Stevan, Yes, I agree that there is a deep misunderstanding here. I think you missed my point.
The "total buyin" scenario puts an upper bound on the size of the archive. That upper bound is quite small, so the reductio argument leads one to conclude that disk space is not an issue for [p]reprints. I think that's a conclusion you would agree with. You also seem to miss the point that many of us disagree with you about the goals/conceptualizaion of an institutional repository. Slightly different conceptualizations from yours, for instance the decision that the repository should hold, in addition to surrogates for published papers, the canonical copies of working papers or supplementary materials, can lead to very big differences in one's sizing expectations and budget for the repository. Re preservation: I also disagree with your claim that having a library mention preservation is likely to dissuade faculty from contributing their work. Quite the contrary, a committment to a reasonable degree of preservation is one way to sell the service, and in fact is a piece that we've found to be fairly appealing to faculty, even if it does have institutional costs that need to be considered. Similarly, we find that there is demand for a convenient way to make supplmentary materials available to colleagues. Many journals these days realize there is demand for this and are offering this service themselves (so it's ALREADY part of the publication process), but not all. Again, offering support for the deposit of these materials is something a library can do to make it MORE likely that faculty will contribute the paper itself to an institutional repository, and hence provide the open access we both agree is important. The key issue here may be: >> [aside: we believe that if we DON'T >> collect such unprintable items we'll never get faculty buy-in for >> Stevan's laudable goal of collecting the printable peer-reviewed works] >But *why* do you feel that? We need more data, but anecdotally, our experience has been that those faculty who are hot to self-archive their preprints are already doing so, and that arXiv and RePEc are meeting most of the demand. There are very few examples of institutional repositories that are proving successful in collecting the types of items you insist on focusing on. Even MIT's DSpace is getting very little true faculty self-archiving, with most of its growth seeming to come from departmental grey literature (and soon from OCI course materials). Meanwhile, though, many faculty express the desire to have better tools for managing large data sets as part of the publication process. We had a dean's retreat last month, and our deanlet for the social sciences made the point that her new hires in the social sciences are starting to imitate their physical science colleagues and demand more startup money; when asked what they say they need the money for, she reported that it is mostly for management and archival of their data sets. Similarly, there is pressure in the U.S. from the granting agencies to make the data that accompanies a submitted paper publicly accessible. And I frequently hear from faculty that they want to increase the impact of their work by making available supplmentary materials that go along with the peer reviewed paper -- data sets, survey instruments, supplementary statistical analyses, maps and images, etc. There's real unmet demand here. I think you make a very good point that it is a large problem that institutional archiving efforts keep running off in all directions. However, although I think there is definitely room for institutional strategies that are monomaniacal in their focus, there's also room for strategies that take a very different direction. For instance, consider MIT's DSpace, or Ohio State's KnowledgeBank. The important thing is that any given institution be clear in its goals, and that we recognize that the precise statement of those goals will imply particular implementation strategies and hardware/technology/budget requirements (the question that Min-Yen Kan originally raised). P.S. please note that I have replied only to one of the lists you CCed. Subscribers to the other lists may like me get multiple copies of your posts. If not, they don't have the context of Kan's original question. JQ Johnson Office: 115F Knight Library Academic Education Coordinator mailto:[email protected] 1299 University of Oregon phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax Eugene, OR 97403-1299 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/
