Archive, with PubMed Central then recommended to harvest the metadata from all those distributed self-archived biomedical papers using the OAI protocol, and to provide a backup locus for archiving the full-text too if the author has no institutional OAI archive to deposit it in yet. This will help pressure the remaining 16% of gray journals to go green and institutions to create OAI archives: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php http://archives.eprints.org/index.php?action=browse On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Heather Morrison wrote: One of Richard Durbin's points which I think is particularly important and bears repeating, is that Pubmed (Medline) is a superior search tool. Although, in my opinion, OAIster is an excellent search tool, and distributed archiving a needed approach, when it comes to searching, no general tool can match a searching indexing tool that is developed to meet the particular needs of a discipline. A search that begins with Pubmed and leads the individual to the fulltext provided through OA - regardless of where the article is archived - is the best means of connecting the user as directly as possible with exactly the information they need, in the medical arena. But that is exactly my point too! Separate the question of the indexer/search engine (PMC is definitely superior) from question of the *locus* of the self-archived full-text (i.e. *where* it is archived)! That is exactly what the OAI harvesting/interoperability protocol is about and for. The present text of the House Committee recommendation is needlessly and counterproductively mandating something over and above what is needed to make all the self-archived NIH research searchable via PMC! It is mandating that the full-text must be self-archived *in PMC* -- whereas PMC could just as easily merely harvest the metadata from whatever OAI-compliant Archive the full-text is actually in, thereby allowing the full benefits of the congressional mandate to propagate across institutions and disciplines rather than needlessly restricting them to the special case of PMC-archiving and NIH research. Moreover, once the UA and UK mandates do their work, and the OA content is at last out there, I assure you that far more indexing/search-engine wonders will spawn over it than any that PMC has yet dreamt of so far! If the articles are housed in a central server, then ideally they would also be able to be searched via OAIster as well - that way, users who are looking for other kinds of information besides the strictly medicine-based, will find what they need as well. That's a foregone conclusion, and part of what I too said in my posting: PMC is already one of the archives indexed by OAIster. But that is not a reason for restricting the Congress's self-archiving mandate to self-archiving in PMC! May I also suggest that central vs. distributed archiving, with OA, is not an either-or proposition? An OA article housed at Pubmed can be easily included in an institutional archive and the author's own website as well. Given that the most basic of technology issues regarding the archiving and preservation of material in electronic format have yet to be worked out, the safest approach, and the one I would recommend, is all of the above (central plus institutional plus author's own website). This would fit with the LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe) principle. I agree on redundancy, but this misses the logic of the amendment I am recommending: Explicitly mandating central/PMC self-archiving of course does not *prevent* authors also self-archiving those papers institutionally (which would bring all the further benefits, in
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
To minimize multiple postings, I have combined three postings from (1) Jan Velterop, (2) Thomas Krichel, (3) David Goodman on the same topic thread, plus my own replies to the first two of them. -- SH -- (1) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 09:47:26 +0100 From: Jan Velterop velte...@biomedcentral.com On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote: Institutional self-archiving is the more powerful and general strategy [than central archiving]. Stevan, Why would this be so? (I'm sure you explained this before, quite possibly many times, but given the volume of your output it takes me rather too long to find it.) And what about funder-central archiving? Many thanks, Jan Velterop REPLY: SH: Given the volume of my output, it would induce chronometric explosion if I tried to recap it all every time I was asked! Please see the recent threads starting: Central versus institutional self-archiving (Aug 8) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3905.html AAU misinterprets House Appropriations Committee Recommendation (Aug 3) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3892.html Re: Mandating OA around the corner? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3851.html SUMMARY: The US Congress self-archiving mandate need to be amended so as not to stipulate central self-archiving (e.g. PMC) as now: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/congress.html It should either not stipulate where to archive at all (except that the archive must be OAI-complaint) or it should preferentially recommend institutional self-archiving (as the UK Committee's recommended mandate did) for full-text, with PMC harvesting the metadata and only a backup (where needed) for the full-text. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm The 3 main reasons for preferring institutional self-archiving are: (1) A mandate to self-archive specifically in PMC will only affect biomedical research funded by NIH whereas a mandate to self-archive in the author's own institutional archive will generalize and propagate the practise and policy of self-archiving across institutions and their disciplines. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php (2) OAI-compliance makes all OAI-compliant OA Archives completely equivalent and interoperable, so PMC can harvest all the metadata anyway; there is no reason whatsoever why it also needs to house all the full-texts too (except as backup). http://www.openarchives.org/ (3) Many of the 8000+ journals surveyed, of which 84% have given their green light to author-institution self-archiving, have balked at giving it also to self-archiving in 3rd-party archives. So mandating 3rd-party archiving raises further needless obstacles (even though the distinction is silly, and this is probably only a minor obstacle). http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Stevan Harnad -- (2) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 10:47:14 +0700 From: Thomas Krichel kric...@openlib.org Richard Durbin writes rd I believe that central open-access archiving is far superior to rd distributed open access archiving. This is what Stevan said years ago. I even had a shouting match with him in front of our funders about this at the time. He has changed his mind since. The truth remains: Some communities (Economics, Computing) have distributed archiving, and some of the features of these distributed systems are superior to what is found in central systems. In some disputed subject matters, such as the ones in the humanities, I can not see how central archiving will ever work. Some will say Derida is a philospher, others will say he is a charlatan. Who will decide if his work is admitted to a central archive? rd The biological community is well on the way towards central archiving. Who will be doing the central archiving? How will it be funded? My answer to this debate is that there is no answer. Different scholarly communities will come up with different ways to publish. Some will publish in open access, some in closed access, other in central system (say Physics) others in distributed system. What is probably least likely to work is the the provost will beat the shit out of the academic if (s)he does not upload her work in the University archive approach, that seems to be favoured by some. But even this could work in certain countries with a national research assessment, with financial penalites for non-performers. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel REPLY: SH: Thomas is quite right that I have changed my mind -- in response to new developments, new evidence, new arguments -- on several
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Prior Threads: Central versus institutional self-archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3787.html Open Access Journal Start-Ups: A Cost-Cutting Proposal http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3783.html Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3770.html I am replying both to Heather's posting, and to several recent postings of Stevan's, in both this thread Open Access Journal Start-Ups: A Cost-Cutting Proposal and in Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving. Stevan is quite right to regard Elsevier's improved standard as a significant move towards open access, as in important respects it is better than before, which he has well explained. It is now better than some of their competitors, which surely will cause them to improve to at least the same level. It is better than many of the societies, that will have a similar effect. It is equal to some of the societies', which will I hope lead them to improve further. But it is nonetheless wrong to regard Elsevier's standard as adequate. Steve is almost always proposing his method of archiving as a supplemental repository to true journal publication. Judged by these standards, it is still lacking in two important respects: 1. The growth of archiving will be greatly facilitated by the growth of the disciplinary archives, such as Cogprints http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/. They're an obvious place to post, and an obvious place to look. Very few universities have BOAI compliant archives now, (neither my present nor my former one does). http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse As Stevan has repeatedly said, the immediate job is to get as much current work as possible into compliant archives. It will only delay things if the job requires as a preliminary, to get one's university to establish a proper archive. The policy of the publisher concerned, which prohibits the use of such extra-university archives, is thus a major hindrance. Do we want results in '04? we will get them much faster if we didn't first have to establish several hundred archives. (I am possibly being cynical about them, but I think the publisher is well aware of the extent to which this will delay archiving. I doubt they are afraid of someone re-gathering the articles into alternative publications. Why would anyone buy a journal which contained only the articles from a journal whose authors chose to post them?) 2. The use of archiving will be significantly facilitated by accurate archives. The differences between the author's final version and the journals may sometimes be trivial--perhaps they are for someone of excellent writing skills-- but they will sometimes be very great. Expecting authors to correct their version in accordance is asking for only a few of the most dedicated will do. I am not aware of many biologists whose refereed but not copy-edited manuscript I would trust to accurately convey their meaning. The policy of Elsevier, which prohibits the use of that final edited version is thus intended not to facilitate the dissemination of accurate scientific information, but to aid in the survival of its journals. An understandable objective for them--but not one worthy of general celebration. I use color analogies only in a joking manner, but I would judge Elsevier no longer only the faintest recognizable green, but just two perceptual steps darker. Perhaps we should give these numerically , as RGB coordinates. :) http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html 3. But Stevan also has proposed in a recent posting the use of such archives as the primary publication medium for a new journal. And here the standards are much higher. They are as high as what we already expect of good journals: guarantees of permanence, backup, accuracy, stability, quality of editing, and so on--all the things that the best publishers have been providing-- at great expense. 4. For this purpose, I proposed that disciplinary archives are better than institutional, and Stevan proposed exactly the opposite. I acknowledge the correctness of his criticism of discipline-based independent archives: they lack institutional and financial stability. But Stevan is as wrong (or as right) as I am: University archives are also unacceptable for this use. Heather gives some of the reasons: the lack of commitment to maintain archives for those who have left the university by change of position, retirement, or death. I suggest also that the commitment of the present university administration may not extent into the future. What this Dean is eager to do may not seem very important to the next one. I do not want to fill up this list with anecdotes; examples are manifold. 5. Since clearly neither can be shown to be reliable,* is there a solution? Yes, exactly the same one as for conventional journals. A permanent archive must be guaranteed by at least
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
David Goodman writes 1. The growth of archiving will be greatly facilitated by the growth of the disciplinary archives, such as Cogprints http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/. Hmm. If the figures at http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/year/ are to be believed, there are now less then 3000 documents in that archive. I think Cogprints exists since 1996 or so. You will have to wait till Kingdom come at that speed before all of cognitive sciences (whatever that is) is in Cogprints. They're an obvious place to post, and an obvious place to look. Some central discipline-based archives work, others don't. I conclude that there is no obvious way to open access across disciplines. Each discipline has to go its own way, and some will never get there. 4. For this purpose, I proposed that disciplinary archives are better than institutional, and Stevan proposed exactly the opposite. This debate has no answer. Scholarly communication occurs across fuzzy groups called disciplines. The Internet and digital documents sets these groups free from brick and mortar library constraints. It would be very peculiar to see all of them adapt the same way of working since the new medium allows so much more freedom. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
on 3/7/04 4:52 AM, Stevan Harnad at har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: Central versus institutional self-archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3208.html Depositing articles -- by authors who are immediately ready to deposit them today -- into existing Central Archives such as Arxiv, Cogprints or Bioline is a good idea, but it is extremely important not to let that replace systematic and general efforts to ensure that every institution also establishes its own eprint archives, and self-archiving policy (and policy fulfillment), and hence that Open Access (OA) grows and generalizes to all articles from all institutions in all disciplines worldwide. Dear Stevan, I am afraid you are promoting or committing your own Zeno's paralysis by needlessly worrying about the possible impact of discipline based or central archives on the diffusion of institutional archives. As you well know, most archives are non-existent or near-empty. So filling the existing archives, whether central or not, should be the priority. And with OAI-interoperability, where the articles sit really doesn't matter. Institutions will or will not set up archives based on their own local reasons, and disciplinary archives will not factor into their decision. Besides, discipline based archives predated institutional archives and one could easily argue that the latter is impeding the growth of the former. I see no evidence for either argument, and I don't see why the two kinds of archives can't work closer together. In my view, any options that lower the barrier to participation in the open access movement should be encouraged. Nature, as you are fond of saying, will take care of the rest. Keep in mind also that the Bioline eprints server bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca is intended for publishers, scholarly societies and research institutions in developing countries that are unlikely to set up their own servers due to economic, technical and all sorts of local barriers. Setting up eprints archive may be easy and inexpensive for some but not so for others. We are of course mindful of the need for larger research institutions to set up their own archives as this is the right strategy in the long run. This is why our good friend Subbiah Arunachalam has been tirelessly promoting the importance of institutional self-archiving in India, one institution at a time. And sometimes that require taking side-street and paths less traveled. Indeed you are the pioneer in this regard. In this exciting time of transition, let the experiments bloom and lets not dissuade each other from the same common cause. May I suggest that just as the BOAI recommends two complementary open access strategies (BOAI-1 and BOAI-2), let BOAI-1 further recommends the following: 1. Deposit your articles in your own institutional archives according to local policy if one is available; 2. If an archive does not exist at your institution, don't wait around for one to be setup. Deposit your publications in the most appropriate disciplinary or central archives NOW, and ask you institution to harvest the data from the disciplinary archive when one has been set up locally. Respectfully Leslie Bioline International http://www.bioline.org.br http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php It is universal institutional action that is needed: They (the universities and research institutions worldwide) are the sources of all the articles; they are the ones who need to establish their own systematic and monitored policy of self-archiving their own research; they produce research in all disciplines, not just physics, or cognitive science, or biology. Institutional self-archiving (OAI-interoperable) is the general solution for arriving at universal OA at last, the natural means, the one that fully engages institutions in open-access provision for all of their own output, in all of their disciplines; it is the means they can identify with, own, and control. http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php Offloading self-archiving on central archives like Bioline is a good immediate solution for those articles that their authors are ready and willing to self-archive today, when their institutions do not yet have eprint archives today. But in fulfilling this immediate need, it also risks joining the many, many factors (like an exclusive focus on OA journals) that slow and even impede the overall solution, producing limited OA for a special subset of articles, but failing to generalize to most or all of them. So please continue to stress the universal institutional self-archiving solution, and treat central archiving as a provisional supplement to it, rather than a way of handling the easy cases now, and forgetting about the hard ones (the vast majority)! Institutions all need their own eprint archives and their own eprint-archive-filling policies, for all of their research output, not
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Leslie Chan wrote: most archives are non-existent or near-empty. So filling the existing archives, whether central or not, should be the priority... where the articles sit really doesn't matter. Agreed! Institutions will or will not set up archives based on their own local reasons, and disciplinary archives will not factor into their decision. Agreed! discipline based archives predated institutional archives and one could easily argue that the latter is impeding the growth of the former (Not impeding, for the very same reasons as above.) But central/discipline-based archives have also failed to grow fast enough within disciplines, even with their 10-year head-start, and, even more important, they have failed to generalize fast enough across disciplines. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0043.gif And there is a very plausible hypothesis as to *why* central/disciplinary are slow to grow and generalize: That there is no common interest, no shared cost/benefit equation, between researchers and their disciplines, whereas there definitely is one between researchers and their institutions: Researchers and their institutions share the benefits of research impact, and the costs of impact loss (salaries, promotion, tenure, research funding, prestige, prizes). And it is institutions, not disciplines, that wield the publish-or-perish carrot/stick, institutions that can mandate and monitor open-access provision for their own researchers' output, just as they mandate and monitor publishing it. Institutions can also distribute the load of archiving and monitoring compliance. There is no such (self-)interest behind a central disciplinary archive. But I don't want to put too fine a point on it. Both forms of self-archiving are welcome, and to be encouraged, just as Leslie says. But institutional self-archiving is, I think, a better bet, for the reasons just listed. I don't see why the two kinds of archives can't work closer together. Agreed, especially conjoined by the glue of OAI and the joint goal of OA! Keep in mind also that the Bioline eprints server bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca is intended for publishers, scholarly societies and research institutions in developing countries that are unlikely to set up their own servers due to economic, technical and all sorts of local barriers. Setting up eprints archive may be easy and inexpensive for some but not so for others. Agreed! (Though I hope some of those local barriers can be overcome.) (Don't forget that I too run one of the bigger central archives, CogPrints, and have now made it multidisciplinary, so it can host journals and articles that have nowhere else to go. But the general solution is still local institutional archiving, I believe, for the reasons listed.) May I suggest that just as the BOAI recommends two complementary open access strategies (BOAI-1 and BOAI-2), let BOAI-1 further recommends the following: 1. Deposit your articles in your own institutional archives according to local policy if one is available; 2. If an archive does not exist at your institution, don't wait around for one to be setup. Deposit your publications in the most appropriate disciplinary or central archives NOW, and ask your institution to harvest the data from the disciplinary archive when one has been set up locally. Absolutely, and I think that is an *excellent* algorithm! (Notice that in the unified OA algorithm below, self-archiving is used generically, without prejudice as to whether the archive is disciplinary or institutional!) BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. 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.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Central versus institutional self-archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3208.html Depositing articles -- by authors who are immediately ready to deposit them today -- into existing Central Archives such as Arxiv, Cogprints or Bioline is a good idea, but it is extremely important not to let that replace systematic and general efforts to ensure that every institution also establishes its own eprint archives, and self-archiving policy (and policy fulfillment), and hence that Open Access (OA) grows and generalizes to all articles from all institutions in all disciplines worldwide. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php It is universal institutional action that is needed: They (the universities and research institutions worldwide) are the sources of all the articles; they are the ones who need to establish their own systematic and monitored policy of self-archiving their own research; they produce research in all disciplines, not just physics, or cognitive science, or biology. Institutional self-archiving (OAI-interoperable) is the general solution for arriving at universal OA at last, the natural means, the one that fully engages institutions in open-access provision for all of their own output, in all of their disciplines; it is the means they can identify with, own, and control. http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php Offloading self-archiving on central archives like Bioline is a good immediate solution for those articles that their authors are ready and willing to self-archive today, when their institutions do not yet have eprint archives today. But in fulfilling this immediate need, it also risks joining the many, many factors (like an exclusive focus on OA journals) that slow and even impede the overall solution, producing limited OA for a special subset of articles, but failing to generalize to most or all of them. So please continue to stress the universal institutional self-archiving solution, and treat central archiving as a provisional supplement to it, rather than a way of handling the easy cases now, and forgetting about the hard ones (the vast majority)! Institutions all need their own eprint archives and their own eprint-archive-filling policies, for all of their research output, not just central archives in physics or biology for the output that some of their authors already happen to be ready to self-archive. Moreover, setting up, maintaining, and monitoring institutional eprint archives is so easy and inexpensive to do: it is important to cultivate the motivation and expertise to do it, rather than just to redirect existing motivation to central archives. http://software.eprints.org/handbook/ In the end, of course, once all articles are being self-archived, the distinction between local and central archiving will not matter at all, because of OAI-interoperability. Central vs. Distributed Archives http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html But now, when most of it is not, the difference matters very much, for the growth of OA. Please don't let your efforts become diverted to a side-street! 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.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, [identity deleted] wrote: I am sure you would have seen the articles published in Nature Vol 426, Nov 2003 (pages 7 and 15) regarding Preprint Server and problems likely to be faced by the servers which host articles routinely (without editing). I am writing to you about this just in case you have missed it. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/dynapage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v426/n6962/index.html Yes, there were AmSci postings on those two Nature articles: Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3151.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3154.html In sum, (1) eprint archives are not publishers but access-providers; (2) hence their only obligation is to remove deposits that have proven to be illegal (such as pornography, inciting violence, libel/defamation, plagiarism) and to have means of identifying the depositors in case there is need for legal action; (3) it is probably too much to expect central archives like Arxiv to vet all their deposits (Arxiv has 4000 per month); (4) hence this probably represents yet another reason why distributed institutional archives are preferable to central ones (in the OAI-interoperable age, when all these archives are equivalent); (5) institutions can easily vet their own deposits, by their own faculty, at a departmental level. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html This has also been followed by a series of postings on how many articles have been removed from the Physics Arxiv across the years, and why, on the thread: Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3180.html Mostly it has been because of errors in the unrefereed preprint. 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 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Dual Open-Access Strategy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Stevan: Thanks for the details [below]. All good strategies, with which I'm reasonably familiar, given that one of my areas of professional interest is in the propagation of p2p networks and the copyright effects on same. However, the specific issue in this case is with SSRN http://www.ssrn.com/ which is an excellent addition to the typical publishing environments (in terms of getting the ideas out to a broad audience), but which is subject to attack as a centralized repository of material which is copyright by others. I can put my material up on my website, or propagate it through eDonkey/BitTorrent/etc, and there is essentially nothing that California Law Review can do about it. They can sue me, but I'm a really really really good copyright lawyer, and I would be *delighted* to run that case in the courts and in the courts of public opinion. However if California Law Review insists that SSRN take the work down, then SSRN has a major problem and may eventually give in. This is something that I don't want to see happen. Hence the strategy in this case is not about my articles (which I can propagate in all manner of devious and amusing ways) but in protecting the benefits of alternative dissemination mechanisms like SSRN. I don't care about winning the battle (my articles). I do care about winning the war (SSRN and like mechanisms are protected). best wishes Dan Dan Hunter Robert F. Irwin IV Term Assistant Professor of Legal Studies The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania On Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 09:02 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Dan Hunter wrote: Thanks for the analysis. And can I just say that I was only deferential and cautious since I was trying to persuade them to change their mind at the meeting they were having yesterday, and I find that you catch more flies with honey (and snide remarks on the side). They have, in fact, deferred their decision until Spring, so it seems to be working. A bit. I'll be using your information in the battle against increasingly white journals in law. Oddly, many of them are going from green to white, in a peculiarly perverse example of the power of commercial publishers. best wishes Dan. Dan, I'd also like to make a few strategic suggestions: (1) Removing a paper posted on the web -- even though it looks feasible on paper, and to lawyers accustomed only to the paper medium -- is not the same as removing a paper from bookshelves and withdrawing it from the market. Once a digital document has been broadcast to the digital airwaves it is never possible to remove it completely: It will have been harvested, cached, copied, and propagated in many directions from which it cannot be withdrawn. (Try removing a paper from the Usenet complex! No one would know where to begin, or whom to turn to!) (2) So if in the initial posting of the preprint, prior to submission, the author posts it sufficiently diversely -- or even if just to one site, but that site is picked up by lots of harvesters -- there must be a word for the kind of law it would be that would require the author to do the undoable at some later date! Rather like a law that says visitors may come to Baltimore, and they may inhale the air, but not exhale it. Or they may only come if they do not have a blue-eyed maternal grand-uncle. (3) There is also a slippery slope between the preprint and the refereed postprint: How many drafts back, and how similar a draft, counts as the *same* paper? In other words, it is not at all clear whether any journal is in a position to require an author to remove drafts that are no longer within his power to remove (but were posted at a time when it was not within any journal's power to prevent their being posted); nor is it clear how similar a text they would even be entitled to require removing, even if it were removable. For these reasons, with Charles Oppenheim (the EU copyright and intellectual property adviser at Loughborough University in the UK and director of the Romeo Rights project), we devised the preprint-plus-corrigenda strategy for authors to legally get around even the most restrictive copyright transfer agreement: The agreement is only binding from the moment it is signed, and pertains to the value-added draft that the journal has refereed, the author has revised, and the editor has accepted (the postprint). The author self-archived the preprint before submission. After refereeing, revision and acceptance, author agrees to transfer copyright but tries to retain the right to self-archive the postprint. If the journal (green) agrees, all is well and author self-archives the postprint. If the journal (white) refuses, author signs it all over anyway, and instead of self-archiving the postprint, merely self-archives the corrigenda arising from the refereeing and revision, and links them to the already-archived -- and ubiquitous -- preprint. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0541.html
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Stevan Harnad wrote: This is *precisely* one of the two fundamental reasons why I have redirected my efforts and support from central archiving (such as the Physics ArXiv, and CogPrints, which I founded in 1997) to institutional self-archiving: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html REASON 1: Researchers and their own institutions share a common interest -- because they are co-beneficiaries -- in maximizing the access to, and thereby the impact of, their own research output. Stevan, Another reason - IMO - is the role institutional repositories play in archiving (literal meaning of the word) the intellectual output of institutions. One should expect that institutions have strong incentives to do such archiving; this is about much more than only publications; it is about all kinds of output of an institution. Institution-based self-archiving can ride on the wave of institutional archiving in general. See also Cliff Lynch's paper in that respect (http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html). herbert Herbert Van de Sompel Digital Library Research Prototyping Los Alamos National Laboratory - Research Library + 1 (505) 667 1267 / http://lib-www.lanl.gov/~herbertv/
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, herbert van de sompel wrote: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html REASON 1: Researchers and their own institutions share a common interest -- because they are co-beneficiaries -- in maximizing the access to, and thereby the impact of, their own research output. Another reason - IMO - is the role institutional repositories play in archiving (literal meaning of the word) the intellectual output of institutions. One should expect that institutions have strong incentives to do such archiving; this is about much more than only publications; it is about all kinds of output of an institution. Institution-based self-archiving can ride on the wave of institutional archiving in general. See also Cliff Lynch's paper in that respect (http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html). herbert A priori, I thought that too: Like you, I at first welcomed the joining of forces among the five main rationales for institutional self-archiving as a way of creating a synergy among them and thereby promoting the self-archiving of refereed research output (5: RES). 1. (MAN) digital collection management (all kinds of digital content) 2. (PRES) digital preservation (all kinds of digital content) 3. (TEACH) online teaching materials 4. (EPUB) electronic publication (journals and books) 5. (RES) self-archiving institutional research output (preprints, postprints and theses) But in practise, instead of a synergy, there has been confusion, with the various different agendas and motivations for institutional archiving mainly obscuring or eclipsing RES (5) instead of clarifying and accelerating it. The self-archiving of refereed research articles is *not* the same as the self-archiving of other institutional output (or the archiving and management [MAN, 1] of institutional digital buy-in). Because of EPUB (4) self-archiving is again being confused with institutional self-publication (which it isn't) and mixed up with institutional ambitions to cash in on their intellectual property (which is not only irrelevant but antithetical to the self-archiving of refereed research). TEACH (2), is clouding faculty's sense of what to self-archive, why, and for whom. And PRES (2), born of institutions' worries about how to preserve both their buy-in digital contents (like journals) as well as their own unique forms of output, has made many people forget that the self-archived refereed-research articles are just *supplements*, provided for access purposes, and not *substitutes* for the primary versions of the article, which is the publisher's (and hence part of the preservation burden for buy-in, not for duplicate output)! So, alas, so far, what looked as if it would give the self-archiving of institutional refereed research output (RES, 5) further synergetic force has instead defocussed and diffused what could have been a very clear and focussed university policy: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html Never mind. Those of us who still have the open-access picture clear in our minds are working hard to get institutions into focus despite all the confusion among disparate archiving agendas. Providing open access to institutional refereed research output is a very specific, urgent task. It should not be mixed up with other kinds of digital archiving that institutions may be contemplating doing. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif Here are some prior threads on this opportunity for synergy that has so far been missed: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2743.html EPrints, DSpace or ESpace? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0045.gif 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 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Dual Open-Access Strategy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Bernie Black wrote: I think it is an open question whether centralized or distributed archiving will dominate. Maybe both can coexist. They can and will co-exist, because OAI-interoperability has made them completely equivalent. The important question is not which form of self-archiving will dominate, but what is the best way to accelerate self-archiving. There are two reasons institutional self-archiving are better able to do that: (1) Institutions can mandate and monitor their own researchers' self-archiving, whereas disciplines and central archives cannot. (2) It's much easier (and in fact more justifiable) for publishers to discourage self-archiving with a 3rd-party archive than with the researcher's own institutional archive. A good copyright agreement ought to allow both. Ought to, certainly. But if the goal is to accelerate open-access as much and as soon as possible, then we should not be looking for good copyright agreements but copyright agreements that maximize self-archiving, now! (Or maybe the definition of a good copyright agreement is the one that generates the most self-archiving, now!) It is a fact that publishers balk at 3rd-party central archiving, because it smacks of rival 3rd-party publication (the original publisher being the first-party and the author and his employing institution being the 2nd party). Of course, in the online age (and not even only the OAI-compliant online age), the difference between offering open access to a paper from the author's institutional archive or from a 3rd-party central archive is a non-difference. It's a joke. So if anyone wants insists on treating this non-difference as a difference, one can only humor them, and let them stipulate whichever kind of self-archiving they like -- whether (1) central, (2) institutional, or (3) author's homepage, since the difference matters not a whit (between (1) and (2), it makes no practical difference and between (2) and (3) not even a logical difference)! What I'm saying is that it would be a great waste if the growth of self-archiving and open access were held back to wait for a good copyright agreement that formally allowed *both* forms of self-archiving, central and institutional -- when one or the other alone would have done just as well (and there is no practical difference!) But let me also point out a very legitimate concern a publisher could have with 3rd-party self-archiving: If allowing the author of an article in Journal X to self-archive included the right to deposit it in a 3rd-party archive, then why shouldn't the publisher of journal Y dub his archive a self-archive and invite authors from all journals and institutions to deposit their articles therein, allowing journal Y to put together an alternative incarnation of all of Journal X, and sell rebundled cut-rate access to all of Journal X on the side -- or use it to enhance sales of some other product? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2601.html The author's own institutional archive is not in a position to do this because it can archive *only that institutions's research output*! Hence it cannot compile a rival version of Journal X or of any other journal, just its own institutional research output. Now you might say: What about that joke we were in on earlier, to the effect that it doesn't make any difference whether a paper is self-archived centrally or institutionally, especially in the OAI age? The punchline still holds: In the end it makes no difference. When each of the annual 2,500,000 articles is accessible toll-free, its provenance and where it resides will be of no interest. But we are not going to get from here to there if we needlessly fan publishers' worst-case-scenario phobias instead of (truthfully) fostering their faith that the only thing researchers really want is to make their *own* work open-access by self-archiving it with their *own* institutional research output, and not with a rival 3rd-party entity: Self-archiving needs to be seen as what it is, which is *self*-archiving and not 3rd-party-archiving. Then SSRN can pursue its centralized strategy, and individual authors/schools can pursue distributed strategies. http://www.ssrn.com/ Schools can mandate the self-archiving of their own institutional research output. SSRN and the like cannot. SSRN would be just as useful a resource if those of its would-be papers that have problems with the Law Reviews in which they appeared -- because the Reviews don't want them deposited in 3rd-party archives, whereas those Reviews do agree to institutional self-archiving -- deposited only their metadata in SSRN, with just a link to the institutional site where the full-text resides. One extra keystroke for the user, but the same visibility, the same download monitoring: all the benefits of archiving in SSRN left intact! That compromise would be far better than needless confrontation over the journal's unwillingness to allow both forms
