Roy,
Sorry for the delay in replying.
I stand corrected on the difficulty of setting up an eprints archive,
but I'm confident that the difficulty will continue to decrease as the
eprints software evolves.
You give two reasons for wanting a new term to replace or supplement
"self-archiving": (1) this term isn't accurate when the archiving is
handled by staff rather than by authors directly, and (2) the term may
deter authors by suggesting that the process requires extra work from them.
On the first: As Stevan has pointed out, "self-archiving" has "self"
in it not because authors do all the work but because authors are using
this means to disseminate their work without the mediation of editors or
publishers. So in this sense, it's still self-archiving even when
assisted. Similarly, one can be "self-employed" even when one has staff
assistance. If you're saying that term is widely misunderstood, then this
is a problem we should face squarely.
Incidentally, there is a related kind of archive limited to the work
of one person. The makers of Kepler software call it an "archivelet". But
that is not at all what "self-archiving" has come to mean, let alone what
it originally meant.
On the second: If the term "self-archiving" deters authors
because it suggests a lot of work on their part, then this is another
tactical issue we ought to face. We want to recruit authors, not frighten
them. But if you're saying that self-archiving *does* require a lot of
work from authors (when the archive itself already exists), that is not true.
>Even should the interface be dead simple, a number of faculty will
>nonetheless find other reasons not to do it. Therefore, our model is to
>use existing organizational structures within the university to do the
>depositing. That is, we target staff at university "organized research
>units" (institutes or centers) and academic departments for training in
>depositing the papers of their associated faculty. Our premise is that
>most faculty shouldn't ever have to know how to do it, just as many do
>not need to know or care about how what it takes to put their papers up
>on their institute's web site. So far it appears that this model will
>allow us to scale up this service fairly rapidly and minimize our
>support overhead.
>
>Therefore I think it does the effort to free online scholarship a
>disservice to conflate staff-supported institution-based repositories
>with "self-archiving". Were I a faculty member with interests other than
>freeing online scholarship (of which I assure you there are many) I
>would find the term "self-archiving" off-putting. I would wonder why on
>earth I should take over a task that had never been mine to begin with.
I like your model very much. Universities should all be so
enlightened as to train staff to handle archiving in this way.
But what about authors who have to deposit their own papers? Why
should they "take over a task that had never been [theirs] to begin
with"? The answer is simply to enlarge their audience and impact. It
takes effort to submit articles, read galleys, and fax corrections, but
authors do it willingly as part of the process of disseminating their
work. When an institutional or disciplinary archive already exists, and no
staff are available to deposit a faculty member's papers, then faculty will
find that depositing their own papers is a quick and easy way to
disseminate their work and reach the fellow researchers who can build on
their work. If the task is new or unfamiliar, at least it has a clear and
direct relationship to one of our primary interests, which cannot be said
for many tasks expected of faculty in a modern university. --In any case,
if this is a problem, I agree with you that the solution is to find staff
assistance for authors, not to pass over the opportunity for archiving.
Best wishes,
Peter
----------original message----------
At 10:24 AM 5/28/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>On Friday, May 24, 2002, at 01:40 PM, Peter Suber wrote:
>
>> Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter
>> May 23, 2002
>>
>>[text deleted]
>
>>There are two primary paths to FOS: open-access journals and
>>self-archiving...
>
>Knowing full well what I may be in for, I want to take issue with the
>term "self-archiving", which Stevan and others are apparently using as
>an umbrella term for activities that I think should now be split apart.
>When "self-archiving" is used, I tend to think of arxiv.org and other
>repositories where the author is indeed depositing their own paper. But
>this term seems much less useful to describe repositories that are
>institutionally sponsored, and for which the depositing process may be
>out of the hands of the author (performed by a staff member, for
>example). I'm beginning to find this latter model much more compelling
>in many instances than true "self-archiving".
>
>It may appear that I'm splitting hairs, but I think not. By depicting
>only two primary paths to free online scholarship you run the very real
>risk of turning away those who have no interest in spending a lot of
>time and effort to do what is required to "self-archive". And despite
>Peter's enthusiasm (see below) this process can still, in some cases, be
>both time consuming and painful.
>
>>If you want to deepen the discussion, focus on why self-archiving isn't
>>spreading more rapidly than it is. Creating an archive is now painless
>>with free software, maintaining an archive takes minimal effort, hosting
>>one takes server space that any university could donate without
>>noticing,
>>and the benefits are immediate and cumulative.
>
>As someone who has created several, I can tell you that creating an
>archive is far from painless. There is free software to be had,
>certainly, but the out-of-the-box interface requires a good deal of work
>to both brand it and make it sufficiently understandable as to be
>moderately usable. Once it is usable, the garden variety faculty member
>(mostly the people NOT on this list) will nonetheless find it difficult
>to understand and time-consuming to use. If you don't believe me,
>perhaps you will believe the experiences of the authors of this article:
>http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ when they say "The
>eprints.org software has a self-archiving facility but our experience of
>this is that it is rather long winded and requires a certain amount of
>IT literacy. Some users may well be put off." That has been our
>experience as well.
>
>Even should the interface be dead simple, a number of faculty will
>nonetheless find other reasons not to do it. Therefore, our model is to
>use existing organizational structures within the university to do the
>depositing. That is, we target staff at university "organized research
>units" (institutes or centers) and academic departments for training in
>depositing the papers of their associated faculty. Our premise is that
>most faculty shouldn't ever have to know how to do it, just as many do
>not need to know or care about how what it takes to put their papers up
>on their institute's web site. So far it appears that this model will
>allow us to scale up this service fairly rapidly and minimize our
>support overhead.
>
>Therefore I think it does the effort to free online scholarship a
>disservice to conflate staff-supported institution-based repositories
>with "self-archiving". Were I a faculty member with interests other than
>freeing online scholarship (of which I assure you there are many) I
>would find the term "self-archiving" off-putting. I would wonder why on
>earth I should take over a task that had never been mine to begin with.
>
>All of this is not to take away from the useful work being done by
>Stevan, Peter, and many others. We are, after all, advocating many of
>the same things. So please take this message in the spirit in which it
>is intended -- to try to tease out differences and nuances in the model
>that has so far been put forward and bring them to light.
>
>These are my personal comments, and are not intended to necessarily
>represent the views of my employer, the eScholarship initiative of the
>California Digital Library.
>Roy Tennant
Received on Sat Jun 01 2002 - 23:05:22 BST