Re: Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:44:19 -0400

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Armbruster, Chris
<Chris.Armbruster_at_eui.eu> wrote in SOAF:
      I fail to see how Harnad's drive against the best that
      exists: large, functional and service-oriented
      repositories, is of any service to the OA movement.

(1) No drive against institution-external OA repositories, just a
drive for mandating direct deposit in institutional OA repositories
instead of institution-external ones -- into which the institutional
repository contents can then be harvested.

(2) Institutions are the research-providers (of all of OA's target
research output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines,
institutions and countries). 

(3) Institutions are in the position to mandate and monitor the
deposit of all their own research output (funded and unfunded, across
all disciplines) in their own OA institutional repositories.

(4) Funder OA mandates need to converge with and reinforce
institutional OA mandates, rather than diverge from or compete with
them, so as to facilitate a coherent transition to universal OA.

Chris keeps talking about the functional benefits of central
services, which are neither disputed  by anything I am saying nor
diminished in the least by the locus of deposit I am urging.
Meanwhile Chris completely overlooks the real problem of OA, which is
getting the content provided. 

Convergent institutional and funder mandates will facilitate and
accelerate this OA content provision; divergent ones will needlessly
complicate and retard it.

(APA has, as predicted, withdrawn its proposed $2500 surcharge for
institution-external deposit, and continues to be Green on immediate
deposit in the institutional OA repository, without charge, as it has
been since 2002.)

      "The OA Deposit-Fee Kerfuffle: APA's Not Responsible; NIH
      Is"
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/436-guid.html


Stevan Harnad


On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Armbruster, Chris
<Chris.Armbruster_at_eui.eu> wrote:

      Stevan Harnad keeps on claiming that the natural and only
      sensible locus for Green OA deposits is the institutional
      repositories. He says we must fill the institutional
      repositories first. He also claims that any kind of
      service based on repositories (like SSRN, RePEc,
      CiteSeerX, Arxiv, PMC, European Research Paper Archive
      etc.) will then take care of itself. The proposed
      solutions is centralised harvesting, inlcuding harvesting
      from IRs to PMC.

      Steven Harnad is currently publicly applauding the policy
      of the APA (American Psychological Association), which
      wishes to charges authors USD 2500 for NIH-compliant OA
      deposit in PMC, but leaves standing an earlier policy
      that enables Green OA deposit in the author's IR for
      free.

      Given the APA stance, is it conceivable that they would
      watch as all manuscripts are harvested by PMC (as a
      'third-party' provider, like Harnad likes to call them)
      to provide service? The logical corollary of the APA
      policy is to slap on conditions that prevent harvesting,
      for why else would they seek to prevent deposit in PMC in
      the first place? Now, we may speculate on whether APA
      will back down or not, but the fundamental point is this
      one:
      You cannot applaud efforts to prevent Green OA archiving
      in large, functional repositories that have a decent
      service for scholars and then say we must all deposit in
      the individual IRs, which are little more than a storage
      facility, and then claim that - as in a miracle -
      functionality and service will emerge. The point of APA's
      policy is to try to prevent that Green OA will ever
      become functional and meaningful.

      I fail to see how Harnad's drive against the best that
      exists: large, functional and service-oriented
      repositories, is of any service to the OA movement.

      Chris Armbruster

      http://ssrn.com/author=434782
Received on Tue Jul 22 2008 - 20:47:22 BST

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