On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Andy Powell wrote:
> > LES CARR:
> > Twice in the last week I've been challenged with the old urban myth
> > that "EPrints can't do multimedia".
> >
> > By way of proof to the contrary, and to celebrate the cutest thing
> > that I have ever seen with an OAI record, I'd like to draw your
> >attention to The Piglet Squid - http://serpent.eprints.org/284/
> >
> > To help with future repository demonstrations, why not share
> > your repository's high "wow-factor" items with the list!
>
> Do you think we could get Stevan H to concede that 100% OA is a lost
> cause and that instead we should focus on 100% deposit of cute/funny
> animal-related resources?
>
> No, thought not... :-)
Do you think we could make a distinction between (1) what researchers,
their institutions and their funders can and should do -- which is
to mandate 100% OA self-archiving in their Institutional Repositories
(IRs) -- and (2) what it is that the various IR softwares on offer can
or cannot do?
EPrints can of course do everything all the other IRs softwares can do.
(Most of those softwares are modelled on or derived from EPrints
anyway!)
What is different about EPrints is that it also has (and has had from the
outset) a *policy agenda* -- a set of priorities for IRs, and methods
for achieving them, with EPrints. That is why Eprints was created and
that is why and how it is being promoted. And those priorities are
first and foremost OA priorities.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
Historians will eventually have to sort out and explain how and why some
sectors of the library community could have been so obtuse, for so long,
as to think that if the promoters of EPrints keep insisting that the 1st,
2nd and Nth priority of EPrints IRs is and ought to be to attain 100%
institutional OA (i.e., 100% of institutional peer-reviewed article
output) as soon as possible, rather than fussing with "cute/funny
animal-related resources," then that means the EPrints software is
incapable of handling "cute/funny animal-related resources"!
But the library community has far less to cringe at from the judgement
of history than the research community has, for the first prize for
obtuseness will surely go to researchers themselves, for waiting over
a decade and then requiring a mandate in order to do what was so obviously
doable, and so obviously in their own interests all along...
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct04/poynder.shtml
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/
Chrs, Stevan
Received on Fri Nov 17 2006 - 04:10:12 GMT