The policies in the OpenDOAR Policies Tool were derived mainly from an
extensive survey of around 300 repositories that was undertaken at the
beginning of 2006. The options therefore generally reflect the actual
permissions, restrictions and practices of real repository
administrators. Some are sites VERY open with their material (e.g.
Lincoln's "You may do as you wish with any metadata harvested from this
site") to highly propriatorial (e.g. ULP Strasbourg's "Text, data and
images should not be downloaded, nor redistributed nor published anywhere
else").
It is up to users of the Policies Tool as to how open or restrictive they
are. Administrators can, and perhaps should bypass the restrictive
options. Les's example is a case in point. (A few repositories had shot
themselves in the foot by prohibiting all harvesting, thus disallowing
Google and other search engines from indexing their content. We therefore
added the riders - adapted from Caltech's policies - to improve matters.)
The Tool also provides links that automatically select "minimal" or
"optimal" policies. The "minimal" policies generally do the least
possible to comply with the spirit of Open Access, whereas conversely the
"Optimal" policies go as far as possible to promote re-use (and encourage
best practices). We've tried to do a good job with the policy options and
recommendations, but are not written in stone. There is always room for
improvement, so if Les or anyone else has any constructive suggestions,
we would be very happy to receive them.
Peter Millington
________________________________________________________________________________
From: Leslie Carr [mailto:lac_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk]
Sent: 12 June 2007 16:26
To: American Scientist Open Access Forum
Cc: Millington Peter
Subject: Re: Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the
Decision Loop
Peter Murray-Rust [PM-R] replied:
"Stevan Harnad... has been consistent in
arguing the logic [of what comes with the
OA territory]... and I agree with the
logic... [but]... several repository
managers at the JISC meeting [said] I could
not have permission to do [such things]
with their current content. I asked 'can my
robots download and mine the content in
your current open access repository of
theses?' - No. 'Can you let me have some
chemistry theses from your open access
collection so I can data-mine them?' - No -
you will have to ask the permission of each
author individually.
The OpenDOAR repository policies tool tends to act towards
over-cautiousness in the policies that they suggest for data and
document reuse.
The current policies that they produce have options to explicitly
allow services that do full text indexing and citation analysis,
BUT THAT IS ALL.
By enumerating the potential allowable services they are
effectively stifling innovation and research, and that is a BAD
thing. The last thing that OA advocates ought to do is build up
ANOTHER rights-withholding infrastructure.
I do hope that this a a short-sighted transition phenomenon, but it
should certainly be addressed now (and strongly).
--
Les Carr
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Received on Tue Jun 12 2007 - 19:05:02 BST