On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, D M Sergeant raises some frequently-raised points that I think it is important to confront head-on:
The digital library community is very much concerned with preservation, which is both commendable and a traditional responsibility of the library community. But there are two things about the rationale for the self-archiving of refereed research that the library community keeps overlooking or failing to understand, and as a result, the well-intended preservation concerns of librarians are proving to be (unintentional) retardants to self-archiving, instead of helping to speed it on its way. The two things that librarians keep forgetting or overlooking are these: (1) In the first instance, and for the time being, the self-archiving of refereed research publications is not a *substitute* for existing forms of publication and preservation, it is merely a *supplement* to them. To put it more explicitly, the papers that researchers need to self-archive (in order to maximise their research impact *now*) are all still appearing, in parallel, in the traditional print journals and their associated online editions. The librarians' preservation concerns and initiatives should be focused on *those* continuing, primary, persistent channels of publication. *That* is virtally where all the literature -- both in analog and digital form -- is. Their preservation concerns should not be directed at the efforts to supplement those continuing, primary, persistent channels of publication, through institutional self-archiving. The primary purpose of research self-archiving today is to remedy the needless daily, cumulative research-impact loss that is occurring because of toll-barriers that block access to this research for potential researcher/users whose institutions cannot afford to pay the tolls to access it: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html Call that "filling the current access-gap." I hope this now makes it more obvious that it is not the already-overdue supplementary measures, intended to fill the current access-gap, that should be waiting for preservation-problems to be solved, with self-archiving continuing to be held back while we shop for future-proof self-archiving software! Which brings us to the second point: (2) If self-archiving had been held back -- pending digital future-proofing -- by the physicists in 1991, then physics would have lost the 12 years of access and impact provided by ArXiv during that time. http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions For the 200,000 papers in ArXiv are still here today in 2003, still being widely and openly read and used. ArXiv has since successfully upgraded to OAI-compliance, and will no doubt continue upgrading its contents to further usability standards as time goes on. Yet it is all the other disciplines -- the ones that have *not* been self-archiving for over a decade as the physicists have, the ones that have needlessly lost another decade of potential research impact -- that are now being enjoined by the well-meaning library community to pause [still longer] and consider that: > the wrong [software] choice may lead to a failure in the preservation. > Other material is ergo being needlessly lost while ever it is not being > preserved. The library community is worrying about the "needless loss" of nonexistent content -- content that (if only it had been self-archived!) would have been but a supplement to its persistent primary incarnation, which is today still in its publishers' proprietary analog and digital form and not the object of any of this discussion -- while the research community is still needlessly losing more years of potential research impact. I would say that there was a certain incompatibility here between the desiderata of the library community and the research community! Yet it is all so simply resolved, if we simply remind ourselves that we are talking here about immediate *supplements* to publication and existing forms of preservation, not *substitutes* for them. Note that the emphasis is on "immediate" rather than "delay" -- including delays for the sake of future-proofing. > How much do either [EPrints or DSpace -- or http://cdsware.cern.ch/] > conform to the OAIS reference model? How much do they *need* to (and why?), in order to provide many years of enhanced access and impact to otherwise unaffordable research, *now*? > It is unlikely that either [EPrints or DSpace] will be able to provide > the full solution. The full solution for what? The library community's *possible* long-term concerns, or the research community's *certain* (and long overdue) immediate ones? Stevan Harnad
