Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
>ph> unless organisational issues (such as, for example, the absence >ph> of an intelligible publishing process for the multiple submission >ph> of eprints to archives) are more important in the field than is >ph> being recognised in this discussion. > >sh> I couldn't follow this! > >sh> What is "an intelligible publishing process"? >sh> Eprints = pre-refereeing preprints + published, refereed postprints. >sh> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint >sh> Self-archiving is not self-publishing; it is merely a means of providing >sh> open access to one's own preprints and postprints. By 'publishing process' I meant the coordination of multiple versions and revisions of the same paper, within the same or different OAI archives. I think this is what Chris Gutteridge was aiming at by suggesting 'some negotiated automated process for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least assisting the author in the process'. It is a publishing process to the user, in that multiple copies are deposited in the archives, and that version control is a feature of the process. This process has to be intelligible to the user, or there won't be siginificant take-up. This is the territory for the development of third party services by service providers, rather than part of the base-level eprints/self-archiving idea. The absence of such services (I was suggesting) might have a bearing on the currently low-level of deposits in archives. I prefer to speak of submission to archives, since not all eprint archives expose all the materials which have been deposited. The act of depositing an eprint does not automatically imply (in practice) open access. It is important to be clear about what is actually happening in the world of eprint archives. Philip *** Philip Hunter, Editor of Ariadne Magazine & UKOLN Research Officer. UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY Tel: +44 (0) 1225 323 668 Fax: +44 (0) 1225 826838 Email: p.j.hun...@ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ ARIADNE: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ OA-FORUM: http://www.oaforum.org/ *** > > And what is "multiple submission of eprints to archives"? > Eprints are not submitted to archives. (They are merely deposited in > archives.) Preprints are submitted to *journals* (for peer review), > and if/when accepted, the refereed postprints are published by those > journals. Preprints and postprints are deposited (self-archived) in > Eprint Archives. > > The rate of archive-creation and filling is increasing, but it needs to > be accelerated substantially, and as soon as possible. Systematic > institutional self-archiving policies will help accomplish this once > institutions realize the direct causal connection between maximizing > research access and maximizing research impact. > > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html > http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi > > Stevan Harnad >
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes > > Success here depends on selling the idea to academics, and that > > depends crucially on what business models are followed. > > I have no idea what "business models" have to do with demonstrating to > academics that increasing research access increases research impact. > http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html For self-archiving, abstract understanding is not sufficiont. You need action by academics. If you want to have an intermediated process (by means of an achive) then it will crucially depond on the behaviour of the intermediary, in this case of the archive managemnt. This is what I mean here by the business model of the archive. You have changed your mind twice on what the optimal business model is. You will change it again... Until then, I shall keep a bit more quiet. When I return to NYC, I will have web access again, and find other things to do. Just for correction > online papers that already exist on arbitrary websites webwide. This > is the invaluable service Thomas's RePEc (Research Papers in > Economics) is performing for over 86,000 non-OAI papers RePEc does not index arbinary website, but archive sites. They have the same functioality as OAI archives, in fact OAI was modeled after RePEc. The whole OAI concept was first implemented there. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
At 21:33 18/03/2003 +, you wrote: sh> It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general sh> discussion of open access and self-archiving for researchers. tk> You constantly belittle techncial problems, and then you wonder tk> why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because tk> these "technical problems" have not been solved. By belittling tk> them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution. You know, I wonder if that's the case. I can see your point, and I won't argue that EPrints, or DSpace, or arxiv provides perfect technical solutions to every imaginable problem or the perfect user interface for every user. (I will refrain here from speaking of RePeC, since I don't know of any shortcomings that it may have :-) In these discussions I am constantly reminded of the many computer systems that I use professionally and their many (many, many) shortcomings. However, the technical shortcomings don't stop me using the systems. It may be that the systems manage to provide a *sufficient* level of utility for the task I need to undertake at the moment. Or it may be that there is no alternative, and "not using them" is unthinkable. In short, if using a computer system helps me towards one of my goals, I'll use it and live with its shortcomings. I think this area (academic motivation) is quite likely to hold the key to the missing content. --- Les Carr PS It may well be that by "belittling" a "technical problem" you put yourself in the way of finding a solution, but I think that the issue here is that there are many possible solutions to this particular problem. Certainly in local discussions several solutions have been suggested, but no agreement on a "globally optimal" solution has been reached :-)
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: >sh> What is needed, urgently, today, is universal self-archiving, and >sh> not trivial worries about whether to do it here or there or both: >sh> OAI-interoperability makes this into a non-issue from the >sh> self-archiver's point of view, and merely a technical feature to >sh> sort out, from the OAI-developers' point of view. > > Success here depends on selling the idea to academics, and that > depends crucially on what business models are followed. I have no idea what "business models" have to do with demonstrating to academics that increasing research access increases research impact. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html > each of the disciplines > that have traditionally issued preprints and working papers, > i.e. computer science, economomics, mathematics and physics > has its own special case. All have their own business model. > One size does not fit all. I still can't follow. These are among the disciplines whose researchers have self-archived -- in the case of physics/maths, mostly in one disciplinary archive, in the case of computer science and economics, in arbitrary websites (and some central archives). I don't know what you mean by a "business model." And the only fact that fits them all is that self-archiving maximizes research impact by maximizing research access. That is also the only relevant fact here -- other than that OAI-compliant self-archiving is far more effective and desirable than arbitrary self-archiving. > > No need! First, because the "duplification of effort" is so minimal > > It will not be, especially when there is a chance to have > different versions in different archives, this could be > rather, if not highly, problematic. I have no idea how much of a technical problem duplicate self-archiving would cause (whether of the same paper in different archives, or different versions of the same paper in the same or different archives). But my response is: "If only that were our only remaining 'problem' then my work would be done!" The real problem is getting the research community to realize that it needs to self-archive *at all* (never mind how many versions!), and why, and how. Compared to that fundamental "nullplification-of-effort" problem, which is the one we are still facing currently, any "duplication-of-effort" or "balking-at-duplicating-effort" problem is truly trivial. > > It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general discussion > > of open access and self-archiving for researchers. > > You constantly belittle techncial problems, and then you wonder > why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because > these "technical problems" have not been solved. By belittling > them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution. I belittle trivial problems to put them in context, and to highlight the sole nontrivial problem. Double-archived papers are a trivial problem. Non-archived papers are the nontrivial problem. I am *certain* (not guessing, *certain*) that the reason the archives are not filling faster is most decidedly *not* because of any aspect of the "duplicate paper" problem. Most researchers don't even understand why they should self-archive *one* version of a paper, let alone being concerned about having to self-archive more than one. What gets in the way of finding a solution to the nontrivial problem -- universal self-archiving -- is a pathway littered with trivial problems and nonproblems (of which "duplication" is merely the 23rd of at least 26 I've catalogued so far: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#23.Version ). Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes > What is needed, urgently, today, is universal self-archiving, and > not trivial worries about whether to do it here or there or both: > OAI-interoperability makes this into a non-issue from the > self-archiver's point of view, and merely a technical feature to > sort out, from the OAI-developers' point of view. Success here depends on selling the idea to academics, and that depends crucially on what business models are followed. > What Chris has in mind is only one, exceptional, special case, > namely, the Physics ArXiv, a disciplinary archive (but the *only* > one) which is, since 1991, well on the road to getting filled in > certain subareas of physics (200,000+ papers) (although even this > archive is still a decade from completeness at its present linear > growth rate: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions see slide 10 of > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm ) There are other special cases. In fact each of the disciplines that have traditionally issued preprints and working papers, i.e. computer science, economomics, mathematics and physics has its own special case. All have their own business model. One size does not fit all. > No need! First, because the "duplification of effort" is so minimal It will not be, especially when there is a chance to have different versions in different archives, this could be rather, if not highly, problematic. > It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general discussion > of open access and self-archiving for researchers. You constantly belittle techncial problems, and then you wonder why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because these "technical problems" have not been solved. By belittling them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: >sh> (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot. > > Cliff [Lynch] imagines that they can, but in practice, it will be tough. > You can not put a KGB officer in every academic's office! You're on the wrong track. Self-archiving can and will be mandated by researchers' instituitions by and for *exactly* the same reasons and methods as publishing-or-perishing is mandated by institutions. No KGB, just the simple carrot/stick career consequences of research and research impact. Once the direct causal connection between access and impact is shown and known -- e.g., http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html -- everyone will find it as natural that research institutions should reward their researchers for maximizing the impact of their publishing (by self-archiving it) as to maximize the publishing itself. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling >sh> (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all. > > Sure, but all have some ways to communicate informally, and many > have innovative channels. Sure, many of them stay small, but > there is no technical obstacle to a meaningful aggregation. Here is the point on which Thomas and I part ways (profoundly). I agree completely that where papers have not yet been self-archived in OAI-compliant Archives (whether institutional or disciplinary) it is highly desirable to find, link, metadata-enhance or harvest any discoverable online papers that already exist on arbitrary websites webwide. This is the invaluable service Thomas's RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is performing for over 86,000 non-OAI papers that would otherwise be very difficult to find and use http://repec.org/ But the objective of OAI-compliant institutional self-archiving (and a systematic policy mandating it) is to get away as soon as possible from having to resort to these makeshift solutions for arbitrary web content. (Nor is any of this relevant to what I said, which is that most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all, and disciplines are in no position to mandate self-archiving, whereas institutions are.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi >sh> (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary >sh> self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but >sh> aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary >sh> OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than >sh> aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional >sh> OAI archives. > > no, it is easier to construct feature-rich datasets out of > disciplinary archives, because some of them will be prepared > with the specifics of an aggregator in mind. I regret I couldn't follow the logic of this at all. First, there are almost no disciplinary OAI archives. Second, makeshift measures with arbitrary web content are exactly that: makeshift, interim measures. Third, from the fact that "some" arbitrary content may happen to have "some" desirable specific features, nothing whatsoever follows. And fourth, whatever are the specific features desired, they can be systematically included (and mandated) in the institutional OAI archives (parametrized to fit each discipline). Aggregation is not the objective: Interoperable content is; and (mandated) institutional OAI self-archiving is the most direct, fastest and surest way to generate it. Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes > Thomas gives exactly the correct answer to Chris! I didn't know this was a quiz :-) > What is needed is institutional self-archiving, distributed across its > departments interoperably, but customized to the different needs of the > different disciplines. That is a tall order. > (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot. Cliff imagines that they can, but in practice, it will be tough. You can not put a KGB officer in every academic's office! > (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all. Sure, but all have some ways to communicate informally, and many have innovative channels. Sure, many of them stay small, but there is not technical obstacle to a meaningful aggergation. > (4) There are many other potential uses for institutional research > archives (apart from open access). I agree. If I would run an institution's archive I would back up all the web sites each year. In 20 years time, you would get a fascinating picture of the development of the institution. > (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary > self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but > aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary > OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than > aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional > OAI archives. no, it is easier to construct feature-rich datasets out of disciplinary archives, because some of them will be prepared with the specifics of an aggregator in mind. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Philip Hunter wrote: >sh> Right now, most OAI >sh> Archives, whether institutional or disciplinary, are either (1) >sh> non-existent, or (2) near-empty! The transition we are striving for is >sh> from empty to full archives (and let us hope it will not be too long!), >sh> not from disciplinary to institutional archives! > > I have to agree with this assessment. It is rather puzzling that take-up of > the technology is (relatively) so low, and the archives are so empty It's not quite *that* slow! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm > unless > organisational issues (such as, for example, the absence of an intelligible > publishing process for the multiple submission of eprints to archives) are > more important in the field than is being recognised in this discussion. I couldn't follow this! What is "an intelligible publishing process"? Eprints = pre-refereeing preprints + published, refereed postprints. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint Self-archiving is not self-publishing; it is merely a means of providing open access to one's own preprints and postprints. And what is "multiple submission of eprints to archives"? Eprints are not submitted to archives. (They are merely deposited in archives.) Preprints are submitted to *journals* (for peer review), and if/when accepted, the refereed postprints are published by those journals. Preprints and postprints are deposited (self-archived) in Eprint Archives. The rate of archive-creation and filling is increasing, but it needs to be accelerated substantially, and as soon as possible. Systematic institutional self-archiving policies will help accomplish this once institutions realize the direct causal connection between maximizing research access and maximizing research impact. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Christopher Gutteridge wrote: > we are planning a University-wide eprints archive. I am > concerned that some physicists will want to place their items in both > the university eprints service AND the arXiv physics archive. They may > be required to use the university service, but want to use arXiv as it > is the primary source for their discipline. This is a duplication of > effort and a potential irritation. This is a very minor technical problem (the interoperability of multiple OAI Archives containing the same paper) and part of another, slightly less minor problem, namely, version-control, within and across OAI Archives (the coordination of multiple versions and revisions of the same paper, within the same or different OAI archives), plus the optimization of cross-archive OAI search services: http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html I recommend that this be discussed with the pertinent experts in oai-tech or oai-general. It is not a general archiving or open-access matter, and can only confuse researchers (needlessly). For them, self-archiving is the optimal thing to do, institutionally in the first instance, but also in a central disciplinary archive if/when they wish; and they should not worry any further about it. (What is needed, urgently, today, is universal self-archiving, and not trivial worries about whether to do it here or there or both: OAI-interoperability makes this into a non-issue from the self-archiver's point of view, and merely a technical feature to sort out, from the OAI-developers' point of view.) > Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that disciplinary archives will be replaced > with subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting from the institutional > archives. But there is going to be a very long transition period in which > the solution evolves from our experience. A very long transition period from what to what? Right now, most OAI Archives, whether institutional or disciplinary, are either (1) non-existent, or (2) near-empty! The transition we are striving for is from empty to full archives (and let us hope it will not be too long!), not from disciplinary to institutional archives! What Chris has in mind is only one, exceptional, special case, namely, the Physics ArXiv, a disciplinary archive (but the *only* one) which is, since 1991, well on the road to getting filled in certain subareas of physics (200,000+ papers) (although even this archive is still a decade from completeness at its present linear growth rate: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions see slide 10 of http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm ) Chris is imagining that if/when the institutions of those physicists who are already self-archiving in ArXiv adopt an institutional self-archiving policy like the one in Chris's own department -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html -- then some of those physicists may wonder why/whether they should self-archive twice! (A tempest in a teapot! The real challenge is getting all the *other* disciplines to self-archive in the first place. Don't worry about those physicists who are already ahead of the game. They are not the problem!) > What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing > over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated process > for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least > assisting the author in the process. No need! First, because the "duplification of effort" is so minimal (the centrally self-archiving physicists being such an infinitesimal subset of all that needs to be self-archived -- namely, 2,000,000 articles per year, across disciplines, not just 200,000 across 10 years, in one discipline!). And second, because the technical problem (of duplicate self-archiving) is so soluble, in so many obvious ways! > This isn't the biggest issue, but it'd be good to address it before it > becomes more of a problem. It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general discussion of open access and self-archiving for researchers. It belongs only in a technical discussion group for developers and implementers of the OAI protocol. The only issue for the research community is how to get the OAI Archives created and filled, as soon as possible; and I think it is becoming apparent that institution-based self-archiving is the most general and natural route to this goal, for the many reasons already discussed in this thread. Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Disciplinary/subject archives vs. Institutional/Organisation/Region based archives. This is going to be a key challenge now open archives begin to gain momentum. For example; we are planning a University-wide eprints archive. I am concerned that some physicists will want to place their items in both the university eprints service AND the arXiv physics archive. They may be required to use the university service, but want to use arXiv as it is the primary source for their discipline. This is a duplication of effort and a potential irritation. Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that disciplinary archives will be replaced by subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting from the institutional archives. But there is going to be a very long transition period in which the solution evolves from our experience. What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated process for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least assisting the author in the process. This isn't the biggest issue, but it'd be good to address it before it becomes more of a problem. Christopher Gutteridge GNU EPrints Head Developer http://software.eprints.org/
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: >cg> What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing >cg> over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated process >cg> for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least >cg> assisting the author in the process. > > This is not a pressing concern as much as it appears, because > discipline-based archives have, arXiv apart, not that much stuff. Thomas gives exactly the correct answer to Chris! > It is better, > within an institution, to proceed department by department and > listen to what the academics want (and these wants will be > different in each department), rather than setting up one > archive that is supposed to satisfy everybody's needs at the > risk of satisfying nobody's. Of course. Institutional self-archiving does not imply one single university archive, but an OAI-interoperable network, parametrized to suit any special needs of each discipline. (That's certainly how Chris's eprints.org software is being designed: http://software.eprints.org/ ) > it is best to listen to academics telling you > what their needs are, rather than setting up procedures around > a central institutional archive, The latter is what Clifford Lynch wants. > I don't think that it will work. What is needed is institutional self-archiving, distributed across its departments interoperably, but customized to the different needs of the different disciplines. >cg> Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that disciplinary archives will be >cg> replaced [by] subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting >cg> from the institutional archives. > > I would put this in different way, I'd say that there should be more > interoperability between institutional archives and disciplinary > aggregators. Such aggregators don't have a prime function of > archiving contents but to put the archival contents into > relations with personal and institutional data and > document-to-document metadata such as citations. Rather > than marking up the documents content in the institutional > archive with subject classification data, it should be marked > up with aggregator data... n the longer run, we need an extension > to the OAI protocol to support this on a larger scale. No problem. This is certainly something the OAI developers can address. But it has nothing to do with what Chris was worrying about (dupicate self-archiving in disciplinary and institutional archives); and it seems to agree about the primacy of institution-based archiving (but distributed across, and adapted to, the institution's departments and disciplines). > Faculty should be given the choice [between disciplinary and > institutional self-archiving]. They should not be required > to do either one. arXiv have been doing a tremendous job at > archiving. You are not going to replace them. But arXiv really > only covers a small set of disciplines well. This seems to contradict what was said before! It would be impossible to implement an effective, systematic institutional self-archiving policy if it were optional whether researchers self-archive in their institutional archive or in a central disciplinary archive (even though OAI-interoperability makes the two alternatives completely equivalent from an open-access point of view). Let me count the ways: (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot. (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all. (3) All institutions have (just about) all disciplines. (4) There are many other potential uses for institutional research archives (apart from open access). (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional OAI archives. (6) But it is not the equivalence or ease of aggregation that is relevant at this point (with most archives non-existent or near-empty) but what is the most promising and natural way to reach universal open access. (Return to (1) above.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Christopher Gutteridge writes > For example; we are planning a University-wide eprints archive. I am > concerned that some physisists will want to place their items in both > the university eprints service AND the arXiv physics archive. They may > be required to use the university service, but want to use arXiv as it > is the primary source for their discipline. This is a duplication of > effort and a potential irritation. Faculty should be given the choice. They should not be required to do either one. arXiv have been doing a tremendous job at archiving. You are not going to replace them. But arXiv really only covers a small set of disciplines well. > Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that diciplinary archives will be replaced > with subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting from the institutional > archives. I would put this in different way, I'd say that there should be more interoperability between institutional archives and disciplinary aggregators. Such aggregators don't have a prime function of archiving contents but to put the archival contents into relations with personal and institutional data and document-to-document metadata such as citations. Rather than marking up the documents content in the institutional archive with subject classification data, it should be marked up with aggregator data. That is, for example, you may decide to export all the computer science papers to rclis. Thus you create an rclis set within and inform rclis of this. Then they can periodically harvest the data and feed it. In the longer run, we need an extension to the OAI protocol to support this on a larger scale. In the meantime, it is perfectly feasible to do this here and now with the model aggregator service that it out there, the RePEc project. In fact, RePEc does this already with the California Digital library, thanks to efforts by Roy Tennant and Christopher F. Baum. So, to all those institutional archivers out there, if you have an economics department that does not already operate a RePEc archive, talk to them, talk to RePEc, and set up a OAI set with the Economics papers. It is better, within an institution, to proceed department by department and listen to what the academics want (and these wants will be different in each department), rather than setting up one archive that is supposed to satisfy everybody's needs at the risk of satisfying nobody's. > What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing > over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated process > for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least > assisting the author in the process. It not a pressing concern as much as this appears, because discipline-based archives have, arXiv apart, not that much stuff. Discipline aggregators, RePEc apart, are still in their infancy. I am involved with others in setting up rclis, an aggregator for computing and library and information science. One thing should be clear: aggregator need years to develop and lots of TLC to sustain themselves. But I repeat: it is best to listen to academics to tell you what their needs are, rather than setting up procedures around a central institutional archive, The latter is what Clifford Lynch wants. I don't think that it will work. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
OK, Stevan, you mentioned biology, so I imagine you expect a reply from me. I agree with you that ecology -- in combination with other terms -- is a sufficient descriptor. The evidence for this is the not very helpful separate attempts of both Biological Abstracts and Zoological Record to divide the area into more specific terms. Free text and citations is indeed the only way to deal with it, and that is what I teach my students. This is however, somewhat truer of all areas where what one is trying to index is concepts or approaches, rather than discrete things. I can easily provide good subject terms for not just things with standardized terminaology like animals, but for machine parts, or clothing, or or even emotions. But I cannot do so for mechanical operations, of programming principles, or ethical ideas: they do not have discrete boundaries and are used in unpredictable ways. The harder classification problem is when you deal with, say, the sort of ecology that mathematical ecologists do. If they are primarily mathematicians, they may not even be aware they are talking about biology, or to what biological fields or problems their techniques are applicable. In practice, this material is initially discovered only through serendipity, and then the knowledge is dispersed through the citation network. And obviously the conventional journal system is not of value here, so I do not think we disagree. I write to expand on what you said, not contradict it. On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote: > On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Lee Miller wrote: > > > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a > > discipline field in the metadata. > > I agree. And this confirms that "aggregation" is merely (1) a > metadata-based from of re-packaging and (2) need not re-package the > full-text but merely the pointers to it. Hence it is not the case that the > (full-text) *data* from distributed Institutional OAI Archives need to be > "fed" (harvested) into central Disciplinary OAI Archives. "Aggregation" > is merely a special case (or rather a special name) for ordinary OAI > Service-Provision -- which is precisely what the OAI Metadata Harvesting > Protocol was designed for! The old paper-based idea of journal-content > "aggregators" is simply misleading us here. Online "aggregators" are > really just search engines, pulling out and ranging over > discipline-specific subsets of OAI full-text content space. > > > This gets back to the problems of subject > > classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined > > discipline descriptors should be sufficient. > > A *very* short list. Because once I have narrowed it to "Ecology," the > rest is best done with boolean full-text search and algorithms rather than > prefabricated human classification schemes. > > > For example, the discipline of ecology includes plants, animals, > > microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, physical environments, > > physiology, applied mathematics, and many other sub-fields. Nevertheless, > > ecologists of all stripes recognize and enjoy common bonds in the general > > discipline. A small number of general journals that publish papers from > > many of the sub-disciplines are followed by many researchers and academics, > > regardless of their specialty fields. Thus inclusion of the discipline > > desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has > > already proved useful to ecologists for over a century. > > No problem. But how many such high-level (useful) partitions do you think > there really are, within, say, "Biology"? I suspect we are talking about > a very small number; the rest is boolean content-based search. (Besides, > it is not just *journals* we are classifying, as in the old aggregator > days, but *papers*.) > > > A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a > > tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional > > archives. > > I suspect that these high-level, a-priori categories will be similarly > sparse in all disciplines: There is no pre-classification needed much > beyond the level of the discipline-name itself. We are not sorting > journals any more; we are searching open-access contents. There will be > powerful content-based algorithms for narrowing it to the kinds of > material we want, but little of it will resemble how we used to > aggregate journals. > > Stevan Harnad > Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
I basically agree with Thomas Krichel on all the substantive points: On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: > institutional archives will lie empty unless there are better > incentives for scholars to contribute to them. If you tell > them that it will open their scholarship to the world to > read, they will listen. If you tell them, figures in hand, > how much it does, and how much impact they gain---relatively > to their colleagues in the offices next door---they will act... > Basically RePEc aims to achieve a type of dataset that will allow > to measure impact I agree. Steve Lawrence has gathered some data along these lines. We are doing so too. And I know you are too. These data will help demonstrate to the research community, quantitatively, the direct causal connection between research access and research impact. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm > you have to get authors to self-archive. To do that, you need > to find the right incentives... > publishing is done more with the academic colleagues in mind > rather than with the university's central administration > in mind. Then you inevitably end up with a situation where > you have to get a whole discipline along to self-archive. As > long as others in the discipline are not doing it, there > is little interest in the individual scholar doing it. > You have to demonstrate that to individual academics, figures at > hand. In the meantime you have to collect formally archive contents. I also agree completely that until OAI-compliant self-archiving prevails, havesting or centralized links to authors' arbitrary websites is extremely desirable and useful. I expect that there is an order of magnitude more non-OAI self-archived content (preprints and postprints) on the Web today then there is OAI. Harvesting it (citeseer-style) or linking to it with OAI-equivalent metadata (RePec-style) is not only valuable in itself (making a lot of open-access work more visible and usable) but it will help encourage more self-archiving, as well as providing the access/impact causality data that will help inspire still more! [Les Carr is doing it now with the 2001 UK-wide RAE returns, generating "RAEprints": http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/submissions/ http://www.rareview.ac.uk/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm ] (I couldn't quite see the point about why individuals couldn't do it, and a whole discipline needs to be convinced. Surely individuals come first, but never mind.) > Incidentally, have you deposited all your papers in institutional > archives? I see some ~harnad above. Of course! All my papers (retroactive to the 70's) have been FTP- and then web-archived since the late '80's, as well as in CogPrints since 1997 and the Southampton ECS Archive since 1999. Both Archives have since become OAI-compliant: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/genpub.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html http://makeashorterlink.com/?R3DD514D3 http://makeashorterlink.com/?S60652783 (I practise what I preach!) Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the BOAI Forum: http://www.eprints.org/boaiforum.php/ the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote: >sh> our rewards (research >sh> grant funding and overheads, salaries, postdocs and students attracted >sh> to our research, prizes and honors) are intertwined and shared with our >sh> institutions (our employers) and not our disciplines (which are often >sh> in fact the locus of competition for those same rewards!) > > But this is not just a matter of rewards. Disciplinary communities play a > vital role in adding coherence to a field. They help researchers focus on > the developing streams of thought and discovery, and on the > interrelationships between specialized knowledge and the broader body of > knowledge residing in the discipline. All true. But disciplines can't make their researchers self-archive. They can't even make them publish. Only the publish/perish carrot/stick wielded by the researcher's institution/employer (and also the researcher's research-funder) can do that. And the only reason the institution would want to is because it have a shares stake in the impact of the research, hence in maximizing it through open-access. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do (But tell me how you think *disciplines* can facilitate and accelerate self-archiving and open access and I am ready to be won back to discipline-based self-archiving!) They can't, and I don't advocate discipline-based self-archiving. As I suggested in an earlier post: > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a > discipline field in the metadata. This simple device would facilitate aggregation by discipline without requiring that the paper be archived by the discipline. > I admire your clear-headed concentration on the primary goal of open > access. But surely the usefulness of open access can be increased by > simultaneously developing some additional features. All sorts of features are possible. But they all depend on one thing, and that is content: Until we get the archives *filled*, the other features and desiderata are rather beside the point. I have argued against classification schemes because I think they are a waste of time, delaying self-archiving till we come up with the "right" classification scheme, instead of just going ahead and self-archiving. I also think they are trivial, in today's age of algorithmic sorting of full-text content. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#26.Classification Agreed, but as noted in a previous exchange: > This gets back to the problems of subject > classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined > discipline descriptors should be sufficient. A *very* short list. Because once I have narrowed it to "Ecology," the rest is best done with boolean full-text search and algorithms rather than prefabricated human classification schemes. But how many such high-level (useful) partitions do you think there really are, within, say, "Biology"? I suspect we are talking about a very small number; the rest is boolean content-based search. (Besides, it is not just *journals* we are classifying, as in the old aggregator days, but *papers*.) I'd say that Biology could usefully be partitioned into as few as four disciplines. Lee Miller
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun. Mar 16 Thomas Krichel wrote: Lee Miller writes > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a > discipline field in the metadata. .. Thus inclusion of the discipline > desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has > already proved useful to ecologists for over a century. > > A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a > tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional archives. Yes, but this is not what I think is the prime task of aggregator services. Your thinking is that such services will make it easier for users to find papers belonging to a certain discipline. Within that thinking I agree there is scope for value-added user services. For example, once you have identified all paper is the area of ecology, you can start something like "NEP: New Ecology Papers". That is, you can mail a list of all the new papers that have appeared within the subject of ecology out to editors (who would be working as volunteers) and then have them filter those papers that belong to microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, etc, and forward the paper discriptions to a list of subscribers who are interested in those subjects. Such a system already works well with RePEc, see http://nep.repec.org. But: such value added services for users are not the main function of aggregators, imho. Aggregators are more about serving the authors of papers. They should be conceived as instruments to incentivize authors to contribute to formal archives. You want to use aggregation to as an incentive to authors, and I see aggregation as merely a tool to help consumers of research narrow their searches. I don't see these options as being mutually exclusive. Both are valuable. Lee Miller
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
dear Colleagues, I agree with Thomas that instead of 'enforce' you have to 'encourage' showing the chance to get better seen by his/her scientific community if he/she does some specific steps. As an example: our Department has stopped ordering all high price journals (keeping only those below 200$/a and Phys.Rev. and Phys Rev. Lett ,both because of access to PROLA, the APS Archive back to 1875..). And uses web-ordering and email copies pp now as a way to get information as prerequisite for doing research. However the other side of the medal is: the visibility of your own research worldwide. [To be read is the aim of research, we are not paid for reading, we only need reading]. We could show that this was bad: online documents not even found in google or scirus, etc. By adding metadata to them (using http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/services/mmm/ ) of PhysNet www.phys.vt.edu/PhysNet the visibility of the papers scored one of the first three places in google etc. and got more read (weblog) and cited. It is the advantage of repec that this information is offered to the authors. Second: the Research group homepages we measured with www.yourpositions.ch which ranged from .17 to .75 and could show that you easily can improve them using metadata to .85 and get a much better visibility. I agree Physics is a large field and authors/readers often do not know each other, in smaller fields this is different. Ebs
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes > Hence my conclusion that distributed, interoperable OAI institutional > archives are enough (and the fastest route to open-access). No need > to harvest their contents into central OAI discipline-based archives > (except perhaps for redundancy, as backup). I agree. But this is not what I mean by "not enough". I suggest that institutional archives will lie empty unless there are better incentives for scholars to contribute to them. If you tell them that it will open their scholarship to the world to read, they will listen. If you tell them, figures at hand, how much it does, and how much impact they gain---relatively to their colleagues in the offices next door---they will act. To be able to build such measures, you need to build complicated datasets. This is too complex a task to be done in all disciplines at once. Therefore you need to work discipline by discipline. > It should be noted, though, that Thomas Krichel's excellent RePec > archive and service in Economics -- http://repec.org/ -- goes > well beyond the confines of OAI-harvesting! RePec harvests non-OAI > content too, along lines similar to the way ResearchIndex/citeseer -- > http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs Not really, these systems are quite different actually. But this is a matter for another email... > by (3) self-archiving them on arbitrary Web and FTP sites (and > hoping they will be found or harvested by services like Repec or > ResearchIndex) RePEc is not a harvesting service. RePEc has pioneered the way OAI operates before there was OAI. The degree of interoperability that it achieves goes way beyond what OAI achieves at present, but we are only at the start with OAI, remember. Basically RePEc aims to achieve a type of dataset that will allow to measure impact---as mentioned in my first paragraph---but it is not quite there yet. In the meantime, it acts as the starting point for a whole bunch of user and contributor services. (sorry, I could not resist...) > My conclusion in favor of institutional self-archiving is based on the > evidence and on logic, and it represents a change of thinking, > for I had originally advocated (3) Web/FTP self-archiving -- > http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ -- then switched allegiance > to central self-archiving (1), even creating a discipline-based archive: > http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ But with the advent of OAI in 1999, > plus a little reflection, it became apparent that > institutional self-archiving (2) was the fastest, most direct, and most > natural road to open access: http://www.eprints.org/ > And since then its accumulating momentum seems to be confirming that this > is indeed so: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2212.html > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim.ppt Hmm, with you changing your mind, and with more than a little reflection over that many years, I think all of us on this forum will be convinced that the best road is not an easy topic to approach. I don't have the answer either, but I will show instead that there is no answer. The way I see it that if you want to achieve self-archiving, you have to get authors to self-archive. To do that, you need to find the right incentives. One way is to have Clifford Lynch running around campus, switching off every independent web service because it is a security risk, and then force faculty to digitally publish through a central facility. Granted, my vision of Clifford's intention is exagerated, but even a milder form of it will not succeed. This is no way to run a university. Right? So you are left off to find a way in which you have to give incentives to academics. Now, please accept my hypothesis that publishing is done more with the academic colleagues in mind rather than with the university's central administration in mind. Then you inevitably end up with a situation where you have to get a whole discipline along to self-archive. As long as others in the discipline are not doing it, there is little interest in the individual scholar doing it. They may send the paper directly to closed-access publisher facilities or, may be in addition, upload it on a web site somewhere. > > The primary sense of belonging > > of a scholar in her research activities is with the disciplinary > > community of which she thinks herself a part... It certainly > > is not with the institution. > > That may or may not be the case, but in any case it is irrelevant to > the question of which is the more promising route to open-access. Our > primary sense of belonging may be with our family, our community, > our creed, our tribe, or even our species. But our rewards (research > grant funding and overheads, salaries, postdocs and students attracted > to our research, prizes and honors) are intertwined and shared with our > institutions (our employers) and not our disciplines (which are often > in fact the locus
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Lee Miller writes > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a > discipline field in the metadata. This gets back to the problems of subject > classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined > discipline descriptors should be sufficient. > > For example, the discipline of ecology includes plants, animals, > microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, physical environments, > physiology, applied mathematics, and many other sub-fields. Nevertheless, > ecologists of all stripes recognize and enjoy common bonds in the general > discipline. A small number of general journals that publish papers from > many of the sub-disciplines are followed by many researchers and academics, > regardless of their specialty fields. Thus inclusion of the discipline > desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has > already proved useful to ecologists for over a century. > > A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a > tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional archives. Yes, but this is not what I think is the prime task of aggregator services. Your thinking is that such services will make it easier for users to find papers belonging to a certain discipline. Within that thinking I agree there is scope for value-added user services. For example, once you have identified all paper is the area of ecology, you can start something like "NEP: New Ecology Papers". That is, you can mail a list of all the new papers that have appeared within the subject of ecology out to editors (who would be working as volunteers) and then have them filter those papers that belong to microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, etc, and forward the paper discriptions to a list of subscribers who are interested in those subjects. Such a system already works well with RePEc, see http://nep.repec.org. But: such value added services for users are not the main function of aggregators, imho. Aggregators are more about serving the authors of papers. They should be conceived as instruments to incentivize authors to contribute to formal archives. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Lee Miller wrote: >sh> our rewards (research >sh> grant funding and overheads, salaries, postdocs and students attracted >sh> to our research, prizes and honors) are intertwined and shared with our >sh> institutions (our employers) and not our disciplines (which are often >sh> in fact the locus of competition for those same rewards!) > > But this is not just a matter of rewards. Disciplinary communities play a > vital role in adding coherence to a field. They help researchers focus on > the developing streams of thought and discovery, and on the > interrelationships between specialized knowledge and the broader body of > knowledge residing in the discipline. All true. But disciplines can't make their researchers self-archive. They can't even make them publish. Only the publish/perish carrot/stick wielded by the researcher's institution/employer (and also the researcher's research-funder) can do that. And the only reason the institution would want to is because it have a shares stake in the impact of the research, hence in maximizing it through open-access. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do (But tell me how you think *disciplines* can facilitate and accelerate self-archiving and open access and I am ready to be won back to discipline-based self-archiving!) > I admire your clear-headed concentration on the primary goal of open > access. But surely the usefulness of open access can be increased by > simultaneously developing some additional features. All sorts of features are possible. But they all depend on one thing, and that is content: Until we get the archives *filled*, the other features and desiderata are rather beside the point. I have argued against classification schemes because I think they are a waste of time, delaying self-archiving till we come up with the "right" classification scheme, instead of just going ahead and self-archiving. I also think they are trivial, in today's age of algorithmic sorting of full-text content. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#26.Classification For the same reason, I have argued *for* distributed, institution-based self-archiving (for the incentive-based reasons I have mentioned), but I have not argued *against* central, discipline-based self-archiving. That is welcome too, just as BOAI-2 (publishing in open-access journals) is welcome. I just favor institution-based self-archiving because I think it is the fastest and most natural road to universal open access. No point waiting for discipline-based archives or open-access journals to be created where there are none: Just self-archive in your own institution's archive. That is a solution that scales to everyone, right now. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun, Mar 16 Stevan Harnad wrote: > > The primary sense of belonging > > of a scholar in her research activities is with the disciplinary > > community of which she thinks herself a part... It certainly > > is not with the institution. > >That may or may not be the case, but in any case it is irrelevant to >the question of which is the more promising route to open-access. Our >primary sense of belonging may be with our family, our community, >our creed, our tribe, or even our species. But our rewards (research >grant funding and overheads, salaries, postdocs and students attracted >to our research, prizes and honors) are intertwined and shared with our >institutions (our employers) and not our disciplines (which are often >in fact the locus of competition for those same rewards!) But this is not just a matter of rewards. Disciplinary communities play a vital role in adding coherence to a field. They help researchers focus on the developing streams of thought and discovery, and on the interrelationships between specialized knowledge and the broader body of knowledge residing in the discipline. I admire your clear-headed concentration on the primary goal of open access. But surely the usefulness of open access can be increased by simultaneously developing some additional features. Lee Miller Editor Emeritus Ecology and Ecological Monographs
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Margaret H. Freeman wrote: > I'd like to ask Stevan Harnad what arrangements can be made for publishing > faculty and independent scholars who don't have the kind of institutional > connections like a major research university for making their work OAI > accessible without having to create personal websites. Is there some > distributed depository that is or could be made available to them? (1) Self-archiving of refereed, published research is not the same as self-publishing. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 (2) Unaffiliated faculty can publish as they always did, but they can self-archive their preprints and postprints either in central archives such as http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ or (as is often the case in the relations between universities and unaffiliated scholars), they can be allowed to self-archive in a university's eprint archive. (3) Or perhaps your question referred to the hypothetical future, if/when all toll-access journals become open-access journals, charging authors' insitutions for the peer-review service? My guess would be that unaffiliated authors are rare enough so a slush fund can cover their costs for them out of a tiny portion of the costs paid by the institutions of affiliated authors. (I don't believe this is a significant issue -- and it is in any case hypothetical, as most journals are not yet open-access.) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Lee Miller wrote: > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a > discipline field in the metadata. I agree. And this confirms that "aggregation" is merely (1) a metadata-based from of re-packaging and (2) need not re-package the full-text but merely the pointers to it. Hence it is not the case that the (full-text) *data* from distributed Institutional OAI Archives need to be "fed" (harvested) into central Disciplinary OAI Archives. "Aggregation" is merely a special case (or rather a special name) for ordinary OAI Service-Provision -- which is precisely what the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol was designed for! The old paper-based idea of journal-content "aggregators" is simply misleading us here. Online "aggregators" are really just search engines, pulling out and ranging over discipline-specific subsets of OAI full-text content space. > This gets back to the problems of subject > classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined > discipline descriptors should be sufficient. A *very* short list. Because once I have narrowed it to "Ecology," the rest is best done with boolean full-text search and algorithms rather than prefabricated human classification schemes. > For example, the discipline of ecology includes plants, animals, > microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, physical environments, > physiology, applied mathematics, and many other sub-fields. Nevertheless, > ecologists of all stripes recognize and enjoy common bonds in the general > discipline. A small number of general journals that publish papers from > many of the sub-disciplines are followed by many researchers and academics, > regardless of their specialty fields. Thus inclusion of the discipline > desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has > already proved useful to ecologists for over a century. No problem. But how many such high-level (useful) partitions do you think there really are, within, say, "Biology"? I suspect we are talking about a very small number; the rest is boolean content-based search. (Besides, it is not just *journals* we are classifying, as in the old aggregator days, but *papers*.) > A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a > tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional archives. I suspect that these high-level, a-priori categories will be similarly sparse in all disciplines: There is no pre-classification needed much beyond the level of the discipline-name itself. We are not sorting journals any more; we are searching open-access contents. There will be powerful content-based algorithms for narrowing it to the kinds of material we want, but little of it will resemble how we used to aggregate journals. Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, David Goodman wrote: >sh> What is the most pressing >sh> reason for creating and filling institutional repositories at this >sh> time? Cliff thinks it is to promote new forms of scholarship whereas >sh> I think it is to promote refereed research. The new scholarship >sh> is coming too, and will certainly grow in importance, but the immediate >sh> rationale for creating and filling institutional repositories is for the >sh> self-archiving of institutional research input, in order to maximize >sh> its research impact, by maximizing user access to it, through open access: >sh> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ > > Stevan, It can perfectly well be for both, and the relatively value is > not yet determinable. Institutional Open-Access Archives are indeed for both new forms of scholarly output and conventional peer-reviewed research output. Moreover, I don't doubt that the *eventual* value of of promoting new forms of scholarship online will outweigh the value of promoting conventional research impact. But what I am pretty sure is true is (1) that it is not the possibility of new forms of scholarship that will *drive* institutional self-archiving or open access, and (2) that it is not the need for new forms of scholarship that makes institutional self-archiving and open access so urgent at this time. Both the driver and the urgency come from the needless daily impact-loss and access-denial for conventional peer-reviewed research output (20,000 journals-worth, 2,000,000 articles annually). And the ultimate reductio is this: Institutional Eprint Archives are intended for both pre-refereeing "preprints" and refereed, published "postprints": Eprints = preprints plus postprints, two different stages in the embryology of research. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint Well, the category "preprint" already includes "new forms of [digital] scholarly output"! Until/unless it is submitted to and published by a peer-reviewed journal, *all* forms of scholarly [digital] output are subsumed by the "preprint" category! So there is no disagreement about what may be self-archived in an Institutional Eprint Archive, just perhaps about what it is most urgent to self-archive and make openly accessible right now, and why. Hence about the immediate raison d'etre of institutional archives and archiving. All the evidence and reasons there point to the refereed research literature and toll-access barriers and impact-loss as the casus belli. Besides, other forms of online digital scholarly output are already open-access. Their problem is not access but academic recognition! Until all this comes into focus in people's minds, institutional self-archiving will be headed off in all directions -- and getting nowhere, fast. Stevan Harnad
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Lee Miller wrote: > Thomas Krichel wrote: > > > The primary sense of belonging > > of a scholar in her research activities is with the disciplinary > > community of which she thinks herself a part of. It certainly > > is not with the institution. Therefore, if you want to fill > > institutional archives---which I agree is the best long-run way > > to enhance access and preservation to scholarly research---it > > to institutional archive has to be accompanied by a discipline-based > > aggregation process. > > I strongly agree. > > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a > discipline field in the metadata. This gets back to the problems of subject > classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined > discipline descriptors should be sufficient. The 'ePrints UK' project is building 8 discipline-focused eprint discovery services. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/ However, our primary mechanism for partitioning eprints by discipline will not be based on subject classification descriptors in the metadata. Instead, we will harvest both the metadata and full-text (where available) and pass these to an automatic subject-classification Web service being developed for the project by OCLC as part of its metadata switch activity http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/mswitch/index.shtm The Web service will assign one or more Dewey terms to each eprint. These will then be used to group eprints into one or more subject areas. Regards, Andy -- Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933 Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: > Stevan Harnad writes: > >sh> There is no need -- in the age of OAI-interoperability -- for >sh> institutional archives to "feed" central disciplinary archives: > > I do not share what I see as a blind faith in interoperability > through a technical protocol. I am quite happy to defer to the technical OAI experts on this one, but let us put the question precisely: Thomas Krichel suggests that institutional (OAI) data-archives (full-texts) should "feed" disciplinary (OAI) data-archives, because OAI-interoperability is somehow not enough. I suggest that OAI-interoperability (if I understand it correctly) should be enough. No harm in redundant archiving, of course, for backup and security, but not necessary for the usage and functionality itself. In fact, if I understand correctly the intent of the OAI distinction between OAI data-providers -- http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl -- and OAI service-providers -- http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html -- it is not the full-texts of data-archives that need to be "fed" to (i.e., harvested by) the OAI service providers, but only their metadata. Hence my conclusion that distributed, interoperable OAI institutional archives are enough (and the fastest route to open-access). No need to harvest their contents into central OAI discipline-based archives (except perhaps for redundancy, as backup). Their OAI interoperability should be enough so that the OAI service-providers can (among other things) do the "virtual aggregation" by discipline (or any other computable criterion) by harvesting the metadata alone, without the need to harvest full-text data-contents too. It should be noted, though, that Thomas Krichel's excellent RePec archive and service in Economics -- http://repec.org/ -- goes well beyond the confines of OAI-harvesting! RePec harvests non-OAI content too, along lines similar to the way ResearchIndex/citeseer -- http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs -- harvests non-OAI content in computer science. What I said about there being no need to "feed" institutional OAI archive content into disciplinary OAI archives certainly does not apply to *non-OAI* content, which would otherwise be scattered willy-nilly all over the net and not integrated in any way. Here RePec's and ResearchIndex's harvesting is invaluable, especially as RePec already does (and ResearchIndex has announced that it plans to) make all its harvested content OAI-compliant! To summarize: The goal is to get all research papers, pre- and post-peer-review, openly accessible (and OAI-interoperable) as soon as possible. (These are BOAI Strategies 1 [self-archiving] and 2 [open-access journals]: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml ). In principle this can be done by (1) self-archiving them in central OAI disciplinary archives like the Physics arXiv (the biggest and first of its kind) -- http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions -- by (2) self-archiving them in distributed institutional OAI Archives -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim.ppt -- by (3) self-archiving them on arbitrary Web and FTP sites (and hoping they will be found or harvested by services like Repec or ResearchIndex) or by (4) publishing them in open-access journals (BOAI Strategy 2: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/journals.shtml ). My point was only that because researchers and their institutions (*not* their disciplines) have shared interests vested in maximizing their joint research impact and its rewards, institution-based self-archiving (2) is a more promising way to go -- in the age of OAI-interoperability -- than discipline-based self-archiving (1), even though the latter began earlier. It is also obvious that both (1) and (2) are preferable to arbitrary Web and FTP self-archiving (3), which began even earlier (although harvesting arbitrary Website and FTP contents into OAI-compliant Archives is still a welcome makeshift strategy until the practise of OAI self-archiving is up to speed). Creating new open-access journals and converting the established (20,000) toll-access journals to open-access is desirable too, but it is obviously a much slower and more complicated path to open access than self-archiving, so should be pursued in parallel. My conclusion in favor of institutional self-archiving is based on the evidence and on logic, and it represents a change of thinking, for I had originally advocated (3) Web/FTP self-archiving -- http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ -- then switched allegiance to central self-archiving (1), even creating a discipline-based archive: http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ But with the advent of OAI in 1999, plus a little reflection, it became apparent that institutional self-archiving (2) was the fastest, most direct, and most natural road to open access: http://www.eprints.org/ And since then its accumulating momentum seems to be confirming that this is indeed so: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Am
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Thomas Krichel wrote: > The primary sense of belonging > of a scholar in her research activities is with the disciplinary > community of which she thinks herself a part of. It certainly > is not with the institution. Therefore, if you want to fill > institutional archives---which I agree is the best long-run way > to enhance access and preservation to scholarly research---it > to institutional archive has to be accompanied by a discipline-based > aggregation process. I strongly agree. The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a discipline field in the metadata. This gets back to the problems of subject classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined discipline descriptors should be sufficient. For example, the discipline of ecology includes plants, animals, microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, physical environments, physiology, applied mathematics, and many other sub-fields. Nevertheless, ecologists of all stripes recognize and enjoy common bonds in the general discipline. A small number of general journals that publish papers from many of the sub-disciplines are followed by many researchers and academics, regardless of their specialty fields. Thus inclusion of the discipline desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has already proved useful to ecologists for over a century. A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional archives. Lee Miller Editor Emeritus Ecology and Ecological Monographs
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan, It can perfectly well be for both, and the relatively value is not yet determinable. . It is not appropriate to try to settle questions like this by argumentation beforehand. What is appropriate is for all those with ideas on how the new forms of communication should be used, to go ahead and try; we will all see what works. I hope that nobody with a good idea will be in the least dissuaded by argument from any of the other participants. (Fortunately, based on the discussions on this list, it does not seem that anyone is in fact being dissuaded.) On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote: > Quote/Comments on: > > Clifford A. Lynch: "Institutional Repositories: > Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" > http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html > > Cliff Lynch makes many very good points. I disagree with him only on one > point, but it is a fundamental one, with important practical and > strategic implications for the immediate future: What is the most pressing > reason for creating and filling institutional repositories at this > time? Cliff thinks it is to promote new forms of scholarship whereas > I think it is to promote refereed research. The new scholarship > is coming too, and will certainly grow in importance, but the immediate > rationale for creating and filling institutional repositories is for the > self-archiving of institutional research input, in order to maximize > its research impact, by maximizing user access to it, through open access: > http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ > > > faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new > > digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication > > of scholarship > > This is the familiar and valid complaint that the university has not > been sufficiently supportive of online innovations by faculty, neither > in terms of resourcing it nor in terms of rewarding it. This is true, > and it is indeed a problem, and no doubt slowing innovation. But it is > also being remedied, by increasing recognition and support, and the > persistence of innovative faculty. It is *not* the reason universities > need digital repositories urgently at this time, and this is *not* the > (main) content that will fill them. > > > faculty have exploited the Net as a vehicle for sharing their ideas > > worldwide, whether these ideas are expressed in relatively familiar > > forms such as digital versions of traditional journal articles or (less > > commonly) in entirely new forms... > > This is a combination of the two kinds of content that are at issue > here. I am putting the primary emphasis on the "familiar forms" rather > than the new ones (important and valuable though they too are). The > progress, productivity and funding of scholarly and scientific research > depend directly on its visibility and accessibility: the degree to which > it is found, seen, read, used, cited, applied, built-upon by other > researchers. In a word, it all depends on *research impact.* And research > impact depends on research access. Whatever blocks access blocks impact. > > There are 20,000 peer-reviewed research journals, across all disciplines > worldwide, publishing 2,000,000 articles annually. Almost all of these > articles are accessible to researchers (i.e., to their potential users) > only if their institution can afford the toll-access (subscription, > license) to the journal in which they were published. And most > universities cannot afford toll-access to most journals -- even the > richest can only afford a minority of the 20,000. This means that *all* > research on the planet is inaccessible to *most* of its potential > users. And every single case of access-denial is a case of potential > impact loss. The overwhelming, pressing rationale for institutional > repositories is accordingly: to put an end of this daily impact loss -- > a legacy of the paper era when the true costs of paper access made it > unavoidable, but no longer necessary in the online era, when open access > can be provided by institutions for their own refereed research output. > > It is quite natural for researchers to self-archive their own refereed > research output in their own institutional archives, giving it away to > all of its would-be users worldwide for free, in order to maximize its > research impact, for they have been giving it away free to their > publishers for the very same reason throughout the paper era: Unlike all > other authors, researchers have always given away their work, written > only for impact, not for royalty revenue from toll-income. Hence it is > only natural that now that it has become possible to do so, they should > self-archive it in their own institutional archives so as to put an end > to the needless daily impact loss that is a legacy of the paper era. > > This -- and not new forms of scholarship -- is the immediate, pressing > rationale for creating and filling institutional repositories at this
Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Stevan Harnad writes > There is no need -- in the age of OAI-interoperability -- for > institutional archives to "feed" central disciplinary archives: I do not share what I see as a blind faith in interoperability through a technical protocol. The primary sense of belonging of a scholar in her research activities is with the disciplinary community of which she thinks herself a part of. It certainly is not with the institution. Therefore, if you want to fill institutional archives---which I agree is the best long-run way to enhance access and preservation to scholarly research---it to institutional archive has to be accompanied by a discipline-based aggregation process. The RePEc project has produced such an aggregator for economics for a while now. I am sure that other, similar projects will follow the same aims, but, with the benefit of hindsight, offer superior service. The lack of such services in many disciplines, or the lack of interoperability between disciplinary and institutional archives, are major obstacle to the filling the institutional archives. There are no inherent contradictions between institution-based archives and disciplinary aggregators, In the paper that Stevan refers to, Cliff Lynch writes, at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html > But consider the plight of a faculty member seeking only broader > dissemination and availability of his or her traditional journal > articles, book chapters, or perhaps even monographs through use of > the network, working in parallel with the traditional scholarly > publishing system. I am afraid, there a more and more such faculty members. Much of the research papers found over the Internet are deposited in the way. This trend is growing not declining. > Such a faculty member faces several time-consuming problems. He or > she must exercise stewardship over the actual content and its > metadata: migrating the content to new formats as they evolve over > time, creating metadata describing the content, and ensuring the > metadata is available in the appropriate schemas and formats and > through appropriate protocol interfaces such as open archives > metadata harvesting. Sure, but academics do not like their work, and certainly not their publishing habits, be interfered with by external forces. Organizing academics is like herding cats! > Faculty are typically best at creating new > knowledge, not maintaining the record of this process of > creation. Worse still, this faculty member must not only manage > content but must manage a dissemination system such as a personal Web > site, playing the role of system administrator (or the manager of > someone serving as a system administrator). There are lot of ways in which to maintain a web site or to get access to a maintained one. It is a customary activity these days and does no longer require much of technical expertise. A primitive integration of the contents can be done by Google, it requires no metadata. Academics don't care about long-run preservation, so that problem remains unsolved. In the meantime, the academic who uploads papers to a web site takes steps to resolve the most pressing problem, access. > Over the past few years, this has ceased to be a reasonable activity > for most amateurs; software complexity, security risks, backup > requirements, and other problems have generally relegated effective > operation of Web sites to professionals who can exploit economies of > scale, and who can begin each day with a review of recently issued > security patches. These are technical concerns. When you operate a linux box on the web you simply fire up a script that will download the latest version. That is easy enough. Most departments have separate web operations. Arguing for one institutional archive for digital contents is akin to calling for a single web site for an institution. The diseconomies of scale of central administration impose other types of costs that the ones that it was to reduce. The secret is to find a middle way. > Today, our faculty time is being wasted, and expended ineffectively, > on system administration activities and content curation. And, > because system administration is ineffective, it places our > institutions at risk: because faculty are generally not capable of > responding to the endless series of security exposures and patches, > our university networks are riddled with vulnerable faculty machines > intended to serve as points of distribution for scholarly works. This is the fight many faculty face every day, where they want to innovate scholarly communication, but someone in the IT department does not give the necessary permission for network access. I am afraid that calling for central administration of digital assets is only making matters worse. Heaven forbid the a situation where a faculty member will have to work with some central authority every ti
Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives
Quote/Comments on: Clifford A. Lynch: "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html Cliff Lynch makes many very good points. I disagree with him only on one point, but it is a fundamental one, with important practical and strategic implications for the immediate future: What is the most pressing reason for creating and filling institutional repositories at this time? Cliff thinks it is to promote new forms of scholarship whereas I think it is to promote refereed research. The new scholarship is coming too, and will certainly grow in importance, but the immediate rationale for creating and filling institutional repositories is for the self-archiving of institutional research output, in order to maximize its research impact, by maximizing user access to it, through open access: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ > faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new > digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication > of scholarship This is the familiar and valid complaint that the university has not been sufficiently supportive of online innovations by faculty, neither in terms of resourcing it nor in terms of rewarding it. This is true, and it is indeed a problem, and no doubt slowing innovation. But it is also being remedied, by increasing recognition and support, and the persistence of innovative faculty. It is *not* the reason universities need digital repositories urgently at this time, and this is *not* the (main) content that will fill them. > faculty have exploited the Net as a vehicle for sharing their ideas > worldwide, whether these ideas are expressed in relatively familiar > forms such as digital versions of traditional journal articles or (less > commonly) in entirely new forms... This is a combination of the two kinds of content that are at issue here. I am putting the primary emphasis on the "familiar forms" rather than the new ones (important and valuable though they too are). The progress, productivity and funding of scholarly and scientific research depend directly on its visibility and accessibility: the degree to which it is found, seen, read, used, cited, applied, built-upon by other researchers. In a word, it all depends on *research impact.* And research impact depends on research access. Whatever blocks access blocks impact. There are 20,000 peer-reviewed research journals, across all disciplines worldwide, publishing 2,000,000 articles annually. Almost all of these articles are accessible to researchers (i.e., to their potential users) only if their institution can afford the toll-access (subscription, license) to the journal in which they were published. And most universities cannot afford toll-access to most journals -- even the richest can only afford a minority of the 20,000. This means that *all* research on the planet is inaccessible to *most* of its potential users. And every single case of access-denial is a case of potential impact loss. The overwhelming, pressing rationale for institutional repositories is accordingly: to put an end of this daily impact loss -- a legacy of the paper era when the true costs of paper access made it unavoidable, but no longer necessary in the online era, when open access can be provided by institutions for their own refereed research output. It is quite natural for researchers to self-archive their own refereed research output in their own institutional archives, giving it away to all of its would-be users worldwide for free, in order to maximize its research impact, for they have been giving it away free to their publishers for the very same reason throughout the paper era: Unlike all other authors, researchers have always given away their work, written only for impact, not for royalty revenue from toll-income. Hence it is only natural that now that it has become possible to do so, they should self-archive it in their own institutional archives so as to put an end to the needless daily impact loss that is a legacy of the paper era. This -- and not new forms of scholarship -- is the immediate, pressing rationale for creating and filling institutional repositories at this time. And this (refereed research output) is the content with which they need to be filled, as soon as possible. With it -- and their newfound role as *outgoing* collections of a university's own research output instead of *incoming* collections of the output of other universities -- the institutional archives will also become the repositories for new forms of scholarship. But the first and most urgent step is to put an end to the needless daily impact loss for peer-reviewed research. What about the peer-reviewed journals? Their toll-access mechanism of cost-recovery may continue to co-exist with the open-access versions in the institutional repositories, with those researchers whose institutions can afford it using the former and t
