Re: Prospects for institutional e-print repositories study

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 13:45:34 +0100

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Chris Rusbridge wrote:

> With respect, the whole point of the OAI movement (as distinct from ePrints)
> is that the metadata is disclosed in a standard form that can be (and is)
> harvested by a variety of services. National Libraries are amongst those
> that should be considering such services, just as they are considering many
> others. OAI makes their tasks easier, and the close identification of most
> ePrint repositories with the OAI movement and its protocols means that your
> ePrint wins on two counts: longevity since your institution will wish to
> sustain evidence of its scholarship, and visibility/accessibility through
> the disclosure and harvesting mechanisms.

I'm not quite sure of the intent of Chris's point (with which I fully
agree), but I would like to make one slight correction concerning
"the OAI movement (as distinct from ePrints)":

There is (virtually) no eprints-as-distinct-from-OAI. Arxiv.org is
OAI-compliant; so is CogPrints. Eprints.org was created and predicated
on OAI-compliance; so was Dspace. (If OAI-compliance had been all that
the worriers about preservation had been on about, then preservation
would have been even more of a non-issue, as all the institutional
eprint archives in question are OAI-compliant.)
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/

If the preservation worry is merely about making the papers self-archived
on authors' websites OAI-compliant, we're all already for that ab ovo!

Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Jul 15 2003 - 13:45:34 BST

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