[GOAL] Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Forwarding from JISC-REPOSITORIES. Begin forwarded message: From: Sue Gardner sgardn...@unl.edu Date: September 16, 2014 at 8:42:22 PM GMT+1 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk Subject: Fw: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Reply-To: Sue Gardner sgardn...@unl.edu Stevan, Apologies for a delayed response. I have been meaning to reply, and now have time. You have asked some questions of us at UNL. Paul Royster may reply, as well. These are my thoughts. (1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? (Without that figure, there is no way of knowing how well N-L is doing, compared to other institutional repositories, mandated or unmandated.) You are requesting a certain metric and claiming that it is the only valid one. We have approximately 75,000 items in our repository, almost all of which can be read freely by anyone with an Internet connection. We also have several dozen monographs under our own imprint, and we host several journals. We don't devote too much of our time to analyzing our metrics, in part because we are a staff of three (as of two weeks ago--before which we were a staff of two), and we spend much of our time getting content into the repository in favor of administrative activities. Personally, I welcome anyone to analyze our output by any measure and I will be interested to know the result, but that information won't change our day-to-day activities, so it would remain off to the side of what we're doing. (2) Why doesn’t N-L adopt a self-archiving mandate? We just don't see how -mandating- deposit would improve anything. You can tell people what to do, and maybe they will do it--and, if they do, it's probably not because you told them to. My feeling about it is: Am I serving the needs of my constituents, i.e. the faculty? I feel strongly that I'm here to facilitate access to their work, not to bear down on them with demands of any kind. If it works for them, it works for me--not the other way around. (3) Why do you lump together author-pays with author-self-archives? I lump them together because they both result in a burden on the author that I feel is best taken up by other constituencies. Author-pays results in a skewed body of work being published. I watch my close colleagues in academic departments deal with this on a daily basis, and it would be comical if it weren't so deadly serious. Author-pays, a scenario: The junior author has money from her institution to go with an author-pays journal. The established author doesn't care about impact factor and wants to go with a smaller, more regional journal. The junior author insists that she must publish within a certain subset of prestigious journals, so they submit to one of them. The reviewers that are assigned know very little about the techniques that the authors are using, but it gets pushed through with suggested revisions that the established author knows border on ridiculous. The paper gets published and it's not what the established author had ultimately envisioned, but there you have it. Self-archiving scenario: An established author has 170 papers going back to 1984. Many of those either do not exist digitally or are not coming through via interlibrary loan, despite several attempts. He has a stack of reprints. He has some manuscripts in various files on his computer, but he's not sure if they're pre-print or post-print. He is administering two large, federally-funded projects, one of which takes him into the field for 2-3 months per year. He teaches at least one class each semester. He runs the weekly seminar for his department. He has three active PhD students, a post-doc, and a master's student who needs a lot of mentoring. He holds two officer positions on national boards that require his attendance at least once a year. He is asked to review dozens of papers per year from for-profit publishers (had to throw that in--all too true). Etc. ... [drum roll?] We tell him has HAS TO deposit his papers into our institutional repository. Is this a person we can reasonably expect to self-archive his work into our repository? Note that he has to understand the vagaries of copyright permissions and post a legal version, or we are going to be doing work after he has complied. If we do not mandate deposit, and if we offer mediated deposit (as opposed to requiring self-archiving), this faculty member's work will be included in the IR. If we mandate self-archiving, his work will remain in the deep archive that is bound up in older, hard copy research. So, that is where I am coming from. I see what works and what doesn't, and that's how I have formed my opinions. Sincerely, Sue Gardner Scholarly Communications Librarian/Professor University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, Nebraska, 68588 USA
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:30 PM, Sue Gardner sgardn...@unl.edu mailto:sgardn...@unl.edu wrote: Stevan, Apologies for a delayed response. I have been meaning to reply, and now have time. You have asked some questions of us at UNL. Paul Royster may reply, as well. These are my thoughts. (1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? (Without that figure, there is no way of knowing how well N-L is doing, compared to other institutional repositories, mandated or unmandated.) You are requesting a certain metric and claiming that it is the only valid one. We have approximately 75,000 items in our repository, almost all of which can be read freely by anyone with an Internet connection. We also have several dozen monographs under our own imprint, and we host several journals. We don't devote too much of our time to analyzing our metrics, in part because we are a staff of three (as of two weeks ago--before which we were a staff of two), and we spend much of our time getting content into the repository in favor of administrative activities. Personally, I welcome anyone to analyze our output by any measure and I will be interested to know the result, but that information won't change our day-to-day activities, so it would remain off to the side of what we're doing. Sue, I mentioned it because UNL was being described as one of the biggest and most successful Institutional Repositories (IRs). This may be true if IR success is gauged by total contents, regardless of type. But if it is about success for OA’s target contents — which are first and foremost refereed journal articles — then there is no way to know how UNL compares with other IRs unless the comparison is based on the yearly proportion of UNL yearly refereed journal article output that is being deposited in UNC’s IR (and when). I might add that the question is all the more important as the success of UNC’s IR was being adduced as evidence that an OA mandate is not necessary for IR (OA) success. Stevan Harnad Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository, and what should be its aims and purpose? I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term “institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in “open electronic archives”. http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive their papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24 I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the paper written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”). Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university community.” Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them; Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public value.” http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf But today I would think that when defining the term “institutional repository” most people (especially librarians) refer to a document authored by Clifford Lynch in 2003 (“Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”). Lynch described an institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.” http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/arl-br-226.pdf The above, for instance, is how Cambridge University defines an institutional repository, see: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/repository/about/about_institutional_repositories.html Speaking to me in 2006, Lynch said, “If all you want to do is author self-archiving, I suspect that there are
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Begin forwarded message: From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Date: September 16, 2014 at 5:28:48 PM GMT-4 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Paul Royster proyst...@unl.edu wrote: At the risk of stirring up more sediment and further muddying the waters of scholarly communications, but in response to direct questions posed in this venue earlier this month, I shall venture the following … Answers for Dr. Harnad (1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? About 3 months ago I furnished your graduate student (at least he said he was your student) with 5 years of deposit data so he could compare it to Web of Science publication dates and arrive at some data-based figure for this. I cautioned him that I felt Web of Science to be a narrow and commercially skewed comparison sample, but I sent the data anyway. So I expect you will have an answer to this query before I do. If the news is good, I hope you will share it with this list; if not, then let your conscience be your guide. As for benchmarking, I don’t believe it is a competition, and every step in the direction of free scholarship is a positive one. I hope when they hand out the medals we at least get a ribbon for participation. Thanks for reminding me! It was my post-doc, Yassine Gargouri, and I just called him to ask about the UNL results. He said he has the UNL data and will have the results of the analysis in 2-3 weeks! So the jury is still out. But many thanks for sending the data. Apparently Sue was not aware that UNL had provided those data (and I too had forgotten!). (2) Why doesn’t N-L adopt a self-archiving mandate? I do not even attempt to explain the conduct of the black box that is my university’s administration; so in short, I cannot say why or why not. I can only say why I have not campaigned for adoption of such a mandate. My reasons have been purely personal and idiosyncratic, and I do not hold them up as a model for anyone else or as representing the thinking or attitude of this university. Bluntly, I have not sought to create a mandate because I feel there are enough regulations and requirements in effect here already. Instituting more rules brings further problems of enforcement or compliance, and it creates new categories of deviance. There are already too many rules: we have to park in designated areas; we have to drink Pepsi rather than Coke products; we have to wear red on game days; we can’t enter the building through the freight dock; etc. etc. etc. I simply do not believe in creating more rules and requirements, even if they are for our own good. The Faculty Senate voted to “endorse and recommend” our repository; I have not desired more than that. But I am concerned mainly with 1600 faculty on two campuses in one medium-sized university town—not with a universal solution to the worldwide scholarly communications crisis. I see discussions lately about “putting teeth” into mandated deposit rules, and I wonder—who is intended to be bitten? Apparently, the already-beleaguered faculty. I agree that we are over-regulated! But I think that doing a few extra keystrokes when a refereed final draft is accepted for publication is really very little, and the potential benefits are huge. Also, there is some evidence as to how authors comply with a self-archiving mandate — if it’s the right self-archiving mandate, i.e., If the mandate simply indicates that henceforth the way to submit refereed journal article publications for annual performance review is to deposit them in UNL’s IR (rather than however they are being submitted currently) then UNL faculty will comply as naturally as they did when it was mandaed that submissions should be online rather than in hard copy. It’s just a technological upgrade. (3) Why do you lump together author-pays with author-self-archives? I was not aware that I did this, so perhaps you are responding to Sue’s catalog of various proposed solutions—“author-pays OA, mandated self-archiving of manuscripts, CHORUS, SHARE, and others”—as all being “ineffectual or unsustainable initiatives to varying degrees.” I feel we are strong believers and even advocates for author self-archiving (so-called), and disdainful non-advocates for author-pays models. But I think we have become aware of the divergence of interests between the global theoretics of the open access “movements” on the one hand and the “boots-on-the-ground” practicalities of managing a local repository, even one with global reach, on the other. Crusades for and controversies about “open access” have come to seem far removed from what we actually do, and now seem more of a distraction than a help or guide. I can understand
[GOAL] {Disarmed} On Open Access, Institutional Repositories and Prophecy
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Richard Poynder richard.poyn...@btinternet.com wrote: Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository, and what should be its aims and purpose? I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term “institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in “open electronic archives”. http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read Correct. There were no institutional repositories in 2002 -- and the word being used to designate them at the time was open archives. Tansley, R. Harnad, S. (2000) Eprints.org Software for Creating Institutional and Individual Open Archives http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD *D-Lib Magazine* 6 (10) Then there was a bit of a terminological tiff for a few years, in which librarians argued that the term archive was inappropriate and already appropriated, so eventually the accepted term became repository. Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive their papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24 Correct, and that was even earlier. (And by the time I wrote that, ftp archives were already superseded by websites...) I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the paper written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”). Now I must demur, or at least question the meaning of seminal: There is no doubt that Crow's paper was influential. But it got so many things so wrong, I hesitate to call it seminal (in any other sense than miscegenation!). I tried at the time (as always, unsuccessfully) to head it off at the pass: *Comments on Raym Crow's (2002) SPARC position paper on institutional repositories http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/671-guid.html (2002)* Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university community.” Yes indeed he did. And I pointed out that the preservation function as well as the gray literature function were distinct from the OA function, and that the OA function needed special attention, with some urgency (that was 12 years ago!) for reasons that have since been oft rehearsed. And, more important, I pointed out that Raym Crow's notion of institutional repository was also infected with the loopy notion of disaggregated journal (originating from JWT Smith http://kar.kent.ac.uk/4/)... Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them; That's a lot of eclectic and inchoate ideology -- access, control, journal costs, library relevance-- but not a coherent notion of institutional repository. Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public value.” http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf Yes, repositories can showcase institutions' research output: but to do that better than a bibliography, they need to make that output OA. And doing that for the gray literature is a piece of cake. The challenge is only with the toll-gated refereed journal literature. Back to the IR's special mission as OA-provider rather than merely a preservation-archive and showcase for other kinds of output. But today I would think that when defining the term “institutional repository” most people (especially librarians) refer to a document authored by Clifford Lynch in 2003 (“Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”). And that one (in the humble opinion of this unheeded lesser-prophet) was just as off-target: *Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2744.html (2003)* *Cliff Lynch on Open Access http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/195-Cliff-Lynch-on-Open-Access.html (2007)* Lynch described an institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”
[GOAL] Re: On Open Access, Institutional Repositories and Prophecy
SH: The same old motto: We need less definition and more open access
provision...
RP: This, however, is difficult if there is no consensus on what exactly open
access is. Likewise, it is difficult to say how successful an institutional
repository has been if there is no consensus on what an institutional
repository is, what it should be doing, and what it should contain!
From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of
Stevan Harnad
Sent: 17 September 2014 15:05
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] {Disarmed} On Open Access, Institutional Repositories and
Prophecy
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Richard Poynder
richard.poyn...@btinternet.com mailto:richard.poyn...@btinternet.com wrote:
Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and
disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository, and
what should be its aims and purpose?
I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term
“institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in
“open electronic archives”. http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read
Correct. There were no institutional repositories in 2002 -- and the word being
used to designate them at the time was open archives.
Tansley, R. Harnad, S. (2000)
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD MailScanner has
detected a possible fraud attempt from www.dlib.org claiming to be
Eprints.org Software for Creating Institutional and Individual Open Archives
D-Lib Magazine 6 (10)
Then there was a bit of a terminological tiff for a few years, in which
librarians argued that the term archive was inappropriate and already
appropriated, so eventually the accepted term became repository.
Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive their
papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”.
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24
Correct, and that was even earlier. (And by the time I wrote that, ftp archives
were already superseded by websites...)
I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the paper
written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC
Position Paper”).
Now I must demur, or at least question the meaning of seminal: There is no
doubt that Crow's paper was influential. But it got so many things so wrong, I
hesitate to call it seminal (in any other sense than miscegenation!).
I tried at the time (as always, unsuccessfully) to head it off at the pass:
Comments on Raym Crow's (2002) SPARC position paper on institutional
repositories http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/671-guid.html
(2002)
Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing and
preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university
community.”
Yes indeed he did. And I pointed out that the preservation function as well as
the gray literature function were distinct from the OA function, and that the
OA function needed special attention, with some urgency (that was 12 years
ago!) for reasons that have since been oft rehearsed.
And, more important, I pointed out that Raym Crow's notion of institutional
repository was also infected with the loopy notion of disaggregated journal
(originating from JWT Smith http://kar.kent.ac.uk/4/ )...
Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a critical
component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that
expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy,
increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings
economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that
support them;
That's a lot of eclectic and inchoate ideology -- access, control, journal
costs, library relevance-- but not a coherent notion of institutional
repository.
Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to
demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research
activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public
value.”
http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf
Yes, repositories can showcase institutions' research output: but to do that
better than a bibliography, they need to make that output OA. And doing that
for the gray literature is a piece of cake. The challenge is only with the
toll-gated refereed journal literature.
Back to the IR's special mission as OA-provider rather than merely a
preservation-archive and showcase for other kinds of output.
But today I would think that when defining the term “institutional repository”
most people (especially librarians) refer to a document authored by Clifford
Lynch in 2003 (“Institutional Repositories:
[GOAL] Re: Fwd: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster
Most interesting dialogue. I will focus on two points: 1. Using the Web of Science collection as a reference: this generates all kinds of problems, particularly for disciplines that are not dominated and skewed by the impact factor folly. This is true, for example, of most of the social sciences and the humanities, especially when these publications are not in English. Stevan has also and long argued about limiting oneself to journal articles. I have my own difficulties with this limitation because book chapters and monographs are so important in the disciplines that I tend to work in. Also, I regularly write in French as well as English, while reading articles in a variety of languages. Most of the articles that are not in English are not in the Web of Science. A better way to proceed would be to check if the journals not in the WoS, and corresponding to deposited articles, are peer-reviewed. The same could be done with book chapters. Incidentally, if I limited myself to WoS publications for annual performance review, I would look rather bad. I suspect I am not the only one in such a situation, while leading a fairly honourable career in academe. 2. The issue of rules and regulations. It is absolutely true that a procedure such as the one adopted at the Université de Liège and which Stevan aptly summarizes as (with a couple of minor modifications): henceforth the way to submit refereed journal article publications for annual performance review is to deposit them in the [appropriate] IR . However, obtaining this change of behaviour from an administration is no small task. At the local, institutional, level, it corresponds to a politically charged effort that requires having a number of committed OA advocates working hard to push the idea. Stevan should know this from his own experience in Montreal; he should also know that, presently, the Open Access issue is not on the radar of most researchers. In scientific disciplines, they tend to be mesmerized by impact factors without making the link between this obsession and the OA advantage, partly because enough controversies have surrounded this issue to maintain a general feeling of uncertainty and doubt. In the social sciences and humanities where the citation rates are far less meaningful - I put quotation marks here to underscore the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of citation numbers: visibility, prestige, quality? - the benefits of self-archiving one's articles in open access are less obvious to researchers, especially if they do not adopt a global perspective on the importance of the grand conversation needed to produce knowledge in an optimal manner, but rather intend to manage and protect their career. Saying all this is not saying that we should not remain committed to OA, far from it; is is simply saying that the chances of success in reaching OA will not be significantly improved by simply referring to huge benefits at the cost of only a few extra keystrokes. This is rhetoric. The last time I deposited an article of mine, given the procedure used in the depository I was using, it took me close to half an hour to enter all the details required by that depository - a depository organized by librarians, mainly for information science specialists. All these details were legitimate and potentially useful. However, while I was absolutely sure I was doing the right thing, I could well understand why a colleague less sanguine about OA than I am might push this task to the back burner. In fact, I did so myself for several months. Shame on me, probably, but this is the reality of the quotidian. In conclusion, i suspect that if Stevan focuses on such a narrowly-defined target - journal articles in the STM disciplines - this is because he gambles on the fact that making these disciplines fully OA would force the other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to follow suit sooner or later. Perhaps, it is so, but perhaps it is not. Meanwhile, arguing in this fashion tends to alienate practitioners of the humanities and the social sciences, so that the alleged advantages of narrowly focusing on a well-defined target are perhaps more than negatively compensated by the neglect of SSH disciplines. yet, the latter constitute about half, if not more, of the researchers in the world. -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal Le mercredi 17 septembre 2014 à 07:07 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : Begin forwarded message: From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster Date: September 16, 2014 at 5:28:48 PM GMT-4 To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Paul Royster proyst...@unl.edu wrote: At the risk of stirring up more sediment and further muddying the waters of scholarly communications, but in response to direct questions posed in this venue earlier this month, I shall
[GOAL] {Disarmed} Re: Re: On Open Access, Institutional Repositories and Prophecy
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Richard Poynder
ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk wrote:
SH: The same old motto: *We need less definition and more open access
provision*...
RP: This, however, is difficult if there is no consensus on what exactly
open access is. Likewise, it is difficult to say how successful an
institutional repository has been if there is no consensus on what an
institutional repository is, what it should be doing, and what it should
contain!
But we'd have had a lot more of it by now if we had taken, as a first
approximation, *free online access to journal articles*, as an operational
definition of OA -- and an OAI-compliant institutional database as the
place to deposit them, as an operational definition of an IR.
Instead we are agonizing over how to define OA instead of providing it, and
we are arguing over what an IR is for instead of filling it with our
refereed journal articles.
Fortunately, after yet another lost decade of access, the institutional and
funder mandates are at last beginning to come to their senses and requiring
their employees and fundees to go ahead and provide the first
approximation...
Stevan Harnad
*From:* goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On
Behalf Of *Stevan Harnad
*Sent:* 17 September 2014 15:05
*To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
*Subject:* [GOAL] {Disarmed} On Open Access, Institutional Repositories
and Prophecy
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Richard Poynder
richard.poyn...@btinternet.com wrote:
Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and
disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository,
and what should be its aims and purpose?
I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term
“institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in
“open electronic archives”.
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read
Correct. There were no institutional repositories in 2002 -- and the word
being used to designate them at the time was open archives.
Tansley, R. Harnad, S. (2000) Eprints.org Software for Creating
Institutional and Individual Open Archives
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD *D-Lib
Magazine* 6 (10)
Then there was a bit of a terminological tiff for a few years, in which
librarians argued that the term archive was inappropriate and already
appropriated, so eventually the accepted term became repository.
Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive
their papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”.
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24
Correct, and that was even earlier. (And by the time I wrote that, ftp
archives were already superseded by websites...)
I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the
paper written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional
Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”).
Now I must demur, or at least question the meaning of seminal: There is
no doubt that Crow's paper was influential. But it got so many things so
wrong, I hesitate to call it seminal (in any other sense than
miscegenation!).
I tried at the time (as always, unsuccessfully) to head it off at the
pass:
*Comments on Raym Crow's (2002) SPARC position paper on institutional
repositories
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/671-guid.html (2002)*
Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing
and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university
community.”
Yes indeed he did. And I pointed out that the preservation function as
well as the gray literature function were distinct from the OA function,
and that the OA function needed special attention, with some urgency (that
was 12 years ago!) for reasons that have since been oft rehearsed.
And, more important, I pointed out that Raym Crow's notion of
institutional repository was also infected with the loopy notion of
disaggregated journal (originating from JWT Smith
http://kar.kent.ac.uk/4/)...
Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a
critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a
component that expands access to research, reasserts control over
scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly
power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to
the institutions and libraries that support them;
That's a lot of eclectic and inchoate ideology -- access, control, journal
costs, library relevance-- but not a coherent notion of institutional
repository.
Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to
demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its
research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status,
and public value.”
