Optimal IR Policy: Direct Deposit, With Editing/Moderation Disabled

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:37:35 +0000

On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, West, Mark Andrew wrote:

> 1. How can we configure EPrints so a user with depositor/editor status
> can "deposit item now" and "move to repository" in one step, eliminating
> the review stage? Essentially, we want to remove the editorial review
> step and allow users with depositor/editor status to do both the deposit
> and move to repository actions in one click.

The EPrints technical experts will reply about how it's done. I know it's
feasible, because that is exactly how the EPrints IR in ECS at Southampton
is set up.

And that's the right way to set up an IR! Let (authorized, LDAP-validated)
institutional authors deposit directly, without any editing, mediating
moderation or delay dogging their efforts. If the IR management or
institution wants to review deposits, let them do it *after* they
are deposited, in the background, not as needless delays and officious
interventions in the deposit process -- especially since authors are still
sluggish about depositing at all! They need the immediate reinforcement
of being able to deposit and being instantly visible netwide (so the
vanity usage-statistics can already start growing!).

> 2. We want to remove the Subject field from the list of those that is
> required. Will we introduce any problems if we remove Subject from the
> list of required fields? Are there other taxonomies that sites are
> using with EPrints?

Yes, you can disable Subjects, and you should! The EPrints software is
designed for both central and institutional repositories (CRs and IRs).

A CR might -- just might -- be searched on subject taxonomies, but an
IR is very unlikely to be. Users will reach the articles via central
harvesters, including Google, which allows boolean full-text search,
which resoundingly beats subject search for a restricted corpus such
as published, peer-reviewed article deposited in IRs. A prefabricated
subject taxonomy is obsolescent at best, but for searches *within*
an IR it is useless in the extreme. (A light-touch taxonomy would be
one which classified simply by institutional department; that might be
useful internally; or possibly one in terms of research funder subject
categories -- but there are many of those... Leave it to harvesters and
machine algorithms to sort it out over the contents of all IRs. No need
for a local solution.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml

Chaire de recherche du Canada Professor of Cognitive Science
Institut des sciences cognitives Electronics & Computer Science
Universite du Quebec a Montreal University of Southampton
Montrel, Quebec Highfield,
Southampton
Canada H3C 3P8 SO17 1BJ United
Kingdom
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/
Received on Wed Nov 21 2007 - 20:49:14 GMT

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