I think Derek Sergeant's view and my own have now converged as closely as they are likely to. http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0302&L=jisc-development&T=0&F=&S=&P=1536
Derek's first concern continues to be long-term preservation, mine continues to be immediate access. We both agree that self-archiving of open-access versions of toll-access research should be immediate. Neither EPrints nor DSpace (nor CERN, nor ArXiv) is OAIS-compliant -- http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/overview.html -- and I think that is irrelevant, whereas Derek thinks it is not. (If ever it becomes relevant, it will be implemented: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may01/05letters.html ) On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, D M Sergeant wrote: > SH> Without content, there is no content to preserve. > >DS> This is a chicken and egg situation. >DS> Without content, there is no content to self-archive. Currently, 2,000,000 articles of toll-access content appear annually in 20,000 toll-access journals, with both on-paper and on-line versions. That's neither fish nor fowl, but it's the content in question, the content that needs to be preserved. No chicken/egg situation there. Over and above that, there is a tiny but growing set of online *duplicates* of a tiny subset of the above toll-access content, self-archived by their own authors, for immediate access and impact. The much-needed growth of this supplementary, *duplicate* content is being held back today by (among other things) premature and irrelevant worries about its preservation! It is about that not-yet-existent because not-yet-self-archived duplicate content, and its lost daily access and impact, that I said "without content, there is no content to preserve." No chicken/egg situation there either. >DS> Done well means doing the best possible job. Why should immediate >DS> preservation be deferred? Because preservation concerns today should be focussed where they belong: on the primary corpus, the 2,000,000 annual toll-access versions, in the 20,000 toll-access journals, not on the long-overdue efforts to increase their access and impact immediately by self-archiving a duplicate version, today. Focusing instead on the latter is not only missing the target, but further slowing a vast yet long-overdue immediate benefit to research and researchers. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html >DS> You do not need to be concerned about my database app. However, >DS> I do need to be concerned about it. There are many things being >DS> lost year after year. Including, maybe, the toll-access versions of the annual 2,000,000 articles (of which the self-archived open-access versions are only a tiny duplicate subset)? >DS> Hopefully it will be two-fold. Use it now to self-archive. Work on >DS> improving the software for preservation. It is to be both! We can certainly agree on that! Stevan Harnad
