To Bill Hubbard, SHERPA:
Dear Bill,
Your Oct 9 blog posting -- "Using institutional repositories to raise
compliance" -- is a very welcome one:
"funders [should] agree a joint deposit-requirement and suggest this to be
adopted by institutional repositories, in exchange for mandates requiring
deposit within institutional repositories"
http://researchcommunications.jiscinvolve.org/2009/10/09/using-institutional
-repositories-to-raise-compliance/
This problem has already been discussed explicitly for years, and this very
solution has already been made suggested many times, but so far ignored.
Let's hope its time has now at last come!
(I've posted the commentary below to your blog, but your blog's spam filter
may block it because it tries to detect spam by the number of URLs. If so,
could you post it for me?)
Chrs, Stevan
DEPOSIT INSTITUTIONALLY, HARVEST CENTRALLY
Apart from the tiny number (about 60) that have already mandated deposit,
institutions are the "slumbering giant" of OA, until they wake up and
mandate the deposit of their own research output in their own IRs. Not all
research output is funded, but all research output is institutional: Hence
institutions are the universal providers of all OA's target content.
Although not many funders mandate deposit either, the few that already do
(about 40) can help wake the slumbering giant, because one funder mandate
impinges on the research output of fundees at many different institutions.
But there is a fundamental underlying asymmetry governing where funders
should mandate deposit: As Prof. Bernard Rentier (founder of EOS
[EnablingOpenScholarship] and Rector of U. Liège, one of the first
universities to adopt an institutional deposit mandate) has recently
stressed, convergent funder mandates that require deposit in the fundee's
own IR will facilitate the adoption of deposit mandates by institutions (the
slumbering giant), whereas divergent funder mandates that require CR deposit
(or are indifferent between CR and IR deposit) will only capture the
research they fund, while needlessly handicapping (or missing the
opportunity to facilitate) efforts to get institutional deposit mandates
adopted and complied with too. The optimal solution for both institutions
and funders is therefore: "Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally" (with
the help of the SWORD protocol for automatic export from institutional to
central repositories).
Central vs. Distributed Archives (thread began Jun 1999)
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0290.html
Central versus institutional self-archiving (thread began Nov 2003)
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3168.html
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How? (Sept
2006)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates (Mar 2008)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html
Batch Deposits in Institutional Repositories (the SWORD protocol) (Jul 2008)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/431-guid.html
Waking OA's Slumbering Giant: Why Locus-of-Deposit Matters for Open Access
and Open Access Mandates (Feb 2009)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/522-guid.html
Repositories: Institutional or Central? (Feb 2009)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/519-guid.html
EOS (EnablingOpenScholarship)
http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/j_6/home
Some of the prior postings on this topic:
http://bit.ly/cBnRh
http://bit.ly/2PXqU9
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat Oct 10 2009 - 12:30:24 BST