The University of Leicester Archive -- and What to Deposit Where

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SUMMARY: Prof. Andrew Colman of the University of Leicester inquires about (1) whether to deposit the publisher's PDF or the author's final refereed draft, and (2) whether a central archive would be more visible and accessible than an Institutional Repository (IR) like the Leicester Research Archive. The reply is quite straightforward:
   The default version to deposit is the author's final refereed draft, as it is the one with the fewest publisher restrictions and it fulfills all the usage needs of all (otherwise access-denied) users; the publisher's PDF should only be deposited if the publisher agrees.
   The locus of the deposit should definitely be the author's own IR. In the OAI-interoperable era, the distributed IR metatada are harvested by central harvesters. Creating and depositing in separate central archives for each discipline and combination of disciplines is not the coherent and systematic way to ensure that all institutional research output is made OA.
    The Leicester Research Archive's policy -- deposit the author's postprint, except if the publisher explicitly allows the proprietary PDF to be deposited, and deposit in the author's own IR, rather than central repositories -- is hence correct, but if the IR does not wish to remain near-empty, as now (only 320 deposits in its first year), deposit needs to be mandated, not just invited. I strongly recommend adopting the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate.

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Prof A.M. Colman (Psychology, U. Leicester):

"The University of Leicester has finally set up an open-access archive."

The Leicester Research Archive was actually set up a year ago, in June 2006, but since then it has only 320 deposits. That is less than one deposit per day, and, I am sure, far less than Leicester's annual research output, even if those deposits were all just 2006-7 output (which is unlikely).

The answers to the questions you raise may help remedy this shortfall, for Leicester, and other Institutional Repositories in the same condition.

Prof Colman:

"But when I submitted my journal articles to it, the librarians told me that none of them was eligible, because of publisher's restrictions, and that I should archive the manuscripts instead.

"That's of limited use, and I won't do it. Two of my colleagues in psychology had the same experience. Apparently either psychology journals don't allow self-archiving or our library is being excessively cautious.

"I have self-archived my own articles on my personal web page, none the less, but they're unlikely to attract many readers at such an obscure location. In fact, even minor university repositories are probably not the answer. What we need is a global archive like the physics one.

"Or do you have a suggestion as to how we might solve this problem?"

Professor Andrew M. Colman, School of Psychology, University of Leicester

There are three important points to be made here:

(1) U. Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well.

(2) Apart from that, Leicester's deposit policy itself is exactly right (and for very good reasons): Deposit your final, accepted, peer-reviewed draft as the default option (except if you have your publisher's blessing to deposit the publisher's PDF).

(3) Leicester's OAI-compliant institutional repository is only "minor" in one respect: It only has 320 deposits. Once deposit is mandated, however, and hence 100% of Leicester's current research output is being systematically deposited, it will be a major archive, and all of its contents will be picked up by all of the relevant harvesters and search engines, especially OAIster, ROAR, and Google (Scholar). (See also the comment, at the end of this message, from Dr. Norbert Lossau, Technical and Scientific Coordinator of the European DRIVER Project, about the BASE search engine.)

In our new era of distributed, OAI-interoperable Institutional Repositories (IRs), all archives (IRs) are equal and there is no need for, nor any added added benefit whatsoever from depositing in a central archive like the physics Arxiv (which is now merely one of the web's many distributed, interoperable OAI archives, all being harvested by central harvesters). Central harvesting and search is the key, not central depositing and archiving.

On the contrary, having to found and maintain a different central archive for every field and every combination of fields would not only be arbitrary and wasteful in the era of central harvesting and search, but it would also be an impediment rather than a help in getting all the distributed universities (and research institutions) to get all their researchers to fill all their own IRs, in all disciplines, by mandating and managing it, locally. (University Research Institute output covers all of research space, in all disciplines, and all combinations of disciplines.)

The right strategy in your situation is hence to deposit your refereed final drafts in the Leicester IR (except where the publisher endorses depositing their PDF) and if you wish, you can also deposit the PDF on your website, as you already do. The IR will list that as an alternative location for your paper.

The purpose of an Open Access (OA) IR is to provide free access to an institution's and individual's research output for those would-be users web-wide who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's PDF version.

It would be totally wrong-headed and counterproductive to deprive one's potential users of access altogether if one's publisher does not happen to endorse self-archiving the PDF! Far fewer publisher object to self-archiving the refereed postprint in place of their proprietary PDF.

To find out which journals are Green on immediate self-archiving of the postprint (62%) see Eprints Romeo.

To find out which subset of those specifically endorse self-archiving the publisher's PDF, see SHERPA Romeo.

If you want to self-archive the publisher's PDF too, over the publisher's objections, that's up to you: you can do it on your own website, as a supplement. No visibility or access is lost that way, and the difference is a difference that makes no difference (to the access-denied would-be user):

I strongly urge you to deposit your postprints in Leicester's IR, as the IR manager has requested. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. (For earlier publications, for which you no longer have the digital final draft, scan/OCR the published text and reformat it, or reformat the publisher's PDF, if you have it.)

I also strongly urge U. Leicester to mandate deposit.

Dr. Norbert Lossau:

"...at a time when we are building trans-national networks of repositories there will be no "minor" archive.

"DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) is the leading European repository infrastructure project, connecting in phase one at least 50 repositories from 5 countries (BE, FR, GE, NL, UK). DRIVER partners in the UK are the University of Nottingham and UKOLN at the University of Bath. DRIVER has set out a roadmap to connect ultimately all digital repositories in Europe. Already now we have established contact to representatives from each country in Europe and have liaised with major academic and funding organisations like the European University Association.

"As addition to the search engines given by Stevan you may also want to check BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), a key partner of DRIVER."

Dr. Norbert Lossau, Director, Goettingen State and University Library, Germany

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Pertinent Prior American Scientist Open Access Forum Topic Threads:

Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)
"Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
"France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories" (started Oct 2006)
"Self-Archive the Refereed Draft: Not the Publisher's PDF!" (Feb 2005)
"Self-archiving: Author's files versus publisher's pdf" (Apr 2005)
"What Provosts Need to Mandate" (began Dec 2003)
Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum