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Stevan's question No 2 is quite relevant and I would like to comment
further: HAL is not emerging on a barren landscape, far from it. Other
institutional initiatives exist and are trying to thrive. However, in a
very typically Jacobine fashion, the temptation to have a centralized
solution appears once more irresistible in France. It is really a pity
the "Girondins" did not win against Robespierre and the "Montagnards"
way back when (ca. 1793-4)...
The negative side of centralized solutions is that they tend to stifle
many interesting, innovative, solutions. They also become very
vulnerable to political winds: their size and costs transform them into
big-budget items and make them easy prey for empire-building
individuals.
The Internet would never have worked, had it been designed in this
fashion, and the French Minitel worked only because it was placed in the
confines of an extraordinary economic greenhouse that no one could
repeat elsewhere. Nowadays, the Minitel lies on the garbage heap of
history, while the Internet thrives.
The other problem of centralized solutions is that they generate
wasteful forms of rivalry. A distributed system on the other hand
creates a positive form of competition that can accelerate progress.
I would recommend our French colleagues to read and, better, to
translate, an OA-book published this year by Yale U. Press: The Wealth
of Networks by Yochai Benkler
(
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page).
And once this reading is done, i would recommend the same French
colleagues to implement a truly networked solution with the accent
placed on rich interoperability and not centralization.
Christian Huitema, of Internet fame, used to describe France as the only
Soviet Union that came close to working...
:-)
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le lundi 02 octobre 2006 à 17:39 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> 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 Wed Oct 04 2006 - 19:34:12 BST