I would like to complement Tomasz Neugebauer's enlightening message.
It is useful to observe that fragmenting the opposition while
maintaining united one's own side is an important strategy in general
(divide and conquer) and it is constantly and masterfully practiced in
the area of OA.
For instance: having a fragmented and well scattered reality of OA
articles, kept in IR's, seems to be an excellent strategy for the
opponents of OA. Indeed, this will slow down the appearance of emergent
properties because the connections among papers will all but disappear
if they are kept in different repositories.
Another way of putting the same thing: properties are much likely to
emerge in complete or at least densely populated thematic (or
disciplinary) repositories (TR's) than in scattered IR's. And the
value or potential value of emergent properties overrides, by far, the
value of a scattered and fragmented OA, even if it is almost
100% complete, which would indeed be formidable. My opinion, anyway.
So, it is perhaps not a coincidence that many Green publishers allow
authors to post their papers in their IR's or on their home page, but
not in TR's. Fragment and conquer!
As for mandates and "the compulsory open society" I would like to
offer a somewhat different point of view. It is an unquestionable
reality that unmandated IR's remain all but empty. ArXiv, CiteSeerX,
Repec and SSRN are the four examples of large thematic repositories I
know of which are populated without a mandate. One wonders why?
I propose one possible explanation which is also relevant to the
current discussion. The communities of these four TR's are much more
impressed by the OA paradigm and by the strength, usefulness and
importance of the emergent properties then by eventual copyright
considerations. This condition does not seem to scale easily to other
communities and for these an institutional mandate becomes a kind of
reassurance that the institution is becoming a partner in eventual
copyright problems that might arise.
Hence, in this perspective the mandate is not only a coercive force,
it is also a partnership or even a relief from possible and quite
fuzzy copyright responsibilities of the author. Please note that the
nature and ways of copyright are very intricate, quite threatening,
and almost all authors are thoroughly ignorant about them. So, at the
end of the day, "the compulsory open society" label might be a bit
harsh and a bit away from reality.
Still on this topic, there are also the mandates which have been voted
on by the Faculty, like the Harvard FAS mandate, which dampens quite a
lot the compulsory adjective and which is, in my opinion, the more
correct way of establishing a mandate.
As for Harnad's proposal of recreating arXiv-like TR's by harvesting
author deposited material from IR's I most completely agree with
you. It would be enormous progress if (1) this could be done and be
replicated in many other areas, while (2) maintaining the possibility
of creating new emergent properties or recreating old ones in new
disciplines! I am, for one, pessimistic about the success of the
endeavor and, like yourself, I fear that it might be based on a
premature trivialization of highly non-trivial problems to be
solved. But, I do root, and very strongly, for them to succeed and
soon, thereby proving me wrong!
Congratulations for a great, thought provoking post! I wish we had
many more of these on this list!
Cheers,
Imre Simon
University of São Paulo, Brazil
Tomasz Neugebauer wrote:
> 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 Sun Feb 08 2009 - 18:50:55 GMT