I'd be interested to hear how other repository projects came about and
about the structure by which they are managed, to compare with our
experience. I hope this response is a useful synopsis of ours.
Talat,
Here is the story of my repository : a "French side story".
I am a French librarian retired (since 2005) from INRA, the French National
Institute for Agricultural Research : INRA counts about 4000 researchers
working in 160 laboratories. These laboratories are distributed in 21
different centres and organized in 14 different departments.
http://www.international.inra.fr/
I worked in a lab of 60 researchers.
Since 1995, I have attentively followed the changes in scientific
communication provided by Internet, in attending conferences and in reading
the limited literature on the subject. I have subscribed to American
Scientist Open Access Forum, ("September forum"at this time) since its
inception (1998). All this allowed me to become aware of what was
approaching in scientific publication and I tried to convince INRA, by
different means (reports, web pages, organizing conferences, etc.) to be a
pioneer in freeing scientific communication. They could use the two ways of
providing Open access (Gold and Green). For example, they edited (and still
edit) periodicals that they could have tried to convert to (Gold) Open
Access periodicals. Some of my propositions began to gain some credit only
in 2004, one year before I retired.
When I decided to set up a E-prints repository, for my lab, in 2001, I
considered that it would provide a concrete example of what can be done for
Open Access at an institutional level and I hoped once again, to succeed in
influencing the Head of INRA to consider this (Green) way of providing OA.
Our archive was launched in the beginning of 2002 at the same time as other
4 initial E-Prints repositories in France
To start my project I first had to convince our computer technician to set
up this repository "just for me" (that is, out of an official project). At
that time OAI was totally unknown. I explained to him what was behind this
standard. He quickly perceived the importance of this project and was
interested in it but was very busy and could only work on our unofficial
project in his spare time. So the setting up took more time than it should
have taken.
As soon as the repository was set up , I started to fill it with recent peer
reviewed articles, seeking all the green copyright agreements for the
publications At that time it was even more difficult to fill an archive. See
the ROMEO figures published in my conference for the national commission of
UNESCO, in Paris in 2003 [1]
When I pre-populated my repository with about eight or ten articles, I
decided that it was time to launch it officially. For that I had to inform
the hierarchy of INRA of the existence of this archive and to declare it OAI
. This bureaucratic part of the establishment of my archive took several
months because at an upper level of INRA nobody wanted to assume the
responsibility of this archive. Too new, therefore too threatening!
Fortunately, when I at last asked the head of my lab, he agreed to assume
this responsibility. I am sure that at time he had not totally understood
what was at stake but he perceived well that scientific communication was
changing and he accepted this challenge without fear concerning a risk of
copyright breach. I am grateful for his confidence and support. The name of
our repository was initially "Physiologie Animale" but when my head of
laboratory became the head of department it took the name of the Department,
that is "Animal Physiology and Livestock Systems Archive » See at
http://phy043.tours.inra.fr:8080
I have been severely criticized for the low number of articles in my
Archives .They said : "You are not credible with this small number of
documents" and they were right. But at that time I had my reasons: I could
have certainly succeeded to deposit a lot of reports or theses, etc., --
that is, all sort of documents without legal issues - so as to increase the
number of documents but I had another goal. I wanted to demonstrate exactly
what Open Access really means, and that an archive is provided essentially
for depositing a copy of a published article. Nevertheless, I was invited in
2004 to a seminar in la Rochelle, to talk about my "experiment".[2]
I explained during that conference that if I can archive 15/20 articles a
year from the publications of my lab, the 160 laboratories of the whole of
INRA could provide between 2000 /3000 annual open access articles,
immediately. Total INRA output is about 6000 articles per year. My idea was
that it would have been easy to set up 13 other departmental Eprints
archives and to centralize them at a national institutional level. This way
has the advantage of emulation among the different departments and the
appropriation of a project on the part of the staff in the different
libraries. After that we could use our database PRODINRA see
http://www.inra.fr/prodinra/pinra/index.xsp to enlarge the archives to older
publications and gradually provide 100 000 open acess documents .There are
about 100 librarians at INRA to help in this task.
I regret that this very simple strategy was not followed at the time. Open
Archives are underway now at the institutional level at INRA. PRODINRA
should become an Open Archive but unfortunately till today the database is
not yet transformed into an institutional open archive, as announced 3 years
ago.
When I retired, I succeeded in populating the archive with 70 recent
published articles . Some of my colleagues have continued digitizing old
publications and others continue to provide relatively recent publications
of her lab.
After my retierement I succeeded in convincing the head of Information of
INRA to study the possibility of a Green OA self-archiving mandate at INRA.
My colleagues were asked to publish a report on the "Mandate". See this
report (in french and english) at
http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00115513I
I contributed to this report and insisted on the necessity of a mandate for
all the metadata (ID/OA).
In conlusion , I can say that despite the difficulties of that "heroic"
time, I succeed in moving my lab, my department and perhaps my institute
toward Open Access. If you are convinced of the importance of your project
you will be able to convince all that are around you. I confirm that Arthur
Sale patchwork policy is worth to be followed.
[1 ]Bosc, H. (2003) Le droit des auteurs à mettre en accès libre leurs
propres résultats de recherche. In : Proceedings «Les droits d'auteur et
droits voisins dans la société l'information», colloque organisé par la
commission nationale française pour l'UNESCO », pages pp. 103-106, Paris.
http://cogprints.org/4411/
[2] The video of my conference is at
http://openaccess.inist.fr/article.php3?id_article=56
Hélène Bosc
Euroscience Member
http://www.euroscience.org/
Convenor of the workgroup on scientific publishing
http://www.euroscience.org/WGROUPS/SC_PUBLISHING/index.htm
Received on Sat Dec 01 2007 - 21:53:37 GMT