A Physicist's Challenge to Duplicate Arxiv's Functionality Over Distributed Institutional Repositories

SUMMARY: The answer to the question of whether longstanding Arxiv self-archivers need either change their locus of deposit or do double the keystrokes if they are to deposit their papers in both Arxiv and their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) is that this can now be accomplished automatically, depositing only once, thanks to the IR software's SWORD import/export functionality. A second question is whether central harvesters of distributed IRs can provide (at least) the same functionality as direct-deposit central repositories (or even better). The provisional reply is that they can, for example, by building the functionality on top of the Celestial OAI-PMH harvester. It is now important and timely to demonstrate this capability technically, in the service of OA's fundamental objective: Getting the OA IRs filled. The demonstration that central harvesting of distributed IR deposits can not only duplicate but surpass the functionality of direct central deposit should help encourage funders to adopt the convergent IR deposit mandates that facilitate the adoption of complementary mandates by the universal provider of research output: the worldwide network of institutions (OA's "sleeping giant") -- rather than divergent mandates that fail to encourage (or even discourage) institutional mandates.

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Physicist (anonymous):

"If you want to convince me [that institutional self-archiving plus central harvesting can provide all the functionality of Arxiv], then try to do so by conducting the following experiment with any... "harvesting" vehicles you like: 

    (1) Choose an area, such as Mathematical Physics, or Integrable Systems, and find all the papers that have been deposited in any of the archives that they cover, within the past week.  (If they cover 95% of the arXiv, they must necessarily producethis information just as well). No other barrage of junk; just that simple list of papers. 

    (2) Do the same with respect to all the posted publications by a given author for the past ten years. Again: not a barrage of google-like junk dumped upon you, but this specific information. (If I want a ton of junk, I can also go to Google scholar, and waste endless time trying to find what I need.) 

    (3) Find out, at one go, if a given article, or set of articles, from the above list,  has been published in a journal , and what the journal reference is.  

    (4) Get a copy of any of these articles, at once, in any convenient format, like .pdf, that is available.

    (5) Be equally sure that all the above is simultaneously done for all such articles deposited in individual institutional repositories.

"If you can do all the above, successfully, you will have given the 'proof of principle'."

Les Carr (ECS, Southampton):

"I think we can reasonably build the required functionality on top of the Celestial OAI-PMH harvester. The "proof of concept" project would need to fund a server to allow registered users to subscribe to alerting emails, based on searches over the "recently added" OAI metadata held in Celestial." 

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Note: This is not about the relatively trivial issue of whether longstanding Arxiv self-archivers need either to change their locus of deposit or to do double the keystrokes in order to deposit their papers in both Arxiv and their IRs: That can be accomplished automatically, depositing only once, by the IR software's SWORD import/export functionality. 

This is instead about whether central harvesters of distributed IRs can indeed provide (at least) the same functionality as direct-deposit central repositories (or even better). The provisional reply is that they can, but it is now important and timely to demonstrate this technically.

The functionality question is extremely important for another matter: Getting the IRs filled. It has become clear that deposit mandates are needed in order to fill repositories (whether central or institutional) with OA's target content: the 2.5 million articles per year published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, in all disciplines and languages, and originating from all the world's research institutions (universities, mostly).

OA deposits need to be mandated by all the world's research institutions, the research providers, reinforced by deposit mandates from the funders of the funded subportion of that research. The universal adoption of these deposit mandates needs to be facilitated and accelerated: There have only been 61 adopted so far (from 31 institutions and 30 funders). The institutional mandates cover all research output, whereas the funder mandates only cover funded research. But whereas an institutional mandate covers all research output, cutting across all fields, funded and unfunded, from that institution alone, a funder mandate covers only funded research, usually only in one or a few fields; however, it cuts across many institutions. 

Hence a funder mandate that requires institutional IR deposit (followed by optional automatized central harvesting or export) also simultaneously serves to stimulate, motivate and reinforce the adoption of institutional mandates by each of its funded institutions, to cover the rest of each institution's own research output, across all fields, funded and unfunded. In contrast, a funder mandate that requires direct deposit in an institution-external, central repository (1) touches only the research output that it funds, (2) fails to propagate so as to facilitate the adoption of complementary institutional mandates for all the rest of institutional research output -- and even (3) competes with institutional mandates by (giving the appearance of) necessitating double-deposit were the institution to contemplate adopting a deposit mandate of its own too. 

In reality, of course, the SWORD automatic import/export capability moots any need for double-deposit, but this is not yet widely known or understood; and even without double-deposit as a perceived deterrent, divergent funder mandates, needlessly requiring direct institution-external deposit, simply miss the opportunity to provide the synergy and incentive for the adoption of complementary institutional mandates that convergent funder mandates, requiring institutional IR deposit (plus optional central harvesting) do.

Hence the demonstration that central harvesting of distributed IR deposits can not only duplicate but surpass the functionality of direct central deposit should help encourage funders to adopt the convergent IR deposit mandates that facilitate the adoption of complementary mandates by the universal provider of research output, the worldwide network of institutions (OA's "sleeping giant"), rather than divergent mandates that fail to encourage (or even discourage) institutional mandates.

"Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally"

"Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum