Open Access Archivangelism

SH: Here is a quick summary of points of agreement and disagreement with the University of California (UC) view of Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) as described by Catherine Candee (CC) in her interview with Richard Poynder (RP) in Changing the paradigm:

(1) UC considers publication reform to be the goal and OA merely a means: I would consider OA to be the goal and publication reform merely a hypothetical possibility that might or might not follow from OA.

(2) UC considers providing OA to postprints (i.e., final drafts of published journal articles) a lesser priority for IRs; I think they are the first priority.

(3) UC moved away from Eprints and postprint self-archiving because of the extremely low level of spontaneous uptake by UC faculty, assuming the low uptake was because it was "too difficult." It is far more likely that the low uptake was because UC did not adopt an institutional self-archiving mandate. Those institutions that have done so have dramatically higher self-archiving rates.

(4) UC instead outsourced self-archiving to an expensive service that, being a secondary publisher, needs to expend a lot of resources on following up rights problems for each published paper; the result so far is that UC's eScholarship IR is still not self-archiving more than the c. 15% worldwide self-archiving baseline for postprints.

(5) The other reason UC moved away from Eprints and postprint archiving is because of its publishing reform goals, including university self-publishing (of journals and monographs). I think monographs are (for the time being) a separate matter, and should be handled separately from journal article OA, and that peer review needs to be implemented by a neutral 3rd party, not the author or the author's institution. The immediate priority is postprint OA.

In summary, UC seems to be giving its own hypothetical conjectures on the future of scholarly publishing -- and its own aspirations for the hypothetical new publishing system -- priority over an immediate, pressing, and remediable practical problem: the needless, daily loss of 25% - 250% or more of the usage and impact of 85% of UC research output. Because researchers are relatively uninformed and uninvolved in all this, they do not have a clear sense of the implicit trade-off between (a) the actual daily, cumulative usage/impact loss for their own research output, with its tested and demonstrated remedy, and (b) the untested hypothetical possibilities with which some in the UC library community (and elsewhere) seem to be preoccupied.

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[Note: all hyperlinks have been added: they were not in the original RP interview]

RP: Initially you built the eScholarship Repository with the EPrints software, which was developed at Southampton University in the UK?

CC: Right. We started with Eprints, and the aim was to create what people now call an institutional repository — a repository where faculty could put materials (text and images) that they wanted to disseminate, or actually publish.

RP: You later switched to the bepress software. Why?

CC: We found it so, so, so difficult to get faculty even to test the EPrints software that we abandoned the idea of providing a platform for faculty to individually publish [sic, emphasis added] their own works.

SH: I think here is where the strategic error occurred. Not in switching softwares (since the software makes absolutely no difference) but in abandoning the goal of 100% OA for UC postprint output. The reason is implicit in the words CC uses to describe it: The self-archiving of already published postprints is not publishing at all, but merely OA-provision -- except if the underlying goal is not OA, but self-publishing!

CC: Around the same time we serendipitously encountered the bepress software, and right away we could see that it would allow us to do something much more important. We could see that if we used the bepress software the repository could also support peer-reviewed publications. Consequently, by the time we launched we had switched to a different model, and we had adopted the bepress software.

SH: Again, it is hypotheses about publishing reform and aspirations for UC self-publishing that motivated the change of "model." (Model for what, one wonders? OA is not a model. It just a means of making journal articles free for all online. It is publishing reform that involves models. Better if UC had done the tested, demonstrated part first, by adopting an institutional self-archiving policy, as at least four other universities have since done, successfully, and once the doable part was successfully done, moved on to the hypothetical part...)

RP: How was the model different?

CC: The bepress software allowed different units within the University of California to become the gatekeepers, with all the editorial and administrative ability resting with an academic department, an institute, or a research unit, rather than with individual faculty, or with the library.

SH: There are two issues here: (1) Did the Eprints software allow departments or research units to be their own gate-keepers for self-archiving? Of course it did, either within one Eprints installation, or, optionally, across many, thanks to OAI interoperability. But much more important: (2) Is local gate-keeping the goal of UC researchers? Has the gate-keeping not already been done by the peer-reviewers for the journal in which it was published? It looks here as if, once again, the hypotheses about publishing reform and UC self-publishing are driving the agenda, not researchers' immediate needs (which are to maximize research access, usage and impact, via OA).

RP: So where EPrints software assumed that researchers would do the inputting of papers themselves, bepress software was more suited to third-parties depositing them?

CC: That is one difference — although, because the software is difficult to use, Eprints submissions are often managed centrally.

SH: As this is not about defending the Eprints software in particular, I only note in passing that the difficulty was not the software but the fact that UC researchers were not required to self-archive, and hence didn't. In institutions where self-archiving is required, it is done, easily, by researchers themselves, not centrally. The central proxy self-archiving is a start-up strategy, used successfully by some institutions to set the practice firmly into motion; it is not a feature of the software:

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.

CC: Additionally, the bepress software lent itself to the size of UC; and it allowed the University to decide exactly what it wanted to put in, and to brand everything in the way it wished.

SH: All the free softwares are likewise configurable in exactly the same way.

RP: You were also able to outsource the hosting of the eScholarship Repository to bepress?

CC: Yes. It is hosted by bepress, but preserved here at CDL. What we are doing is harvesting citations. We then send them to faculty members saying that the listed works may be eligible for inclusion in the eScholarship repository. It is a way to alert them to the repository, and to the fact that they have content that could be placed in it.The message sent to faculty is clickable, and when they click on the link it brings them directly into the repository, where the citation data for the paper automatically fills out the repository metadata fields for them. This, by the way, is the one case where we allow authors to put their content in directly themselves. However, we also allow them to use a proxy — so they can legally assign someone else to put their papers in for them. The aim is to make the process as easy as possible, because time is the biggest constraint when it comes to getting faculty to participate.

SH: So far, this is all excellent practice, and an ingenious start-up strategy (though only if coupled with an institutional self-archiving requirement). But it is the next step that defeats it:

RP: And you have contracted bepress to do rights clearance on the papers?

CC: Right. After the papers are submitted we pay bepress to check the rights on them. That was a concession to the fact that bepress' business would be threatened if they got sued for allowing something illegal to be put into the repository. This part of the process is both onerous and expensive, and we hope we will not need to do it at some point in the future.

SH: So because UC have gotten into a 3rd-party publisher situation, they face rights problems they would not face if it were all in-house UC self-archiving. They are also incurring considerable additional expense needlessly (and at a time when institutions are being deterred from IRs and OA out of the false impression that it is expensive). Worst of all, so far the result is still not more UC postprints becoming OA than the global 15% average:

RP: I'm told you have acquired about 1,000 papers in this way... 1,000 postprints is a small drop in the ocean I guess. How many researchers are there within the UC system?

CC: UC is the largest public research university I know of. It has ten campuses and around 16,000 faculty and researchers.

RP: When you ask faculty for a postprint is it a request or a demand?

CC: It is not a demand. Clearly, incentive is the single biggest issue for getting content in. Awareness is another issue, so we are just starting some market research to discover what percentage of UC faculty even know about the repository. I suspect it is less than half.

SH: Perhaps a UC self-archiving requirement would be worth considering after all, since several international surveys have now reported that 70% - 95% of faculty say they would comply with a self-archiving requirement, and the 4 institutions that have adopted such a policy so far confirm that it works.

Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report, Key Perspectives Inc.

RP: So you still have work to do in publicising the repository?

CC: We do. While we are very excited that we have more than 200 departments participating in the repository we have no idea what percentage of the faculty know about it; and we have no idea what percentage would participate if they did know — because there is no overriding incentive for them to do so today. We need to understand the situation.

SH: The missing element is the institutional requirement to deposit the final accepted, peer-reviewed draft (not the publisher's PDF) as an institutional record-keeping matter: a fulfillment condition for annual review, for research assessment, and for standard CV creation/submission.

RP: As your experience shows, creating a repository is only half the task. You then have to fill it. For that reason there are growing calls for funders to mandate researchers to self-archive their papers. Do you think that that is the best way of filling institutional repositories?

CC: Well, I wouldn’t say that our purpose is simply to fill institutional repositories. We built an institutional repository as one way of providing an alternative to the current publishing system, and to give faculty something to do with that copyrighted material that we keep saying shouldn’t be given away to publishers.

SH: Filling an OA IR with the institution's annual research article output may not be the only possible goal for an IR, but it is surely the most important priority at this moment for researchers, whose need is not for an alternative to the current publishing system but for OA and the enhanced research impact it brings. Copyright retention is not an end in itself for researchers either: OA is. And with OA, copyright retention becomes moot.

CC: It may turn out that institutional repositories aren’t the way to go however. For that reason we are also interested in encouraging faculty to manage their copyrights differently, and to consider who they give their manuscripts to, and where they commit their editing and reviewing time. So our main focus is in accomplishing that, rather than filling repositories.

SH: Why all this when, in and of itself, this is not what faculty want and need? It would be fine if copyright retention were an essential means to an end that faculty do want and need, but it is not. OA is an end in itself, and it does not require copyright retention when 93% of journals have already given OA author self-archiving their green light:

RP: Do you nevertheless anticipate that funders will eventually introduce mandates?

CC: Actually we expect that universities will make some sort of a mandate before funding agencies do. In this regard there are a number of white papers floating around the University of California right now. We are waiting to see what happens to those.

SH: But the UC proposal is for copyright retention, whereas what is needed is a self-archiving requirement. Copyright retention requires needless re-negotiation with the 93% of journals that have already endorsed OA self-archiving, and it puts 100% of authors at risk of an unsuccessful re-negotiation, instead of just requiring that 100% of them deposit, leaving the 7% to set access as restricted access instead of OA, pending negotiations, if they wish.

RP: ...Given what you say about rights, I 'd be interested to hear more about the Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy white paper. This proposes that UC faculty "routinely grant to The Regents of the University of California a limited, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to place the faculty member's scholarly work in a non-commercial open-access online repository." Would this apply only to journal articles or all the works of faculty, including books?

CC: Ultimately it is intended to apply to all works, but starting with journal articles.

SH: Does it make sense to hold back (and weigh down) the sure research benefits of the self-archiving of published journal articles (postprints) for the much vaguer and more controversial case of books?

RP: If it does go ahead would you envisage a postprint mandate following behind it?

CC: Yes.

SH: A postprint mandate should not come behind a copyright blanket retention mandate! That is like making a local emission-reduction plan's adoption contigent on first getting all nations to agree to sign the Kyoto Accord!

RP: And you would welcome that?

CC: I would. While I don’t find the postprint issue as interesting or exciting as trying to encourage new forms of communication, it is strategically important — because it would allow us to put in place a production-level service capable of managing UC copyrighted material, which would better prepare us for the future.

SH: Then why not adopt a posprint self-archiving mandate immediately, instead of waiting for agreement on the much more demanding and controversial copyright-retention policy?

CC: ... eScholarship Editions are scholarly monographs encoded in XML. ...As you know, the corollary to the serials crisis is that libraries have less money to buy monographs, and so fewer monographs are being published. The fact is, however, that an awful lot of monographs could be published if the UC Press had more editorial bandwidth. So we have been experimenting with empowering UC Press editorials boards, or faculty editorial boards, to become, essentially, publishers. In this way we can extend the work of UC Press.

SH: This is the UC self-publishing agenda, and it is fine, but why is it being coupled with the OA IR issue? and worse, why is it being allowed to hold OA back? The (1) UC authors who publish their articles in established peer-reviewed journals may often be the same individuals as the (2) UC authors of monographs, but their situations are very different. The article authors already have publishers (not UC!) and need only OA. The monograph authors may or may not have a publisher, which may or may not be UC, and they may or may not want OA. Why should the straightforward solution for (1) be constrained by the much less straightforward solution for (2)?

RP: It's clear you have a very broad view of the role of an institutional repository. Advocates of self-archiving, by contrast, insist that an institutional repository should only ever be viewed as a postprint archive. What's your response to that view?

CC: I think it is unfortunate that the term institutional repository has come to mean something narrower. As I say, the postprint component is the least interesting and ultimately the least important part of this. So while right now it is tactically extremely important to deposit postprints, ultimately I envision a very different arrangement between universities and publishers than we have now.

SH: The reasoning here is unclear: Postprint OA is clearly the heart of the OA movement, and an end in itself (even if there are further ends thereafter). CC agrees that "right now it is tactically extremely important to deposit postprints." Yet UC is not doing what needs to be done to achieve that "narrower" immediate goal. It is instead aiming at the "wider" hypothetical one, and the result is that only 1000 of the "extremely important" postprints have been deposited in the UC IR to date, five years after the IR was created, while white papers are being written about copyright retention, publishing reform, and UC self-publishing plans. If the narrower postprint target is indeed an important prerequisite for the rest, then why not make a concerted effort to reach it first and leave the more hypothetical phase for afterward? (Or at least do them in parallel.)

RP: You believe universities should be in control of the publishing process, rather than managing papers that have been published by someone else?

CC: That's right. Eventually I hope all the content will be hosted and managed by universities themselves, and the publishing services would be in the form of added value. So, for instance, a published article would refer back to the raw article in the repository.

SH: This is all fine, but completely speculative. The course that will be taken by journal publishing and monograph publishing, whether published by universities or published by others, is right now a matter of pure speculation, whereas the course that is taken in access-provision for a university's own postprint output is a practical matter, entirely in the hands of the university and its researchers. Why is immediate OA to postprints being held hostage to hypotheses about eventual publishing reform?

RP: What worries self-archiving advocates about this is that if universities try to make institutional repositories too broad in functionality they could delay the transition to an open access environment; that we need to stay focused on the narrower view until OA is achieved. You are arguing that we need to plan for the longer-term future from day one are you?

CC: I think so. Moreover, I don’t see why a broader view would slow OA down. It is a matter of getting the right platform and getting things moving so that faculty can see that there are other things that can be done.

SH: But we have a clear example of "why a broader view would slow OA down"! In 2001, UC adopted Eprints and waited to see whether its IR would fill spontaneously. It did not. So instead of adopting a self-archiving policy (as Southampton, QUT, Minho, and CERN have since done, successfully filling their archives -- Eprints, Eprints, Dspace, and CDSware, respectively), UC adopted another software -- and another agenda instead of OA: publishing reform, copyright retention, and university self-publishing.

RP: I wonder if we might see increasing tension between researchers and librarians over the issue of institutional repositories? I ask because the primary aim of researchers is to achieve maximum impact for their research; librarians, by contrast, are looking to create large digital libraries or even, as in the case of UC, complete publishing systems. Could this threaten the historic relationship between librarians and researchers?

CC: I can see such a tension theoretically: where resources were limited, for instance, the aim of building a digital library could seem to stand in the way of getting publishing out quickly. But ultimately I think you are presenting a false dichotomy.

SH: The only tension is about lost time. UC, the world's biggest university system, 5 years down the line after establishing one of the first IRs, has 10285 items therein, 1000 of them postprints of UC published journal articles. Meanwhile, tiny Minho has 3297 items, QUT has 2194, Southampton 7745 plus 9795 for its ECS department alone, and CERN, larger but nowhere near UC in size, has 73898 items. Assuming that (as reported by Southampton and CERN) 40-70% of these, at least, are postprints, it looks very much as if an institutional postprint self-archiving mandate has served these other institutions well. Particularly instructive is CERN: Now that it is firmly on the road to 100% postprint OA for its own vast annual output -- and only now -- CERN is turning to the question of publishing reform. If all other universities and research institutions (including the biggest, UC) were to do likewise (in that order!), we would already be there (at 100% OA) and in a far better position to contemplate the hypothetical horizons of ensuing publication reform.

Stevan Harnad

[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]

Dr. Raveendran, whose message appears at the end of this item, is Chief Editor, Indian Journal of Pharmacology, an OA ["gold") Journal, but he seems to be mistaken about what Open Access (OA) means: He seems to think OA is about "abolishing copyright"! That is certainly not what OA means, or advocates. I am puzzled as to where that erroneous idea came from (and offer 3 hypotheses below), but first, the meaning of OA needs to be made clear straight away (I. DEFINITION OF OA, below).

Dr. Raveendran also recommends the journals pay author reprint royalties. I discuss this in the second part of this posting (II. AUTHOR REPRINT ROYALTIES?)

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I. DEFINITION OF OA

OA (Open Access) is about making the full-texts of all published, peer-reviewed research journal articles accessible online toll-free for all would-be users, webwide, in order to maximise their research usage and impact.

There are two ways to provide OA. One ("OA Green," also called BOAI-1) is for the author to publish the article in a traditional journal (with the usual copyright agreements) but also to make his own final draft freely accessible online by self-archiving it in on the web, free for all (usually in his own institutional repository).

Of the nearly 9000 journals published by the 128 publishers processed by SHERPA/Romeo so far (including virtually all of the top international journals), 93% have already endorsed author self-archiving.

The second way to provide OA ("OA Gold") is for the journal in which the article is published to make the published version freely accessible online. (Some, but not all, OA journals charge $500-$3000 per article to the author-institution for this service.) The total number of OA journals is currently 2000 (and Dr. Raveendra's IJP is one of them).

As should now be clear, neither form of OA involves the abolition of copyright. Both forms continue to depend on it. OA green retains conventional copyright or licensing agreements; OA gold sometimes adopts a Creative Commons copyright license, sometimes not.

The only three ways I can even imagine that Dr. Raveendran arrived at his mistaken idea that OA is about abolishing copyright are (1) from the minority of well-intentioned people who are unfamiliar with OA and have been (needlessly) urging researchers to retain copyright (or negotiate a Creative Commons License) rather than to transfer it to the journal in which they publish. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but it is neither OA nor necessary for OA (and implying that it is either OA or a necessary prerequisite of OA, is actually a disservice to OA, needlessly delaying it still longer, when it is already long overdue).

The second possibility is that Dr. Raveendran heard the recommendations (2) from an even tinier number of well-meaning but misinformed individuals who have been urging authors to make their work "public domain." e.g., the ill-fated US Sabo Bill (2003) . That 2003 Bill was not well thought out, and has already failed. It has been replaced in the US by the (pending) 2005 CURES Act, and in the UK by the UK Government Science and Technology Committee 2004 recommendation
which is soon (we hope) to be implemented as the 2006 RCUK self-archiving policy.

My third and last hypothesis as to how Dr. Raveendran might have arrived at his mistaken impression of OA is that it was somehow a result of some early, unfortunate internal squabbling in the OA movement about so-called "Free Access" (FA) vs. "Open Access" (OA).

That squabbling arose from two sources: the first was (i) an unnecessarily exacting initial "definition" of OA, defining it, needlessly, as not only the free online webwide access that it really is, but as also including the retention by the author of certain re-publishing/re-use rights, which the author then gives to all users.

This over-exacting initial definition of OA (since replaced in practice by the more natural, simpler, and more realistic one: "free online access") had itself been inspired by what had at first glance appeared to be valid analogies between the OA movement and (a) the Open Source Initiative, (b) the Creative Commons movement and (c) the data-sharing of the Human Genome Project.

Ultimately, however, all three analogies proved to be misleading and invalid, and the extra requirements they would have entailed (including author copyright retention/renegotiation and the granting of blanket re-use and re-publication rights to all users) proved to be both unnecessary and a retardant to OA, for the simple reason that for article texts (unlike software, data, and other kinds of content), all requisite and legitimate research uses already come with the territory when the full-texts are made immediately and permanently accessible for free for all online, webwide.

(The second source of the squabbling was (ii) a green/gold dispute about whether green OA is "true" OA. This has, I think, now been settled affirmatively, and so we can forget about it.)

"Free Access vs. Open Access" (2003)

"On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned"

"Apercus of WOS Meeting: Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons" (2004)

"Open Access Does Not require Republishing and Reprinting Rights"

"Proposed update of BOAI definition of OA: Immediate and Permanent" (2005)

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II. REPRINT ROYALTIES?

The idea of peer-reviewed research journals offering to pay their authors "royalty" revenue from reprint sales is based on a misunderstanding of why researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals. It is in order to maximise the usage and impact of their findings, not in order to make pennies from their sales! (That is why researchers, as authors, give away their texts to their publishers as well as to all would-be users, and that is why researchers, as peer-reviewers, give away their refereeing services to publishers and authors for free.)

"Authors 'Victorious' in UnCover Copyright Suit" (2000)

Indeed, in the paper era, authors used to take upon themselves the time and expense of providing free reprints to all would-be users who mailed them a reprint request (based, often, on scanning ISI's weekly "Current Contents") -- so eager were authors to maximise the usage and impact of their work. Today the OA movement's main motivation is to end all access-denial to would-be users who cannot afford the access-tolls, thereby ending authors' needless impact loss.

Harnad, S. (2006) Publish or Perish - Self-Archive to Flourish: The Green Route to Open Access. ERCIM News (January 2006)

Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research

Maximising the Return on Australia's Public Investment in Research

Making the case for web-based self-archiving [Canada]

Indeed it was Thomas Walker's proposal that authors should pay journals for OA eprints (a precursor of OA gold) that launched the American Scientist Open Access Forum in 1998!

Walker, T.J. (1998) Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals. American Scientist 86(5)

I doubt, though, that reinforcing access-blocking tolls is what Dr. Raveendra had in mind, given that his is an OA (gold) journal! If I might make a suggestion, a better use of any journal reprint-sale revenue would to be to use it to cover the journal's own costs, to ensure that it remains a viable OA journal in the long term! If there is a surplus, why not use it to reduce the journal's paper subscription costs, or reprint costs themselves, thereby increasing access still more, rather than simply offering the author a share in the access-blocking tolls?

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From: R. Raveendran, Chief Editor, Indian Journal of Pharmacology
To: Discussion Group for Open Access Workshop India
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 1:12 PM
Subject: [oa-india] Sharing reprint revenue, OA and FA

"I am not a great enthusiast of OA mainly because of its 'copyright abolition clause'. I have already expressed my concern on this forum that copyright abolition will benefit only the commercial organisations not the researchers and academics. In my opinion, Free Access will be more beneficial to researchers if only journals are willing to change their policies. One such policy and its benefits to the researchers is evident from the announcement given below. Journals can retain the copyright and use it to make money for themselves and the researchers. At the same time journals should not restrict any legitimate, non-commercial use of its contents by academics and researchers. Can't this be achieved by Free Access? Why do we need OA which is likely to kill many journals if not all?"

IJP starts sharing reprint revenue with authors

Starting 2005, IJP took a policy decision, to reward authors for their contributions which bring in reprint revenue for the journal. Sale of reprints adds to the financial stability of the journal, while propagating knowledge transmitted by its contributors. Sharing of the reprint revenue by the journal is expected to motivate authors for better quality inputs to the IJP. This practice will be more rewarding for the journal as well as the authors

In 2005, IJP sold reprints for more than one lakh rupees. A German company, bought reprint rights of the paper "Ginger as an antiemetic in nausea and vomiting induced by chemotherapy: a randomized, crossover, double blind study " which was contributed by Smita Sontakke, Vijay Thawani and Meena Naik from Government Medical College, Nagpur (IJP, Feb 2003, 35: 32-36). The chief editor gave away 10% of the reprint revenue to the authors by presenting them with a cheque for Rs 12,000 during the Annual Conference of the IPS at Chennai in December 2005.

The IJP congratulates the first recipients of the "reprint share scheme" and hopes they would utilize this amount for academic pursuit.

R.Raveendran
Chief Editor
Indian Journal of Pharmacology
JIPMER, Pondicherry - 605 006
Ph: 0413-2271969

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Stevan Harnad

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Melanie Bates wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

"The Learning Technology world discovers the Digital Library world and it makes an enormous discovery. That the librarians are storing, cataloguing and managing research content in one place using FREE software. Not only is this software FREE but it is being adopted by almost simultaneously by many Institutions in the UK and around the world - hey even Google are doing it, ... it must be the next big thing! And so the 'Institutional Repository' is born."

If anyone is interested in the history, provenance and motivation of all this free software, hence of the "IR" movement itself, they will find it in this October 2000 D-lib item and this August 2001 SPARC E-News item.

This is not by way of touting Southampton's causal role, but by way of suggesting that the fact that OA and OAI were the source of IRs might just have something to do with what IRs should be used for (as a matter of first and urgent priority).

It is not that storing and preserving every digitised object under the sun is not a good idea. It is just a question of priorities. For universities and research institutions, the immediate priority is this: Scholarly and scientific research usage and impact have been needlessly lost, cumulatively, since paper publication first began, because paper costs and distribution necessarily meant that many would-be users could not afford to access and use most research output. This has always meant a great loss of potential research impact and hence research progress to researchers, their institutions, and to research itself.

Ever since the creation of the Internet, however, with FTP, the Web, and now OAI-compliant OA IR software and IRs, this annual research-impact bleed can in fact be stanched. Yet the bleed is still being stanched spontaneously for only about 15% of the planet's annual research output today; 85% of it is still being lost, daily, and cumulatively. This continuing bleed is hence a needless loss to the planet's research institutions, the primary consumers of research findings, whose daily bread (pardon the messy, mixed metaphor!) is research impact and progress (and funding), as well as to the planet's teaching/learning institutions, the secondary consumers of research knowledge and progess, and of course each nation's tax-payers, the tertiary consumers of research applications and benefits, who also happen to be the funders of much of the research.

So, to repeat, whereas there is no doubt a worthy and worthwhile agenda to be pursued in ensuring the long-term storage and preservation of all institutional digital output (and input), there is still some acute and chronic bleeding to be stanched (85%) as a matter of urgent priority.

Until the digital era, the intrinsic limitations of paper itself were the cause of the unstoppable hemorrhaging of daily research usage, impact and progress. Please let us not now make diffuse digital conservationism (a worthy and worthwhile pursuit) into its digital-era cause, through neglect or distraction. Let us stanch the bleeding immediately, as a matter of priority, and then get on with the generic digital preservation agenda.

Stevan Harnad