Three different questions are getting mixed up here.
1. How do we encourage/mandate/force academics to post their published
papers so that they are available to the world free of charge?
2. What sort of facilities should the place they post them at have?
3. Should that place have only published papers on it, or can they be mixed
up with other things?
The answer to the first question is, at least in the early years, that you
need a dedicated staff member somewhere in the university - probably in the
library - helping/encouraging academics to do it. When we investigated
costs of setting up IRs a couple of years ago, we found that, in addition to
the relatively small costs recently listed here by Chris Gutteridge, the
major cost in most institutions was the salary cost of this 'advocate'
person.
To the second question, the answer is 'it depends how important you think
proper metadata is'. One can of course just use Google to look for an
author's name and the article's title, and find papers available free of
charge on the web that way. But an OAI-PMH-compliant server will provide
metadata that enables search services to locate papers reliably. This is
the old, old 'natural language versus controlled language' argument in new
clothing.
To the third question, I guess the answer is that it is a matter of opinion.
Stevan and others think it is very important that an OA IR providing
published and to-be-published papers should provide nothing else. My view
is that this issue is unconnected with question 1. If effective ways exist
to persuade or coerce authors to post their papers on the IR, and the
published or to-be-published papers are clearly and indelibly identified as
such, it is irrelevant whether or not there is other stuff on the same
server.
Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Leslie Carr" <lac_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 7:56 AM
Subject: Re: Poynder Again on Point on Institutional Repositories
> On 8 Mar 2006, at 13:32, Andy Powell wrote:
>
>> I may be missing the point here, but if Richard is correct
>> ...
>> then perhaps his conclusions don't
>> go far enough? Why talk about repositories at all? Why not simply
>> say
>> that all scholarly output should be made available on the Web?
>
> A reasonable question, but I think that you'll find that the answer
> is not a matter of "simply" anything, because evidence is that (left
> to themselves) researchers don't deposit their articles on the web
> either!
>
> In an environmental assessment that Jessie Hey and Pauline Simpson
> undertook for the TARDis project, they discovered that most
> departments in Southampton University had some research papers on the
> web, but that these web pages were on average two years out of date.
> (The figure is from memory, but the report is available from the
> TARDis web site tardis.eprints.org).
Received on Thu Mar 09 2006 - 15:48:32 GMT