This is perhaps a good juncture at which to make it explicit that there is "small-p preservation" and "large-P Preservation." Of course GNU Eprints, like everyone else (including ArXiv since way back in 1991) is doing small-p preservation, and will continue to do so: Open Access is for the sake of
immediate access, today, tomorrow, and into the future -- and this, in turn, is for the sake of maximising immediate usage and impact, today, tomorrow, and into the future. Hence small-p preservation is a necessary means to that end.
But big-P Preservation, in contrast, is Preservation as an end in itself: as the motivation for archiving in the first place; or as a pressing need for ephemeral or fragile "born-digital" contents; or as a responsibility for content-providers (journal-providers) or content-purchasers (subscribing libraries) or content-preservers (deposit/record libraries) who need to ensure the perennity of their sold/purchased product.
So it is absurd to imagine (and for that reason needs to be stated explicitly, again and again, even though it is patently obvious) that Eprints is either oblivious to small-p preservation or that its contents are one bit more or less likely to vanish tomorrow than any other digital contents that are being conscientiously preserved and migrated and upgraded today, keeping up with the ongoing developments in the means of preservation.
The difference between preservation and Preservation is that preservation is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end (which is immediate, ongoing access-provision and usage), whereas Preservation is an end in itself.
Why is it so important to make it crystal clear that Eprints and OA are
not for Preservation projects? that their primary motivation is
not to ensure the longevity of digital contents (even though Eprints and OA
do provide longevity, and do keep up with whatever developments occur in the means of long-term preservation of their contents)?
Because OA's target contents are 85% missing! The pressing problem of absent content cannot be its Preservation! Eighty-five percent of the 2.5 million articles published annually in the world's 24,000 journals are not being self-archived today (and, a fortiori, were not self-archived yesterday, or the month/year/decade before). What has been -- and continues to be -- lost, as a consequence of this, is not the contents in question (for they are being Preserved in their proprietary-product version, by their producers [publishers] along with their purchasers [libraries]).
What has been (and continues to be) lost for the 85% of annual OA target content that has not been (and is not being) self-archived, is
access,
usage, and
impact. That is the true motivation for Eprints and OA self-archiving. And (listen carefully, because this is the gist of it!): that content will
never be self-archived by its authors for the sake of Preservation, because it
need not be: its Preservation is already in other hands than its authors (or its authors' institutions), as it always was, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be. The mission of authors and their institutions was not, is not, and should not have to be the Preservation of their own published journal article output [but see Note below**].
Nor, by the same token, is it the mission or motivation of authors' institutions to create Institutional Repositories (IRs) for the Preservation of their own published journal article output. If there is no better reason for creating OA IRs today than the Preservation of one's own journal article output, then there is no reason for institutions to create OA IRs today, and no reason for their authors to self-archive. This is a logical, empirical and practical fact, stated (recall, again) at a historical moment when 85% of OA target content is still missing, even though it is overdue, even though its self-archiving has been feasible for years, and even though its continuing absence entails that 85% of maximised research usage and impact (i.e., impact from usage by all would-be users rather than only those whose institutions can afford journal access) continues to be lost.
To wrongly identify the mission or motivation of Eprints or OA self-archiving with the need to Preserve digital contents is to provide yet another (strong) reason for authors
not to self-archive. Because Preservation is simply no reason at all (for OA self-archiving).
And to subsume the urgent mission of finding a way to generate that missing 85% of OA target content under the murky mission of the generic Preservation of generic digital content is simply to miss the point of OA self-archiving altogether, and to imagine that it is merely yet another instance of Preservation-Archiving -- whose mission and motivation, to repeat, yet again, is not immediate, urgent, long-overdue content-provision, access-provision, and usage/impact-maximisation, but long-term content-Preservation, as an end in itself.
So please, let us reassure those who might be fussed about it, that the contents of OA IRs like Eprints can and will continue to be preserved, but that to be Preserved is not their purpose, nor the purpose of self-archiving: immediate and ongoing access-provision and usage/impact-maximisation is their purpose. And that purpose is currently not being met -- not because the OA contents are at risk of not being preserved today, but because (85% of) the OA contents are at a
certainty of not being
provided today.
The OA problem, in other words, is not Preservation tomorrow, but Provision today. Hitching today's Provision problem to tomorrow's Preservation problem is yet another recipe for prolonging the non-Provision of 85% of OA's target content.
What is needed for the provision of the missing 85% of OA's target content is author motivation; and the empirical findings on how OA enhances usage and impact go only part of the way toward engaging author motivation. The critical missing bit to ensure the provision of the missing content is institutional OA self-archiving mandates,
not the plugging in of OA as merely another plank in the institution's generic Preservation platform.
I sense I am repeating myself -- but it appears to be needed, for the conflation of the Preservation-archiving mission and the OA access-provision mission just keeps recurring, deferring time, energy and motivation from OA access-provision, which is Eprints' raison d'etre.
[**Note: One last, somewhat subtler point, almost need not be stated, but it's probably better to make it explicit too, even though it is highly premature and highly hypothetical: If and when it should ever transpire -- and there is as yet no sign at all that it will -- that 100% OA via 100% self-archiving, having been neared or reached, should cause radical changes in the journal publishing system, forcing publishers to down-size into becoming only peer-review service-providers and certifiers, rather than also being the analog and digital product access-providers, as they are now, thereby forcing them to off-load access-provision and archiving onto their authors' institutions, then, and only if/when "then" ever comes, authors' institutions will inherit the primary-content Preservation mission, and not just the supplementary-content preservation mission.
But before that hypothetical contingency needs to be faced, there is still the very real, unsolved problem of getting that missing 85% of OA target content systematically self-archived. Let us not continue delaying that actuality by getting caught up in or deflected by hypothetical speculations.]
Stevan Harnad
