(1) Preserving Access-Archive Contents. As always when this topic
comes up, the same old points need to be repeated: I am of course not
saying that the contents of IRs should not be and are not being
preserved!
That is why I linked (and of course fully support) PRESERV, of which
my friends and colleagues Les Carr and Steve Hitchcock are,
respectively, principal investigator and (nervous) project manager!),
as well as LOCKSS, etc. etc.
My point was that preservation archiving is not the purpose of access
archiving. Access-provision is. And the purpose of an OA deposit
mandate is OA-provision, not preservation.
(2) Locus of Deposit. For all the indisputably valid and worthy
things Steve Hitchcock says below about loci, collaboration,
interoperability, services and harvesting, my point was that the
locus of deposit for both funder and institutional deposit mandates
needs to be the institutional repository, not the the central
collection or service, such as PubMed Central, if funder and
institutional mandates are to converge and to facilitate one another
rather than diverge and to impede one another in the global
transition to universal OA.
(3) Version of Deposit. Again, for all the incontestably useful
points Steve makes, what the institutional and funder mandates
(rightly) require to be deposited is not the publisher's version of
record, to be preserved for posterity, but the author's refereed
final draft, to be made accessible (today, tomorrow, and for as long
as need be) for all would-be users who cannot afford access to the
publisher's version of record.
That is not the version that preservation-archiving is concerned
about: Preservation-archiving is concerned about the preservation of
the publisher's version of record.
(That said, it is very possible -- indeed more than likely -- that
after the global transition to universal OA has transpired, safely
and successfully, there will be an eventual further transition, in
which subscriptions to the publisher's version of record shrink,
under pressure from Green OA, until they become unsustainable,
journals cut costs, phase out inessential products and services (such
as the print edition and even the online version of record), offload
all archiving and access-provision onto the (now global) network of
OA IRs and CRs, and downsize to just peer-review service-provision,
funded on the Gold OA cost-recovery model, per article, charged to
the author institution, and paid for out of the institutional
windfall subscription cancellation savings. At that time, but not
before, the IR deposit version will become the version of record and
access-archiving will converge with preservation-archiving.)
(4) The Wisdom of the Mandators. Yes, all of this will come to pass
thanks to the wisdom of research funders and institutions in
mandating Green OA self-archiving, but, no, it will not be because
they were prescient, saw what was coming, and formulated their
objectives and policies accordingly.
Much of this is happening somnambulistically, with the mandators --
institutions and funders alike -- still profoundly confused about
what it is that they are mandating, how, and why. They are blithely
mix-matching, each in their own idiosyncratic ways, access-archiving
and preservation-archiving, locus of deposit issues, version of
deposit issues, journal affordability and research
accessibility, green and gold OA, publishing and access-provision,
content-provision and service-provision, access issues and rights
issues, and OA and non-OA matters.
So, yes, we must accommodate mandates and mandators if we are to
reach universal OA at all, but let us not fool ourselves that it is
not often the blind leading the blind...
Stevan Harnad
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Steve Hitchcock
<sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
At 02:31 19/07/2008, Stevan Harnad wrote:
(One discerns the dead hand of digital
preservationists here, pushing their agenda,
oblivious to the fact that the content they
seek to preserve is mostly not even OA yet,
and that the version that NIH has (rightly)
stipulated for OA deposit (each
"investigator's... electronic version of
their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon
acceptance for publication") is not even the
draft that is in the real need of
preservation, but just a supplementary copy,
for access purposes -- the definitive
version, the one that really stand in the
need of preservation, being the original: the
publisher's proprietary version. But is the
NIH mandate an access mandate or is it a
preservation mandate? For preservation, you
need to deposit in an archival depository,
not an OA collection like PMC, and you need
only deposit one or a few copies of the
original, and APA would certainly have no
problem with that...)
Stevan, Most funder mandates have expressed concern
about preservation, and this would suggest it is better
to go with that flow rather than rebuke it. The way to do
that is view preservation as a service. Then there is
analogy with your scenario here: locus of OA deposit is
the IR, after which any service can be applied, e.g.
harvest to PMC for OA and preservation, if that is the
objective.
The emphasis of our work on digital preservation
currently is storage and interoperability, so you have
flexibility about where/who stores the selected content
and which services can be applied. That's no different
from any other interoperable services that characterise
OA IRs.
The main drawback is likely to be rights, not just in the
OA case, but generally. This concern led recently to
proposals to allow some organisations to harvest for
preservation:
International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on
Digital Preservation (pdf 214pp), LoC, JISC, OAK Law
Project, SURFfoundation, July 2008
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/2008/20080714news_article_wipo.html
This highlights the general problem with rights and
digital content, but the proposed solutions, exempting
certain organisations, may not be broad enough to help
the content appearing in IRs. This rights problem applies
to content copies and could apply to other service
organisations too, not just those concerned with
preservation, so we should be careful about beating up
preservation for this. It will apply to
repository-repository copies, so affects the case in
point here too.
There is no advantage in suggesting all these policy
makers are wrong on preservation. It is possible to put
your case - IRs as locus of OA deposit - without
detracting from any possible preservation objectives. In
fact quite the reverse, if you can embrace these concerns
with practical solutions, as outlined here, it will be
easier to win support for the practical or policy changes
you are seeking, in the NIH case or others.
From your summary of the blog version of this post:
"For preservation, the definitive document needs to be
deposited in an archival depository (preferably several,
for safe-keeping, updating and migration as technology
evolves), not an OA collection like PMC. But that
essential archival deposit/preservation function has
absolutely nothing to do with either the author or with
OA."
But it does have something to do with the interacting
repositories concerned. They must look at the overlap of
their content, and what they want or expect to be
preserved, with that of other repositories, publishers
and preservation services. They probably don't see
sufficient overlap yet, so don't feel able to leave
preservation to others. It's not such a simple picture as
the above paragraph paints. The Preserv project, which
you link, is looking to build a framework for services
that can take all this into account, such as what types
of services, and where, are needed for repository
preservation. but this requires repositories to engage
with the issue, since at the moment there aren't enough
services, not LOCKSS nor archival depositories for
repositories, for them to be able to ignore it or leave
it to others. The technology and the scope for
preservation services is improving, but the business
drivers are not there yet, and in the end these will
derive from policy and mandates, just as the funder
mandates recognise.
Steve Hitchcock
Preserv Project Manager
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
http://preserv.eprints.org/
Received on Tue Jul 22 2008 - 04:27:39 BST