Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/257-guid.html
SUMMARY: What is needed for Canadian biomedical research output isn't
yet another (this time Canadian) PubMed Central but that all Canadian
(and US and UK) biomedical research output (as well as the output
of all other scientific and scholarly disciplines) should be made
Open Access for all users, webwide. The way to do that is for the
institutions and funders of the researchers to mandate that they
deposit each article, immediately upon acceptance for publication,
in each author's own Open Access Institutional Repository (IR). That
is the solution that will scale to cover all research, from all
institutions, across all fields, across all countries. Not the
founding, willy-nilly, of central repositories like PubMed Central
to deposit it into directly. PubMed Central should be a central OAI
harvester, harvesting the biomedical research output of all IRs.
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) should think twice,
and then lead, clear-headedly, instead of following, blindly, in this.
A Canadian PubMed Central
http://blogs.openmedicine.ca/node/23 is not
what is needed for Canadian biomedical research article output (any more
than a US or UK PubMed Central is what is needed for US and UK biomedical
research output).
What is needed is that Canadian (and US and UK) biomedical research
output (and output in all other scientific and scholarly disciplines)
should be made Open Access for all users, webwide. The way to do that
is for the institutions and funders of the researchers who produce the
research to mandate that they make their research articles Open Access
for all users, webwide, by depositing each article, immediately upon
acceptance for publication, in each author's own Open Access
Institutional Repository (IR). That is the solution that will scale to
cover all of research, from all institutions, across all fields,
across all countries. Not the founding, willy-nilly, of central
repositories like PubMed Central to deposit it into directly.
Then PubMed Central (and its mirrors in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere)
can harvest the biomedical content of their own country's IRs (if they
wish: but why just their own countries? why not, google-scholar-style,
all biomedical research articles, from all the world's IRs?).
There are two worldwide movements afoot in the area of Open Access
("Green") self-archiving: (1) an Institutional Repository movement, to
create and fill each research institutions own IRs, and (2) a Central
Repository movement, to create and fill multiple, national,
discipline-based central repositories along the lines of PubMed
Central (with vague affinities to the multiple-mirrored central
Physics Repository, Arxiv). The two movements -- distributed
institutional self-archiving and central disciplinary self-archiving
-- are not coordinating their agendas, indeed they are hardly taking
cognizance of one another. If they did, they would realize that their
two agendas are incoherent, if not at odds:
Researchers' own institutions (universities and research institutes)
are the primary providers of all research output. Those researchers,
their own institutions, and their funders, are the ones with the joint
stake in maximizing the visibility, uptake, usage and impact of their
joint research output. That is what the IRs are created for. The IRs
are interoperable with one another, because they are all compliant
with the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol. That means that their
contents -- which it would make no sense to search individually, IR by
IR -- can be harvested centrally, by search engines and meta-archives
that cover part or all of the distributed IRs' contents (i.e., all of
the world's refereed research journal article output).
That is what PubMed Central should be, and should be doing: A central
OAI harvester, harvesting the biomedical research output of all IRs
(or of all IRs in their country, though, again, that exercise has
doubtful search value for users worldwide, who would no more want to
have access to the biomedical output of only one country than to that
of only one institution). (National central harvesting might have
other uses, however, such as in inventorying and evaluating one
country's own research output, and perhaps in comparing national
productivity and impact -- though even that is best done via metadata,
gathered by global harvesters, rather than national ones.)
The incoherent, competing agendas of (1) institutional vs. (2) central
self-archiving are slowing down the progress and the focus of the
world OA movement because they are further confusing researchers --
who are already greatly under-informed and confused about OA -- about
where and why to deposit their articles. Only 15% of researchers
self-archive spontaneously today. That is why the OA movement has
turned to self-archiving mandates, requiring researchers to
self-archive. But the OA mandate movement is needless split and
diffuse because some mandators are mandating central deposit (mostly
in the national PubMed Centrals), other mandators are mandating
deposit in the researcher's institutional IR, and still other
mandators are mandating deposit in either one or the other.
That is not a coherent or systematic way to ensure that the mandate is
clear, complete, and covers all research output, funded and unfunded,
in all fields, from all institutions, across all countries. The
coherent, systematic way to do that is for researchers' institutions
and funders to mandate deposit in the researcher's own IRs, and to
relegate central archiving to harvesting from those IRs.
Can the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) not sit and
reflect on this for just a few moments, and then take a rational
decision, setting a clear-headed example for the world, instead of
reflexively following the unthinking trends that are still keeping OA
progress so diffuse and slow instead of fast-forwarding it to the
optimal and inevitable, where it should already long have been by now?
"Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3207.html
Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O?Brien,
A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model
for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher
education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11000/
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Sun Jun 10 2007 - 04:09:34 BST