Open Access Archivangelism

The new RePEc blog is a welcome addition to the blogosphere. The economics community is to be congratulated for its longstanding practise of self-archiving its pre-refereeing preprints and exporting them to RePEc.

Re: the current RePEc blog posting, "New Peer Review Systems":

Experiments on improving peer review are always welcome, but what the worldwide research community (in all disciplines, economics included) needs most urgently today is not peer review reform, but Open Access (OA) to its existing peer-reviewed journal literature. It's far easier to reform access than to reform the peer-review system, and it's also already obvious exactly what needs to be done and how, for OA -- mandate RePEc-style self-archiving, but for the refereed postprints, not just the unrefereed preprints -- whereas peer-review reforms are still in the testing stage. It's not even clear whether once most unrefereed preprints and all refereed postprints are OA anyone will still feel any need for radical peer review reform at all; it may simply be a matter of more efficient online implementation.

So if I were part of the RePEc community, I would be trying to persuade economists (who, happily, already have the preprint self-archiving habit) to extend their practise to postprints -- and to persuade their institutions and funders to mandate postprint self-archiving in each author's own OAI-compliant Institutional Repository (IR). From there, if and when desired, its metadata can then also be harvested by, or exported to, CRs (Central Repositories) like RePEc or PubMed Central. (One of the rationales for OAI-interoperability is harvestability.)

But the primary place to deposit one's own preprints and postprints, in all disciplines, is "at home," i.e., in one's own institutional archive, for visibility, usage, impact, record-keeping, monitoring, metrics, and assessment -- and in order to ensure a scaleable universal practise that systematically covers all research space, whether funded or unfunded, in all disciplines, single or multi, and at all institutions -- universities and research institutes. (For institutions that have not yet created an IR of their own -- even though the software is free and the installation is quick, easy, and cheap -- there are reliable interim CRs such as Depot to deposit in, and harvest back from, once your institution has its own IR.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum