On 6-Feb-09, at 10:38 AM, Tomasz Neugebauer wrote:
[snip]
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.
Comment
As a librarian and faculty member, I strongly support both academic
and intellectual freedom. However, this is not an academic freedom
issue. If a researcher is not willing to be affiliated with a
university because of other research conducted there, they would not
want to publish and list their university affiliation, have their
name listed as a faculty member on the university website, etc.,
etc. In other words, if the researcher has such strong philosophical
objections to the work of another researcher at a university, they
should not be at that university. In situations like this, many
researchers choose to work for institutions with a religious mandate,
for precisely this purpose.
A university green mandate is advisable, in my opinion, even for
researchers for whom the more salient open access archive is a
disciplinary repository (or disciplinary harvesting service).
Universities with researchers whose work is covered by one of the
many medical research funding agency mandates (NIH, Wellcome, UK-MRC,
CIHR, and more), would be well advised to supplement the funding
agency mandate with a university mandate. This would make it easier
for the university staff to ensure compliance with the funding agency
mandate, hence increasing the probabiliy of university success in
receiving funding by avoid unnecessary delays in future funding due
to non-compliance. For example, researchers could be required
through a university mandate to deposit in a university repository,
and provide such metadata as funding support. Then the university
repository can be set up to automatically cross-deposit in the
appropriate disciplinary repository as well.
Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, and
does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library
Network or Simon Fraser University Library.
Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Received on Tue Feb 10 2009 - 18:20:51 GMT