Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
Thomas, what you actually wrote is Show me an archive, and a university, who will vouch that for a certain period, all that is in the IR with free full-text is a equivalent to the university's authors' total research papers in the same period. Does such a university exist? Such a university can never and will never exist if you insist on every term in the statement. Mainly because no university authority can ever know all of the university authors' research output with absolute certainty, unless its staff size is very small (say less than 50). Maybe the head of a small research institute can be that sure, but a senior executive simply can't for even a small size university. Insistence on a free full-text is also impossible given current publisher requirements, though deposit of a full-text is achievable. Exactly the same is true of discipline specific repositories, with the proviso that the repository manager must be even more unsure. I assumed that you meant the question seriously and would accept 'close to all'. To be reasonably sure that you are capturing close to all research output requires some audit capability - for example that there is independently collected data on the university's research output to compare with the repository. As it happens, such a situation existed in Australia in 2007 as you probably know. The HERDC data collection for Government provides such an independent estimate. The HERDC is spot-audited by Government to prevent over-claiming. Queensland University of Technology I assert that QUT achieves an acceptable closeness to collecting all research output in its repository. Indeed Paula Callan is in a good position to cross-check the two collections against each other, and does so. The QUT policy statement is widely known within Australia and outside, and you can read the current version approved by the Academic Senate at http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/F/F_01_03.jsp. The QUT eprints site is certainly up now because I checked. University of Queensland As to UQ, I need not wait until 2009 to know that they will collect all research output for 2008 by March 2009. They are simply implementing the usual Australian Government HERDC report through their repository. In other words the HERDC report will be generated from the repository contents. That guarantees that they will collect the same data that the HERDC requires or suffer financially for it by losing funds from the research block grant. As I wrote, I need no evidence to know this (nor does any other Australian repository manager), though it will be worth confirming in 2009. This policy is weaker than QUT's because it is not necessarily Immediate Deposit (ID), but it is also stronger since it guarantees much closer to 100%. There is a financial penalty for losing publications, often down to the department. Of course there may always be a small number of missing publications in any system. This may be because of laziness on the part of the authors, mislaid documentation, illness, or other reasons. Charles Sturt University and others BTW, Charles Sturt University has exactly the same intention. Probably about ten or more other Australian universities are actively considering the same step as UQ, because it eliminates duplication of work. Disagreement You write But I hope that we can agree that, from today's perspective, filling IRs until we achieve 100% open access will be a very very long process. Sorry, we can't agree. Filling IRs is happening now. The rate varies by country and situation, of course. I have hopes that IRs in all or most ~40 Australian universities will be capturing substantially all their research output by say two years. It may not all be open access, but it will be deposited. And by filling, I don't mean retrospectivity but that current output is captured and continues to be captured into the future. I could agree with you that filling discipline-specific repositories and covering all disciplines and inter-disciplinary fields will be a very long process, if that will help. Arthur Sale Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAX I.ORG] On Behalf Of Thomas Krichel Sent: Sunday, 17 February 2008 3:10 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] How to Compare IRs and CRs Arthur Sale writes In response to Tom's request for one university that will guarantee that they collect all their research output, here are two: Queensland Institute of Technology, Australia, since 2004. University mandate since 2004. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Now in its 5th year! The site can not be reached on Februrary 17 at 09:41:21 NOVT 2008. http://qut.edu.au can be, but I don't find such a statement there. University of Queensland, Australia, since beginning
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
Arthur Thomas RE: -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Krichel Sent: Sunday, 17 February 2008 2:10 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs Arthur Sale writes In response to Tom's request for one university that will guarantee that they collect all their research output, here are two: Queensland Institute of Technology, Australia, since 2004. University mandate since 2004. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Now in its 5th year! The site can not be reached on Februrary 17 at 09:41:21 NOVT 2008. http://qut.edu.au can be, but I don't find such a statement there. As the manager of QUT's institutional repository, I can confirm that there is no statement on our website that 'guarantees' that we collect fulltext copies of ALL our research output. I don't believe ANY university can give such a guarantee at this point in time. However, we can say that a significant proportion of QUT's research output is being deposited (at least 65% for some years) and, to a large extent, this is due to the University-wide Eprint policy. (http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/F/F_01_03.jsp) The policy puts 'self-archiving'and OA on the agenda within QUT academic departments and research centres. The adoption of similar policies by funding bodies will reinforce the message that providing open access to research results (not just publication) is an integral part of the research process. In my experience, researchers who are most enthusiastic about our repository see it as a useful 'tool' that makes their academic life more effective and more efficient. With multi-disciplinary research becoming increasingly common, I think it makes sense to encourage deposit via an IR with the option of including metadata that will facilitate later harvesting by CR's. Alternatively, IRs could include options for forwarding the metadata to a CR specified by the depositor. It is important that we acknowledge disciplinary differences - one tool will not suit all. But, if I may mix my metaphors, researchers should not have to hammer the same nail with two hammers. Paula Callan eResearch Access Coordinator Library Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia PH: +617 3138 3413 University of Queensland, Australia, since beginning of 2008. That is for just 1 and a half months? Now achieving annual government research reporting through their IR. This implies 100% coverage of course. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/ I did not ask you to tell me about them, I asked if there would be an official from an institutions warrant us that they have achieved it. I happen to know a bit about the Queensland Institute of Technology, situation, I hold a QUT staff card and know the repository manager there. But I don't think that it is worth discussing the situation in one particular institution here. I am not saying that IRs are not a potentially good development and I am not saying that they will never work. But I hope that we can agree that, from today's perspective, filling IRs until we achieve 100% open access will be a very very long process. With cheers from Novosibirsk (sunny, -13C), Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
Arthur Sale writes In response to Tom's request for one university that will guarantee that they collect all their research output, here are two: Queensland Institute of Technology, Australia, since 2004. University mandate since 2004. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Now in its 5th year! The site can not be reached on Februrary 17 at 09:41:21 NOVT 2008. http://qut.edu.au can be, but I don't find such a statement there. University of Queensland, Australia, since beginning of 2008. That is for just 1 and a half months? Now achieving annual government research reporting through their IR. This implies 100% coverage of course. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/ I did not ask you to tell me about them, I asked if there would be an official from an institutions warrant us that they have achieved it. I happen to know a bit about the Queensland Institute of Technology, situation, I hold a QUT staff card and know the repository manager there. But I don't think that it is worth discussing the situation in one particular institution here. I am not saying that IRs are not a potentially good development and I am not saying that they will never work. But I hope that we can agree that, from today's perspective, filling IRs until we achieve 100% open access will be a very very long process. With cheers from Novosibirsk (sunny, -13C), Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
In response to Tom's request for one university that will guarantee that they collect all their research output, here are two: Queensland Institute of Technology, Australia, since 2004. University mandate since 2004. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Now in its 5th year! University of Queensland, Australia, since beginning of 2008. Now achieving annual government research reporting through their IR. This implies 100% coverage of course. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/ A considerable number of Australian universities, including my own, are independently going down this latter track. Not that in neither case is it guaranteed that 100% of deposits are open access, but it is guaranteed that the deposits are made. In some cases expiry of an embargo will deal with access to the deposited full texts. Equally, there is no guarantee that the figure is actually 100%. It may be 99% with a few recalcitrant or lazy non-performers, but that is generally acceptable. The really active researchers are usually the compliers. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, David E. Wojick wrote: I disagree Steve (and I am doing staff work for the US Federal Interagency Working Group that is grappling with these issues). Which issues? OA's target content is the 2.5 million annual articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, in all languages. Mind you I am all for OA, but integrating all the web accessible science is far from trivial. I agree. But (1) OA is not about integrating all of web accessible science; nor is it (2) only about science; nor is it (3) about making all science web-accessible. It's first and foremost about making the 2.5 million annual articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, in all languages freely accessible on the web, Google, Google Scholar, Science.gov, Worldwidescience.org, etc., each have large, irrational hunks. It is far from clear that adding tens of thousands of independent IR's is going to help. OA is not about adding tens of thousands of empty IRs to existing web content. It is about getting the 2.5 million annual articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, in all language into their authors' OA IRs. Also, journal articles are not my favorite content, because they tend to be one to two years after the research and are too short. But journal articles are OA's target content. And OA means getting them freely accessible online immediately upon acceptance for publication, not 1-2 years afterward. I prefer conference presentations, reports, even awards and news, to journals. We are trying to speed up science and journals are the tail end of research. Those are all fine, and welcome in IRs, over and above OA's target content; but OA's target content -- the 2.5 million annual articles published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, in all languages -- is OA's immediate priority. So OA is a worthy cause but only a small part of the policy picture. Findability of key information is the core issue. Findability may be a problem for other causes, but it is not a problem for OA (which is the only cause I am talking about). Absence, not findability, is OA's problem. BTW I did some research that suggests that 60-80% of the journal lit, or something roughly equivalent, is findable for free if you poke around long enough, in some disciplines anyway. I would be very interested to see that research, to find out in what fields that is true, and in what time-slice. I am aware of a few fields (mostly in physics) where it is true, but always happy to learn of more. Our robot studies, across fields and years, find 5% to 15% of content, depending on field (and that's using google). Stevan Harnad David Wojick On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, dwoj...@hughes.net wrote: Steve, I am concerned when you say the following -- It's from the local repositories that the local produce can then be harvested (the limitations of a mixed metaphor!) to some central site, if desired, or just straight to an indexer like Google Scholar or Citebase. OA in 10's of 1,000's of IRs is virtually worthless without some very good, central, global, search capability. How to build this capability is far from clear. David Wojick http://www.osti.gov The answer is as simple as it is certain: OA's problem today is *content* not *search*. What is missing is 85+% of OA's target content (2.5M annual articles in 25K peer-reviewed journals), not the means of searching it! Current search power -- both implemented and under development -- is orders of magnitude richer than the OA database for which it is intended. Figure out a way to fill all the world's university IRs with 100% of their annual article output, and the rest is a piece of cake. Keep fussing about the dessert when there's still no main course, and you have a recipe for prolonging the hunger of your esteemed guests even longer than they've already endured it (for over a decade and a half to date). (The way is already figured out, by the way: it's the institutional Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. What still needs effort is getting the universities to go ahead and adopt them, instead of waiting passively, while fussing instead about preservation, copyright, publishing reform, -- and improved search engines!) Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-For um.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, dwoj...@hughes.net wrote: My point is that one should not consider (and design) OA in isolation. It is not at all clear why not, David. One does not have to redesign the web, publishing, or science, to attain 100% OA. One need merely self-archive in one's IR. OA should be viewed as part of a systematic change in the way we do science. But why? when reaching 100% OA is simple and reachable -- just a matter of a few keystrokes, and the only thing universities and funders need do is mandate them -- whereas systematically changing the way we do science is complicated, and not at all within obvious reach? Or, to put it another way, OA has to be justified in terms of the benefits it will provide. OA is disruptive and costly so the benefits must be correspondingly great. What disruptive and costly effects? IRs cost next to nothing; keystrokes cost nothing; mandates cost nothing. Are we speculating, then, about the possible future of journal publishing after Green OA self-archiving is mandated and reaches 100%? (It will convert to Gold OA publishing. But what does that have to do with the scientific and scholarly research community? Publishing is a service industry and will adapt itself to the needs of research. Is research instead supposed to adapt itself to the needs of the publish industry?) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399w e152.htm The benefits of OA in science lie in increased efficiency of communication. What I call better, faster science. But access is only part of the communication process. I am working the other part -- Agreed that access is only part of it. But it is a necessary part, indeed an essential prerequisite. And it is an immediately doable part: The way to do it is for universities and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving in the researcher's own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR). That's immediately reachable, right now. Then we can worry about other parts... [NB: Recall that I am only talking about OA's target content: journal articles.] getting the stuff to the people who need it as efficiently as possible (findability). My point is that my part of the system has something to say about your part. But you can't find what's not there: Green OA IR mandates will provide the missing content, and then we can see whether there's truly any residual findability problem at all. Less metaphorically, OA design issues like IR versus CR need to consider the delivery (or findability) issue, perhaps even being determined by them. IF it were the case that direct CR (Central Repository) deposit could deliver 100% of the target OA content and IF direct CR deposit were also somehow essential for findability, you would be quite right. But direct CR deposit cannot and will not deliver 100% of the target OA content (thematic CRs cannot cover all of research output space, exhaustively and non-redundantly, and institutions and funders are the entities that have the interests, and the means, to mandate deposit; themes are not); and harvesting content to CR search services will provide the findability. So both the conditional IFs are counterfactual. My specific point was that your IR solution to OA looks like it creates problems with my delivery solution. Perhaps we can discus this. I would be happy to discuss it. My guess is that your delivery solution calls for richer metadata than OAI. Fine. If the richer metadata really prove necessary, either CRs can harvest the OAI metadata from the IRs and enrich them, or, once the IRs are at last capturing all their own research output, the IRs themselves can be persuaded (by the advantages of your delivery solution) to enrich their own metadata requirements. But direct CR deposit is a nonstarter, either way, because it will not generate 100% OA content -- and it is totally unnecessary. [NB: Again, recall that I am only talking about OA's target content: journal articles.] As for the research, it was very preliminary. We just took one issue of each of several major journals, in physics and chemistry, and manually (intelligently) searched the web for each article. Starting by author typically worked better than by title or text. We got a good success rate. I should point out that much, perhaps most, of web available science is not on Google. It is in the deep web. Depositing on arbitrary websites, let alone in the deep web, is obviously nonoptimal. Mandates to deposit in OAI-compliant IRs will solve that. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs - or maybe how not to?
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Armbruster, Chris wrote: I also have my doubts that IRs, federated IRs and OAI-PMH will do the job... But what job, exactly, is it that you doubt they can do, Chris? Because searching over nonexistent content cannot be done by anyone or anything! but CRs are also sometimes no better. Even assuming that content is self-archived, will it be found? This is rather like asking: But assuming we have a cure for cancer, how will we distribute it? The immediate goal is to find a cure for cancer. Let's wait till we have one before assuming we have a nontrivial distribution problem too! (Fortunately, in the case of OA, we already know the cure: mandate self-archiving in OAI-compliant IRs.) The reason the OA target content cannot be found today is that most if it isn't there; hence no resource is (or needs to be) developed and implemented today on the assumption that the target content is all or mostly there, free for all on the web, and that the only thing we are missing is a reliable way to find it. What we need is that nonexistent content, not the content-finder. (In a parallel reply to David Wojick I address the question of free content in the deep web, not indexed by Google: The solution there, too, is to bring it to the reachable, surfable surface, by mandating that it be deposited in the researcher's OAI-compliant Institutional Repository [IR].) Consider this: It is often assumed that what stands in the way of enhanced functionality and quality is the lack of journal articles available in open access. However, a critical experiment has shown that databases already have problems with coverage even if items are available in open access. It has been found (Bergstrom/Lavaty 2007) that for 33 key economic journals, ninety percent of articles in the most-cited journals had been self-archived and about fifty percent of articles in less-cited journals were also available freely online. All of the freely available articles were found through Google. Using Google Scholar, they found about 10% less. However, when using OAIster they found only 1/4 of the freely available articles and results were only marginally better for SSRN and RePEc searches. (0) (It is noteworthy that the BL study is in Economics, which, along with Physics and Computer Science, make up the three disciplines that have been spontaneously self-archiving for over a decade and a half now. But the OA problem is with all the other disciplines: They have not followed this admirable example. Nor have even these three laudable disciplines come anywhere near depositing 100% of their annual article output.) (1) But I'm not sure what, exactly, your point is, Chris: If all of the free articles were indeed found with Google, then find them with Google! OAIster and Google Scholar will get them too, once they are deposited in mandated OAI-compliant IRs, as proposed, rather than on arbitrary websites, as now. (2) Of course a specific-item Google search only works if you know that the item is on the web, and you know some or all of the boolean search words that will pick it out, Google-style. No use expecting much of that content to pop up in a generic-topic Google search, where you have no idea know what is and isn't out there. (3) The remedy for that is to have all of it in OAI-compliant IRs. Then you can restrict the boolean full-text Google search to OA content, and OA content alone, instead of searching for it in a haystack of at least 30 billion web pages (in Feb 2007). Here is the sort of thing it would be absurd to expect to succeed today, on the full web -- but would be a trivial piece of cake if the full texts of all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 were self-archived in an OAI-compliant IR: (i) Do a generic boolean search, GB, using content terms, on a dedicated database, such as PubMed. (ii) Then take the references for all the P PubMed hits, and first do a specific-item boolean search, SB, for each of them, item by item, by reference term, on the full web via Google. (iii) Lets say the SB search on the web finds W of those P hits as full texts on the web. W/P is the proportion of the Pubmed hits that is currently available free on the web (apart from the deep web unreachable by Google). (iv) Now re-do the generic boolean search GB (i.e., using content terms rather than each items reference) this time directly on the web, via Google. (v) Of course the result will be a huge and unnavigable mess, despite the miracle of PageRank. PageRank is good enough for rank-ordering the single targeted item reference search, but not for the generic boolean search GB on content terms. (vi) Why not? Two obvious reasons: (i) The target content that is there, is embedded in too large a mess of irrelevant content and (ii) most of the target content is not there. (vii) Remedy: (i) get all of the target content out there in OAI-compliant IRs so that (ii) the search can be restricted to all
How to Compare IRs and CRs
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Leslie Carr wrote: On 9 Feb 2008, at 11:35, Thomas Krichel wrote: Yeah, but E-LIS is really small, looking at it today it tells us it has 7253 documents. That IRs struggle to compete with that sort of effort demonstrates that IRs don't populate, even in the presence of mandates. No amount of Driver summits will change this. If you go to ROAR you will find 62 Institutional or Departmental repositories that are bigger than E-LIS (that's out of a total set of 562). Admittedly that's just 1 in 8 institutional repositories pulling something approximating to their weight, but then there are only 89 subject repositories listed in total. It's not a done deal by any means, but I think that the trend is looking a lot more positive than you suggest . It's even a shade more subtle than that: Not only is comparing IRs to CRs comparing apples to fruit, but the genus and species have different respective denominators to answer to! (1) Obviously, we would not be surprised if Harvard (with an output of, say, 10K journal articles yearly) had a bigger IR than Mercer County Community College (with a yearly output of 100 journal articles). (2) But we would be surprised if the yearly deposit rate for Harvard's 10K annual articles was 1% and the yearly deposit rate for MCC was 90%, even if that meant that Harvard had 100 annual deposits and MCC had only 90. (3) So the right unit of comparison is not total repository content, of course, but proportion of annual output self-archived. (4) The comparison is more revealing (and exacting) when we compare CRs with IRs: How to compare Harvard's IR to the CR for Biomedicine (PubMed Central). (5) We are not surprised if the total annual worldwide (or even just US) output in Biomedicine exceeds the total annual output of Harvard in all disciplines. (6) Again, the valid unit of comparison is total annual-deposits divided by annual-output, and for a discipline, total annual output means all articles published that year in that disciple, originating from all of the world's research institutions. And that (if you needed one) is yet another reason why direct IR deposit is the systematic way to generate 100% OA. It's apples/apples vs fruit/fruit -- and all the fruit, hence all the apples, oranges, etc. are sown, grown and stocked locally. It's from the local repositories that the local produce can then be harvested (the limitations of a mixed metaphor!) to some central site, if desired, or just straight to an indexer like Google Scholar or Citebase. The moral of the story is that we have to normalize IR/IR, IR/CR and CR/CR comparisons -- and that absolute, non-normalized totals are not meaningless, but especially misleading about CRs, which give a spurious impression of magnitude simply by omitting their even-larger magnitude denominators! Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
Stevan Harnad writes (Could Tom please state his evidence for this, comparing the 12 mandated IRs so far with unmandated control IRs -- as Arthur Sale did for a subset, demonstrating the exact opposite of what Tom here claims.) http://fcms.its.utas.edu.au/scieng/comp/project.asp?lProjectId=1830 Show me an archive, and a university, who will vouch that for a certain period, all that is in the IR with free full-text is a equivalent to the university's authors' total research papers in the same period. Does such a university exist? And the question of the *locus* of mandated deposit still needs to be sorted out for the funder mandates: they ought to be mandating IR deposit and central harvesting rather than going against the tide by needlessly mandating direct central deposit. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html Central deposit in the funders archive is better because it assures the funder that a copy is and remains available. It does not preclude IR archiving. (It was my impression that Tom Krichel too was a fan of distributed local self-archiving and central harvesting; as I recall, he was one of those who warned me off of centralism during my brief fatuous flirtation with it. I remember still you apologizing to me in a public meeting about this. Surely, few readers of this forum will believe it happened, but I have witnesses. ;-) Now you just as infatuated with the idea of in institutional mandate as a simple solution. You love simple ideas, that you then keep on repeating. But now Tom seems so comfortable with the continuing spontaneous deposit rate of economists Where is your evidence for this? I am not comfortable. For a start, I am in Siberia at this time. ;-) that he does not notice that this spontaneous formula has utterly failed to generalize to all other disciplines for well over a decade now, I may be dump, but I am not deluded. I do notice. The problem is that there are not enough pioneers such as Paul Ginsparg and Thomas Krichel. And they don't get enough help. It's time for universities to support academics who are interested to lead forward scholarly initiative for their groups of scholars. Help them with disk space, CPU time, open TCP ports etc. In the long run this will generate more visibility for the sponsoring institution (per money spent) than pure research. BTW, I am working in pioneering initiatives (again), if an institution is interested in sponsorship (in kind not money) get in touch. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
Leslie Carr writes It's not a done deal by any means, but I think that the trend is looking a lot more positive than you suggest . I am not saying that the trend is not up, but I would like to see one successful institutional archive as outlined in the other message, before I believe that a mandate really can work. I am not saying that mandates IRs are wrong, but relying exclusively on them is failing to realize other opportunities. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Thomas Krichel wrote: Stevan Harnad writes (Could Tom please state his evidence for this, comparing the 12 mandated IRs so far with unmandated control IRs -- as Arthur Sale did for a subset, demonstrating the exact opposite of what Tom here claims.) http://fcms.its.utas.edu.au/scieng/comp/project.asp?lProjectId=1830 Show me an archive, and a university, who will vouch that for a certain period, all that is in the IR with free full-text is a equivalent to the university's authors' total research papers in the same period. Does such a university exist? Yes, Les Carr has already provided these data for the first mandate, Southampton ECS, in the pages of this Forum. CERN had done the same. We are currently gathering the corresponding data for QUT and Minho. Arthur Sale's comparative studies have also demonstrated this. But while we're at it, what's good for the goose is good for the gander (or, rather, for each genus and species): Show me a discipline-based CR that normalizes by its own denominator -- i.e., by the total research output of that discipline from all institutions, worldwide! And the question of the *locus* of mandated deposit still needs to be sorted out for the funder mandates: they ought to be mandating IR deposit and central harvesting rather than going against the tide by needlessly mandating direct central deposit. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html Central deposit in the funders archive is better because it assures the funder that a copy is and remains available. It does not preclude IR archiving. It does not preclude IR archiving, but it doesn't mandate it, it doesn't help it, and it in fact hinders it, by confusing researchers as to where self-archiving needs to be done, and how many times. Simple solution: Both universities *and* funders mandate deposit in the researcher's IR; then funders can also harvest centrally from the IRs (or the IRs can -- very easily -- be configured to export to the designated CRs, where desired or required). So, No: Central deposit is decidedly *not* better -- it is worse, far worse, on all counts. It is just something else that is being done unthinkingly, and the effort is not being made to think it through. (It was my impression that Tom Krichel too was a fan of distributed local self-archiving and central harvesting; as I recall, he was one of those who warned me off of centralism during my brief fatuous flirtation with it. I remember still you apologizing to me in a public meeting about this. Surely, few readers of this forum will believe it happened, but I have witnesses. ;-) Now you just as infatuated with the idea of in institutional mandate as a simple solution. You love simple ideas, that you then keep on repeating. Tom, I foolishly apologized to you publicly for my foolish brief lapse from distributed institutional self-archiving to central self-archiving between 1996 and 1999, and this is the thanks I get for my politeness? Whereas here you are, defecting (I think!) to central deposit now without so much as by your leave? (Alright then, let me put it less charitably: My changes in strategy were empirically-driven, not opinion-driven. They were always backed up by reasoning on the best evidence available at the time, and they continue to be. The empirical sequence was that once self-archiving became possible (via FTP and then Web), some communities -- notably Physics, depositing centrally, and Economics, depositing locally -- spontaneously took it up in significant numbers while most didn't. My first instinct was local deposit (1989-5). But no one listened, while the growing Physics Arxiv made it seem to me as if central deposit might be a better way. So we created CogPrints (1997) for central deposit; yet the other communities still weren't depositing. Then came OAI (1999), opening up a new, interoperable way to do local depositing, so we created the generic OAI-IR software (2000), and IRs caught on, globally, yet their contents were still not growing. Then came Green OA mandates, they worked, and it became obvious that they were the way to systematically cover all research output, from all institutions, in all disciplines. So I'm afraid it was those empirical facts that made me change my mind, Tom, not your preference for local deposit in 1996, nor your preference for central deposit in 2008. I am afraid that -- not for the first time -- I was, in that public posting to which you allude, giving rather more credit than credit was due. I've done worse. I've fatuously portrayed myself as playing John the Baptist to someone else's Messiah. I confess to an occasional weakness for hyperbole and even bathos, but not too often. Mostly it's the facts and reasoning that prevail...) But now Tom seems so comfortable with the continuing spontaneous deposit rate of economists Where is your evidence for this? I am not
Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, dwoj...@hughes.net wrote: Steve, I am concerned when you say the following -- It's from the local repositories that the local produce can then be harvested (the limitations of a mixed metaphor!) to some central site, if desired, or just straight to an indexer like Google Scholar or Citebase. OA in 10's of 1,000's of IRs is virtually worthless without some very good, central, global, search capability. How to build this capability is far from clear. David Wojick http://www.osti.gov The answer is as simple as it is certain: OA's problem today is *content* not *search*. What is missing is 85+% of OA's target content (2.5M annual articles in 25K peer-reviewed journals), not the means of searching it! Current search power -- both implemented and under development -- is orders of magnitude richer than the OA database for which it is intended. Figure out a way to fill all the world's university IRs with 100% of their annual article output, and the rest is a piece of cake. Keep fussing about the dessert when there's still no main course, and you have a recipe for prolonging the hunger of your esteemed guests even longer than they've already endured it (for over a decade and a half to date). (The way is already figured out, by the way: it's the institutional Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. What still needs effort is getting the universities to go ahead and adopt them, instead of waiting passively, while fussing instead about preservation, copyright, publishing reform, -- and improved search engines!) Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 (Green): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 (Gold): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/
