Re: John Wiley on RoMEO and John the Baptist on Supererogation

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:29:45 -0500

On 17-Feb-09, at 4:32 AM, Ian Stuart wrote:

      Leslie Carr wrote:

            HOWEVER one step away (literally) from the
            W-B "Best Practice document" is the W-B
            "Copyright FAQ" in which they elaborate that
            although the ELF is used for societies, the
            wholly owned journals still retain the
            practice of Copyright Assignment. The sample
            Copyright Assignment document (for the aptly
            chosen International Headache Society)
            contains the following text:

> ---- quote ----
            Such preprints may be posted as electronic
            files on the author's own website for
            personal or professional use, or on the
            author's internal university, college or
            corporate networks/intranet, or secure
            external website at the author's institution,
            but not for commercial sale or for any
            systematic external distribution by a third
            party (e.g. a listserve or database connected
            to a public access server).

            ----- end -----

            I *think* that an institutional repository is
            OK by that definition. After all, it is a
            secre external website at the author's
            institution which is not offering the item
            for sale nor run by a third party.


      Where does this leave the Subject Repository (ex aXive)?
      It's not the authors own website, or an intranet at the
      authors local institution, or an external server at the
      authors institution... yet it also doesn't offer
      commercial sales or *systematic*[my emphasis]
      distribution to a third party

      Where does this leave the Depot?
      It's /effectively/ an Institutional Repository, but like
      aXive it's not at the authors institution.

      .... or is this one of those questions one shouldn't
      really ask?


Here's my tuppence worth on this one -- and it's never failed me (or
anyone who has applied it, since the late 1980's. when the
possibilities first presented themselves) as a practical guide for
action: (A shorter version of this heuristic would be "If the
physicists had been foolish enough to worry about it in 1991, or the
computer scientists still earlier, would we have the half-million
papers in Arxiv or three-quarter million in Citeseerx that we have,
unchallenged, in 2009?"):
When a publisher starts to make distinctions that are more minute
than can even be made sense of technologically, and are
unenforceable, ignore them:

The distinction between making or not-making something freely
available on the Web is coherent (if often wrong-headed).

The distinction between making something freely available on the web
here but not there is beginning to sound silly (since if it's free on
the web, it's effectively free everywhere), but we swallow it, if the
"there" is a 3rd-party rival free-riding publisher, whereas the
"here" is the website of the author's own institution. Avec les dieux
il y a des accommodements: Just deposit in your IR and port metadata
to CRs.

But when it comes to DEPOT -- which is an interim "holding space"
provided (for free) to each author's institution, to hold deposits
remotely until the institution creates its own IR, at which time they
are ported home and removed from DEPOT -- it is now bordering on
abject absurdity to try to construe DEPOT as a "3rd-party
rival free-riding publisher".

We are, dear colleagues, in the grip of an orgy of pseudo-juridical
and decidedly supererogatory hair-splitting on which nothing
whatsoever hinges but the time, effort and brainware we perversely
persist in dissipating on it. 

This sort of futile obsessiveness is -- in my amateur's guess only --
perhaps the consequence of two contributing factors:

      (1) The agonizingly (and equally absurdly) long time
      during which the research community persists in its
      inertial state of Zeno's Paralysis about self-archiving
      (a paralysis of which this very obsession with trivial
      and ineffectual formal contingencies is itself one of the
      symptoms and causes). It has driven many of us bonkers,
      in many ways, and this formalistic obsessive-compulsive
      tendency is simply one of the ways. (In me, it has simply
      fostered an increasingly curmudgeonly impatience.) The
      cure, of course, is deposit mandates.


and

      (2) The substantial change in mind-set that is apparently
      required in order to realize that OA is not the sort of
      thing governed by the usual concerns of either library
      cataloguing/indexing or library rights-management: It's
      something profoundly different because of the very nature
      of OA.


Rest your souls. Universal OA is a foregone conclusion. It is
optimal, and it is inevitable. The fact that it is also proving to be
so excruciatingly -- and needlessly -- slow in coming is something we
should work to remedy, rather than simply becoming complicit in and
compounding it, by giving ourselves still more formalistic trivia
with which to while away the time we are losing until the obvious
happens at long last.

Bref: Yes, this is "one of those questions one shouldn't really ask"!

Yours curmudgeonly,

Your importunate archivangelist
Received on Tue Feb 17 2009 - 12:30:10 GMT