Re: DASER 2 IR Meeting and NIH Public Access Policy

[David Stern <david.e.stern@yale.edu>]

Stevan,

If you had stayed through the final presentation you would have heard one 
other suggestion that directly addresses your highest priority: 
immediately increasing the percentage of OA material in the repositories.

My suggestion was to place OA materials immediately in centralized 
repositories rather than waiting for each researcher organization to mount 
its own Institutional Repository (IR).

arXiv was a success because it had an immediate critical threshold of 
materials in a discipline.  This would not have happened if we had waited 
for the majority of authors to have IRs.  Many important research 
organizations still do not have IRs, and will not have fully functional 
ones for some time for many reasons which must be accepted as reality.

Yes, we can harvest the information centrally for those with IRs, but we 
can quickly increase the possibility of mass contributions through 
providing and emphasizing shared repositories for those without IRs.

We really don't need to do anything technical, as arXiv could immediately 
add additional discipline archives.  We only need to redirect authors to 
existing infrastructures.

Might this be a proactive and significant change in policy resulting in 
immediate positive impact?

David David Stern
Director of Science Libraries and Information Services
Yale University Library