Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:11:25 -0400

Thomas Krichel wrote:

>> SH:
>> And an author having to import and deposit every one of his own
>> institutional outputs into his own institutional repository

> TK:
> No this can be partly automated at today's level of technology
> and data infrastructure. The rest can be done by IR staff.
> Future scholarly communciation infrastructure could almost
> fully automate the process.

I agree completely about the future. But we are talking about now. And
today the status quo is the following:

(1) A few funder mandates for central deposit (most notably NIH, and
most of the other funder mandates consciously emulating NIH in this
regard), affecting many, many institutions.

(2) A few institutional mandates for institutional deposit.

(3) Most institutions not yet mandating at all.

So you are absolutely right (a) that the harvesting could go either
way, or both, and (b) that either or both ways could be automated.

But the reality is that we now have a few funder mandates that could
easily automate the harvesting from many, many institutional IRs to
their own CR.

And we also have many, many institutions (most of whom have not yet
even achieved consensus on adopting a mandate), each having to
automate the reverse-harvesting of their own content, deposited
remotely, if they are to have a mandate that does not impose double or
multiple deposit on their authors.

I leave it to institutions (the universal OA content providers in
either case) to consider which is the simpler solution, and the more
likely to lead to successful adoption and implementation of
institutional mandates and the generation of universal OA, C or D:

(C) Institutional and funder mandates both converging on IR deposit,
with automatic harvesting (if desired) by a few CRs, from all funded
institutions, based on the submission to the funder, by the fundee, of
the IR URL for each deposit

or

(D) Institutional and funder mandates diverging on IR and multiple CR
deposit, with (D1) automatic back-harvesting -- by each institution,
into its own IR -- of its own authors' remote deposits of funded
research from (various) funder CRs, alongside (D2) direct deposit of
all unfunded (or non-funder-mandated) research into its own IR.

>> SH:
>> because it was deposited institution-externally instead of
>> institutionally [this entails] extra work (for every author, and
>> institution)?

> TK:
> If you require the deposit at the author's IR you will
> create work for the funders. Funders don't like to
> mandate extra work for themselves.

It is not at all clear that automatic funder harvesting based on IR
URLs would be more work than the NIH's current direct deposit system
(especially in its indeterminate split between author deposit and
publisher deposit!).

>> SH
>> Isn't the gist of the OAI concept that central service-providers should
>> harvest from distributed local content-providers, rather than vice versa?
>
> TK:
> I am not sure if there is an "OAI concept". There is an OAI-PMH protocol,
> it talks about metadata being harvested from one computer system
> to another. Whether the first computer or the second computer is
> a central service provider is of no interest to the protocol.

But it's of interest to the users. And the difference between many
local content-providers harvesting back their own content from a few
global service providers, as opposed to a few global service providers
harvesting the content from many local content-providers is a
pragmatic, functional and ergonomic distinction that can be weighed on
its own intrinsic merits.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Jul 25 2008 - 15:20:10 BST