Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: What is needed for Canadian biomedical research output isn't yet another (this time Canadian) PubMed Central: What is needed is that all Canadian (and US and UK) biomedical research output (as well as all the output of all the other scientific and scholarly disciplines, worldwide) should be made Open Access (OA) for all users, webwide. And the way to accomplish that is for the institutions and funders of the researchers to mandate that they deposit each article, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into each author's own OA Institutional Repository (IR). That is the solution that will systematically scale up to cover all research, from all institutions, across all fields, across all countries -- not the creation, willy-nilly, of central repositories like PubMed Central to deposit it into directly. PubMed Central should instead be a central OAI harvester, harvesting the biomedical research output of all the (distributed, local) IRs.
   Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) should think twice, and then lead, clear-headedly, instead of following, blindly, in this.

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A Canadian PubMed Central 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 American and British) biomedical research output (and all the output of all the other scientific and scholarly disciplines, worldwide) should be made Open Access for all users, webwide. And the way to do that is for the institutions and funders of the researchers who produce that 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 systematically scale up to cover all of research, from all institutions, across all fields, across all countries. Not the creation, willy-nilly, of central repositories like PubMed Central to deposit research into directly.

Then PubMed Central (and its counterparts in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere) can harvest the biomedical content of their own country's IRs (if they wish: but then 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 (IR) movement, to create and fill each research institution's 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., 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 own 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 -- although 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 diffusing 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 needlessly split and diffuse because some mandators are mandating central deposit (mostly in the national PubMed Centrals), other mandators are mandating local deposit in the researcher's institutional IR, and still other mandators are mandating deposit, indifferently, 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 achieve that is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate deposit in the researcher's own IR, and to relegate central archiving to harvesting from those distributed institutional IRs.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) should sit and reflect on this for just a few moments, and then take a rational decision, setting a clear-headed example for the rest of the world, rather than reflexively following the unthinking trends that are still keeping OA progress so diffuse and slow. CIHR can thereby help to fast-forward us all to the optimal and inevitable, where we should already long have been by now.

"Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)

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.
   ABSTRACT: A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC] examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals. Their relative merits were considered, addressing not only technical concerns but also how e-print provision (by authors) can be achieved -- an essential factor for an effective e-print delivery service (for users). A "harvesting" model is recommended, where the metadata of articles deposited in distributed archives are harvested, stored and enhanced by a national service. This model has major advantages over the alternatives of a national centralized service or a completely decentralized one. Options for the implementation of a service based on the harvesting model are presented.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum