With points 10-14 Stevan has rather deftly restated the OA IR as a
mandate, managed within the policy and business unit of the
institution with a view to monitoring implementation and compliance.
What we currently think of as an IR, some software managed by
computing services and/or the library, will change.
All that's required is a deposit interface, and the more flexible and
closer to the user this gets, the better. Even here something like
SWORD potentially separates deposit from system as 'deposit once-put
anywhere'. In such a system we don't know where content will be put
as long as it is put somewhere that is open access.
Beyond that it's all services. Some we know now, if not all as we
know them now. DSpace, EPrints, Google, etc. PubMed Central as a
service? And many, many new services.
In ensuring that its mandate goals are met, the institution will
probably have to organise coordinated storage, and take a long-term
view of that arrangement, because it's not clear that anyone else
will. What would be the point of mandating OA content today if it
weren't to be accessible tomorrow. This is a service too, one within
the institution's control. Some other services may be; most will not be.
There are some caveats. First, the IR has become more than an OA IR,
in fact some might not be OA IRs at all. What about teaching and
learning materials, and data? Here the mandates don't apply. Both are
unresolved about institutional vs central approaches. In the case of
data, what matters is that it too is open and can be linked to open
access content. In economically straightened times perhaps costs and
business drivers will be the ultimate resolver of the scope of the IR.
Second, we shouldn't overlook the possibility that institutional
proprietorial instincts will appear. Not all will like everywhere
'their' content emerges or what some services do with it. They should
resist the urge.
Third, crucially, will enough institutional mandates be adopted?
Stevan, and some notable others, are indefatigable about this.
Progress can be seen, and Harvard and Stanford faculty mandates may
be tipping points in this direction, but those apart a positive PR
spin has been elusive, ironically perhaps because it may be hard to
justify institutional mandates based on current IRs. That's why this
restatement may be significant.
The successful IR will be determined by the unity and purpose of its
management, not its software, from those that sanction the vision and
policy, to those charged to ensure it happens. The rest is services
and can be outsourced. There are a few good examples of such IRs now,
but not many.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
At 19:40 17/07/2008, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> Chris Armbruster,
> <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/182-guid.html>as
> in the past, and like many others, completely conflates the problem
> of content and the problem of functionality:
>
> (1) Virtually all OA repositories today -- institutional and central
> -- are low on content: Only about 15% of annual refereed research is
> being deposited today.
>
> (2) The only two exceptions are the fields of physics and economics,
> where authors have been spontaneously depositing their papers in,
> respectively, Arxiv and various collections of working papers in
> economics, now harvested by RePEc.
>
> (3) Even after many years of their positive example, the
> self-archiving practices of these two fields have failed to
> generalize to the rest of scholarly and scientific research.
>
> (4) This is why self-archiving mandates -- from research
> institutions and research funders -- are needed.
>
> (5) Since all research, in all fields, originates from institutions,
> institutional repositories (IRs) are the natural, convergent locus
> of deposit for both institutional and funder mandates.
>
> (6) Because IRs are OAI-compliant, hence interoperable, their
> contents (metadata + links, or metadata + full-texts) can be
> harvested into central collections (CRs) of various kinds
> (subject-based, funder-based, nation-based, or global).
>
> (7) Functionality can be enhanced at the harvester level in many
> ways; all that is needed is the content itself.
>
> (8) But we won't have the content unless we mandate it.
>
> (9) And mandates won't work if funder mandates and institutional
> mandates are in competition, and diverge.
>
> (10) Institutions are the content-providers, in all fields, funded
> or unfunded.
>
> (11) Institutions share with their researchers a joint interest in
> maximizing the accessibility, uptake, usage, and impact of their
> joint research output.
>
> (12) Institutions can also monitor and ensure compliance with funder
> mandates (alongside their own institutional mandates).
>
> (13) Locus of deposit has absolutely nothing to do with functionality.
>
> (14) But locus of deposit has everything to do with ensuring that
> the content is provided.
>
> On 17-Jul-08, at 3:54 AM, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
>
> > I would like to publicly applaud the NIH policy makers for strengthening
> > a central repository.
>
> NIH could "strengthen" its central repository (CR) (PubMed Central)
> irrespective of the locus of deposit. Locus of deposit is relevant
> to maximizing content provision and unrelated to functionality.
>
> > As far as I can see, after several years,
> > institutional repositories have not made decisive progress in being
> > useful to either authors or readers by providing services that are
> > of any value (beyond storage).
>
> The purpose of IRs is not to provide services but to provide
> content. The services are provided at the harvested collection (CR) level.
>
> And the usefulness of CR services depends entirely on whether the
> content -- on which the service is to be based -- is actually
> provided in the first place.
>
> > If I look at the kinds of services
> > that arxiv, SSRN, CiteSeerX, RePEc and PMC offer, I see no equivalent
> > emerging from the IRs, no matter how much you synchronize and
> > harvest.
>
> I have great difficulty understanding the point Chris is trying to make
> here:
>
> Both CiteSeerX and RePEc are harvester services. There is no CR
> there in which authors deposit directly. CiteSeerX and RePEc (like
> Google Scholar) harvest their contents from IRs and other
> institutional and personal sites on the web.
>
> Arxiv, as noted, is a longstanding CR in which physicists have been
> depositing directly since 1991, but there is no sign of that
> spontaneous phenomenon duplicating itself in any other field (even
> though CRs are available in other fields too, including CogPrints,
> in cognitive sciences, which I created in 1997).
>
> SSRN is a CR, but the way to assess how full it is is to divide its
> annual contents by the global annual output in all the fields
> covered. It will be found to hover at the very same spontaneous
> deposit level (15%) as the IRs. And no matter how many or wondrous
> the services you provide over it, 15% is still just 15%.
>
> No one would search a topic IR by IR, so it makes no sense providing
> certain services at the IR level. (IRs provide local services
> pertinent to the institution itself, such as generating CVs,
> research assessment data, and
> <http://stats.eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/irstats.cgi?>usage
> statistics. If you want to search across IRs, go to OAIster, Google
> Scholar, CiteSeerX, or Citebase.
>
> But you will be disappointed, because all you will find is about 15%
> (except in physics and economics).
>
> That's what the mandates are for.
>
> And that's why it's important that institutional and funder mandates
> converge on the providers, the IRs, rather than competing, by
> requiring direct deposit in institution-external CRs (instead of
> just having the CRs harvest).
>
> > Also, centralized repositories seem to lend themselves
> > much more easily to the creation of overlay services that extract
> > further value for the scholarly community.
>
> Overlay services can be developed over any OAI-compliant
> repositories, whether IRs or CRs. The locus of deposit makes no
> difference whatsoever. That was the whole point of the OAI protocol.
>
> > Just consider the following
> > service: <http://www.gopubmed.org/>http://www.gopubmed.org/
> (developed in Germany, based on
> > the efforts of the NIH, a splendid example for the kind of
> > trans-national innovation that has become possible on the basis of
> > repositories).
>
> And if NIH mandated direct deposit in IRs, and harvested PMC content
> from there, the very same services could be built on it. The
> difference would be that the NIH mandate would be convergent and
> synergistic with institutional mandates, generating far more
> content, beyond just what is funded by NIH, across all fields,
> institutions and countries.
>
> > I hope the NIH holds fast and that more research funders will ensure
> > deposit in centralized repositories - either discipline-specific
> > or at least national.
>
> For the "success" of national CRs, see France's HAL. Without
> mandates, it languishes at the usual 15%, no matter how you cut the cake.
>
> No, Chris, what's missing is content, not functionality. And the
> reason for the focus on IRs is because that is the convergent,
> systematic way to get all the content, not depositing willy-nilly
> and hoping that that will somehow cover all of OA space.
>
> Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Jul 18 2008 - 13:47:46 BST