At 02:31 19/07/2008, Stevan Harnad wrote: (One discerns the dead hand of digital preservationists here, pushing their agenda, oblivious to the fact that the content they seek to preserve is mostly not even OA yet, and that the version that NIH has (rightly) stipulated for OA deposit (each "investigator's... electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication") is not even the draft that is in the real need of preservation, but just a supplementary copy, for access purposes -- the definitive version, the one that really stand in the need of preservation, being the original: the publisher's proprietary version. But is the NIH mandate an access mandate or is it a preservation mandate? For preservation, you need to deposit in an archival depository, not an OA collection like PMC, and you need only deposit one or a few copies of the original, and APA would certainly have no problem with that...)
Stevan, Most funder mandates have expressed concern about preservation, and this would suggest it is better to go with that flow rather than rebuke it. The way to do that is view preservation as a service. Then there is analogy with your scenario here: locus of OA deposit is the IR, after which any service can be applied, e.g. harvest to PMC for OA and preservation, if that is the objective. The emphasis of our work on digital preservation currently is storage and interoperability, so you have flexibility about where/who stores the selected content and which services can be applied. That's no different from any other interoperable services that characterise OA IRs. The main drawback is likely to be rights, not just in the OA case, but generally. This concern led recently to proposals to allow some organisations to harvest for preservation: International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation (pdf 214pp), LoC, JISC, OAK Law Project, SURFfoundation, July 2008 http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/2008/20080714news_article_wipo.html This highlights the general problem with rights and digital content, but the proposed solutions, exempting certain organisations, may not be broad enough to help the content appearing in IRs. This rights problem applies to content copies and could apply to other service organisations too, not just those concerned with preservation, so we should be careful about beating up preservation for this. It will apply to repository-repository copies, so affects the case in point here too. There is no advantage in suggesting all these policy makers are wrong on preservation. It is possible to put your case - IRs as locus of OA deposit - without detracting from any possible preservation objectives. In fact quite the reverse, if you can embrace these concerns with practical solutions, as outlined here, it will be easier to win support for the practical or policy changes you are seeking, in the NIH case or others. >From your summary of the blog version of this post: Status: O "For preservation, the definitive document needs to be deposited in an archival depository (preferably several, for safe-keeping, updating and migration as technology evolves), not an OA collection like PMC. But that essential archival deposit/preservation function has absolutely nothing to do with either the author or with OA." But it does have something to do with the interacting repositories concerned. They must look at the overlap of their content, and what they want or expect to be preserved, with that of other repositories, publishers and preservation services. They probably don't see sufficient overlap yet, so don't feel able to leave preservation to others. It's not such a simple picture as the above paragraph paints. The Preserv project, which you link, is looking to build a framework for services that can take all this into account, such as what types of services, and where, are needed for repository preservation. but this requires repositories to engage with the issue, since at the moment there aren't enough services, not LOCKSS nor archival depositories for repositories, for them to be able to ignore it or leave it to others. The technology and the scope for preservation services is improving, but the business drivers are not there yet, and in the end these will derive from policy and mandates, just as the funder mandates recognise. Steve Hitchcock Preserv Project Manager IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 http://preserv.eprints.org/