On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote: > with the emergence of > large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the advantages of > having a centralised global databases are becoming obvious.
Google books is actively scanning books and paying for it. No OA CR is doing that for OA content: We are talking about author/university *self*-archiving! And other the special case of Google Books is certainly not replacing the distributed harvesting norm for Google Scholar and Google itself. > A choice between 'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy decision > for a university or group of universities and such a decision is > driven by number of factors... > For universities which produce a high number of research > papers annually, creating IRs may be sensible but there are universities > in India that are producing only a handful of research papers. As Arthur Sale pointed out, A consortial IR for a group of small universities is still an IR. It doesn't scale to all universities, nor does it need to. (And the only relevant policy decision for a university is to mandate Green OA self-archiving...) And an arbitrary networking of (direct-deposit) subject-based CRs not only does not scale but is incoherent (whereas any subject-based central *harvesting* from IRs is perfectly feasible and coherent). > For full text data, interoperability is challenged by copyright > restrictions. These dilemmas are avoided intrinsically in CRs. The copyright constraints are far bigger on external, 3rd-party direct-deposits than they are on institutional self-archiving. > large scale CRs are having the opportunity to make full text > search and retrieval feasible. The most powerful and effective full text search and retrieval service provider is Google, a central harvester... > Volatility of harvested metadata from IRs is avoided with the > implementation of CRs. Getting the OA full-text content trumps "metadata stability" many times over (Citeseerx generates its own metadata from harvested full-text.)... > Self-archiving and mandate is not a technological issue, it is a > regulatory one - hence, it can be done in IRs and/or CRs. (This sounds like the confusion of consortial IRs with subject-based CRs again.) Please consider how a university can mandate that all of its research output, in all disciplines, must be self-archived in external subject-based CRs. (Which CRs? Which subjects? How many? How maintained and financed? How does each university monitor and audit compliance?) Could/would a university mandate that, say, various credit card companies should do the university's expense accounting in place of its own internal record-keeping? Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h tml http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/
