Open Access: Query About CogPrints (Central vs. Institutional Deposit)

This is a reply to a query (anonymized) about CogPrints, a central repository for the deposit of Open Access (OA) content. The topic is whether the locus of direct deposit should be central or institutional:

On 5-Nov-09, at 4:00 AM, [Identity deleted] wrote:

"We [deleted] are informing researchers from the social sciences and humanities in [deleted] about repositories in their domain. We have 2 questions considering cogprints."

I am happy to answer your questions about central disicplinary repositories in general and, in particular, about CogPrints, which was founded in 1997 as a conscious effort to extend to other disciplines the long-standing practice of physicists to self-archive their papers -- both before and after refereeing -- in what used to be called "XXX" and then became the Los Alamos (now Cornell) Physics Arxiv.

The idea of CogPrints was to show that making one's papers freely accessible online was not just feasible and useful in physics, but in all disciplines. The idea was also (vaguely) that it could all be deposited in one global archive -- Arxiv, perhaps, eventually, but that first CogPrints needed to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of self-archiving in other disciplines, as evidence that the practice could be generalized and could scale.

But there was always some uncertainty about whether the self-archiving should be central or local (institutional). The original self-archiving proposal (1994) had been for local self-archiving. Somehow, however -- perhaps because of the prominent success of Arxiv (which had launched in 1991, but was preceded by similar practices by high energy physicists in the sharing and distribution of preprints in hard copy form, at central deposit sites such as CERN and SLAC) -- the original proposal to self-archive locally mutated, temporarily, into central self-archiving, and that was when CogPrints was created.

Since then, however, the OAI metadata harvesting protocol (itself first inspired by Arxiv) was created (1999), making all OAI-compliant repositories interoperable and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001) was launched; meanwhile CogPrints was made OAI-compliant (1999), and then used to create the first generic OAI-compliant, Open Access (OA) Institutional Repository (IR) software (EPrints) (2000), and the international OA IR movement began, and is now culminating in institutional mandates to self-archive in institutions' own local IRs. 

So the tide has turned, for both functional and practical reasons, to institutional rather than central self-archiving, with the OAI protocol making it possible to harvest the metadata data (or both the metadata and the full-texts) from all the distributed IRs into many discipline-based or geographic central repositories.

This development was natural, and indeed optimal, because institutions (not disciplines) are the universal providers of all of OA's target content (refereed research), across all disciplines and nations. Hence distributed local deposit and central harvesting is the most natural and universal way to ensure (and mandate) that all of OA's target content is systematically provided. That had been the gist of the original 1994 self-archiving proposal.

The notion of direct central deposit was made obsolete by the OAI harvesting protocol. (The idea is the same as with Google: we don't deposit centrally in Google; we deposit content locally, and Google harvests. With research, there are disciplines and countries and funders, and if any or many of them want their own central collection, they need merely harvest it. No need to have researchers depositing willy-nilly here and there, to fulfill funder mandates or to fill disciplinary repositories. Depositing once, in their own institution's IR is enough, and the rest is just a matter of automated import/export and/or harvesting. Moreover, distributed local IRs cost far less to create and maintain than central repositories, because they distribute both the cost and the load.)

So CogPrints -- and other direct-deposit central repositories, even Arxiv -- are obsolescent, with good reason. It is institutional self-archiving mandates that will put an end to the direct-deposit central repository era, but harvested central collections may still continue to flourish, until generic global harvesters manage to provide the same functionality or better, across disciplines and nations. Institutions -- the universal providers of all research output -- have a special interest in hosting, showcasing, managing, monitoring, analyzing and archiving their own research output. 

"Are peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed documents available on CogPrints?"

Yes, both unrefereed preprints and refereed postprints can be deposited in CogPrints -- and in IRs. But only refereed postprint deposit can be mandated by institutions (and funders). Whether researchers choose to make their unrefereed drafts public (as many physicists have found useful to do) must be left up to the individual researchers.

"If yes, do you control whether documents from authors who say they are peer-reviewed are really peer-reviewed? Is there such a control at CogPrints?"

CogPrints certainly does not fact-check whether papers deposited as having been published in a (named) refereed journal were indeed published in that refereed journal. 

Institutions may choose to fact-check that for deposits in their own IRs (but I doubt it's necessary: publicly claiming to have published in a journal when anyone on the web can check and confirm that it is untrue would be a very foolish thing for an academic to do -- and the deception would not last long).

"Is it free for authors to upload their documents on CogPrints or do they have to pay something?"

Of course it is free -- both to the uploading author and to the downloading user. 

But it is not cost-free to maintain a central repository. (And maintaining Arxiv costs a lot of money; it doesn't cost much to maintain CogPrints simply because CogPrints -- and central self-archiving in general [with the sole exception of Arxiv] is either a failure or just a very minor and temporary success. The natural and optimal way to self-archive is institutionally, with central repositories being just harvested collections, not multiple off-site loci of direct remote deposit, competing for or overloading the poor depositing authors' keystrokes, and discouraging instead of facilitating and reinforcing convergent institutional and funder self-archiving mandates.) 

It's a good idea to consider setting up central collections, but crucial to encourage local institutional deposit, and to harvest therefrom, rather than trying to get authors -- who mostly (85%) don't self-archive at all --  to deposit directly in yet another central repository.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum