On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Armbruster, Chris <chris.armbrus...@eui.eu> wrote in SOAF: I fail to see how Harnad's drive against the best that exists: large, functional and service-oriented repositories, is of any service to the OA movement.
(1) No drive against institution-external OA repositories, just a drive for mandating direct deposit in institutional OA repositories instead of institution-external ones -- into which the institutional repository contents can then be harvested. (2) Institutions are the research-providers (of all of OA's target research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, institutions and countries). (3) Institutions are in the position to mandate and monitor the deposit of all their own research output (funded and unfunded, across all disciplines) in their own OA institutional repositories. (4) Funder OA mandates need to converge with and reinforce institutional OA mandates, rather than diverge from or compete with them, so as to facilitate a coherent transition to universal OA. Chris keeps talking about the functional benefits of central services, which are neither disputed by anything I am saying nor diminished in the least by the locus of deposit I am urging. Meanwhile Chris completely overlooks the real problem of OA, which is getting the content provided. Convergent institutional and funder mandates will facilitate and accelerate this OA content provision; divergent ones will needlessly complicate and retard it. (APA has, as predicted, withdrawn its proposed $2500 surcharge for institution-external deposit, and continues to be Green on immediate deposit in the institutional OA repository, without charge, as it has been since 2002.) "The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH Is" http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/436-guid.html Stevan Harnad On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Armbruster, Chris <chris.armbrus...@eui.eu> wrote: Stevan Harnad keeps on claiming that the natural and only sensible locus for Green OA deposits is the institutional repositories. He says we must fill the institutional repositories first. He also claims that any kind of service based on repositories (like SSRN, RePEc, CiteSeerX, Arxiv, PMC, European Research Paper Archive etc.) will then take care of itself. The proposed solutions is centralised harvesting, inlcuding harvesting from IRs to PMC. Steven Harnad is currently publicly applauding the policy of the APA (American Psychological Association), which wishes to charges authors USD 2500 for NIH-compliant OA deposit in PMC, but leaves standing an earlier policy that enables Green OA deposit in the author's IR for free. Given the APA stance, is it conceivable that they would watch as all manuscripts are harvested by PMC (as a 'third-party' provider, like Harnad likes to call them) to provide service? The logical corollary of the APA policy is to slap on conditions that prevent harvesting, for why else would they seek to prevent deposit in PMC in the first place? Now, we may speculate on whether APA will back down or not, but the fundamental point is this one: You cannot applaud efforts to prevent Green OA archiving in large, functional repositories that have a decent service for scholars and then say we must all deposit in the individual IRs, which are little more than a storage facility, and then claim that - as in a miracle - functionality and service will emerge. The point of APA's policy is to try to prevent that Green OA will ever become functional and meaningful. I fail to see how Harnad's drive against the best that exists: large, functional and service-oriented repositories, is of any service to the OA movement. Chris Armbruster http://ssrn.com/author=434782