Dear David, Stevan,
Sorry for not replying earlier, I'm only now sitting at my desk going
through email.
David is correct in that most of our current documents are not submitted
individually by authors to CDS. Instead the vast majority are submitted
by secretaries on behalf of a group or are harvested from arxiv. There
are a few keen self-archivers but they are really a minority.
Because of our particular history, an official CERN report number is
very important to many of our authors and they will only get one of
these by submitting it through the official internal channels and it is
through this process that the secretaries upload the details and text to
CDS. With regards arXiv harvesting, this accounts mainly for theory
papers and is usually the individual authors submitting their work. As
the theory department knows that we harvest nightly from arxiv we have
an understanding that it is enough for them to continue submitting there
instead of to the institutional repository.
However, I do think a mandate has helped in filling the repository -
without it I am guessing it would not have been so easy to set up the
secretarial effort, nor would be have the staff resources to put into
the harvesting and managing of the repository. So a mandate might not
change the behaviour of many authors, but it does still help to get the
content in a more indirect way.
We are taken with Minho's idea of offering financial incentives...we
might test the political waters for this. And as part of our OA
publishing project we'll be making new efforts to encourage individual
submission for the missing documents. OA publishing has grabbed the
interest of the HEP community far more than talking about preprint
deposit did so we hope to piggy-back a bit on this enthusiasm to improve
the repository content too.
All the best, Joanne
********************
Joanne Yeomans
Office 3/1-012, DSU/SI Service
http://library.cern.ch/
Mail address:
Mailbox C27810
CERN CH 1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland
Tel: 70548 (externally dial +41 22 76 70548)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: SPARC Open Access Forum [mailto:SPARC-OAForum_at_arl.org]
> On Behalf Of David Goodman
> Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 12:52 AM
> To: SPARC Open Access Forum
> Subject: Re: [SOAF] Universite du Quebec a Montreal becomes
> first North American University to sign Berlin Declaration on
> Open Access
>
> Your guess about CERN is partially correct. There is indeed
> the large legacy conversion project that they have
> undertaken, and it does account for most of the material
> they are adding.
>
> Aside from that, there is also
>
> a)the failure to require OA to the text, but just to the
> abstract and metadata.
>
> "A document which satisfies the conditions for being a CERN
> Scientific Document, should be submitted to the SIS
> [Scientific Information Service which includes the Library]
> in complete electronic form. The full bibliographic
> information (including abstract) and the location(s) of
> the full text of the document have to be supplied."
> and:
> "Although the rule to submit to CDS exists, in general CERN
> does not strictly enforce it using coercion but rather using
> encouragement and reminders. Library staff time is better
> spent on finding papers that are not available anywhere than
> on telling those authors who do submit that they are doing it
> in the 'wrong' way.
>
> Official CERN divisional/departmental reports are always
> submitted via departmental administrative channels direct to CDS.
> The rest are requested, though not always supplied, from CERN
> authors and it is the responsibility of the Library to locate
> and upload missing papers."
>
> Other than Minho and QUT, is there now any large institution
> where your requirements are met exactly including an
> enforceable requirement?
>
>
> Please undertand that this is a friendly question, to help
> determine where
> we are.
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> Associate Professor
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> Long Island University
> and formerly
> Princeton University Library
>
> dgoodman_at_liu.edu
> dgoodman_at_princeton.edu
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> Date: Wednesday, April 5, 2006 11:59 am
> Subject: Re: [SOAF] Universite du Quebec a Montreal becomes
> first North
> American University to sign Berlin Declaration on
> Open Access
> To: SPARC Open Access Forum <SPARC-OAForum_at_arl.org>
>
> > > Similarly CERN, so far the lagest organization to require
> > > self archiving, reports that
> > > some researchers do not cooperate, and the library staff
> > > needs to obtain copies from journals or the web.
> > > http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/12/papers/2/
> >
> > Unless I am mistaken, the library intervention is needed mostly for
> > CERN's huge legacy literature, stretching back decades. Strictly
> > speaking, a mandate can only be for the forward-going literature
> > (todayand onward), because authors may not have digital copies of
> > theirearlier work. (They may no longer even be at CERN, or alive!)
> >
> > Stevan Harnad
> >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 20:02:02 BST