Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Atanu Garai/Lists]

Thanks Stevan. These are key points that are coming to my mind.

Stevan Harnad wrote:
  On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote:

Dear Colleagues
This question is very basic. Institutions all
over the world are
developing their own repositories to archive
papers written by staffs. On
the other hand, it is very much feasible to
develop thematic and
consortia repositories wherein authors all
over the world can archive
their papers very easily. Both the approaches
have their own pros and
cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g.
subject based) and/or
consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive)
repositories is more
advantageous than maintaining hundreds of
thousands small IRs, taking
cost, management, infrastructure and
technology considerations. Moreover,
knowledge sharing and preservation becomes
easier across the
participating individuals and institutions in
large IRs. If this
advantages are so obvious, it is not
understandable why there is so much
advocacy for building IRs in all
institutions?

  Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs)
  over institutional
  repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs
  vastly outweigh
  those of CRs on every count:

This forum must have discussed this issue. Also, the objective of
posing this question should be made clear, so that you can find it in
the right context and spirit. At one point of time and still now, we
wanted to have disbursed information platforms and database. But with
the emergence of large digitisation projects, notably Google Books,
the advantages of having a centralised global databases are becoming
obvious. 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. Again, the question is what
are the sequence of events and rationale that led the open access
community to select IRs as primary archiving mechanism over CRs.
Institutions should be able to make a choice of their own, but if you
want to advise the institutions what should be the key criteria to
advise them to go for own IRs, over the CRs.
  (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a
  worldwide
  network of independent research institutions (mostly
  universities).

  (2) Those independent institutions share with their own
  researchers a
  direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in
  archiving, evaluating,
  showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their
  own research
  output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there
  are provisional
  back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally
  unaffiliated researchers
  or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.)
  http://roar.eprints.org/
  http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/

Points 1 and 2 are essentially dealing with the notion of
self-archiving mandate that the institution may or may not invoke for
its researcher. From an institutional point of view, the choice of CR
and IR will primarily be driven by management, impact and
effectiveness of the repositories. 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. My understanding is that for such universities
maintaining own repositories are less effective, even if we take cost
considerations alone. The issue  of  "a direct (and even somewhat
competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating,  showcasing, and
maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output" does
not conflict with the choice of having a CR (or rather global
repository). Independent institutions can have both mandated
self-archiving and archiving, evaluating, showcasing, maximizing the
usage etc. in CRs as well.
  (3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed
  institutions'
  repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata
  (or data) can all be
  harvested into multiple central collections, as desired,
  and searched,
  navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed
  archiving is also
  important for mirroring, backup and preservation.)

  (4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes
  institutionally
  or centrally, so there is no difference there; but
  researchers normally
  have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are
  multiple. (The
  only "global" CR is Google, and that's harvested.)
  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

Technology is not a constraint in making metada

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Andy Powell wrote:

> This topic may well have been discussed since 1999 - unfortunately much
> of that discussion (at least at a technical level) has not acknowledged
> that the Web has changed almost immeasurably between then and now.
> Web 2.0, social networks, Amazon S3, the cloud, microformats, Google
> sitemaps, REST, the Web Architecture, ... I could go on.
> 
> The technical landscape is now so completely different to what it was
> when the OAI-PMH was first discussed that it makes no sense to apply a
> 1999 design approach to the space, which is effectively what we are doing.

The Web has alas progressed a lot more since 1990 than OA target content
on the Web has done.

And none of the changes in the Web are relevant to the issue of whether
the locus of direct deposit of OA content should be convergent --
in researchers' own IRs or divergent, in thematic CRs.

The bottom line is that OA content should be deposited directly where
we can ensure that all of it will indeed be speedily and systematically
deposited at long last -- and that locus is each authors' own university
IR, because universities (and research institutions) worldwide are the
providers of all that OA content, both funded and unfunded, across all
disciplines and themes -- the ones with the both interest and the means
to mandate, monitor and co-benefit from storing and showcasing their
own research output.

The rest -- including all Web 2.0 etc. benefits -- are all there for the
having at the harvester level. IRs are for direct deposit.

"How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html

"Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest
Centrally"
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/1/nihx.html

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/

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Thomas Krichel]

  hussein suleman writes

> this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory 
> ...
>
>
> in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world (like
> arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they were run by
> poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the owners of data
> trying to provide services as well) and the model simply did not replicate to
> all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of poster child repositories) 
> ...
> in some senses, this "crisis" in subject repositories led to the Santa Fe
> meeting of the OAI.

  Your memory is indeed fading.

  The Santa Fe meeting was informed by work of a group of authors:

Herbert Van de Sompel, Thomas Krichel, Michael L. Nelson, Patrick
Hochstenbach, Victor M. Lyapunov, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Mohamed
Kholief, Xiaoming Liu, and Heath O'Connell, The UPS Prototype project:
exploring the obstacles in creating across e-print archive end-user
service, Old Dominion University Computer Science TR 2000-01, February
2000.

  This is the full version. There is a censored version of it that
  apeared in D-LIB magazine, but the above is the full version,
  I still have a copy at

http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/upsproto.pdf

  The project looked at building a user service uniting
  contents from the following archives: arXiv, CogPrints, NACA,
  NCSTRL, NDLTD and RePEc.

  Out of these NCSTRL is out of business, it was NSF funded, as
  soon as the funding stopped, it was dropped, bascially. Thus

http://dlib.cs.odu.edu/publications.htm

  has a link to the full version, but it's a dead link to
  a server at Cornell where NCSTRL services lived. But
  all the others are still in business.

> but who is willing to invest a lot of money and many years on
> redoing an experiment that failed in many instances not too long
> ago?

  I would be interested in seeing a list of these "many instances".

  There is indeed a problem of grant-funded digital libraries
  failing when the grant expires. This continues to be a serious
  problem. But I don't think this was the impetus for the OAI
  work.


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
  phone: +7 383 330 6813   skype: thomaskrichel

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Andy Powell]

This topic may well have been discussed since 1999 - unfortunately much of that 
discussion (at least at a technical level) has not acknowledged that the Web 
has changed almost immeasurably between then and now.  Web 2.0, social 
networks, Amazon S3, the cloud, microformats, Google sitemaps, REST, the Web 
Architecture, ... I could go on.

The technical landscape is now so completely different to what it was when the 
OAI-PMH was first discussed that it makes no sense to apply a 1999 design 
approach to the space, which is effectively what we are doing.

Andy
--
Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
http://efoundations.typepad.com/
andy.pow...@eduserv.org.uk
+44 (0)1225 474319 

> -Original Message-
> From: Repositories discussion list 
> [mailto:jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: 08 March 2008 12:07
> To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
> 
> On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote:
> 
> > Dear Colleagues
> > This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are 
> > developing their own repositories to archive papers written 
> by staffs. 
> > On the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and 
> > consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world 
> can archive 
> > their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their 
> own pros and 
> > cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or 
> > consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more 
> > advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small 
> IRs, taking 
> > cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. 
> > Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier 
> across the 
> > participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this 
> > advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so 
> > much advocacy for building IRs in all institutions?
> 
> Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) 
> over institutional repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the 
> pro's of IRs vastly outweigh those of CRs on every count:
> 
> (1) The research providers are not a central entity but a 
> worldwide network of independent research institutions 
> (mostly universities).
> 
> (2) Those independent institutions share with their own 
> researchers a direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest 
> in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and maximizing the 
> usage and impact of their own research output. (Most 
> institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional 
> back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated 
> researchers or those whose institutions don't yet have their 
> own IR.) http://roar.eprints.org/ http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/
> 
> (3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed institutions'
> repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or 
> data) can all be harvested into multiple central collections, 
> as desired, and searched, navigated and data-mined at that 
> level. (Distributed archiving is also important for 
> mirroring, backup and preservation.)
> 
> (4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes 
> institutionally or centrally, so there is no difference 
> there; but researchers normally have one IR whereas the 
> potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The only "global" 
> CR is Google, and that's harvested.) 
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
> 
> (5) The distributed costs of institutional self-archiving are 
> certainly lower than than maintaining CRs (how many? for what 
> fields? and who maintains them and pays their costs?), 
> particularly as the costs of a local IR are low, and they can 
> cover all of an institution's research output as well as many 
> other forms of institutional digital assets.
> 
> (6) Most important of all, although research funders can 
> reinforce self-archiving mandates, the natural and universal 
> way to ensure that IRs (and hence harvested CRs) are actually 
> filled with all of the world's research output, funded and 
> unfunded, is for institutions to mandate and monitor the 
> self-archiving of their own research output, in their own 
> IRs, rather than hoping it will find its way willy-nilly into 
> external CRs.
> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
> 
> This topic has been much discussed since in the American 
> Scientist Open Access Forum. See the topic threads "Central 
> vs. Distributed Archives" (since 1999) and "Central versus 
> institutional self-archiving".
> 
> See also:
> 
>  Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C.,
>  O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) 
> Developing
>  a model for e-prints and open access journal content in 
> UK further
>  and higher education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40.
>  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/
> 
>  Harnad, S. (2008

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Stevan Harnad]

-- Forwarded message --
List-Post: goal@eprints.org
List-Post: goal@eprints.org
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:46:26 +0200
From: Hussein Suleman 
To: Atanu Garai/Lists ,
oai-implementers -- openarchives.org
Subject: Re: [OAI-implementers] local/distributed vs global/unified archives

hi Atanu

this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory
...

in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world (like
arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they were run
by
poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the owners of data
trying to provide services as well) and the model simply did not replicate
to
all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of poster child repositories)
...
in some senses, this "crisis" in subject repositories led to the Santa Fe
meeting of the OAI.

to address especially the sustainability problem, open access advocates
began
to recommend institutional repositories rather than subject repositories
because scholarship is a primary function of institutions and if anything
will
be here hundreds of years from now it will be the institutions of higher
learning.

the core idea of OAI-PMH was therefore to bridge between sustainable
repositories (e.g., IRs, although the term did not exist back then) and high
quality service providers (e.g., those hosted by scholarly societies)

so OAI-PMH is supposed to give us the best of both worlds. it is tempting to
believe that global subject repositories will be a better model, but this
did
not work in the 90s. maybe it will work now (maybe scholarly societies,
research agencies, etc. have deeper pockets now) - we dont know for sure -
but
who is willing to invest a lot of money and many years on redoing an
experiment
that failed in many instances not too long ago?

ttfn,
hussein

=
hussein suleman ~ hussein -- cs.uct.ac.za ~ http://www.husseinsspace.com
=


Atanu Garai/Lists wrote:
> Dear Colleagues
> This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are
> developing
> their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On the other
> hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and consortia
> repositories
> wherein authors all over the world can archive their papers very easily.
> Both
> the approaches have their own pros and cons. However, having few big
> thematic
> (e.g. subject based) and/or consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive)
> repositories is more advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands
> small IRs, taking cost, management, infrastructure and technology
> considerations. Moreover, knowledge sharing and preservation becomes
> easier
> across the participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If
> this
> advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much
> advocacy for building IRs in all institutions?
> Thank you for reflecting on this issue.
> Best
> *Atanu Garai
> *Online Networking Specialist
> Globethics.net
> /International Secretariat:
> /150, route de Ferney
> CH-1211 Geneva 2
> Switzerland
> Tel: 41.22791.6249/67
> Fax: 41.22710.2386
> /New Delhi Contact:
> /Tel: 91.98996.22884
> Email: garai -- globethics.net 
>   atanu.garai -- gmail.com 
> Web: www.globethics.net 

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote:

> Dear Colleagues
> This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are
> developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On
> the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and
> consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive
> their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and
> cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or
> consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more
> advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking
> cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover,
> knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the
> participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this
> advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much
> advocacy for building IRs in all institutions?

Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional
repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh
those of CRs on every count:

(1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide
network of independent research institutions (mostly universities).

(2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a
direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating,
showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research
output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional
back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers
or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.)
http://roar.eprints.org/
http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/

(3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed institutions'
repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or data) can all be
harvested into multiple central collections, as desired, and searched,
navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed archiving is also
important for mirroring, backup and preservation.)

(4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes institutionally
or centrally, so there is no difference there; but researchers normally
have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The
only "global" CR is Google, and that's harvested.)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

(5) The distributed costs of institutional self-archiving are certainly
lower than than maintaining CRs (how many? for what fields? and who
maintains them and pays their costs?), particularly as the costs of a
local IR are low, and they can cover all of an institution's research
output as well as many other forms of institutional digital assets.

(6) Most important of all, although research funders can reinforce
self-archiving mandates, the natural and universal way to ensure that IRs
(and hence harvested CRs) are actually filled with all of the world's
research output, funded and unfunded, is for institutions to mandate
and monitor the self-archiving of their own research output, in their
own IRs, rather than hoping it will find its way willy-nilly into
external CRs.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

This topic has been much discussed since in the American Scientist
Open Access Forum. See the topic threads "Central vs. Distributed
Archives" (since 1999) and "Central versus institutional self-archiving".

See also:

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C.,
O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing
a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further
and higher education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/

Harnad, S. (2008) Optimize the NIH Mandate
Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest
Centrally. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15002/

Harnad, S. (2008) How To Integrate
University and Funder Open Access Mandates.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html


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.epri