I am quite bemused by the direction that this discussion seems to be taking
in the minds of some!
En cas de doute, I am not the apostle of some sect preaching a "compulsory
open society" -- just trying to apply common sense toward achieving (1)
broad and rapid external dissemination of my university's researchers'
output and (much less important) (2) a full internal registry of the
research done and published at our University. That's all.
We have the tools to do it. Let's not rack our brains trying to find
far-fetched pretexts for protecting researchers from having a small extra
chore to do once in a while! One can always find mind-bending reasons to
avoid facing the burden of filing data. Please just say "it is too tedious
and we don't want to do it". Don't invoke academic freedom and don't
misquote poor Socrates: His thoughts were miles above these banal concerns.
Personally, I shall be pursuing my goal and I shall lead my university into
the group of those who will have achieved full exposure of what they are
producing, even if it takes a mandate to achieve it.
My university receives sizeable amounts of funding to perform two functions:
(1) teaching/training, which is already measurable, and (2) research, its
extent currently known only sketchily, even in-house; I would like to have
all this productivity up front. There is nothing wrong, either legally or
morally, in any of this. Rather, it is morally remiss not to have any of
this, and I am convinced it is all for the benefit of my academic community.
Bernard Rentier
Le 09-févr.-09 à 21:56, Tomasz Neugebauer a écrit :
> As to the need to fulfill multiple objectives:
> 1) University repositories with all the publications by their employees,
> 2) funders repositories with all the publications they have funded and
> 3) thematic repositories of researchers' choice;
>
> Bernard Rentier argues that
>
> "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."
>
> In other words, there is an ideal: that of "100% OA", a global benefit, a
> collective good. First, I do not think that there is a universal agreement
> about the meaning of "open access" - the debate about the meaning of this
> will continue, in my opinion, indefinitely. Even if a researcher agrees
> that such a collective good exists, it does not follow from this that he
> has a responsibility to act to strive towards it - that requires altruism
> and individual decision on their part. My point is that an argument based
> on the existence of some ideal collective good in the minds of
> institutional administrators is insufficient for a mandate to change the
> current deposit practices of researchers.
>
> Imre Simon wrote,
> "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."
> I agree that this is the preferable way to proceed - the faculty and
> researchers need to be involved in their own institutions - otherwise you
> get a few wise and visionary 'philosopher kings' who are mandating a
> change of behavior based on a vision that only they understand. One of
> the paradoxes of freedom is that a democracy can lead to sub-optimal
> results (like the current 15% OA figures), it can even result in the
> election of someone who dissolves democracy and installs themselves as a
> tyrant.
>
> A granting agency can make open access to the results of the research a
> condition of funding, but a university mandate that makes the university
> IR the compulsory locus of deposit, handed down to the faculty as a higher
> wisdom in the name of "100% OA" that only the administration understands
> is not a good idea. An appeal to individualism of the researchers should
> be sufficient: open access in an IR is an excellent service to faculty to
> promote their research, there is little reason for faculty not to
> participate. An appeal to altruism is also good: make it easier for
> others to access their research. However, the argument for collectivism:
> i.e., "submit your article to IR because that is the only way to achieve
> our vision", is not beneficial.
>
> Intellectual honesty requires, I think, to admit to the limitations of
> what we understand and what is still unclear - Socrates said, "I do not
> think that I know what I do not know". I think that the relationship
> between IRs and CTRs, and how the properties of collections will be
> recreated/rediscovered in the environment of distributed IRs is still not
> solved or understood. The physicists challenge demonstrates the fact.
> It follows from this limitation that it is not necessarily the case that:
>
> "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."
>
> Open access to more research content would be beneficial to researchers
> and institutions - but that is as far as the certainty goes. "How do we
> get more research to be open access?" - I think this is still an open
> question - certainly voluntary support (and usage) by the researchers
> seems more beneficial to me than a mandated 'compliance'. The current
> voluntary submission rates in CTRs is a fact that supports their role.
> Perhaps IRs can learn something from CTRs in terms of the type of services
> that they offer.
>
> Bernard Rentier: "Basically, depositing a paper in the local IR is exactly
> like depositing a reprint of the paper ay the local library. [...]"
>
> The local library has unique emergent properties that are not the same as
> those of an IR, so it is not exactly the same.
>
> Bernard Rentier: "No researcher would complain (and consider it an
> infringement upon his/ her academic freedom to publish) if we mandated
> them to deposit reprints at the local library. "
>
> I think that we would need to let researchers have the opportunity to
> voice their opinion on that claim, before we can be sure that no
> researcher would indeed complain. I think that it would depend in part on
> the nature of the local library in question, the researchers' altruism,
> etc.
>
> Best regards,
>
> 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 Bernard Rentier
> Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 3:53 PM
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Subject: Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? emergent properties
> and the compulsory open society
>
> 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 Wed Feb 11 2009 - 12:09:14 GMT