Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
On Mon, 31 May 2004, Colin Steele wrote: > I know that much of the debate focuses on specific issues, for example, > with the self-archiving option. I have no disagreement with this but I > believe in the long-term that we have to work within and focus on a > holistic approach to scholarly communication, see for example, > http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/respubs/changing_res_prac/exec_summary.htm Before we delve into Holism, would it not be a good idea to grasp that part that is within our immediate reach: Open Access (OA) through immediate self-archiving of all the annual 2.5 million articles in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals? > As a number of commentators have mentioned, such as Fred Friend and > Stephen Pinfield, the current issue with institutional repositories is to > increase their population. Indeed. And there is a very simple and certain way to fill those institutional OA archives (sic) and that is to adopt institutional policies requiring it: Swan & Brown (2004) "asked authors to say how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in one or more... repositories. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly." Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html Swan, A. & Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224. > The issues are political and social rather than > technical. Institutional repositories in my opinion are far more than > simply the STM post-prints, so to speak, and this is reflected in the > depositing of material at ANU, both in the e-prints and D-Space > repositories. One problem with widening the OA archive-filling agenda to include arbitrary digital contents rather than specifically focussing on journal articles (and theses, and those monographs that also fit the author give-away, impact-maximization model unproblematically) is that it risks blurring and diffusing the OA target and merely diluting archive contents, rather than focusing and filling! "EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html "Publish or Perish: Self-Archive to Flourish" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html > A way to proceed, which we are pursuing, and I know the > Dutch are also following up with, is to link with the research offices and > the research assessment exercises, which universities undertake. It is > relatively simple to link the metadata and the full text across, from such > exercises, into institutional repositories. Indeed it is, and the proposal has already been formally made and mapped out: Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ > Until the academic community have the time and inclination to deposit > material automatically then someone else must be the catalyst. Why should > the library not take the lead and allocate staff time to this process? We > collectively spend large amounts of time and hundreds of millions of > dollars acquiring research information, considerable amounts of which are > still little used electronically, so why can't we spend a small proportion > of staff time on working with the academic community to place material in > institutional repositories? As the amount of material increases, so will > the spin-offs within an institutional setting, apart from the > opportunities for new metrics in terms of citation/impact. Excellent idea, and likewise already being recommended and implemented: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do "Let us Archive it for you!" http://eprints.st-andrews.ac.uk/proxy_archive.html But libraries can only coax and assist. It is universities themselves that must adopt self-archiving policies: http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php > The Elsevier ruling is undoubtedly welcome but will be somewhat cumbersome > to implement in the context of each individual academic, and the library > may need to be the facilitator with them. The vast majority of the > academics surveyed in the recent UK City University Report, while > "troubled" by publishers, continue to be unaware of a lot of the issues > that we debate - what I have termed the sound of one hand clapping: > http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc2004/ The publisher's green light to self-archive is certainly not sufficient to induce authors to self-archive! What is needed to induce them to do it is: (1) the collection and energetic promotion http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt of the objective
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
Tennant, Roy (2002) "Institutional Repositories" Library Journal 9/15/2002 http://makeashorterlink.com/?F3C441CE1 The above informative article by Roy Tennant is well worth reading. We applaud the success of Rob Tansley, Eprints' brilliant original designer, in his subsequent contribution to MIT's wonderful Dspace: http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/ All archive-creating software is very welcome, especially if it is free, though the real challenge for all of us now is not so much to MAKE archives but to get them FILLED as soon as possible! http://tardis.eprints.org/ Roy writes: "DSpace is designed to be a more flexible solution than ePrints. It makes fewer assumptions regarding what type of object is being uploaded. Since the programmer who developed ePrints is now a key developer with the DSpace project, DSpace has roots in ePrints but has no doubt surpassed it. MIT is the only user, but once the software is released in open source, other institutions may choose to implement it. I hope they will! But I wouldn't write off ePrints just yet! Its features and flexibility have likewise been growing quite remarkably since Rob's day http://software.eprints.org/docs/php/history.php and have now made it configurable for adoption as a journal-archive for new open-access journals or established journals converting to open access: http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. It has also been expanding its all-important reference-linking and scientometric potential, along with sister OAI services such as citebase http://citebase.eprints.org and paracite http://paracite.eprints.org/ and may soon be expanding into the still broader domain of data-archiving: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/esci4.htm It is true that ePrints is very consciously focussed on institutional research output in particular -- both pre AND post peer review, Roy! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0661.html -- and that its raison d'etre is to help get that literature in particular (about 2,000,000 papers annually, appearing in about 20,000 peer reviewed journals worldwide) self-archived and openly accessible as soon as possible. But it has also been adding more and more other features that institutions may well be wanting now or in the future http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/6768/ and is always hewing to feedback from its growing user base to add still more features and flexibility as desired by users: http://software.eprints.org/users.php But institutional research output is still by far the most important target for us all, and will no doubt be the one that brings all the other kinds of content and features on board, once it reaches critical mass. http://www.sellic.ed.ac.uk/publicat/updates/ud0502.html#eight Hence MIT is surely performing at least as great a service by setting the world's universities the splendid example of FILLING its own DSpace as in eventually making its software available for others to use too! 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 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: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
At 15:57 26/07/2002 +0100, Tim Chown wrote: ...what's the best way to get the institutions engaged? You may be interested in the TARDIS project we are just starting up at Southampton. Funded by JISC in the UK, its objective is to examine ways of achieving cultural and institutional change in order to get academics self-archiving. Using a multidisciplinary institutional archive for Southampton University as the focus, we are looking at various carrot-and-stick ideas to get archives in general filled. Fronted by librarians calling on our technical resources, we are looking at various forms of assisted self-archiving as well as technical and administrative 'inducements'. Six departments across the institution are being targetted; at one end of the spectrum we are undertaking advocacy campaigns, at the other end we intend to simply sit down with hundreds of individuals, help them fill out the eprints forms and answer their questions. Although our website isn't ready yet you can see the project details at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/TARDIS/ Les Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 594-479 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
Congratulations [to Stepen Pinfield, John MacColl and Mike Gardner) on a very clear and succinct article in Ariadne. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ Reminds us that we should have written something up. Our E Prints started late last year and we have 150 up and 800 waiting to be deposited. We had 50,000 hits in the first quarter of this year - with the highest proportion coming from America. One of the processes slowing us up is that we are currently doing a national E Prints Roadshow "Pour encourager." Our website is http://eprints.anu.edu.au. -- Colin Steele Director Scholarly Information Strategies Division of Information W.K. Hancock Building (043) The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983 Fax +61 (0)2 612 53215 Email: colin.ste...@anu.edu.au Library Web: http://anulib.anu.edu.au/
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, William Nixon wrote: > Re: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ > Here at Glasgow we also have an ePrint service up and running at: > http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk And, of course, for Glasgow too, the real task starts now: getting the archive filled, promptly, and across disciplines, university-wide! The first university that comes up with a successful strategy for filling its Eprint Archives will be widely emulated, and will have performed a historic service. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): 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 and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
Re: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ Here at Glasgow we also have an ePrint service up and running at: http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk It was launched on the 9th of April and is a key component of our Create Change / Advocacy campaign [http://www.gla.ac.uk/createchange/] which is intended to raise awareness among our academic colleagues here of the various options available to them for publishing / making their publications more widely available. Best wishes and we look forward to moving to ePrints v.2. Chris and his team are doing very good work. William Nixon == William J Nixon, Deputy Head of IT Services / Project Co-ordinator Glasgow University Library, Hillhead Street, Glasgow, G12 8QE, Scotland, UK e-mail: w.j.ni...@lib.gla.ac.uk www: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/staff/wnixon tel:+44 (0)141 330 6721 fax:+44 (0)141 330 4952
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
> http://eprints.lib.gla.ac.uk > > And, of course, for Glasgow too, the real task starts now: getting the > archive filled, promptly, and across disciplines, university-wide! Yes, the real challenge now is to fill these archives - it will be interesting to see what impact the successful FAIR bids will have in pushing UK universities forward in this endeavour. I am finalising a local FAQ based on much of yours http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ to provide our staff with a ready reckoner of why ePrints is a GOOD thing and should be supported/encouraged. I will also now be visiting various departments and having one on one meetings to evangelise and support the service from the ground up. Best wishes, William J Nixon, Deputy Head of IT Services / Project Co-ordinator Glasgow University Library, Hillhead Street, Glasgow, G12 8QE, Scotland, UK e-mail: w.j.ni...@lib.gla.ac.uk www: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/staff/wnixon tel:+44 (0)141 330 6721 fax:+44 (0)141 330 4952
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Stephen Pinfield wrote: > http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ > Setting up an institutional e-print archive Stephen Pinfield's University Eprint Archive at Nottingham is splendid and its design is worthy of emulation by other universities: http://www-db.library.nottingham.ac.uk/ep1/information.html But now it must move to the next step, which is to fill those archives! Here are some suggestions from the self-archiving FAQ: How can an institution facilitate the filling of its Eprint Archives? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling (1) Install OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. (2) Adopt a university-wide policy that all faculty maintain and update a standardised online curriculum vitae (CV) for annual review. (3) Mandate that the full digital text of all refereed publications should be deposited in the University Eprint Archives and linked to their entry in the author's online CV. (Make it clear to all faculty how self-archiving is in the interest of their own research and standing, maximizing the visibility, accessibility and impact of their work.) (4) Offer trained digital librarian help in showing faculty how to self-archive their papers in the university Eprint Archive (it is very easy). (5) Offer trained digital librarian help in doing "proxy" self-archiving, on behalf of any authors who feel that they are personally unable (too busy or technically incapable) to self-archive for themselves. They need only supply their digital full-texts in word-processor form: the digital archiving assistants can do the rest (usually only a few dozen keystrokes per paper). (A policy of mandated self-archiving for all refereed research, together with a trained proxy self-archiving service, to ensure that lack of time or skill do not become grounds for non-compliance, are the most important ingredients in a successful self-archiving program. The proxy self-archiving will only be needed to set the first wave of self-archiving reliably in motion. The rewards of self-archiving -- in terms of visibility, accessibility and impact -- will maintain the momentum once the archive has reached critical mass. And even students can do for faculty the few keystrokes needed for each new paper thereafter.) (6) Digital librarians, collaborating with web system staff, should be involved in ensuring the proper maintenance, backup, mirroring, upgrading, and migration that ensures the perpetual preservation of the university Eprint Archives. Mirroring and migration should be handled in collaboration with counterparts at all other institutions supporting OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. What can libraries do to facilitate self-archiving? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do Digital librarians are the natural candidates for maintaining the Eprint Archives, their institution's outgoing collection of peer-reviewed research output. (1) Offer trained digital librarian help in showing faculty how to self-archive their papers in the university Eprint Archive (it is very easy). (2) Offer trained digital librarian help in doing "proxy" self-archiving, on behalf of any authors who feel that they are personally unable (too busy or technically incapable) to self-archive for themselves. Authors need only supply their digital full-texts in word-processor form: the digital archiving assistants can do the rest (usually only a few dozen key/mouse-strokes per paper). (The proxy self-archiving will only be needed to set the first wave of self-archiving reliably in motion. The rewards of self-archiving -- in terms of visibility, accessibility and impact -- will maintain the momentum once the archive has reached critical mass. And even students can do for faculty the few keystrokes needed for each new paper thereafter.) (3) Digital librarians, collaborating with web system staff, should be involved in ensuring the proper maintenance, backup, mirroring, upgrading, and migration that ensures the perpetual preservation of the university Eprint Archives. Mirroring and migration should be handled in collaboration with counterparts at all other institutions supporting OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. What can researcher/authors do to facilitate self-archiving? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#researcher/authors-do Make sure that your university or research institution has installed OAI-compliantEprint Archives. Self-archive your pre-peer-review preprints in your institutional (or central) Eprint Archives. Self-archive your post-peer-review postprints (or corrigenda file) in your institutional (or central) Eprint Archives.
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ Ariadne 31 March-April 2002 Setting up an institutional e-print archive Stephen Pinfield, Mike Gardner and John MacColl outline some of the practical issues involved in setting up an OAI-compliant e-print archive in a Higher Education Institute "This article outlines some of the main stages in setting up an institutional e-print archive. It is based on experiences at the universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham which have both recently developed pilot e-print servers (1). It is not the intention here to present arguments in favour of open access e-print archives -- this has been done elsewhere (2). Rather, it is hoped to present give an account of some of the practical issues that arise in the early stages of establishing an archive in a higher education institution." http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/ Stephen Pinfield Academic Services Librarian Library Services Hallward Library University Park University of Nottingham Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK Phone +44 (0) 115 951 5109 Fax +44 (0) 115 951 4558 Email stephen.pinfi...@nottingham.ac.uk Web http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/library/staff/pinfield.html
Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
In the lastest issue of Ariadne, John MacColl, Marieke Napier and Philip Hunter report on a meeting held at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London. Wednesday 11th July 2001. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/open-archives/ NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives
John MacColl (SELLIC project, University of Edinburgh) has kindly given his permission for this edited version of his report on the OAi day to be circulated to the DNER list. The event will also be covered in the September edition of Ariadne (issue 29). 'Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives' Report of Meeting, Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London. 11 July 2001. The meeting was chaired by Sheila Corrall. The first presentation was given by Catherine Grout, Assistant Director (Collections) of the DNER, and essentially outlined the JISC/DNER perspective on the OA initiative, which is that open archiving provides a technology for cementing the DNER architecture. The DNER investment over the next few years will be primarily in middleware, fusion and infrastructure services. Her assumption seemed to be that content and presentation are already largely catered for (a view which was challenged later during the moderated discussion at the end of the day). JISC services supplying or facilitating access to content are the RDN and MIMAS, which are seeking to make their metadata OAi-compliant. JISC has also funded the eprints distribution work at Southampton, and is supporting the Open Citations project. Tools, guidelines, best practice case studies and pilot projects are all likely to be the sort of initiatives which JISC will wish to fund. JISC will be interested also in projects involving communities other than libraries. Michael Nelson, (NASA) gave an entertaining historical overview of the OAI in 'OAi past, present and future'. Distributed searching, the computing science 'hammer' to the 'interoperability nail' is hard to do. There were many attempts in the mid-90s, which failed. the OAI alternative, metadata harvesting, proposed instead by Van de Sompel (now the e-Director of the BL), Nelson, Lagoze and others, was also hard to do. Every archive had its own different format. The repositories which were included at the beginning included arXiv (physics), Cogprints (cognitive science), NDLTD (theses) and RePEc (economics). The OAi idea separates out data providers from service providers. Data providers must provide methods for metadata harvesting. The OAI is only about metadata not full-text. It is also neutral with respect to the source of the metadata. The protocol, launched in January/February of this year, has been frozen for 12-15 months to allow services to be built on a stable platform. Nelson also explained the difference between OAi and OAIS (Open Archival Information System), which is a developing standard for digital preservation. This has confused a lot of people. The protocol uses XML, which has lots of advantages (e.g. schemas to determine compliance). But it is unforgiving and a strong disciplinarian, in that it forces clean metadata. The OAi protocol is always a front-end for another dataset: it has no interface for record input or deletion. Eprints, for example, is an archiving system with the OAi protocol built in. The protocol also supports sets to partition archives, e.g. by discipline. Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, then gave a paper on 'The potential of institutional eprint archives'. OAi has widened from its original focus on eprints, and Harnad wanted to narrow the focus back to the original publication type (i.e. peer reviewed papers). He now calls this the 'Self-Archiving Initiative'. He was very much in favour of archiving at the institutional level rather than by discipline - he argued that the motivation to do this is institutional, since institutions lose when their own researchers work cannot be read by other researchers, because they are debarred from access due to high subscription costs. Harnad advocates that all research universities mandate a CV with all published papers linked to an institutional archive. There is therefore an explicit link there to RAE methodology, which could make the RAE redundant (the impact would be measured by continuous assessment.) Harnad has been trying to persuade a group of Provosts of elite US universities to do this. In the UK, the people we need to persuade are the Funding Councils, in order to change the methodology for research assessment. After lunch, Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at UCL, spoke on 'Why research libraries need open archives'. The cumulative increase in the RPI since 1986 is c. 50%; that in periodical prices is nearly 300% - while at the same time library funding in real terms has dropped by about 1% over the same period. The NESLI deals which have been brokered have proved difficult for CURL, since they have been based on traditional spend on print journals. This is effectively a tax on research. CURL wants to lobby for a general review of STM publishing by the Director of Fair Trading. CURL will produce advocacy packs for its member institutions for next acad
