Peter Suber has written an excellent FAQ on the House Appropriations
Committee/NIH mandatory self-archiving plan:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm
The FAQ is clear, comprehensive and on-target. I highly recommend it
to anyone who is having any difficulty understanding the House/NIH
recommendations.
There is only one point on which I would disagree. Peter's FAQ says:
Why PubMed Central [PMC]?
PMC is maintained by the NIH; it already houses a very large body
of medical literature; it has benefited from years of infrastructure
refinements; it is committed to open access, long-term preservation,
and interoperability. Some publishers object to the use of PMC and
would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature
elsewhere, either in multiple repositories or in any repository that
meets certain conditions. If the report language were amended to meet
these objections, open access would not suffer. At the same time,
however, the high quality of PMC makes such amendments unnecessary.
Peter is right that if the report were amended to allow grantees to
deposit in any OAI-compliant archive, open access *to those papers*
would not suffer.
He is also right that this amendment would not be a *necessary*
one.
But such an amendment would make the recommendation a far *better*
one. For it would generate far more Open Access (OA), in more disciplines
and institutions, and sooner, if PMC were not stipulated as the mandatory
locus of the self-archiving, only that the self-archiving must be done
in an OAI-compliant OA Archive, preferably the author's own institutional
OA Archive.
The reason is that:
(1) the self-archiving practice is far more likely to generalize
to other disciplines at the same university if it is done at that
university than if it is only done in PMC;
(2) for functionality and quality the physical locus of the full-text
makes no difference at all, as long as it is in an OAI-compliant
OA Archive;
(3) all OAI-compliant OA Archives (including PMC) are equivalent
and interoperable;
(4) the metadata of all OAI-complaint OA Archives are harvestable,
hence they could be harvested into PMC too, if that was desired;
(5) even the full-texts could be harvested into PMC, if that was
desired;
(6) PMC could (and should) be available as a backup locus for
self-archiving for any grantee whose university does not yet
have an OAI-compliant OA Archive.
Another (very minor) reason for institutional rather than central
self-archiving is that many of the 86% of journals that have already
given their green light to author self-archiving have stipulated
self-archiving at the author's own institution (so that their green light
should not be legally construable as sanctioning 3rd-party free-riding
by rival publishers). The publishers' worry is silly, but mandating PMC
self-archiving just makes it into a further needless obstacle.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
So it is not just publishers who "would like to see Congress allow
grantees to put the literature elsewhere": It is also those OA
advocates (like myself) who hope to see the House/NIH self-archiving
mandate's effect propagate far beyond just the NIH-funded biomedical
research papers to all of OA, in all fields.
"In a study in the UK which we have just completed for the Joint
Information Systems Committee, JISC (a brief account of which will,
referees permitting, be published in a forthcoming special issue
of Serials Review), after quite exhaustive review of all aspects
of e-prints archiving, we recommended a "harvesting model", in
which full texts (and other digital objects) remain at distributed
institutional (and other) archives, but metadata is harvested and
processed centrally." --- Fytton Rowland
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html
See also:
"Central vs. Distributed Archives"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html
"Central versus institutional self-archiving"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html
Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Aug 16 2004 - 22:54:42 BST