Bruce Royan's point is an interesting one. I should express an interest,
that I work on the ESRC's database 'Regard' <www.regard.ac.uk>. While
Regard does not currently hold eprints, we are conducting a feasibility
study into this. Our development plan specifically mentions moves toward an
ESRC eprint service, though whether that would be as content or service
provider is still undecided. It may well be, as Stevan Harnad suggests,
that institutions are in the best place to be content providers.
I should make clear, however, that I do not speak for the ESRC, since
Regard is a contracted service run by the ILRT at Bristol. As far as I'm
aware, the ESRC's plans in this area are under active development.
Best wishes
Neil Jacobs
----------------------
Dr Neil Jacobs, Information Officer (Regard)
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol
8-10 Berkeley Square
Bristol, BS8 1HH, UK
phone: +44 (0)117 9287057
fax: +44 (0)117 9287112
email: neil.jacobs_at_bristol.ac.uk
On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:21:45 +0100, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Prof Bruce Royan wrote:
>
>> As an occasional lurker on these exchanges, can I ask what the role of
the
>> Research Councils is, or should be, in all this? They fund much of the
>> research which is published, and they have an interest in the results of
the
>> research they fund being widely disseminated, rather than locked up in
>> journals only accessible from institutions that can afford to pay
(possibly
>> with research council money :-). Is there a role for them in building
Open
>> Archive services for folk in institutions that are not doing this, or
>> portals to the archives that are? Perhaps they are doing this already?
>
>The role of the Research Councils should be to ensure that funded
>research is not only published ("publish or perish") but made openly
>accessible to all potential users worldwide. There are two ways they can
>help in this regard. One is to mandate institutional self-archiving of
>all refereed research:
>
> Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online
> RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.
> http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/
>
>The other is to support open-access journals:
>
> Re: Bethesda statement on open access publishing
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2878.html
>
>There is progress on both these approaches, but open-access journals
>seem to be an easier concept to grasp, even though they are not within
>immediate universal reach, as self-archiving is. (It is for this reason
>that although I fully support both BOAI approaches to open access --
>http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- I invest all my own
>available time and energy into demonstrating the feasibility and benefits
>of immediate self-archiving.)
>
> Maximizing university research impact through self-archiving
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm
>
> "Research funding agencies such as NSF or NIH (US), HEFCE or
> EPSRC (UK), NSERC, CFI or FRSQ (Canada), or CNRS or INSERM
> (France) need to encourage self-archiving as part of the normal
> research cycle, requiring not only that the research findings
> be published, as they already require, but that their visibility
> and usage be maximized by making them openly accessible through
> self-archiving."
>
>Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Jun 25 2003 - 15:48:47 BST