On 2011-12-16, at 7:36 AM, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
Stevan, Â Â Â I'm not sure why a question about better repository
indexing leads to the answer: Mandates not indexes.
It's not "Mandates, not indexes."Â
It's that we won't have anything to index until/unless we mandate!
Surely both are needed, and are mutually reinforcing. You improve
the chances of mandates if it can be shown that existing repository
content is being used more. At what point in the growth of mandates
do we concede the need for better repository services?
When the repositories have enough content to make better services worthwhile.
You can't squeeze blood out of a stone. While IRs are near-empty of OA content,
there's next to nothing to search on, and certainly nothing to crow about.
My response was actually to Peter Murray-Rust who wrote:Â
"I would feel more strongly about supporting GreenOA if
we actually built an index of it - it's not fair to
expect the scholarly poor to traverse the tangle of
badly organised "free" publications."
This may make PM-R -- a crusader for open data, and for libre OA that ensures
article harvestability and data-crunchability by data-base services -- feel more
strongly about OA.Â
But what is actually needed to get researchers to provide OA is OA mandates, not
indices or even navigational tools to "traverse the tangle of badly organised
'free' publications."
The trouble with that tangle is not that it is badly organized but that it is
mostly non-existent.
Every year, maybe every month, one hears someone say that "there won't be OA, or
they won't provide OA, or OA will not be useful -- until/unless X" (substitute
for X anything you like: indexes, navigational/analytic tools, richer metadata,
copyright reform, reliable digital preservation, Gold OA, whatever you like).
My reply, always, is that there is one thing, and one thing only, that is needed
in order to have 100% (green) OA, and that is immediate-deposit (no delay, no
waiver, ID/OA) mandates, adopeted globally by institutions and funders.
If we keep on believing and waiting upon all the X's that people propose
instead, we will wait for more needlessly lost decades.
(On the other hand, whenever anyone states clearly that the overwhelming
priority is to mandate OA, and that, in addition, X too would be welcome, I
happily applaud.)
What is the current rate of growth of mandates? Might it have
slowed?
Yes, it has.
If so, why might that be?
I'm not sure, but I think it's for two main reasons:Â
(1) distraction by and diversion to X's (the two main distractions
being publishing reform (gold OA) and copyright reform)Â
andÂ
(2) the adoption of ill-thought-out and ineffective mandate models.
I hope, fervently, that this will now be remedied by Bernard Rentier's and Alma
Swan's  newly chartered EnablingOpenScholarship, created specifically to give
institutions reliable guidance on how to formulate and implement their OA
mandates. http://www.openscholarship.org
Perhaps it is because institutions will get progressively hard to
convince (the early adopters will presumably have been the easiest
to persuade). Maybe some of them are asking the same sort of
questions about repositories as Donat.
There is no question that institutions (and funders) are hard to convince.
That's why a concerted global effort to convince them, based on clear,
well-thought-out, tested methods is so very much needed. And I hope
EnablingOpenScholarship will provide just that.
The OA repository world should not stop to wait for mandates, it
should be developing on every front. Instead, repositories are
developing on other fronts, just not necessarily OA #jiscmrd
Yes, through their entire decade of existence, OA repositories have been
developing on every front, just not OA.
And that's the point.Â
Please, let's not lose another decade like that.
Mandating OA is the only way to achieve OA. As long as we keep running off in
every other direction, we will get everywhere else, but not to OA.
Stevan
On 15 Dec 2011, at 12:28, Stevan Harnad wrote:
On 2011-12-15, at 5:58 AM, Donat Agosti wrote:
Dear Peter and Stevan
âI would feel more strongly about supporting
GreenOA if we actually built an index of itâ
I always thought that this is or is
happening within these two
The two leading lists of OA repositories
around the world are the Directory of Open
Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and the
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
Or does this index really not exist â this
then would be the same problem we face in
taxonomy, where have no clue what we
published since 1758 the start date of
zoological taxonomic literature that we need
to consult to make sure our names are
correct.
Dear Donat,
Yes, ROAR and OpenDOAR are indexing Green OA in that
they track the repositories as well as their content
(though the content cannot yet be sorted reliably by
full-text/metadata-only, and
peer-reviewed/non-peer-reviewed, but only by indirect
indicators such as document-type and size).
More important, the all-important annual ratio of
institutional deposits to total annual institutional
peer-reviewed research output is not being tracked, for
the simple reason that institutions don't yet know their
total annual research output! They have no mechanism for
monitoring it. In fact, OA repositories will become that
mechanism -- but only after it has been mandated that
they must deposit it all!
Keith Jeffery's CERIF and CRIS's would do this, but they
need to be adopted to do so.
So, yet again, it is Green OA mandates that are needed
most, not Green OA indexes.
(Yassine Gargouri has been periodically measuring the
ratio of annual ISI-indexed institutional output that is
Green and Gold OA, and will shortly post some results.
And the EU has called for proposals to develop a
long-term mechanism for measuring this ratio.)
Cheers, Stevan
Cheers
Donat
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Thomas Kluyver
Sent: Thursday, 15 December 2011 2:13 PM
To: Peter Murray-Rust
Cc: john wilbanks;
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [open-science] How CC-BY can
become TA
On 15 December 2011 03:24, Peter Murray-Rust
<[email protected]> wrote:
I would feel more strongly about supporting
GreenOA if we actually built an index of it
- it's not fair to expect the scholarly poor
to traverse the tangle of badly organised
"free" publications.
I've had an idea like this in the back of my
mind for a while. When you're denied access
to a paper on a journal website, it would be
great to have a browser plugin to search
institutional repositories etc. for the same
paper. A sort of alternative DOI resolution
system. Obviously there's some technical
challenges in that - and the publishers
probably wouldn't cheer for it - but it
seems worth exploring.
Thomas
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