I believe we are getting carried away here.
My point was much simpler...
1. Universities may legitimately own a repository of all the publications by
their employees, no matter what their statutes can be, they may also impose
a mandate and simply enforce it by making it conditional for futher in-house
funding, advancement, promotions, etc.
2. Funders may legitimately own a repository of all the publications they
have funded and exert a mandate as well.
3. Researchers my want their publications to be accessible in a thematic
repository.
And so on.
One cannot reasonably hope that all researchers will fulfill all these
objectives. There is only one way to get close to it while minimising the
efforts for the author: make the institutional repository the primary
deposit locus and set up an easy mechanism for harvesting the data in other
loci.
I believe the whole matter of academic freedom is flat wrong here. Academic
freedom is freedom to speak and write without neither constraint nor
censorship. It has nothing to do with compliance to university rules.
Researchers are free to publish wherever they want to. They are also free to
deposit wherever they want to.
Depositing in an instititutional repository is a different matter. Mandates
are a duty among many others for university members, they do not by any
means reduce academic freedom.
It is true that To consider that "researchers have the freedom to choose and
promote the channels of distribution for their work". The Institutional
mandate does not reduce that freedom. It is just an additional (but
sufficient) duty. Refusing this duty is denying recognition of what is owed
to one's Institution.
Fortunately, in my own experience in Liege, compliance is very good
(although still incomplete of course, after 2,5 months). All it takes is,
when explaining to the researchers community, to put more emphasis on the
positive aspects and benefits for the Institution, for the research teams
and for the researchers themselves rather that on the inconvenience of
having to file in the data.
Bernard Rentier
Le 06-févr.-09 à 19:38, Tomasz Neugebauer a écrit :
> Research repositories, whether they are a physical library, an electronic
> journal archive, an institutional repository or a subject repository, are
> collections of interconnected components. Understood in this way, as
> systems, they have emergent properties. That is, properties of the
> collection that none of the components (eg.: individual research
> articles) have, as well as properties of the components that the
> components have as a result of being a part of that collection (eg.:
> relevance ranking with respect to a topic within that collection). What
> are some examples of emergent properties of repositories: the subject
> coverage, the intended purpose of the collection, the demographics of the
> readers and authors of the collection, etc.
>
> When a researcher makes the decision to publish/provide access to their
> work, the emergent properties of the repository are a relevant
> consideration. Consider the following hypothetical situation: a
> researcher in Buddhist studies may, for example, object to being
> "mandated" to the act of placing his article on the topic of
> "interdependent co-arising" in the same repository that is also home to
> articles from another department in his institution that specializes in,
> say, promoting the philosophy of Charles Darwin in social science. That
> researcher may wish to place his article in the Tibetan and Himalayan
> Digital Library, but not in the IR of his university. I agree with Thomas
> Krichel that researchers currently have the freedom to choose and promote
> the channels of distribution for their work.
>
> About Arthur Sale's statements such as:
>
>
> Arthur Sale:
> "Researchers are not free agents.
> [..]
> I strongly support academics being required to contribute to their
> discipline and access to knowledge (and opinion). Otherwise why are they
> employed?"
>
>
>
> In my opinion these statements can only succeed in creating resistance
> from researchers. I don't think that "the compulsory open society" is
> what Karl Popper had in mind when he wrote The Open Society and Its
> Enemies; "Open access in your employer's IR, or else!" The fact that the
> Open Society Institute claims to be inspired by Karl Popper's Open Society
> and its Enemies does not mean that Popper ever intended to have his
> theories be implemented through OSI's NGOs, or at all. The Open Access
> Initiative claims to define and promote "open access", but the concepts of
> open society and open access reach back to antiquity and touch on
> paradoxes of freedom and political theory. As an aside, OAI-PMH is a "a
> low-barrier mechanism", but a barrier nevertheless - perhaps not a
> paradox, but there is something counterintuitive about promoting open
> access with a new barrier.
>
> The concepts of open society and open access existed long before Budapest
> OAI and OAI-PMH. And here we can go back to Jean-Claude Guédon's point
> about the fact that this debate goes a long way back, and that there is an
> important difference between theory and practice:
>
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon:
> "This is an old debate where one should carefully distinguish between two
> levels of analysis.
>
> 1. In principle, is it better to have institutional, distributed,
> depositories, or to have central, thematic, whatever depositories?
>
> 2. In practice, we know we will not escape the will by various
> institutions to develop central, thematic, whatever depositories (e.g. Hal
> in France). And these depositories will exist. The question then becomes:
> how do we best live with this mixed bag of situations?
>
> Pursuing the battle on principles is OK with me, but it does not get me
> enthused.
>
> Pursuing the battle on the pragmatic, practical level, knowing that
> various tools exist that will restore the distributed nature of these
> depositories anyway, appears to me far preferable."
>
>
>
>
> I agree with Jean-Claude Guédon regarding the important difference between
> theory/principle and practice. However, I don't agree with the last
> sentence, where he expresses confidence that "various tools exist that
> will restore the distributed nature of these repositories", I am not
> convinced of this. A while back there was a posting on this list about A
> Physicist's Challenge to Duplicate Arxiv's Functionality Over Distributed
> Institutional Repositories:
>
>
>
>
> "If you want to convince me [that institutional self-archiving plus
> central harvesting can provide all the functionality of Arxiv ], then try
> to do so by conducting the following experiment with any... "harvesting"
> vehicles you like:
>
> (1) Choose an area, such as Mathematical Physics, or Integrable
> Systems, and find all the papers that have been deposited in any of the
> archives that they cover, within the past week. (If they cover 95% of the
> arXiv, they must necessarily producethis information just as well). No
> other barrage of junk; just that simple list of papers.
>
> (2) Do the same with respect to all the posted publications by a given
> author for the past ten years. Again: not a barrage of google-like junk
> dumped upon you, but this specific information. (If I want a ton of junk,
> I can also go to Google scholar, and waste endless time trying to find
> what I need.)
>
> (3) Find out, at one go, if a given article, or set of articles, from
> the above list, has been published in a journal , and what the journal
> reference is.
>
> (4) Get a copy of any of these articles, at once, in any convenient
> format, like .pdf, that is available.
>
> (5) Be equally sure that all the above is simultaneously done for all
> such articles deposited in individual institutional repositories.
>
>
> If you can do all the above, successfully, you will have given the 'proof
> of principle'."
>
>
>
>
> This challenge is about recreating some of the emergent properties of
> arXiv with distributed IRs. I think that even this problem is currently
> unsolved and it will be very difficult to solve at best. It calls for
> authority control on the researchers' names in a distributed environment
> that includes thousands of repositories from all subjects. And this
> challenge calls for the re-recreation of only some, and not all, of the
> emergent properties of arXiv.
>
> I think that ignoring the relevance of emergent properties of collections
> is a mistake. I remain skeptical of attempts at formalizing this abstract
> notion of "collection" into the data model of an IR software (such as is
> the case with DSpace), as well as the vision of future harvesters that
> recreate the emergent properties of subject-thematic repositories with
> probabilistic algorithms. I do not object to trying to create these new
> algorithms and technologies, in fact the topic is of great interest to me,
> but I don't think it is helpful trivialize that which is far from trivial.
>
> I am not an opponent of IRs, in fact, I am preparing one for Concordia
> University, but I see IRs as a service that the university offers to its
> faculty.
>
>
> Tomasz Neugebauer
> Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian
> tomasz.neugebauer_at_concordia.ca
> Concordia University Libraries
> 1400 de Maisonneuve West (LB 341-3)
> Tel.: (514) 848-2424 ex. 7738
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
> [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
> Behalf Of Thomas Krichel
> Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 9:46 PM
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Subject: Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from
> Rector's blog, U. Liège]
>
> Stevan Harnad writes
>
> > (Academic freedom refers to the freedom to research (just about)
> > whatever
> > one wishes, and to report (just about) whatever one finds and concludes
> > therefrom.
>
> in the channel of one's choice. IRs should make themselves
> publication channels of choice.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
> skype: thomaskrichel
>
Received on Sat Feb 07 2009 - 01:46:54 GMT