Re: France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 17:39:49 +0100

On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Franck Laloe wrote:

> Hal (and I presume Prodinra)
> are of course OAI-PMH compatible, and of course
> can be harvested within this protocol and others.
> This compatibility is a necessary condition for
> an archive to be useful to the scientific
> community. But a necessary condition is not
> always sufficient. We need more interoperability
> than just that possible within OAI-PMH;
> Hal meets this requirement.
>
> I know that Stevan and others will disagree with
> the last sentence above...

But I don't disagree at all! The more interoperability the better!

What I am still very keen to know is the following

    (1) How is is proposed to get all of France's research output
    into HAL?

    (2) why do the deposits need to be directly in HAL, rather than in each
    author's own Institutional Repository (IR), then harvested by HAL?

    (3) Are there are any self-archiving mandates being proposed or
    planned in France (along the lines already adopted by RCUK and
    the Wellcome Trust in the UK, proposed by the FRPAA in the US,
    and recommended (A1) by the European Commission recommendations)?

    (4) Where will such mandates, if any, require researchers to deposit:
    in HAL or in the their own institution's IR?

The most important question is (3), because what is becoming increasingly
clear is that -- be they as interoperable as one could possibly wish --
near-empty repositories are not very useful! The spontaneous (unmandated)
self-archiving rate worldwide is about 15% (with a few disciplines,
e.g. physics, well above 15%, but most disciplines at or below 15%),
whereas the mandated deposit rate climbs toward 100% within a few
years of adoption (as predicted by Alma Swan international surveys, and
confirmed by Arthur Sale's analyses comparing mandated and unmandated
deposit rates).

So where do things stand in France regarding self-archiving mandates (whether
for local institutional deposit or national deposit in HAL)?

Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Oct 02 2006 - 17:50:36 BST