(wrong string)  : Re: Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy

From: (wrong string) édon Jean-Claude <jean.claude.guedon_at_UMONTREAL.CA>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:18:05 -0400

I believe Arthur is right on his first point. This said, the issue of university autonomy varies enormously from one country to another and that must also be taken into account. In some countries, universities simply do not have the needed margin of maneuver to create institutional repositories with a mandate. For example, The French case should be examined in this regard, especially at a time when there is a national debate about the issue of university autonomy.

The second point is treated too rapidly. The French case, once again, provides a counter example. In France, it appears that a national, central organization is going to act as a national repository. This points to a situation where the issue of accountability is transferred to a national institution. Many centralistic countries may opt for this kind of solution.

The last point is way too rapid. The distributed solution of IRs remains flaky when it comes to retrieving articles. I know because I try to use these resources myself and sometimes I do not find documents which I know are there. Furthermore, researchers in a given discipline like to go to a one-stop entry point to find their documentation. Perhaps Google will be that universal entry point some time in the future, but this is not presently the case, and facing this prospect brings up othe rissues related to monopolistic power which i do not want to broach here but which should nonetheless stay in the background. For biomedical researchers, knowing that Pubmed is the place for bibliographic searches *and* document retrieval is a clear advantage. and this point, I think, amply justifies the decision by NIH to have the research articles they finance deposited in their depository. Furthermore, the NIH deposit does not prevent a parallel deposit in the local IR. So the conflict of interest appears non-existent or
 minimal in practice.

Finally, so long as solutions roughly work in the same direction, let us agree to support them all. Time for refinements will come later. As the IETF people say in the Internet world, what we need is rough consensus and working code! To repeat myself, let us avoid the narcissism of minor differences.

Jean-Claude Guédon


-------- Message d'origine--------
De: American Scientist Open Access Forum de la part de Arthur Sale
Date: jeu. 24/07/2008 03:10
À: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Objet : Re: Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy
 
Let me add something that I have said repeatedly in many forums and without
contradiction:

"Universities are delinquent in their duty of public accountability if they
do not make all their research outputs which are not specifically
commissioned by private enterprise publicly accessible on the Internet."

 

One simply cannot say the same for any 'central' or better 'subject'
repository, for which deposit is simply desirable.

 

Funders can nominate where they want the research they fund to be deposited,
but in reality, to do so other than in the institutional repository simply
creates extra work for everyone, and conflicts of interest.

 

Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania

 

From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Thursday, 24 July 2008 2:58 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Harnad's faulty thinking
on OA deposit and APA policy

 

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Guédon Jean-Claude
<jean.claude.guedon_at_umontreal.ca> wrote:

 

How can Harnad simultaneously state that there is no drive on his part
against "institution-external OA repositories" and then proceed to state
point 4?

 

To repeat:

 

No drive against institution-external OA repositories, just a drive against
MANDATING DIRECT DEPOSIT in institution-external OA repositories.

 

(Deposit mandates should be convergent, on institutional OA repositories,
not divergent; then institution-external OA repositories can harvest the
deposits from the institutional OA repositories.)

 

Reason:

 

To facilitate instead of retarding the scaling up to universal OA.

 

(It would save readers a lot of time and bandwidth if those rushing to
proclaim "Harnad's faulty thinking on OA deposit and APA policy" would first
take the trouble to understand what Harnad is saying on OA deposit and APA
policy...)

 

Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Jul 24 2008 - 17:52:20 BST