Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:29:54 -0400

Fred Friend wrote:

> My understanding is that much of the content coming into UKPMC
> will be coming through publisher deposit, so for many researchers
> UKPMC will not be using time they would otherwise spend in
> depositing in their institutional repository.

Alas, that is not a further plus, but a further minus: funder
self-archiving mandates *should* mandate author deposit, not publisher
deposit, again, so that universal OA self-archiving is facilitated,
across all institutions and all fields, funded and unfunded, not
just the specific target of a particular funder.

Leaving the deposit in the hands of publishers makes funder mandates
even more divergent: diverging on the locus of deposit (IR vs CR)
and diverging even on the agent of deposit (author vs publisher).

I fervently hope that UK funders will fix this. UK funders (e.g.
MRC) should mandate direct deposit in authors' IRs -- the UK
is the most advanced in the world in the creation of IRs -- and
UKPMC can harvest from the IRs.

Both the NIH and MRC policy is incoherent on both version of deposit
(author's final refereed draft, as specified, or publisher's version?)
and agent of deposit (author or publisher).

All of this can be fixed up with just a little bit of reflection.
I do not understand why policies that are so new are being discussed
as if they were immutably etched in stone, as good as we can get
them, and beyond the reach of upgrading!

There's time to:

(1) Mandate institutional IR deposit (and UKPMC harvest)
(2) of the author's final refereed draft
(3) by the author, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

> And because UKPMC
> does not rely entirely upon individual deposit, the growth in
> biomedical OA content in UKPMC and its equivalents in other
> countries will - unless there is a radical change in author
> behaviour - be at a faster rate than the growth in biomedical
> content in institutional repositories. Don't we all want OA
> content to grow at the fastest rate possible?

But why on earth is UKPMC relying on publishers to do self-archiving?
The mandate is on fundees -- authors. Why can't the exact same
scope of coverage be implemented in a way that will maximise
not only biomedical deposits in the UK but deposits in all
fields, worldwide, by converging on author IR deposit.

(If UKPMC has some extra arrangements with publishers, having nothing
to do with funded authors, but simply concerning the direct deposits
of entire journals, that's another matter, and outside the scope
of what we are discussing, with no bearing on it whatsoever, one
way or the other.)

Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Jul 25 2008 - 22:32:33 BST