Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] Frontiers 2020: one third of journals raise price 45 times the inflation rate (or more)
Heather Morrison writes > A third of the journals published by Frontiers in 2019 and 2020 (20 > / 61 journals) have increased in price by 18% or more (up to 55%). Thank you for this. This is timely, in the light of a new framework agreement drafted in Germany. You can read about it, with links to cometary by yours truly, on the inetbib archive. https://www.inetbib.de/listenarchiv/msg67546.html -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge
Sarven Capadisli writes > By persistency, I assume you mean archival ie. a source deemed to be > trustable as it promises to preserve knowledge for long-term. Along the > lines of [1]. Yes. > Isn't archiving an independent and an external function that any actor > should have read-write access to ie. to create snapshots and read > existing ones? Yes, but it's still a third party. And a lot of open access material is not immediately accessible in bulk. I'm sure Peter can sing us a song about that issue. > Third-party (non- or for-profit) publishing services neither provide the > archival service or expected to, but merely act as a proxy. Yes, but they are big, extremely well funded and they have agreement with third-party services. Building a low-cost scholarly communication system that is decentralized is a complicated issue. Even in situation where we have a head start, like in RePEc, there are important conceptual and organizational challenges. I think we should take that discussion off list, but before we do, let me add the following. I think the current centralized systems we use for scholarly communication are an overhang of the paper era, that made such centralization unavoidable. In future, better days, there may be systems that are much more discipline or subject specific, depending on * the requirements for formal review of material * the structural nature of the outputs * the economic circumstances surrounding its production * some initial conditions -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge
brent...@uliege.be writes > In other words - and even if we restrict our thinking to COVID-19 - > what humankind needs urgently NOW, is an open access to all the > relevant research literature in a much wider domain than just that > of this virus. Very simply, to all the scholarly literature. In practice, I doubt that access to current research is such a big issue "NOW" as libraries and open access advocates make it appear to be. The average academic only reads about one hour a week. In most cases, if you know that a paper exist and who the author is, you can contact the author to get the paper. Most authors will comply because they crave citations. The open access situation will improve anyway as the virus crises in the long run will leave institutions too weak to afford the journal subscription folly. There are two other important issues. One is the issue of older literature. Its authors are not reachable. JSTOR have locked it up behind paywall. They don't get the abuse here that Elsevier gets. A fairer spread of abuse would be welcome ;-) We need better archiving procedures, and for the RePEc world I'm working on that. The other is the problem to stay current with the literature. I mean the "know that a paper exist and who the author is" part. Fortunately for the biomedical world, it has PubMed and it has me. Based on PubMed, I have created "bims: Biomed News" http://biomed.news, to address this issue. It's an expertise-sharing system powered by human selectors who are aided by sophisticated use of machine learning. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge
Jean-Claude Guédon writes > The right way to go is OA free for authors and for readers, which means that > it must be subsidized. But that is all right because scientific research is > subsidized and scientific communication is an integral part of scientific > research (and it costs only 1% of the rest of research). Research is done to generate visibility for the researcher. As such it has advertising value. Therefore OA is the right way to organise it. At some stage, universities and other research intensive institutions will release that visibility is not only gained from doing but also from storing, organising, and reviewing it. Libraries ought to have pressed that case a long time ago. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] COVID-19 and access to knowledge
Sarven Capadisli writes > Does the "the right way" to contribute to scientific communication in > context of OA require the use of (non- or for-profit) third-party > services as opposed to self-publishing? Yes, it does > If so, why? because there needs to be persistency to the published output that a person can not provide. However that persistency layer could be constructed in such a way that it cost way less than what is paid, mainly by libraries, to keep the current system going. I'm currently working on building a persistency layer for RePEc. It's work funded with a 3000 Euro grant by the French central bank foundation for economic research. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] New paper: A tale of two 'opens': intersections between Free and Open Source Software and Open Scholarship
Jon Tennant writes > In order to achieve this, we propose the formulation of a new type of > institutional mandate. How much chance does this have, given that the "old", "Hanard-style", mandate of deposit of research output in institutional repositories has largely failed? In the paper, the authors write > We believe that the pragmatic way to reverse this problem is the > formulation of new national and supra-national mandates, which could > be based around the Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy > Development (Tennant, Beamer, et al. 2019). Governments and funding > bodies should provide modern, sustainable and technically > interoperable infrastructures based around existing established > repositories, and all their associated functionalities (e.g., > persistent identifiers, standardised metadata, research data > repositories, usage metrics), with immediate, unrestricted, and full > access to all research outputs Just the usual "let somebody else pay for it". It won't happen. If libraries where to stop paying for subscriptions, there would be enough funds for a head start at this repository based infrastructure. That's why the first mandate failed. The resources available for repositories were a pittance compared to what the proprietary publishers got, so the repositories could not compete. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Projekt DEAL is a very serious impediment to BOAI Open Access
Peter Murray-Rust writes > * set a precedent for everyone else - the "true price" of an article at > 2750 Eur. It would not be outrageous if the reviewers---who do all the real work---would get 2k, say 500 for each of four reviewers. But I guess they will get only three things: zilch, nada, and sweet fa. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] ‘Transformative’ open access publishing deals are only entrenching commercial power
Jon Tennant writes > Every year, we waste billions of euros of taxpayers money on inefficient > systems with outrageous profit margins. Not "we" waste. Subscription-purchasing librarians waste. I have been calling for subscriptions to be cut for many years only to be dismissed and ridiculed. But finally the tide is starting to turn. > The current model of scholarly publishing contains a disastrous blend of > Stockholm Syndrome and cognitive dissonance. Researchers are helplessly > locked into the system because of an over-reliance on journal brands for > their evaluations, including for promotion, grants and tenure. That has little to do with the expense of the current system. An over-reliance on journals could also happen in a system that is much less expensive. > I find it absurd that the most supposedly intellectual people in the > world cannot find an evaluation system better than this. There are many ways of being intellectual. I for one don't expect people who are experts in their own special area also to be experts on scholarly communication. > "Plan S" does not seem to make this situation better. I'm not closely following Plan S but I tend to agree. Open access has the risk of making commercial intermediation even more expensive than toll-gated access ever was. > We are continuing to actively work against efforts to return control of > publishing to the academic community. Who is your "we" here? -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] Open Access: "Plan S" Needs to Drop "Option B"
Peter Murray-Rust writes > The situation with all commercial publishers (including many scholarly > societies) is now unacceptable. It seems perfectly acceptable to libraries who continue to pay vast amounts for subscription journals with most of the contents receiving very little use. The average academic reads one hour a week. Now you take all the academic in the institution, you count 56 weeks a year and divide your annual subscription cost by that number ... it turns out to be a very very expensive hour I am sure. > Yes. I am now appalled at the scale of OA APC charges. I have outlined > these in > > https://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/scientific-search-for-everyone > slides 3-11 > > where I contend that probably >1000 USD of an APCs goes to shareholder > profits and corporate branding and gross inefficiency. It is easy to be outraged at the riches of others, but clearly some people think it worth to pay that sort of amount. As long as they do, publishers can charge it. We should not be angry at those who charge but those who let them get away with it. > The effect of APCs on the Global South is appalling People can still publish. If the research is good, it will eventually make it to become known. Stevan writes > The only thing that is and has been sustaining the paywalls on research > has been publishers' lobbying of governments on funder OA policy and their > manipulation of institutional OA policy with "Big Deals" on extortionate > library licensing fees to ensure that OA policies always include Option B. If I recall correctly, "paywalls" usually, in this group's discussion, refers to limit access papers to those who pay for it. It is library subscriptions that keep paywalls running. I said this years ago. Stevan kept on dismissing my call to cancel subscription saying we need to wait until full green OA is achieved to start cancelling subscriptions. I agree fully that APCs as charged by commercial publishers are too high. But you can't blame publishers for wanting to charge them. You have to address the willingness to pay them. If institutions were to pay them fully, a race to spend more on APCs to demonstrate research quality will raise the cost of scholarly communication intemediation, potentially making OA more expensive than subscriptions. But I am not worried yet, because Plan S would only cover funded research, and it calls for a cap. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] levels of open access based on Web of Science and oaDOI data
Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen) writes > We very much value your feedback. Because all researchers and > policymakers (with access to WoS, not trivial) Yeah right. I don't see the point, unless WoS pay you for it, to evaluate their closed-access tools. That time could be much more usefully spent building open access tools and/or data. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] bepress Joins Elsevier, with Exciting Potential for Growth
Jean-Gabriel Bankier writes > I am thrilled Is anybody else thrilled? -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier
Ted Bergstrom writes > Hooray for RePEc! Thank you. > Thomas, Is there a short answer to the question: > "How do we know RePEc can't be bought?" I have two answers. For younger people, tell them that RePEc is just data distributed on over 1800 different servers. It belongs to the organisations running the servers. It would be very hard to buy these organisations. For older people, tell them that RePEc is basically the electronic version of the old printed working papers publishing practice. Of course it's more than that but understanding the printed world analogy is sufficient for starters. It would have been very hard to buy the printed working papers system. > Do you have any advice to offer economists who are wary of > the SSRN sellout? Well if your institution does not have a RePEc archive, make sure you put your papers up at the MPRA https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/ And get in touch with re...@repec.org if you want to sponsor us. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: [GOAL] SSRN Sellout to Elsevier
Stevan Harnad writes > Shame on SSRN. Why? I am certainly looking forward to SSRN becoming as undynamic as Mendeley after an Elsevier takeover. > I don't know about Arxiv (needless centralization and its concentrated > expenses are always vulnerabe to faux-benign take-overs) but what's sure is > that the distributed network of Green institutional repositories worldwide > is not for sale, and that is their strength... RePEc can not be bought either. I created it before institutional repositories came along. It is based on the same principles as institutional repositories. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: "Yawanna know wush wrong with this damn planet...?."
Stevan Harnad writes > 1. Actually, no one really knows why it is taking so long to reach the > optimal and inevitable outcome -- universal OA -- oh I know. It's because libraries are spending money on subscriptions. And as long as they do, OA remains evitable. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Dutch begin their Elsevier boycott
Danny Kingsley writes Dutch universities have begun their boycott of Elsevier due to a complete breakdown of negotiations over Open Access. I guess the Summer silly season is here. As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. It would be very foolish indeed for any academic to give up such a prestigious post forever, presumably, to come in aid of a temporary, presumably, boycott, with no compensation from the boycotters. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. This may have a small effect since reviewing for journals is a tedium to many academics. Dutch academics can use the boycott as as excuse not to review. But publishers can draw on a non-Dutch reviewers. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals. Good luck with that. As an academic you have to take submission decisions based on the likelihood to be in a good journal, not based on some boycott ideology. The whole strategy makes very little sense whatsoever from a theoretical perspective thinking about academics' incentives. And there is historical evidence that adds weight to the theoretical argument. Recall the Public Library of Science. Before it became a publishing business, it was a grass root group. It issued a similar boycott call. I can't find the text now. I guess they withdrew the text from public view. By my impression it was completely ineffective. Libraries have created, and continue to maintain the closed-access publication system by subscribing to journals. They should stop subscribing to journals and use the proceeds to fund open access publications. Publishers will get the same revenue stream but open access is achieved. In short: Stop bothering academics and publishers about a library-made problem. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OAI9 registrations close on 30 May
The OAI9 Workshop on Current Developments in Scholarly Communication, 17-19 June 2015, is fast approaching. For a detailed view of the Tutorials and Programme for the event, see https://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/timetable/#20150617 Applicants for the poster session have now been confirmed and over 30 posters will be available for viewing and discussion with the poster submitters in Geneva. Registration for the Workshop closes on 30 May. The OAI Workshops are well known for providing a setting where developments in the world of scholarly communication are displayed and discussed. Do join us if you would like to be part of this conversation by registering to attend the Workshop at https://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/registration/ Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OAI9 poster submission deadline
The OAI Workshop on Current Developments in Scholarly Communication is being held in the University of Geneva on 17-19 June 2015. It has a call for posters. The deadline is 17 April 2015. See http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/page/6 for more details. The Workshop will contain 6 plenary session, focussing on the following topics: 1. A Technical Open Access/Open Science session led by Herbert Van de Sompel 2. Barriers and Impact 3. Open Science Workflows: CHORUS and SHARE 4. Quality Assurance 5. Institution as Publisher 6. Digital Curation and preservation of large and complex scientific objects Use https://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/registration/ to register. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OAI9 Workshop in Geneva 17-19 June 2015
The OAI9 Workshop on Current Developments in Scholarly Communication is taking place in the University of Geneva and in CERN, Geneva, on 17-19 June 2013. The meeting's web site is http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/ There are six plenary sessions * Technical developments * Barriers and impact * CHORUS and SHARE * Quality assurance * The institution as publisher * Digital curation and preservation of large and complex scientific objects The tutorials, which start the Workshop, are devoted to: * The institution as publisher: getting started * Author identification systems * Open Monograph Press * Hiberlink project * Managing a digitization project * Open Access Café 2015 Five breakout groups have been arranged so far for group discussions: * OA policy * Legal framework for innovative science - text and data mining * Research data management * Open annotations * Managing APC payments There will also be 20+ posters in the timetabled poster session. We will soon issue a call for posters. The OAI Workshops provide a space for all those interested in developments in scholarly communication to come together to learn from each other, to exchange ideas, and to hear papers from leading experts in the field. They are rather prominent European events in the year in which they are held. Registration is open at http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/registration/register#/register The OAI Organisers (see http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/page/7) look forward to meeting you all in Geneva in June. For the OAI9 Organising Committee with cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Interesting Current Science opinion paper on Predatory Journals
Dana Roth writes it is totally unrealistic to assume serious researchers have the time to wade thru anything more than a fraction of what is being published. Sure. Is there really anything better than limiting current awareness to high quality peer reviewed journals, Of course there is better. Get yourself a precise topic-focused current awareness service that delivers people the papers they need to look at based on their topics rather than the outlet that they were published, and that delivers them now, rather in years' time when the papers have gone through peer-review whatever that means. I have created such a service for RePEc at http://nep.repec.org. I want to work on creating similar services for areas other than economics. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] announcing OAI9 in Geneva 17-19 June 2015
The CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9) University of Geneva June 17th-19th 2015 This series of Workshops in Geneva has become the major community event in Europe in the year in which it is held. For these three days, librarians, IT professionals, publishers and researchers come together to network, hear presentations from keynote speakers, attend tutorials on cutting-edge themes, and congtribute their ideas through breakout/technical sessions and poster displays. The workshop is designed to provide a focus for the interchange of ideas, the building of new partnerships, the annoucement of new developments and the celebration of success in innovation in the whole scholarly communications process. The workshop will be held in the University of Geneva at the Institute of Graduate Studies and Campus Biotech. Both locations are close to each other and easily accessible on the Geneva tram network. The Programme Committee is currently drawing up an innovative programme for the meeting. Please reserve the dates for OAI9 in your diaries now. Keep an eye on the Workshop website at http://indico.cern.ch/e/oai9, which also lists the Twitter feed and hashtag for the meeting. On behalf of the OAI9 Programme Committee, I look forward to seeing you in the University of Geneva to hear news of current developments in scholarly communication. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Fight Publishing Lobby's Latest FIRST Act to Delay OA - Nth Successor to PRISM, RWA etc.
brent...@ulg.ac.be writes The only way researchers can be convinced is through mandatory pressure from the funders and/or the Academic authorities. And the only way mandates can be imposed is through the research assessment procedures. Everything else lingers or fails. I beg to differ. Researchers can also be convinced by the fact that publication in a toll-gated journal means that there is no readership for their output. And precisely that happens if libraries cancel subscriptions. Of course mandates are useful. But the uptake of mandates has been so slow that, at current speed, we can wait for centuries to achieve open access. In the meantime, the publishing industry can use the subscription revenue bonanza to effectively lobby for any change to be on its terms. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Scholars jobs not publisher profits
Heather Morrison writes If a university is looking for voluntary severance from faculty members while at the same time paying even more above inflationary cost increases to publishers with high profit margins, that is wrong and needs to stop. I agree. And the way to stop it is to cancel subscriptions. Faculty who have not made their work open access just don't deserve it to be read or cited. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Keeps Revising Its Double-Talk (But Remains Fully Green)
Friend, Fred writes I am sorry to be cynical, but the academic community gets the contracts it deserves. We have to learn to say no and really mean it. Say no to what? And how will you make sure what you say is matched by what you do? -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Keeps Revising Its Double-Talk (But Remains Fully Green)
Heather Morrison writes As a reminder, here is how at least some of us academics are saying no to Elsevier, the Cost of Knowledge boycott: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Individual academics have little incentives to carry out a threat like this. And this is specific to Elsevier when other publishers are just as expensive. The only ones who have clout here are libraries. They can cancel subscriptions. It's the only message publishers will understand. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Disruption vs. Protection
Stevan Harnad writes It does not, because it is both arbitrary and absurd to cancel a journal because it is Green rather than because their users no longer need it It is not. There simply is not the money to buy all subscriptions, and the more a journal's contents can be recovered from the web the more the need for subscribing to it declines. But more important than any of that is the gross disservice that gratuitous public librarian announcements like that do to the OA movement: Libraries are not there to serve the OA movement. to get the money the UK has foolishly elected to throw at Fool's Gold unilaterally, and preferentially. I agree. But the subscription model is even more foolish. Let toll-gating publishers have embargoes till kingdom come. If nobody reads the papers, authors, who need the attention of readers, will have to use the IR to place a version of the paper out. Scholars will find alternative ways to evaluate these papers. With friends like these, the OA movement hardly needs enemies. I'm all in favour of OA, but it will not happen until subscriptions decline. The more subscriptions decline the better for OA. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Journal cancellations are primarily about journal costs
Heather Morrison writes Journal cancellations are primarily about journal costs, not whether the content is available for free. Sure. In April of last year Harvard sent a memo to faculty informing them that they cannot continue to afford high priced journals and asking them to consider costs when deciding where to publish. The memo can be found here: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448 I don't see incentives for academics to comply with such a request. It would be more effective for universities to set up black lists of journals not review for. Academics then would have a better excuse not to review for journals that are high-priced, ultimately putting pressure on the quality of these journals. This is not an open access issue, rather another issue that needs to be addressed, and the drive for OA policy should not impede progress on necessary market corrections. I beg to differ. The same euro can only be spent once. It can be spent to beef up the IR, or on subscriptions. May I suggest that research funding agencies should look carefully at the publishing record of academics (past, future plans, editing etc.), and look at high-priced choices the way funding agencies and committees in my area would look at grant submissions including first-class airfares at many times the cost of available economy airfares? Again, you can surely suggest this but I don't see why funding agencies would have incentives to take up your suggestions. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Censorship? Seriously? (Re: Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: Disruption vs. Protection)
Couture Marc writes As previous messages in this thread clearly show, the ultimate fate of the subscription model, and how it will unfold, is completely unknown, Stevan has written many times that open access is optimal and inevitable. If you accept this what room is there left for subscriptions? I don't see any. Stevan points out that actions or policies which may seem justified locally, because they allow for short term savings, can be globally harmful in the long term. Cutting subscriptions is benefical locally, because it saves money and/or allows to improve institutional visibility. And it is beneficial globally as it increases incentives for academics to make papers available in IRs or with open access publishers because otherwise they loose more impact. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Aaron Swartz RIP
Andrew A. Adams writes he downloaded a substantial number of papers from JSTOR (which he explained he desired to use for text mining and could not access that size of corpus any other way). JSTOR seem to me like a highly commercial outlet under a cover of a non-profit operation. It seems very difficult to get anything for free from them, even if it would be to their advantage. Case in point, for the CitEc project, we tried for years to get them to agree to allow us to use the plain text from papers that we have referenced in RePEc to get references from. The resulting citation links would give them advertizing. We never got anywhere with them. When I became aware of Aaron's actions I was pleased this may raise awareness of JSTOR's locking away historic scholarly contents behind their firewall with no prospects of ever releasing it. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: New Year's challenge for repository developers and managers: awesome cross-search
Lisa Schiff writes Actually ORCID has a public API, though there is a request to use throttling so as not to overwhelm the servers. I believe some guidance around this is being developed, but you can use the API now: http://support.orcid.org/knowledgebase/articles/132354-searching-with-the-public-api An API is not the same thing as a stock of data that is freely available. For example CrossRef also has an API, you can conduct searches but you will never know if/when you have the complete data. Neither ORCID nor CrossRef are open access. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: New Year's challenge for repository developers and managers: awesome cross-search
Robert Hilliker writes Further, as initiatives like ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) begin to get off the ground, there are opportunities for repositories to play a key role in ensuring that these consortial efforts help us to further the goals of the OA movement by enhancing the accessibility of OA content and not just that of commercial publishers and content providers. ORCID itself is not an open access initiative. It's a step backwards. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: New Year's challenge for repository developers and managers: awesome cross-search
Beall, Jeffrey writes Could you please explain why you think ORCID is a step backwards? I am not saying it's a step backwards, but it is step backwards for open access. The data is ORCID will not be open access data. Access to ORCID data will essentially be limited to ORCID members. ORCID say there will be some dump of some data made available on an annual basis. That's not enough to build a service on the data that require bulk instantaneous access to the data. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: Dark Side of Openness: Identity Theft and Fraudulent Postings By Predatory OA Publishers
Stevan Harnad writes The research community needs to unite to expose, name and shame these increasingly criminal practices by predatory publishers I wonder if there is a criterion for when a publisher is predatory. bent on making a fast buck by abusing the research community's legitimate desire for open access (OA) (as well as exploiting some researchers' temptation to get accepted for publication fast, no matter what the cost or quality). If the aim open access then we should first expose the toll-gated publishers who have for many years extraordinary profits from material they obtained for free and that was reviewed for them for free. Surely the amounts wasted on open access publishing dwarf the sum spent on library subscriptions to buy access to articles that nobody ever seems to cite, so probably nobody ever reads. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OAI8 at the University of Geneva. 19-21 June 2013
2013 sees the 8th OAI Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication at the University of Geneva and at CERN. These Workshops are major international gatherings where those interested in Scholarly Communication developments can meet, discuss and network. OAI8 will be taking place in the context of the EU’s launch of its €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme, which has Open Access as a key deliverable of the outputs from its funded research programs. New areas to be discussed at OAI8 will be Alternative Metrics and a special focus on Scholarly Communication developments in the Arts and Humanities. An introductory video, announcing the Conference, can be seen at http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=211600 Please reserve 19-21 June 2013 in your diaries. On behalf of the Programme Committee, we look forward to seeing you in Geneva. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers but from institutions and funders
Stevan Harnad writes Can you give us an example of an institution with a mandate that has managed, for a period of a year, for example, to collect its complete research output in its IR? U. Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (the oldest Green OA mandate). (Not U. Southampton, which has a sub-optimal mandate.) And CERN. None of them are cross-discipline, therefore they don't count. I would not count any of the 1400 RePEc archives many of which And Liège (with its optimal ID/OA mandate) is now coming close; Can somebody from Liège confirm this? There is a time period for which they have stored in their IR all research papers produced? Maybe they can also let us know about the cost this effort entailed. and so soon will its emulators. Well, assuming IRs came along in 2002, and assuming that Liege would indeed be full, then teh expected value of all others coming to this stage would be how long? Many thousands of years. Good things come to those wait. But even the 60%-70% mandates are not to be sneezed at, I am sneezing. I applaud. This is the UK lead in OA that the Finch Report now proposes to squander, I agree. in favour of a very long and very expensive gold rush. The green rush appears to be a longer rush. In fact it's no rush at all. Unless it gets more resources, I think. The amount spent on IRs appears insignificant to the amount spent a subscriptions. It just is not fair to compare both approaches. But that's precise what the Finch report is doing. L'appétit vient en mangeant... On ne fait pas d'omelette sans casser des œufs. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying Again To Wag The Public Research Dog
Stevan Harnad writes Mike Eisen, in his splendid, timely op-ed article, The article, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html contains the statement. Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. Do you agree with this? Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: op-ed on Research Works Act in today's NYT
Michael Eisen writes I have an op-ed in today's NYT about the Research Works Act Excellent job. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html I especially note Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. Finally somebody agrees with what I have been saying for years. It is libraries, rather than publishers or researchers, that hold back open access. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: op-ed on Research Works Act in today's NYT
David Prosser writes Oh come on Thomas, I know you like to be provocative, but: I think it better to stick to the issues, rather than personalise the debate. It is not libraries that submit their papers to publishers and sign over exclusive rights, nor is it libraries that compel researchers to do so. This is orthogonal to the open vs toll-gated access issue, since the sign-over could occur also to an open-access outlet. I agree that blank sign-over of rights is bad in many cases but this not what the issue is about here. It is not libraries that provide peer-review services to publishers for free Again this is orthogonal to the open vs toll-gated access issue because the peer review is essentially the same process for open access as for toll-gated journals. It is not libraries that decide promotion and tenure conditions, or make research funding decisions based on the journal in which researchers publish, rather than the quality of the research itself. Again this is essentially orthogonal to the open vs closed access issue because the evaluation of research by the outlet is independent of the fact if the research is in an open access vs a toll-gated journal. I concede that the majority of high quality outlets are old. Thus evaluation by outlet introduces a bias. Dismissing academics as only looking at the publishing outlet when evaluation research quality strikes me as provocative but it's a provocation that is not central to the toll-gated vs open-access debate. If libraries unilaterally cancelled all subscriptions today the immediate result would not be open access tomorrow - it would be the sacking of library directors by their institutions! This is completely unproven. I suggest to give half of the money saved for faculty travel and/or submission fees to journals and half to institutional repository (IR) development. All jobs in the library will be saved and new staff for IR development will be hired in the library. My assertion is as unproven as David's, of course. Now back to bed... Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: Open Access Doubts
Eric F. Van de Velde writes Remember, I am an OA supporter, though I am getting discouraged about the slow progress. Blame your colleagues in the library community. If they would stop subscribing to toll-gated journals, the toll-gated journals can't survive. You say that journal prices do not matter with Green OA in place. I say they do, because universities end up underwriting two overlapping systems: one to maintain the scholarly record and editorial boards and the other to provide immediate access. Admittedly, Green OA is the better bargain. But if Green OA is not reducing the cost of the other, it just adds to the total cost. It is time to reduce expenditure on the former to build the latter. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Scattered works of a researcher
Francis Jayakanth fr...@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in writes Hello List, I have a question about the inclusion of all the publications of an author in an institutional repository (IR). The actual scenario is the following: Author A works in Institute X for 'n' of number of years. Institute X has an IR and all the works of A till the time he was associated with institute X are available from the IR of institute X. Author A then relinquishes his position at institute X and takes up a position in Institute Y and henceforth all his works are available from the IR of Institute Y and so on. For a prospective research student or an end user, it becomes difficult to get a full picture of the nature work being done by author A from single source. I agree. We have been dealing with this in the RePEc digital library by having authers build their profiles. Each author does it for him/herself. We have over 20,000 economists who have registered. We use the profiles to build rankings. As an example, for Ben Bernanke, we have http://ideas.repec.org/e/pbe55.html That system has been growing for 11 years now. My question is, what should be the policy of the IRs with respect to the scattered works of an author and how should it be handled? I am working on a system that implements an author claiming system for all disciplines. This is the AuthorClaim system at http://authorclaim.org. The software was funded by the Open Society Institute (OSI). The AuthorClaim system runs since 2008. Within the AuthorClaim system, I am currently reading data for IRs. I don't want to do the harvesting myself. I have been relying on the kind folks of the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, http://www.base-search.net. I have been getting from them data about documents that could be used for author claiming. Clearly not all IR-stored items are suitable. For example, a mediaeval manuscript would be unlikely to be claimed by a living author. Also I am not taking archives of student work as a first priority but I will probably relax that later. Also some data I know for sure is duplicated. Say PubMed central paper are all in PubMed, so I only take one description of it from that source. The data that I have from selected from BASE is documented here http://wotan.liu.edu/base You may want to check that your IR is included. If you don't see it please conduct searches in BASE http://www.base-search.net to see if you find your documents there. If you don't see them contact, contact the Master Aggregator of BASE, Friedrich Summann friedrich.summ...@uni-bielefeld.de. If you do see them in BASE but not in http://wotan.liu.edu/base contact me with a sample record you found in BASE and I will see what I can do for you. At the moment I am still reading the BASE data. Today my records show that I have 2.7 million of 12 million read. Overall are over 100 million authorships that can be claimed in AuthorClaim. All profiles are available at ftp://authorclaim.org for easy mirroring and reuse. The data is licensed as CC0. All profile changes are instantly recorded in the ftp tree. It should be technically straightforward to import all profiles in AuthorClaim into any IR. If a local paper has been claimed (which can be found be looking at the handle) you can build a profile page that contains detailed information about the local paper and brief links to remote papers. Then if your local users complain that the profile page only shows brief descriptions for the remote papers tell them to upload. If you are running EPrints, we have some software that was written as part of the OSI project that allows a tighter intergration between AuthorClaim and an IR, including author name input aids and automatic AuthorProfile update when an author uploads a new paper. But discussing details here would be too technical. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
Derek Law writes Amend the contract. They never notice (two dozen changed so far!) Springer did notice for my ECDL 2000 paper. http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/phoenix.a4.pdf They did not publish it. The conference managers begged me not to mention that the non-appearance of the paper was a permissions issue. Their official version was a technical error. ECDL still publish with Springer, without open access. Yet the same people who go to ECDL hang around the open access meetings. I guess it is a case of do what I say, don't do what I do. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Open Archives and their Significance in the Communication of Science, Workshop in Uppsala November 16 ? 17
Jenny Ericsson writes Open Archives and their Significance in the Communication of Science, Workshop in Uppsala November 16 ? 17. The aim for this workshop is to introduce and sum up the current research about usage- and download data from open archives. How can usage metrics from open archives provide new knowledge about how science is communicated? Can it be a tool for future evaluation of science? These and related questions will be discussed at the workshop at Swedish University of Agricultural sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, on the 16th ? 17th of November. Read more about the programme and participants on the workshop web pages (updated continuously): http://www.slu.se/en/library/about/projects/oaworkshop/ I am surprised you don't Sune Karlsson, the creator of LogEc http://logec.repec.org the usage statistics service of the RePEc digital library http://repec.org who has been working on usage statistics for many years now. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Special OAIster Announcement from OCLC
Dirk Pieper writes Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (www.base-search.net) will stay free and independent. Our API can be used to integrate harvested and normalized content into other search services, maybe we should think about an OAI interface to the BASE index. I am not sure if an API is sufficent. I'd like to have a copy of the source data as well as of the data and scripts that are used to produce the output data. Anybody who will join my line of work will get these via rsync. I still wonder, why there is no discussion about the OCLC OAIster Terms and Conditions: https://www3.oclc.org/app/oaister/oaister_terms.htm There is discussion, not much on the American Scientist Open Access Forum. I am aware of http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-general/2009-September/thread.html https://arl.org/Lists/SPARC-IR/ but there may be others. In general, an OAI-PHM data users, polite for OAI-PMH data exegetes list is probably a good idea. I'd be happy to run it, but I don't want to be the only member. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Special OAIster Announcement from OCLC
I just received this, because I am the maintainer of the RePEc OAI gateway http://oai.repec.org. With around 80 records, it is is one of the largest OAI-PMH providers by number of records. This rather confusing mail hints that the inclusion of OAIster in FirstSearch. It appears to suggest that OAIster will become part of a toll-gated product. I suspect that the RePEc community will not be very much amused to see OCLC making a commercial gain on what RePEc have collected for free use. What do others think? Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel - Forwarded message from OCLC o...@oclc.org - From: OCLC o...@oclc.org To: kric...@openlib.org Subject: Special OAIster Announcement OCLC Updates and Special Offers: OAIster Database Contributors Dear OAIster database contributor: In January, OCLC announced a partnership with the University of Michigan to ensure continued access to your open-archive collections through the OAIster database and expand the visibility of your collections to millions of information seekers through OCLC services. This message provides an update on our progress and some changes planned for October. http://visit.oclc.org/t?ctl=26B403C:09562C313F0DE2FB62E0BBD7DFD73DADF544A2D6437664E7; Transition to OCLC Since January, OCLC has expanded access to your digital resources in OAIster in the following ways: Added the OAIster database to FirstSearch Base Package subscriptions at no additional charge and provided access to the database through the FirstSearch service. Provided access to the OAIster database through WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local quick start for Base Package subscribers. Through this enhanced interface, users of libraries with Base Package subscriptions can search OAIster alone or in combination with other databases such as WorldCat, CAMIO or ArchiveGrid. At the same time, OAIster.org has remained available to provide ongoing Web access. http://visit.oclc.org/t?ctl=26B403D:09562C313F0DE2FB62E0BBD7DFD73DADF544A2D6437664E7; Next steps OCLC and the University of Michigan are working together to complete the transfer of OAIster harvesting operations to OCLC. In October 2009, OCLC will add OAIster records to WorldCat.org. In order to make your OAIster records discoverable on WorldCat.org, we are requesting your institution's agreement. Please see item number 2 below. What do these changes mean for users of the OAIster database? OAIster users will have two ways to access the records you contribute to OAIster. - WorldCat.org search results will include OAIster records. WorldCat.org is a publicly available Web site searchable at no charge. When users search WorldCat.org, OAIster records will be included in search results. Each search will retrieve results from the WorldCat database along with OAIster and article-level content from sources that now include GPO Monthly Catalog, ArticleFirst, MEDLINE, ERIC, the British Library and Elsevier. Records from all sources are presented to users in integrated search results. - Authenticated users of libraries that subscribe to the FirstSearch Base Package may search OAIster as a separate database through WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local quick start. These users will be able to select OAIster for searching from the Advanced search screen. What do these changes mean for me, as an OAIster contributor? Your participation in this open archive project will help maintain the ongoing growth of the OAIster database and ensure that the OAIster collections continue to support scholarly research, communication and scholarship. With your commitment, OCLC will continue to provide access to these valuable resources that complement the types of resources already cataloged in WorldCat, broadening the scope of collections to include open archives, and reaching millions of information seekers through WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local quick start. 1. Harvesting your metadata (records) OCLC will continue to harvest and index the records you make available via OAI-PMH. As records are harvested, they will be made available through WorldCat.org. Details about harvesting will be available on a new Web site in mid-October. If you currently use CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software, you have the added benefit and option of uploading your CONTENTdm metadata to WorldCat, for even better Web visibility, using the new self-service Web tool--the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. The Gateway enables you to choose the right content and appearance for WorldCat display, as well as how often the metadata is synchronized with WorldCat. With your records in WorldCat, your
Re: Special OAIster Announcement from OCLC
Jonathan Rochkind writes I read this as saying that Why do we have to do OCLC astrology? Why can't they say clearly what they want to do? If OCLC stopped providing the free access points to OAISter that we are used, that would be a problem. Doesn't sound like this is happening. http://visit.oclc.org/t?ctl=26B403F:09562C313F0DE2FB62E0BBD7DFD73DADF544A2D6437664E7; asks me to nominate an IP address to receive free access to OAIster from. Meaning that the IP addresses will no have free access. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
Arthur Sale writes I totally disagree that researchers should be free to deposit where they will. This one of the basic tennants of academic fredom. Instititutional mandates reduce that freedom. That's why I, and many other academics, oppose mandates. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? [in French, from Rector's blog, U. Li�ge]
Stevan Harnad writes (Academic freedom refers to the freedom to research (just about) whatever one wishes, and to report (just about) whatever one finds and concludes therefrom. in the channel of one's choice. IRs should make themselves publication channels of choice. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates
Guédon Jean-Claude writes That, in itself, deserves commenting and may well point to faculty resistance to doing yet another bureaucratic task. Faculty? The authors in this study are not necessarily faculty. In fact, I think it is problematic to study faculty authors together with student authors. For student authors, mandates should be fairly effective, since they take it as part of the process. For faculty, I agree with you, it's just another bureaucratic task. It does not have to be like that. IRs fill if they appeal to faculty's' sense of self-promotion. This is what makes RePEc archives so successful. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates
Alma Swan writes True, we shouldn't get too wound up about this. Interoperability means that back-harvesting, forward-harvesting and upside-down-harvesting can go on wherever appropriate but it is a shame that we have arrived at a point where universities, the mainstays of our societies' research endeavours, have to develop more complex policies than would otherwise have been the case had funders simply directed their grantees to deposit their work in their institutional collections and harvested from there. The funders know where their grantees are, the repository software has a metadata field for funder, so the mechanics are simple. The funder would still have to be aware of all institutional repositories, harvest the metadata from all, police IRs so that the funder information is actually correct, find themselves in the funder field, adapt procedures to find the full-text from the metadata, harvest the full text. It's very difficult to do at present, because no appropriate registries exist. If a universal registry of authors and institutions can be be built, then it becomes reasonably easy to gather within an IR the OA material authored by all authored of the institution irrespectively of initial locus of deposit. I am working precisely on these registries at this time. I thought that RePEc was an example of how things should work. You are of course correct. Contributors of articles put them in their institutional collection and RePEc harvests them - actually, harvests the metadata - and presents to the economics research community a collection of free-to-access economic literature. I am at a loss to understand, then, why Thomas keeps apparently arguing against this model, Where do you get this idea from? I am opposed to institutional mandates as the way to populate an IR. Institutions should encourage deposit but respect the freedom of academics to publish their work as they see fit. No RePEc archive that I know of (there are now over 900 contributing archives, so I can't be sure) has been populated with a mandate. I also support subject based collections, such as E-LIS. But that does not mean I am against institutional repositories. since he himself has been instrumental in establishing it I am generally considered to be the founder but I have, over the years, made myself dispensable. and showing it to be a success, and why others consistently hold it up as an example of good practice (which it is) while arguing the case for centralised deposit (which RePEc doesn't have). Or have I got the wrong end of the stick there? You are quite correct in your description of RePEc. Experts use RePEc not an example for central deposit but to emphasise the need to get community involvement. Some of the elements that made RePEc a success can be exported to an interdisciplary level. Two of these are the author and institutional registration. Again this is precisely what I am working on. Thus is the same way that I have been battling for years to set up RePEc, against all odds since no such system had been set up, I am now battling to on these registries. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy
Stevan Harnad writes And an author having to import and deposit every one of his own institutional outputs into his own institutional repository No this can be partly automated at today's level of technology and data infrastructure. The rest can be done by IR staff. Future scholarly communciation infrastructure could almost fully automate the process. because it was deposited institution-externally instead of institutionally is not extra work (for every author, and institution)? If you require the deposit at the author's IR you will create work for the funders. Funders don't like to mandate extra work for themselves. Isn't the gist of the OAI concept that central service-providers should harvest from distributed local content-providers, rather than vice versa? I am not sure if there is an OAI concept. There is an OAI-PMH protocol, it talks about metadata being harvested from one computer system to another. Whether the first computer or the second computer is a central service provider is of no interest to the protocol. (Or should everyone be depositing directly in Google, and then harvesting back?) AFAIK, Google does not accept deposits. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy
Arthur Sale writes ~SUniversities are delinquent in their duty of public accountability if they do not make all their research outputs which are not specifically commissioned by private enterprise publicly accessible on the Internet.~T That's what you think is their duty. There are plenty of publicly funded bodies that don't make their documents publicly available on the Internet. Think of the OECD, or the UK Ordenance Survey for example. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter for debate. Funders can nominate where they want the research they fund to be deposited, but in reality, to do so other than in the institutional repository simply creates extra work for everyone, Not for everyone. If a funder has a repository it is safest for them to require deposit in their repository. It is otherwise cumbersome to check that the deposit is there and stays there. If the university wants a copy they can download it from the funders' site. and conflicts of interest. What conflicts? Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse
Stevan Harnad writes (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. So, do you reccommend arXiv, RePEc, E-LIS, etc to close down? Disclosure: I am the creator of RePEc and involved in E-LIS. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse
Stevan Harnad writes (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. So, do you reccommend arXiv, RePEc, E-LIS, etc to close down? Disclosure: I am the creator of RePEc and involved in E-LIS. Cheers, Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
hussein suleman writes this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory ... in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world (like arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they were run by poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the owners of data trying to provide services as well) and the model simply did not replicate to all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of poster child repositories) ... in some senses, this crisis in subject repositories led to the Santa Fe meeting of the OAI. Your memory is indeed fading. The Santa Fe meeting was informed by work of a group of authors: Herbert Van de Sompel, Thomas Krichel, Michael L. Nelson, Patrick Hochstenbach, Victor M. Lyapunov, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Mohamed Kholief, Xiaoming Liu, and Heath O'Connell, The UPS Prototype project: exploring the obstacles in creating across e-print archive end-user service, Old Dominion University Computer Science TR 2000-01, February 2000. This is the full version. There is a censored version of it that apeared in D-LIB magazine, but the above is the full version, I still have a copy at http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/upsproto.pdf The project looked at building a user service uniting contents from the following archives: arXiv, CogPrints, NACA, NCSTRL, NDLTD and RePEc. Out of these NCSTRL is out of business, it was NSF funded, as soon as the funding stopped, it was dropped, bascially. Thus http://dlib.cs.odu.edu/publications.htm has a link to the full version, but it's a dead link to a server at Cornell where NCSTRL services lived. But all the others are still in business. but who is willing to invest a lot of money and many years on redoing an experiment that failed in many instances not too long ago? I would be interested in seeing a list of these many instances. There is indeed a problem of grant-funded digital libraries failing when the grant expires. This continues to be a serious problem. But I don't think this was the impetus for the OAI work. Cheers, 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
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: Central versus institutional self-archiving
David Goodman writes 1. The growth of archiving will be greatly facilitated by the growth of the disciplinary archives, such as Cogprints http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/. Hmm. If the figures at http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/year/ are to be believed, there are now less then 3000 documents in that archive. I think Cogprints exists since 1996 or so. You will have to wait till Kingdom come at that speed before all of cognitive sciences (whatever that is) is in Cogprints. They're an obvious place to post, and an obvious place to look. Some central discipline-based archives work, others don't. I conclude that there is no obvious way to open access across disciplines. Each discipline has to go its own way, and some will never get there. 4. For this purpose, I proposed that disciplinary archives are better than institutional, and Stevan proposed exactly the opposite. This debate has no answer. Scholarly communication occurs across fuzzy groups called disciplines. The Internet and digital documents sets these groups free from brick and mortar library constraints. It would be very peculiar to see all of them adapt the same way of working since the new medium allows so much more freedom. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Workshop on Open Access
a centralized archive called arXiv, which has more than 15 mirror sites including one located in India (Matscience, Chennai). There are several other centralized archives such as Cogprints (for cognitive sciences), CiteSeer (for computer science) and RePEc (for economics). RePEc is not a centralized archive. It is an archival system that has itself more than 350 archives contributing to it. CiteSeer is not an archive at all. Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Setting up an institutional archive: some experiences
Eriksson Jörgen writes We are very interested in getting in touch with other institutional archives to share experiences on ways of implementing an institutional archive. Please send comments and your experiences either to the list or directly to us. There is a special mailing list for this purpose, see http://lists.openlib.org/mailman/listinfo/oai-eprints I set it up as an outcome of the last CERN OAI workshop. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Author Publication Charge Debate
Fytton Rowland writes I believe that paid-for secondary services like Chemical Abstracts *will* have a place in the new world of OA. Some may have, others won't have. Building collections of secondary data is what the OAI-PMH protocol is all about. If the full-text is free, it is more valuable the better it is disseminated. So you can see that content publishers will be happy to make some extra efforts to make their data collections harvestable and aggregatable. Comparining RePEc http://repec.org, 200k records, free and EconLit http://www.econlit.org, 600k records, $$$, I don't see how EconLit will survive in the longer run. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: New channel of support for open-access publishing
Stevan Harnad writes On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Thomas Krichel wrote: $1500 per paper should be amply sufficient to fund the publishing operation. I suggest that libraries support other ventures with more moderate charges. Thomas, did you mean $500 ? Otherwise your posting does not quite make sense. (PLoS is proposing $1500.) Yes, that is what I meant: $1500 should be amply sufficient. Institutions should not be handing more money to PLoS. If you meant $500 I remind you that PLoS is aiming explicitly for the high (quality, impact, prestige) end of science publishing (the level of Nature and Science) on the assumption that if the high end can be won over to OA journals, the rest will follow suit. By the same token, do you sincerely want to suggest that the competitors of PLoS who charge more reasonable fees are intending to attract low-quality papers? Surely not! They just not as greedy as PLoS. It costs as much to publish quality intellectual contents as it cost to publish rubbish intellectual contents. Sure, if you have complicate multi-media contents, then your costs are likely to be higher. But most of the documents we are talking here about are, presumably, the traditional stuff of text, mathematical formulas and pictures that academic authors are trained to produce. To produce good multi-media is a different story, it is likely to be the preserve of trade authors. $1500 may well cover extra enhancements that make the transition at the high end more appealing to authors at this time. PLoS can use the 9 Million subsidy that they already have received for that transition. Institutional monies will better spent on institutional archiving, or participation in discipline based initiatives such as arXiv.org, RePEc, or rclis.org. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Third Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative
Announcement [crossposted] CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the benefits of OAI 3rd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI3) LIBER, SPARC and SPARC-Europe, and the CERN Library are organising the third OAI workshop at CERN, Geneva (Switzerland) on 12-14 February 2004. Please see further details and book online at http://info.web.cern.ch/info/OAIP/ The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was founded in 2000 to bring the benefits of open archives-compliant software to the research community and launch an international network of institutional repositories. Since OAI's founding, there have been many successful applications of the technology, and a simultaneous, widespread understanding that open archives technology is the foundation for the future of research. In the field of scholarly communication there has also been a remarkable evolution: open access journals have achieved respectability through the activities of BioMed Central and PLoS and the number of such journals is rising; scholarly societies are becoming interested in the open access model, and we have seen some society publishers adopt the open access model. The foremost granting agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. have both issued statements supporting open access. However, libraries have not yet reaped large benefits from the OAI's success. Through publishers' big deals, more commercial journal titles than ever before are accessible, and library budgets are tightly bound to them in long-term contracts. Library customers are growing accustomed to the enormous comfort offered by the databases of those publishers and, as a consequence, switching to alternative models for scientific communication has become less and less acceptable. We want to change this. The third CERN workshop will bring together librarians and information specialists, publishers, scientists and university managers who want to bring the benefits of open archives technology and open access publishing to libraries. The conference's action-focused agenda will prioritize initiatives to be undertaken, in order to increase the impact of OAI on the process of scientific publishing. [sent on behalf of the OAI3 Organising Committee] http://info.web.cern.ch/info/OAIP/Committee.htm
Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
?iso-8859-1?Q?Hugo_Fjelsted_Alr=F8e?= writes By community-building, I mean that such archives can contribute to the creation or development of the identity of a scholarly community in research areas that go across the established disciplinary matrix of the university world. This crucial if self-archiving is to take off. I know the same thing can in principle be done with OAI-compliant university archives and a disciplinary hub or research area hub, and in ten years time, we may not be able to tell the difference. But today, it is still not quite the same thing. Correct. This is a point that is too many times overlooked. RePEc (see http://repec.org) prodives an example for this in the area of economics. RePEc archives are not OAI compliant but an OAI gateway export all the RePEc data. Many RePEc services are in the business of community building. The crucial part, though, it RePEc's author registration service. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org from Espoo, Finlandhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
Barry Mahon writes The actual technical aspects of the database loading may be irrelevant but there is an important corollorary - secondary information services (abstracting and indexing) play an increasingly important role as the primary literature becomes more and more diffused in the location of its primary publication. These are certainly not free - it costs a lot of money to collect and collate the material, even though a number of the organisations doing this work are non-profit, such as Chemical Abstracts, Inspec, etc. There are free abstract and indexing services around, see CiteSeer, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs, DBLP, see http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/, for computer science and RePEc, http://repec.org, for economics. I am the principal founder of RePEc and I am in the process of implementing the ideas behind this collection for Computing and Library and Information Science, see http://rclis.org. Not much there yet, though, because such systems take a long time to be produce. BTW, ICSTI will be holding a meeting in January 2004 on the topic of the 'new economic models' The trick is to get the community involed, in that way you minimize cost on a central collection. The RePEc collection illustrates this masterfully. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
Matthew Cockerill writes * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The * freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs * (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for * this. * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. Thank you for pointing this out. I have always held these ideas (as formulated by Richard Stallman) in high esteem. This is where I see the main role of the OAI, as to provide metadata on primary works with which secondary, i.e. abstracting and indexing services can be built, as I pointed out in my presentation to the ALA, http://openlib.org/home/krichel/presentations/toronto_2003-06-22.ppt BioMed Central's policy of Open Access is based on a giving the scientific community a similarly broad freedom to make use of the research articles that we publish. This includes giving access to the structured form of the articles, and giving the right to redistribute and create derivative works from the articles. It will take a long time until the ideas of reusable code will move from the hacker community to the academic community. Part of that time delay comes from the underlying matter, i.e. academic research is not as immediately reusable as object-oriented software code. Another reason for the delay is the social environment. It matters a lot more who has written a research paper than who has written a piece of code. Because of that the open access movement must make sure that the transition to open access is demonstrably rational for each academic, not just collectively rational for the academic community as a whole. This is not a trivial task. We need to have freely-available conventional abstract and indexing data, as well as evaluative data. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org visiting CO PAH, Novosibirsk http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: The RePEc (Economics) Model
Leslie Carr writes sh It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general sh discussion of open access and self-archiving for researchers. tc You constantly belittle techncial problems, and then you wonder tc why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because tc these technical problems have not been solved. By belittling tc them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution. You know, I wonder if that's the case. I can see your point, and I won't argue that EPrints, or DSpace, or arxiv provides perfect technical solutions to every imaginable problem or the perfect user interface for every user. I did not express myself well I wrote, I meant to say that much of what Stevan belittles as technical is in fact symptomatic of wider social issue that impact on the academic self-documentation process. (I will refrain here from speaking of RePeC, since I don't know of any shortcomings that it may have :-) One obvious example is the captialization of the name that folks don't seem to get right :-) I think this area (academic motivation) is quite likely to hold the key to the missing content. That is what I have been saying all along. You have to give academics the motivation to participate. A reliance on carrot and stick from central administration is not likely to be sufficient. Certainly in local discussions several solutions have been suggested, but no agreement on a globally optimal solution has been reached :-) Sure, because a global solution is not there, it depends on the discipline. Some will get to self-archive slowly some fast, some not at all. I can surly imagine a situation where for legal scholarship you have to pay, but where physics is free. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: The RePEc (Economics) Model
with Clifford and his---implicit---call to shut them down, to fit all publishing activities into a central straightjacket. but then the slow progress in this, and the success of the physicists' centralized disciplinary model suggested that centralized, discipline-based self-archiving might be faster, with the Physics Arxiv itself perhaps subsuming it all http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/99/ (Thomas Krichel argued against central archiving, Nope. I simply argued that the centralized model would not carry through to many disciplines. Where it worked it was certainly an extremely good model. But you insisted that because the Physcists had done it everyone could and would, it was the optimal way (your flavour of the day). But I am still right. arXiv has a very unequal distribution of papers even in sub-areas of Physics, I am told. Ebs will know better. arXiv is still growing and that is a good thing. But central archiving did not catch on (Cogprints has only reached 1500 papers in 2003) or generalize to other disciplines, Exactly as I had forecasted! And that, depite the fact that it was a project subsidized by public funds. When WoPEc became a funded project, by the same funders, it had around 5,000 papers accumulated as a labor of love, only. Much of that work was done by José Manuel Barrueco Cruz. and Arxiv itself kept growing at only an unchanged linear rate from year to year: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions Sure, but it is still is the finest self-archiving project on the planet. But it really is self-archiving. Self-archiving is only a part of what I call self-documentation. And then came the OAI protocol in 1999, making distributed self-archiving equivalent to central (because of interoperability) http://www.openarchives.org/documents/index.html They are not quite, but that is a matter for another email... which immediately prompted me to ask Rob Tansley to redesign the Cogprints software to make it OAI-compliant and then turn it into free generic OAI archive-creating software for institutions http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html And I think your team are doing a very good job with this. I think I now understand this. See above. Both Repec's aggregation of institutional multi-paper archives in economics and Citeseer/ResearchIndex's harvesting of arbitrary individual websites in computer science Citeseer are a truely fab project. The material that is there should become part of new, RePEc-like data structure called rclis and pronounced reckless. Watch out for it over the next few years. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: The RePEc (Economics) Model
Stevan Harnad writes The Big Koan is: Why aren't all researchers self-archiving yet, given its benefits and feasibility? http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html One answer that I have is that the benefits of doing self archiving have to be demostrated to the invidual level of each researcher. Making general arguments about it is not enough. One thing that we do in RePEc (sorry), is that we aggregate all papers for a certain author, through a registration project called HoPEc. We also aggregate access logs across most of our user services in the LogEc project. Thus we can furnish researches with precise data to see how much the papers that they have been making available are accessed. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes Thomas gives exactly the correct answer to Chris! I didn't know this was a quiz :-) What is needed is institutional self-archiving, distributed across its departments interoperably, but customized to the different needs of the different disciplines. That is a tall order. (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot. Cliff imagines that they can, but in practice, it will be tough. You can not put a KGB officer in every academic's office! (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all. Sure, but all have some ways to communicate informally, and many have innovative channels. Sure, many of them stay small, but there is not technical obstacle to a meaningful aggergation. (4) There are many other potential uses for institutional research archives (apart from open access). I agree. If I would run an institution's archive I would back up all the web sites each year. In 20 years time, you would get a fascinating picture of the development of the institution. (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional OAI archives. no, it is easier to construct feature-rich datasets out of disciplinary archives, because some of them will be prepared with the specifics of an aggregator in mind. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes What is needed, urgently, today, is universal self-archiving, and not trivial worries about whether to do it here or there or both: OAI-interoperability makes this into a non-issue from the self-archiver's point of view, and merely a technical feature to sort out, from the OAI-developers' point of view. Success here depends on selling the idea to academics, and that depends crucially on what business models are followed. What Chris has in mind is only one, exceptional, special case, namely, the Physics ArXiv, a disciplinary archive (but the *only* one) which is, since 1991, well on the road to getting filled in certain subareas of physics (200,000+ papers) (although even this archive is still a decade from completeness at its present linear growth rate: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions see slide 10 of http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm ) There are other special cases. In fact each of the disciplines that have traditionally issued preprints and working papers, i.e. computer science, economomics, mathematics and physics has its own special case. All have their own business model. One size does not fit all. No need! First, because the duplification of effort is so minimal It will not be, especially when there is a chance to have different versions in different archives, this could be rather, if not highly, problematic. It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general discussion of open access and self-archiving for researchers. You constantly belittle techncial problems, and then you wonder why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because these technical problems have not been solved. By belittling them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Lee Miller writes The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a discipline field in the metadata. This gets back to the problems of subject classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined discipline descriptors should be sufficient. For example, the discipline of ecology includes plants, animals, microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, physical environments, physiology, applied mathematics, and many other sub-fields. Nevertheless, ecologists of all stripes recognize and enjoy common bonds in the general discipline. A small number of general journals that publish papers from many of the sub-disciplines are followed by many researchers and academics, regardless of their specialty fields. Thus inclusion of the discipline desciptor ecology would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has already proved useful to ecologists for over a century. A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional archives. Yes, but this is not what I think is the prime task of aggregator services. Your thinking is that such services will make it easier for users to find papers belonging to a certain discipline. Within that thinking I agree there is scope for value-added user services. For example, once you have identified all paper is the area of ecology, you can start something like NEP: New Ecology Papers. That is, you can mail a list of all the new papers that have appeared within the subject of ecology out to editors (who would be working as volunteers) and then have them filter those papers that belong to microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, etc, and forward the paper discriptions to a list of subscribers who are interested in those subjects. Such a system already works well with RePEc, see http://nep.repec.org. But: such value added services for users are not the main function of aggregators, imho. Aggregators are more about serving the authors of papers. They should be conceived as instruments to incentivize authors to contribute to formal archives. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
!) Sure, that is why we need institutional support to take the competition head on, by maximising the impact of our work. But the object of the competition is still the discipline. Content aggregation, in other words, is a paper-based notion. In the online era, it merely means digital sorting of the pointers to the content. I understand that. But you can aggregate and aggregate, as long as you not prove that formal archiving is improving impact, you are not likely to get far with your formal archiving. I am afraid, there more and more such faculty members. Much of the research papers found over the Internet are deposited in the way. This trend is growing not declining. You mean self-archiving in arbitrary non-OAI author websites? I do. There is another reason why institutional OAI archives and official institutional self-archiving policies (and assistance) are so important. In reality, it is far easier to deposit and maintain one's papers in institutional OAI archives like Eprints than to set up and maintain one's own website. All that is needed is a clear official institutional policy, plus some startup help in launching it. (No such thing is possible at a discipline level.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi If this is what authors feel, then this is wonderful. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If the authors do not deposit, you will have to think (yet again) about your best strategy. Incidentally, have you deposited all your papers in institutional archives? I see some ~harnad above. Heaven forbid I tell Clifford about this :-) But where there is a causal contingency -- as there is between (a) the research impact and its rewards, which academics like as much as anyone else, and (b) the accessibility of their research -- academics are surely no less responsive than Prof. Skinner's pigeons and rats to those causal contingencies, and which buttons they will have to press in order to maximize their rewards! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm Yes, but the arguing in the aggregate is not sufficient, I think. You have to demonstrate that to individual academics, figures at hand. In the meantime you have to collect formally archive contents. Institutional archives is one way, departmental is another way, discipline based archiving another, but there is no right or wrong way. Whatever way there is discipline-based services will be a key to providing incentives to scholars. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data
Stevan Harnad writes The excellent (truly remarkable!) Regensburg resource Ebs cites below: http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=Acolors=7lang=e\ n lists 759 Physics journals, of which 103 (14%) are open access. (Is this complete?) The list is a remarkable piece of work. It is unfortunate that you seem to missread their data. When the award the green mark, it means that the journal comes with freely available fulltext articles. It does not mean open access. I checked this out for the Wirtschaftswoche, marked green for, a German Economics magazine and by no intents and purposes a scholarly journal. Some contents are short full texts, others are summaries of articles in the magazine, and some are short news items. But this is by no means the full contents of the magazine, I should think. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data
Stevan Harnad writes Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9 million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html This is excellent news for open access Maybe. But is it good news for scholarly communication? Probably not. They want $1500 per submission. We discussed that with the RePEc community. A library would have to cancel one of the expensive journal in our discipline for a year to fund one submission. Using data from Ted Bergstrom, Bob Parks made a rough calculation that if a library took all the journals in Ted's list, which has many journals in economics and certainly the most expensive ones, it could fund 42 submissions with the money that it would save from cancelling all the submission, assuming that it would buy all of the, no library does that. Now note that these are submissions, not accepted papers. If they have a high rejection rate, you burn all you money for your serial budget onto trying to get into one of the two journals. Noone except the very well-funded will be able to publish there. Can anyone tell me how an organization can cash in $9 Million, over 5 years, and not be able to operate two, presumably online, journals with this money without charging a submission fee, for at least the time that the subsidy runs for? Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Interoperability - subject classification/terminology
Stevan Harnad writes (2) The University Eprint Archive as a means of providing open access to all of the university's peer-reviewed research output (before and after peer review). Almost without exception, this is the work that also appears in the peer-reviewed journals sooner or later (indeed, that is how it gets peer-reviewed). It should be clear that (2) is a very special subset of (1). But it should be equally clear that that special subset does not have any particular or pressing classification problem! I beg to differ. Scholars are subject to herd behavior. You will not get scholars to deposit papers in the local archive if their colleagues in other universities don't do it. Thus you have to approach scholars by community. To do that, you need to classify the mateiral that you have per discipline, in order to build discipline-specific aggregators, such as the (pioneering) RePEc project for economics. can beat google-style boolean search on an inverted full-text index, especially if aided by citation-frequency, hit-based, recency-based, or relevance-based ranking of search output, as done, for example, by http://citebase.eprints.org/help/index.php ). Yes but all those services require discipline based, relational dataset to be precise. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel ___ OAI-eprints mailing list oai-epri...@lists.openlib.org http://lists.openlib.org/mailman/listinfo/oai-eprints
Re: Book on future of STM publishers
Fytton Rowland writes Thomas, are you suggesting that PhD students should not have to pay the printing and binding costs of their theses? Yes. That the University should print and bind the thesis for the student free of charge? Theses have been bound and printed to make them accessible and preserve them. If universities think that this is still necessary, they should do it on behalf of the student. Or, more sensibly, that the University should stop requiring printed theses and allow submission in electronic form -- on a CD-ROM, if they wish to avoid any subsequent changes to the thesis? Universities should preserve the students' works, because students don't have the lifespan to take on that task. This is a principle that should be medium-independent. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Book on future of STM publishers
Fytton Rowland writes But here the students usually just groan and bear it! Getting the money for the printing cost back sounds like a flimsy excuse to me. If someone does a doctorate to become a member of the academic profession, then toll-gating the PhD does not seem to me to be a good strategy, because of the adverse effects that it has on dissemination. And the same thing should hold for libraries. Libraries should pay for printing out students work, archive local dissertations on paper (because of the problems of digital preservation), and make them available through Eprints, and pay for this by not buying dissertations produced anywhere else, or reduce serials holdings. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Book on future of STM publishers
M. Meier writes An exposé is availabel under http://www.ep.uni-muenchen.de/themen.htm. The book as a whole will unfortunately not be available online for free. I understand that the book is Michael's PhD thesis. I think that it would be interesting to understand the reasons why it is not freely available online. If the FOS movement can not convince scholars in scholarly communication to make their work freely available online, we do have a problem. I would like to understand what the problem is here. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: What About the Author Self-Archiving of Books?
David Goodman writes The traditional solution here is a traditional library. Some things librarians can't do as well as we would like, but we do know how to buy books and lend them to people. It would be a waste of resources for a book that is written in German, when there may only be a handful of people on campus who read that language. That brings me back to my earlier point about the automated translation. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
I think that much of this debate comes from a confusion about the meaning of the term free. When we talk about Eprints software being free, the term free should take the meaning as implied by the GNU public license. In this particular meaning, one should think of it as freedom, rather then zero euro. More precisely, Richard Stallman, who is the main father figure of the free software movement, will tell you that free software is any software that has four freedoms attached. freedom 0: You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. freedom 1: You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. freedom 2: You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee. freedom 3: You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Since Eprints is under the GNU public license, it is has a license attached to it that aims to protect these freedoms. Under the license, the producers of Eprints are free to charge per download, but they could not prevent another organization allowing zero-charge downloads. Free software is sometimes opposed to commercial software. That is a false opposition. Commercial software is written for a profit. Free software can also be written for a profit. For example mySQL a leading free relational database software. It is produced by a commercial company. I assume they make their money consulting others on how to costumize and use it, rather than on the software itself. I have no affiliation with the company so I am not entirely sure. I presume that Ingenta have similar things in mind. Plus, they will be running services to run archives on behalf of other organizations. The clients would choose to let Ingenta run Eprints for them, rather than doing it themselves. I have been a champion of free access since 1993, when I put the world's first free economics paper online, and I am the the founder of RePEc, a very large FOS initative for economics. I have had my fair share of arguments with Stevan in the past, but on this occasion :-), he is spot on right, there is nothing to worry about. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: What About the Author Self-Archiving of Books?
Stevan Harnad writes On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Thomas Krichel wrote: Not so simple. What do you mean? He does not give away, I do not read. Two simple choices by two individuals. It has no bearing on the general issues. Then why post it to this Forum, which is concerned with the general issues? Other lines in my message and the previous one pertained to general issues. That preference and that prerogative are as old as the hills, and have nothing to do with the radically new open-access possibilities opened up by the online medium, which pertain only to give-away goods: This includes all peer-reviewed articles (2 million a year, appearing in 20,000 journals), but it most definitely does not include all books. You are speaking as if there is an immutable split between give-away and non-giveway. That is not the case. Authors will have to choose between the two. It is important that authors be made aware on how much more their work will used if it is freely available. This is one aspect where the FOS has not done as well as it could. The conflation of the objective of free access to give-away digital content with the notion that all digital content should be free That is not what I have been advocating. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: EPrints Handbook
Roy Tennant writes Here it is at the EconPapers archive in Sweden: http://econpapers.hhs.se/paper/cdloplwec/38.htm Here it is in the WoPEc archive in the UK: http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/WoPEc/data/Papers//cdloplwec38.html There URLs come through RePEc project, see http://repec.org. RePEc provides a few more services of this style. They all deliver to a common pool of logs that has abstract view and downloading statistics, see http://logec.repec.org This can show authors with figures at hand how well they are doing. Most RePEc services contribute to this common pool. A set of current awareness lists that are filtered by subject editors, see http://nep.repec.org, does not do this at the moment. Formerly, we talked about the possibilities of OAI in the abstract to our faculty. Now we can demonstrate it in reality. That, as you might imagine, is a powerful thing. Yes, but David Cahill is right that you can not build many good services with the oai_dc metadata. For your data, we rely on massaging cdl data into RePEc's internal format to deliver the services that we do. We really need better data and better metadata. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel CORRECT private phone: 1-718-507-1117 RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
Bernard Lang writes The one important point I read there is: « You can put your paper on your own Web site if you want. The only thing we insist on is that if we publish your article you don't publish it in a Springer or Wiley journal, too. In fact, I believe we have the most liberal copyright policy available. » Is that what the Elsevier copyright form says ? Yes, at least one that was common for economics journals a few years ago. However, as far as I am aware off, that policy is not posted on any Elsevier web site. Furthermore, he did not say anything about putting it on another web site. On an open archive managed by someone else ? The concept of own web site is a fuzzy one. Salut, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Elsevier's ChemWeb Preprint Archive
Jim Till writes It may be noteworthy that the largest number of preprints has been in the subfield of physical chemistry. Might this be another example (along with the arXiv server) of physics-oriented scientists choosing to be early adopters of preprint servers? My theory is that it is because Physical Chemistry is at the border with physics and physics is a preprint discipline. Similar things happen around econonomics which is another area of preprint tradition. You will find preprints in finance at the border between economics and business much more than say in marketing, which is as area that is further away from economics. Thus it has more to do with established behaviour rather than flexibility towards a new behaviour. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Open Archives Initiative
ps, there is just today an interesting article in the Cronicle of HE Scholars Urge a Boycott of Journals That Won't Release Articles to Free Archives http://chronicle.com/free/2001/03/2001032601t.htm Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Citation and Rejection Statistics for Eprints and Ejournals
David Goodman writes There is also a difference bewteen the various fields about how much workjustifies a separate publication. This is sometimes called the LPU, Least Publishable Unit. also called a publon. Physicists have researched that area (they are always ahead of the rest of us ;-). James Trevelyan and Peter Kovesi write: Publons Recent discoveries in the particle physics of the scientific publication industry have confirmed some hitherto ill-defined properties of the elusive publon particle. Originally discovered in Oxford, according to disputed reports, the publon is the elementary particle of scientific publication. A recent international congress [1] agreed on a definition: the elementary quantum of scientific research which justifies publication. However, the exact measurements were the subject of heated debate and no agreement was possible. It has long been known that publons are mutually repulsive. The chances of finding more than one publon in a paper are negligible [2]. The recent discoveries seem to confirm suspicions that publons can exist in more than one place simultaneously. Evidence from conferences in the more prolific disciplines, as diverse as Artificial Neural Networks, Cancer and AIDS research, and DNA Fingerprinting, has confirmed that the same publon has appeared in more than one conference or journal publication at the same time. Even more intriguing is the apparent ability of the same publon to manifest itself at widely separated instants in time. Once alerted to this new property, researchers have been inundated with confirmed reports of papers containing the same ideas separated by several years or even decades. One reason why this has not emerged until now seems to be that a publon can manifest itself with different words and terminology on each occasion, thus defeating observations with even the most powerful database scanners. From this, one can conclude that publons occupy a warped space-time continuum, and thus may be the first elementary particle to be confirmed to do so. Time travel, at least in the reverse direction, is a possibility. Spatial and time confusion are more definite probabilities. Of perhaps most concern is the likelihood of multiple publon images, particularly in CV's. Therefore, readers are warned to be cautious with publication lists, and to verify the exact number of distinct publons which give rise to the many publon images visible within the lists. The number of publons is likely to be less than the number of distinctly observable images, though the multiple image factor is known to vary widely. Researchers creating publons face the greatest difficulties arising from this research. For their career prospects depend not so much on the number of publons they create, as the number of images which are apparent to their employers. While word processors have helped enormously, drastically reducing the time needed to create publon images, their quality is subjected to an unprecedented level of quantitative analysis. Many believe that such quantitative analysis is neither feasible or economically justifiable. Most seem to agree that quality assessment requires experience of publon creation, and cannot be left to amateurs. [1] International Council of Scientific Unions, Working Party on Scientific Publication, Committee on Free Circulation of Scientific Ideas, XXV meeting, Aachen, Germany, 1991, pp 55423-87. [2] International Standards Organization, ISO/TC 297/SC 42/WG 3 N 8/ Revision 25b/ 1981-10-32. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Evaluation of preprint/postprint servers
Jim Till writes So, should one criterion for the evaluation of the quality of preprint/ postprint servers be the existence of (as a minimum) a filtering system analogous to the one described by Greg? Yes. But it may not be done at the archive level, but rather at the issuing institution level. Within the RePEc system, (almost all) archives are operated by institutions, be they University departments, or public bodies like the Federal Reserve Boards, the IMF and others. They simply continue the tradition---inherited from the print era---of issuing free publications. In the amount of crackpot material in these archives is nil. When a new RePEc archive is opened, we check the affiliation of the person who requests an archive. If she is working for a recognized institution, then we allow them to go ahead. From our experience that eliminates the need for further screening. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel 2000-10-05 to 2001-01-06: Institute for Economic Research / Hitotsubashi University 2-1 Naka / Kunitachi / Tokyo 186-8603 / Japan / +81(0)42 580 8349 tho...@micro.ier.hit-u.ac.jp
Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
Greg Kuperberg writes But I disagree entirely with the claim that distributed interoperability has never been tried before. It has been tried several times, whole-heartedly with these two projects: MPRESS - mathnet.preprints.org NCSTRL - ncstrl.org And it has been a factor in many other projects, including Hypatia and the AMS preprint server. Some of these projects are more successful than others, but *all* of them suffer from inconstancy of the underlying archives. The largest project that has been done with a distributed interoperability is RePEc. RePEc catalogs 11 items now. While there is the occasional case that an archive my become obsolete, from about 140 archives, I think 5 have been made obsolete, i.e. have been moved to a place outside the original archive maintainer's control. Thus while it is problem, it is not a minor one. It is by far outweight by other advantages, such as distributed costs, minimum quality control, and wide community partipation. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel 2000-10-05 to 2001-01-06: Institute for Economic Research / Hitotsubashi University 2-1 Naka / Kunitachi / Tokyo 186-8603 / Japan / +81(0)42 580 8349 tho...@micro.ier.hit-u.ac.jp
Re: Legal ways around copyright for one's own giveaway texts
Christopher D. Green writes Stevan Harnad wrote: Please note that you are now asking about embargo POLICY, not copyright LAW, and embargo policy has no legal status. It is merely a practice that a journal may or may not adopt, and may or may not follow (such as not accepting articles in Spanish or on Experimental Oenology). This is a fine distinction in principle, but in practice it makes no difference for people who must attempt to publish ... Could not agree more. At the end of the day, each author has a choice to make between getting published and surrender copyright, or not getting published and continue to have the right to self-archive. For journals, that is a tough choice. But it is a different matter for conference proceedings. The prestige from giving a paper at a conference comes from presenting it there. It does not really come from having the paper included in the conference proceedings. I have just written to the organisers of ECDL2000 http://www.bn.pt/org/agenda/ecdl2000/ that I and my co-authors will not surrender the copyright to our paper http://openlib.org/home/krichel/phoenix.html to Springer for inclusion in the proceedings. I presume that I will still be able to present the paper. It will simply not appear in the conference proceedings, which I consider to be a minor inconvenience. Has anybody here stories to share about copyright surrender refusal? Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
Steve Hitchcock writes Paul Ginsparg defined an eprint as something self-archived by the author. Isn't that the clearest distinction, and an obvious one for this forum to draw? I tend to think of an eprint as a public-access scientific document in electronic form. The insistance on author self-archiving obscures the fact that there are many eprints that are not archived by the author but by an agent of the author, for example an academic institution or a scholarly society. The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable if this sort of activity is real archiving. What we need is to have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through an agent is what I call formal archiving, and I oppose it to the tendency of informal archiving in homepages. My impression is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal archivers to regain initiative. Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel offline 2000-06-04 to 2000-06-11
Re: BioMed Central and new publishing models
Mike Brown writes BioMed Central is part of the Current Science Group [http://current-science-group.com]. Current Science Group is an independent, privately owned publishing group and has no connection with Elsevier Science. In 1997 several companies within the Current Science Group (Current Biology, BioMedNet and ChemWeb) were sold to Elsevier Science, this may account for any confusion about ownership. BioMed Central believes that primary research should be available free to all, globally, and without any barriers to access. We believe the new technologies that are now available allow publishing of primary research to be done at very low cost and much more efficiently than before. These two paragraphs illustrate well a potential problem with commercial intermediation between academics. Are there any guarantees that the BioMed will not be taken over by or sold to another company, who may hold different beliefs than yours? Thomas Krichel http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: NIH's Public Archive for the Refereed Literature: PUBMED CENTRAL
Paul Ginsparg writes of course i conducted consultations with the affected scientists before doing anything. The importance of this point can not be overemphasized. Since 1993 I have worked on the Internet distribution of preprints in Economics. I think that the system that has resulted from that, called RePEc, is now, after arXive.org, the second largest preprint source. The concepts behind RePEc are very different from what I perceive are the principles behind arXive.org. Of course all scientists need to disseminate their research results. All disciplines have books, journals conferences etc. But behind that there are many subtle differences between disciplines. Any attempt to introduce an electronic dissemination system in a discipline must depart from a knowledge of the special circumstances in a given discipline. As an outsider that is probably best done through listening to the discussions of the insiders in the pub. An electronic system will start in parallel to established dissemination system. It must therefore be designed such as to minimize the extra cost on discipline insiders. Ideally it should make it easier for those who are involved in dissemination to perform the tasks that they are already doing. p.s. Note that these remarks should not be regarded as a comment on the NIH proprosal, they simply sum up the experience of my six years of work in this area. Thomas Krichelhttp://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Serials Review Interview
Mark Doyle notes I don't think the econ one was kept current at all and it was never brougt back under the central server. It is still operates, and it is still the one archive that will give your papers the largest exposure. But you can repeat that to authors as many times as you want, they still don't want to upload there. I had thought that one reason that things weren't catching on in economics was that publishers had more restrictive policies about preprint circulation, but maybe I am misinformed. One thing that has happened is that an individual author wants to open a personal archive only for her reprints, because a clause in most copyright transfer agreements allows for reprint in collection that only contain the authors work. Are all servers high-availibility servers? I am not sure what you mean by that, but presumably the answer is no, i.e. not all are. Are they run by a grad student who will move on at some point leaving it to languish? Some are. Others are run by central banks or economics think tanks. These are larger archives that we expect to be quite stable. Do they keep abreast with the latest technical developments and migrate to new formats as needed? Yes. There is no 'subsuming', I borrowed that term from Stevan's post. I don't think you should write off the advantages of having a scalable centralized (but mirrored) repository. I am not doing that at all. All I am writing is that a centralised approach may not be suitable for all commuities. Certainly when we think of extending free electronic documents from preprint disciplines to non-preprint disciplines, from TeX based collections to wordprocessor babylon collections, from uncontested to contested knowledge it may not be optimal to consider xxx as the only possible model. Cheers, Thomas Krichel mailto:t.kric...@surrey.ac.uk http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
