Re: Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse

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

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Thomas Krichel wrote:

>   Stevan Harnad writes
> > SH: (7) University-external, subject-based self-archiving does 
> > not scale up to cover all of OA output space: it is divergent, 
> > divisive, arbitrary, incoherent and unnecessary.
>   TK: So, do you recommend arXiv, RePEc, E-LIS, etc to close down?
No, I was talking about where institutions and funders should 
*mandate* depositing institutional research output.

     (8) ..."(The deposits, or their metadata, can then be externally
     harvested into whatever subject-based, disciplinary, or
     multidisciplinary central collections we may desire.)"

To reach 100% OA at long last, the problem is not the small 
minority of articles that are already being deposited, 
unmandated, for over a decade now, but the vast majority that 
have not been, and are not being.

>   Disclosure: I am the creator of RePEc...
Disclosure: I am the creator of CogPrints (launched over ten 
years ago).

We can have all the central collections our hearts desire, and 
the small minority (out of all researchers, at all institutions, 
in all disciplines) who already deposit centrally can continue to 
deposit centrally if they wish.

It is infinitely easier for an institution to hack up a way to 
back-harvest the (usually tiny) portion of its own total research 
output that its researchers are already systematically 
self-archiving in an OAI-compliant central repository (as CERN -- 
a special case of a physics-only institution with the majority of 
its output already being self-archived in Arxiv -- has done) than 
to keep imagining that 100% of institutional output can and will 
find its way into some central collection, somewhere, of its own 
accord.

Or to imagine that the way for an institution to mandate the 
self-archiving of 100% of its own research output (and to audit, 
assess, archive and showcase its own research assets, and to 
reward compliance by its own researchers) is to mandate that it 
be deposited "somewhere."

(Not mention the even more incoherent and short-sighted notion of 
institutional and funder mandates somehow relying on -- and 
paying for! -- proxy institution-external deposit by publishers 
instead of direct self-archiving by researchers.)

What is needed is a coherent, convergent strategy that will 
systematically scale up to cover all of research output, funded 
and unfunded, from all disciplines and interdisciplines, from all 
institutions (most of which are pandisciplinary universities) 
worldwide.

Institution-external deposit into arbitrary central collections 
is not that scaleable strategy. Mandated institutional deposit 
is. Both institutions and funders need to take this into account, 
when they mandate OA self-archiving.

Whatever central collections we may desire are then just a matter 
of harvesting content from the distributed OAI-compliant IRs -- 
which were made OAI-compliant specifically so as to make their 
content all interoperable and harvestable.

Stevan Harnad