Depot: Central Round-Up, Back-Up and Stop-Gap for UK's Open Access Institutional Repositories

EDINA, SHERPA and JISC have just announced DEPOT, which looks as if it will be a superb central service for the UK, and a model for all countries worldwide that wish to provide Open Access to their research output.

DEPOT is many things, but chiefly a mediator for UK Institutional Repositories (IRs):

(a) If your institution already has an IR, Depot will redirect your deposit there, while also registering it and tracking it centrally, to make sure the deposit is picked up by the major search engines.

(b) If your institution does not yet have an IR, you can deposit directly in Depot and Depot will provide access to your deposit until your institution has an IR, at which point it will transfer your deposit to your IR.

I have mostly only congratulations for the designers and implementers of Depot. It is the optimal synthesis: It reinforces the author's own IR as the canonical locus for OA content. It monitors and integrates all of the UK's IRs. And it provides a provisional locus for any researcher whose institution does not yet have an IR (or for researchers who are not affiliated with an institution).

I would, however, like to recommend three small but very important changes in the following:

(1) Currently, Depot states that only postprints can be deposited.

(The postprint is either the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication, or the published PDF itself.)

(2) Currently, Depot does not state when deposit should be done.

(3) Currently, Depot states that the deposit depends on the policy of the publisher.

(The depositor is referred to the Romeo directory of publisher policies on author self-archiving to ascertain whether and when he can deposit.)

These are the corresponding three small but crucial changes I would strongly urge:

(1') Do not restrict deposit to postprints: Include preprints too.

(Preprints are pre-peer-review versions of articles that are to be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.)

(2') Make it clear that the deposit of the postprint should be done as soon as the article is accepted for publication.

(The preprint should be deposited even earlier, to be followed by the postprint as soon as it exists.) And most important of all:

(3') Make it clear that the deposit itself, and its timing, does not depend in any way on publisher policy: only the OA-access-setting date might.

The postprints of any articles for which the publisher has not yet endorsed immediate self-archiving can still be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, but the deposit can be provisionally set as Closed Access, instead of Open Access, if the author wishes, with only the metadata accessible to all.

Depot's FAQ is not quite clear on the relation between Depot and the many IRs. Presumably if the author's institution has an IR, Depot will redirect the deposit there. (In that case, excluding preprints is not a good idea, not only because they are crucial precursors of postprints, but because all IRs will welcome both preprints and postprints. It would be a very bad idea to try to draw a formal line between the two. Let peer review itself do that, and then the journal's name, both prominent metadata tags in EPrints as well as other IRs.)

Moreover, as it is stated that Depot itself will be based on the EPrints IR software, this means that Depot will have (i) the option for Closed Access deposit as well as (ii) the "Fair Use" Button -- REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT. With those features, almost-OA can be provided almost-immediately and semi-automatically for any Closed Access deposit:

Any would-be user webwide, led by the metadata to a deposit that turns out to be in Closed Access, can just copy/paste his email address into a box that is provided by the software, and then press the REQUEST EMAIL EPRINT button. This immediately sends the author an automated email eprint request, containing a URL on which the author need merely click in order to authorize the automated emailing of one copy of his eprint to the requester.

There is a vast difference between deferring deposit until the publisher endorses OA deposit, and doing an immediate CA deposit, deferring only the OA-setting. Depot should definitely facilitate the latter practice.

(Some clarification is also needed of the mechanism of transfer from Depot to the author's IR.)

But overall, the Depot service is near-perfect, and once optimised with these two small changes, it is worthy of not only admiration but emulation worldwide.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum