Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 16:26:37 +0000

No disagreement of substance with my friend Lorcan Dempsey, but as he
is pointing out slight oversights on the part of my other friend Les
Carr, I might point out some of his own:

>>LC> Les Carr:
>>
>>LC> OAI and BOAI assume open distribution of metadata and open access
>>LC> to texts (respectively).

Lorcan misses the "respectively" and addresses Peter to answer Paul:

>ld> Lorcan Dempsey:
>
>ld> This is misleading. The "open" in OAI is explained in the OAI FAQ...

That is followed by an OAI quote that confirms what we all know, which
is that OAI is agnostic about open-access (whereas BOAI is not).

>>LC> the scenarios given in OAIS are without exception data archives...
>
>ld> This is again misleading... on the OAIS you will see several examples
>ld> of document-related scenarios...

This is one of the reasons one should never say never. But Les's
substantive point stands. (Moreover, documents are merely special cases
of data.)

>ld> Curation and use are intimately connected...

Undeniable, but still misses the substantive point that it is the
primary refereed research corpus -- the proprietary toll-access one,
20K journals-worth -- that needs the curatorial attention today, not
the beginnings (at last) of self-help efforts on the part of researchers
and their institutions to maximise the impact of their own publications
by self-archiving open-access *duplicates* of them! (Worrying about those
is rather like museum curators worrying about preserving replicas
while ignoring the originals.)

Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Feb 16 2003 - 16:26:37 GMT