Alma Swan writes
> True, we shouldn't get too wound up about this. Interoperability
> means that back-harvesting, forward-harvesting and
> upside-down-harvesting can go on wherever appropriate but it is a
> shame that we have arrived at a point where universities, the
> mainstays of our societies' research endeavours, have to develop
> more complex policies than would otherwise have been the case had
> funders simply directed their grantees to deposit their work in
> their institutional collections and harvested from there. The
> funders know where their grantees are, the repository software has a
> metadata field for funder, so the mechanics are simple.
The funder would still have to be aware of all institutional repositories,
harvest the metadata from all, police IRs so that the funder information
is actually correct, find themselves in the funder field, adapt
procedures to find the full-text from the metadata, harvest the full text.
It's very difficult to do at present, because no appropriate registries
exist.
If a universal registry of authors and institutions can be
be built, then it becomes reasonably easy to gather within an
IR the OA material authored by all authored of the institution
irrespectively of initial locus of deposit. I am working
precisely on these registries at this time.
> I thought that RePEc was an example of how things should work.
You are of course correct.
> Contributors of articles put them in their institutional collection
> and RePEc harvests them - actually, harvests the metadata - and
> presents to the economics research community a collection of
> free-to-access economic literature. I am at a loss to understand,
> then, why Thomas keeps apparently arguing against this model,
Where do you get this idea from?
I am opposed to institutional mandates as the way to
populate an IR. Institutions should encourage deposit but
respect the freedom of academics to publish their work as
they see fit. No RePEc archive that I know of (there are now
over 900 contributing archives, so I can't be sure) has been
populated with a mandate.
I also support subject based collections, such as E-LIS.
But that does not mean I am against institutional repositories.
> since he himself has been instrumental in establishing it
I am generally considered to be the founder but I have, over
the years, made myself dispensable.
> and showing it to be a success, and why others consistently hold it
> up as an example of good practice (which it is) while arguing the
> case for centralised deposit (which RePEc doesn't have). Or have I
> got the wrong end of the stick there?
You are quite correct in your description of RePEc. Experts
use RePEc not an example for central deposit but to emphasise
the need to get community involvement. Some of the elements
that made RePEc a success can be exported to an interdisciplary
level. Two of these are the author and institutional registration.
Again this is precisely what I am working on. Thus is the same
way that I have been battling for years to set up RePEc, against
all odds since no such system had been set up, I am now battling to
on these registries.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
skype: thomaskrichel
Received on Sat Jul 26 2008 - 11:09:57 BST