Re: Institutional vs. Central OA Repositories

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 09:52:10 -0500

On 5-Feb-09, at 9:19 AM, Frederick Friend wrote (in
JISC-REPOSITORIES):

      As Professor Rentier acknowledges, "most authors are
      simply not yet depositing their articles at all", and I
      add "often not even when there is an institutional
      mandate in place". In that situation criticising the
      development of CRs would seem like cutting off the CR
      nose to spite the OA face. We need more mandates, and we
      need a higher rate of deposit into IRs, but until the day
      when there is100% deposit in 100% of research
      institutions, we should not deny researchers, research
      funders and the taxpayer the benefits of having open
      access to the content that is in CRs. We have to work
      with the reality of funding agency support for CRs and
      secure interoperability between as many IRs and CRs as
      possible.


Fred, you are quite right that funder mandates (and CRs) are
extremely welcome, and indeed godsends for the growth of universal
OA.

But the issue here is not whether funder mandates or CRs are
desirable and beneficial. They are, indisputably. The issue is locus
of deposit.

Does it make sense, and does it provide any further benefit at all,
for funder mandates to require direct deposit in CRs, thereby
competing (for author compliance) with actual and potential
institutional mandates, instead of reinforcing them by converging on
IR deposit (and then harvesting into CRs)?

Let us not forget that institutions are the universal providers of
all of OA's target content, funded and unfunded, across all
disciplines, institutions, languages and nations.

This very concrete and specific implementational point has to be
brought into focus, rather than blurred with a "let 1000 flowers
bloom" stance.

The devil is in the details, insofar as the growth and success of
both mandate adoption and mandate compliance are concerned. We need
to think the details through, carefully, rather than simply
applauding divergent (and even competitive) efforts that could so
easily be modified so as to collaborate and converge, in the
interests of universal OA.

Stevan
Received on Thu Feb 05 2009 - 14:53:29 GMT