** Cross-Posted: Apologies if you receive more than one copy **
This is the English translation of yesterday's timely and incisive
analysis of what is at stake in the question of locus of
deposit (institutional vs. central) for open access self-archiving
mandates universities and research funders. It was written (and
translated into English) by Prof. Bernard Rentier, Rector of the
University of Liège and founder of EurOpenScholar. It is re-posted
here from Prof. Rentier's blog.
For more background on the important issues underlying the question
of institutional vs. central deposit mandates by institutions and
funders, click here.
Liège is one of the c. 30 institutions (plus 30 funders) worldwide
that have already adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate.
____________________________________________________________________________
Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?
Posted by Bernard Rentier in Open Access
(Also recommended: a remarkable and very
complete review of OA by Peter Suber.)
The "Green Open Access (OA)" solution, providing free
access to research publications in Institutional
Repositories (IRs) via the Web, is certainly
the best one, but sooner or later it will face a new wave
of centralised thematic or funder repositories (CRs).
The latest initiative comes from the very
active EUROHORCs (European Association of Heads of
Research Funding Organisations and Research Performing
Organisations), well known for its EURYI prizes and its
prominent influence on European thinking in the research
area. EUROHORCs is working to convince the European
Science Foundation (ESF) to set up, through a large
subsidy from the EC, a centralised repository (CR) which
would be both thematic (Biomedical) and local (European).
The concept is inspired by PubMed Central, among others.
The EUROHORCs initiative is very well-intentioned. It is
based on an awareness that many of us share: It is of the
utmost importance that science funded by public money
should be made freely and easily accessible to the public
(OA). But the initiative also reveals a profound
misunderstanding about what OA and researchers' real
needs are all about.
The vision underlying the EUROHORCs initiative is that
research results should be deposited directly in a CR.
However, if research results are not OA today, this is
not because of the lack of a CR to deposit them in, but
rather because most authors are simply not yet depositing
their articles at all, not even in an IR.
Creating a new repository is hence not the solution for
making research OA. The solution lies in
universal deposit mandates, from both institutions and
funding agencies. If this task is left to large funders
such as the European Community, their central
repositories will only contain publications of the
research they have funded. From this it is easy to see
that researchers will ultimately have to deposit their
publications in as many repositories as there are funders
supporting their research. Not only is this not
practical, it is needlessly cumbersome.
The obvious solution is that both research institutions
and funding agencies should jointly require IR deposit.
Once that systematic coordination has been successfully
implemented, if CRs are desired, they can easily be
created and filled using compatiblesoftware for exporting
or harvesting automatically from IRs to CRs.
What is worrisome is the needless double investment in
creating two distinct kinds of repositories for direct
deposit. This trend seems to rest on the naive notion
that, in the Internet era, it is somehow still necessary
to deposit things centrally. But in reality, the
centralising tool is the harvester, and its search
engine. Google Scholar, for example, is quite efficient
in finding articles in any repository, institutional or
central, yet no one deposits articles directly in Google
Scholar. The perceived need for direct-deposit CRs is
groundless, technically speaking. Such CRs even run the
risk of serving as hosts for only the publications funded
by a single funder. IRs guarantee OA webwide for all
research output, in all disciplines, from all
institutions, regardless of where (or whether) it has
been funded.
It is understandable that funders may wish to host a
complete collection of the research they have funded, but
nowadays that can easily be accomplished by importing it
automatically from the more complete collections of the
distributed IRs -- since institutions are the universal
providers of all research output, funded and unfunded --
as long as funders collaborate with institutions in first
ensuring that all the IRs are filled with their own
institutional research output.
Besides, the OA philosophy is global. It cannot be
reduced to a single continent. Science is universal.
Giving priority to creating more CRs for direct deposit
today is not only a waste of time: it is also
counterproductive for the growth of convergent funder and
institutional mandates. It would generate multiple
competing loci of primary deposit for authors -- most of
whom, we must not forget, are still not depositing at
all.
In conclusion, it seems far more efficient to focus first
on filling IRs at this time; once that is accomplished,
if it is judged useful, CRs can be configured to collect
their data from IRs rather than being used as divergent
points of direct deposits themselves.
The potential success of OA, without conflicting head-on
with publishers, rests on the deposit of authors' own
final drafts of their published articles, through
a one-time, simple action on the part of the author. All
research is generated from research institutions: IRs are
hence the natural locus for author deposit, providing
optimal proximity, convenience and congruence with the
mission of the author's own institution. The rest is
merely technical: a matter of automated data transfer to
external CRs.
The EUROHORCs proposal is only worthwhile if it
contributes to the secondary harvesting of data from
primary IRs. Otherwise, it is missing the point of OA.
ORBi wins its challenge
U. Liège's IR "ORBi" (Open Repository and Bibliography)
is fulfilling its promise: over 4,000 references have
already been filed since November 26th and, in a happy
surprise, 79% of these articles turn out to be full text.
This is thus ahead of schedule for our institutionalGreen
OA Mandate (announced in March 2007 to take effect in
October 2009): "Whenever the university reviews faculty
publications for promotion, tenure, funding, or any other
internal purpose, the review will be based exclusively on
full texts deposited in the IR."
This graph shows clearly how the IR contents are growing.
And yet a quick calculation also reminds us that we are
still far from capturing the actual number of papers
published yearly by our university authors.
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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Received on Thu Feb 05 2009 - 19:30:42 GMT