Re: local/distributed vs global/unified archives

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Greg Tananbaum wrote:

> Atanu Garai poses an interesting question.
For replies, see the ongoing thread

     "Central versus institutional self-archiving"

on the American Scientist Open Access Forum: 
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

> The bottom line, however, is that launching an IR is a more
> straightforward and capturable task for most institutions.
It is indeed. See:

     "Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest
     Centrally"
     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/

     ABSTRACT: On December 26 2007 a mandate to self-archive all NIH-funded
     research articles became US law. However, the benefits of Congress's
     wise decision to mandate deposit immediately upon acceptance for
     publication are lost if that deposit is required to be made directly
     in PubMed Central, rather than in each author's own Institutional
     Repository (and thence harvested to PubMed Central): With direct IR
     deposit, authors can use their own IR's "email eprint request" button
     to fulfill would-be users' access needs during any embargo. And,
     most important of all, with direct IR deposit mandated by NIH,
     each of the world's universities and research institutions can go
     on to complement the NIH self-archiving mandate for the NIH-funded
     fraction of its research output with an institutional mandate to
     deposit the rest of its research output, likewise to be deposited
     in its own IR. This will systematically scale up to 100% OA.

and

     "How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html
     SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and
     university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary.
     There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic
     and mutually reinforcing:
         Universities' own Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the
     natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output:
     Universities are the research providers and have a direct interest
     in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and showcasing
     their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their uptake,
     usage and impact.
         Both universities and funders should accordingly mandate deposit
     of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), in each author's
     own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication,
     for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to
     that immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may
     be set immediately as Open Access if copyright conditions allow;
     otherwise access can be set as Closed Access, pending copyright
     negotiations or embargoes. All the rest of the conditions described by
     universities and funders should accordingly apply only to the timing
     and copyright conditions for setting open access to those deposits,
     not to the depositing itself, its locus or its timing.
         As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all
     research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce
     and monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates
     will reinforce university mandates; (4) legal details concerning
     open-access provision, copyright and embargoes will be applied
     independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis, according
     to the conditions of each mandate; (5) opt-outs will apply only to
     copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its timing; and
     (6) any central OA repositories can then harvest the postprints from
     the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the agreed time,
     if they wish.

Stevan Harnad