Re: Role of arXiv

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2010 12:56:30 +0100

On Fri, 8 Oct 2010, Monica Duke wrote:

>> SH:
>> Harvesting is cheap. And each university's IR will be a standard part of
>> its online infrastructure.
>
> So far do we have enough (or any) evidence that harvesting is cheap? What
> sense of cheap did you mean?

A harvester does not have to manage the deposit or host the content, as
Arxiv does. It need only harvest and host the metadata. There countless
such OA harvesters sprouting all over (not to mention the Google
Scholar!) -- and that's on the sparse OA content that exists today (c
5-25%). Harvesters will abound once the OA content rises toward 100%,
thanks to OA self-archiving mandates by universities and funders.

History will confirm that we are simply spinning our wheels as we keep
banging on about publishing costs, repository costs, harvesting costs --
while our annual research usage and impact burns, because we have not
got round to mandating deposit...

Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Oct 08 2010 - 13:06:02 BST