On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Helen Hockx-Yu wrote in
JISC-REPOSITORIES:
"I should be grateful if anyone can provide me some evidence to back the following statement: 'Concern of longevity has contributed to the lack of active engagement from many researchers [with institutional repositories]. Guarantee of long-term preservation helps enhance a repository's trustworthiness by giving authors confidence in the future accessibility and more incentives to deposit content'
"I guess longevity here also applies to the financial sustainability of the repository itself as a business operation, in addition to its content."
The statement is (1) not based on evidence at all, but pure speculation and (2) speculation not on the part of the content-providers (i.e., the authors, who are presently only spontaneously self-archiving their published articles at about the 15% level) but on the part of others, whose a priori concept of an institutional repository is that it is for long-term preservation (rather than for immediate access-provision and impact maximisation)
One pretty much gets out of such subjective speculations what one puts into them (including the requisite confirmatory moans from fellow-preservationists!).
JISC author surveys have given the empirical answer as to why only about 15% of papers are being self-archived spontaneously today (although 49% of authors have deposited at least once): Authors are too busy to do it until/unless their employers and or funders make it a priority by mandating it -- and then 95% of them will duly do it:
Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC/ Key Perspectives Technical Report.
But it would be absolutely absurd of their employers and funders to mandate self-archiving for the sake of long-term preservation! Preservation of
what, and why? Articles are published by journals. The preservation of the published version (PDF/XML) is the responsibility of the journals that publish it, the libraries that subscribe/license it, and the deposit libraries that archive it. None of that is the responsibility of the author or his institution, and never has been. Hence it is ridiculous to think the reason authors are
not self-archiving today is because they are fretting about preservation!
Nor is there the slightest evidence that the 15% of articles that
has been self-archived spontaneously in central or institutional repositories has vanished or is at risk! Arxiv content is still there today, a decade and a half since its inception in 1991, under nonstop use. CogPrints contents likewise, since its inception nearly a decade ago. Ditto for the
IRs that have been up since GNU Eprints was first released in 2000.
The pertinent feature of all of these archives (even the oldest and biggest) is the pathetically small proportion of their total annual
target content -- for Arxiv, all of physics+, for CogPrints, all of cognitive science, for PubMed Central, all of biomedical science, and for institutional IRs, all of each institution's own annual research article output -- what a pathetic proportion of their respective target contents they are actually capturing.
But there are exceptions, and the biggest of them is
CERN, which is far above the spontaneous 15% self-archiving baseline and rapidly approaching 100% for its current annual output (while making remarkable progress with its retroactive legacy output too, thanks to superb library activism).
So too are
Southampton ECS, U.
Minho, and
QUT. And the reason is that these four institutions (3 institutions plus 1 institutional department)
self-archiving mandates for their own output (rather than
no policy, or
library activism alone). And the rationale for the mandates (although of course these archives, like all IRs, are duly attending to the preservation of what contents they have!) is not long-term preservation but immediate access-provision for the sake of maximising usage and impact before their authors' bones are in preservation.
So while preservationists lose themselves in speculation about the fact that maybe authors are not depositing because their secret yearnings for preservation are even more exacting than the preservationists', so they are abstaining until they can be absolutely guranteed of immortality for their texts as well as their institutions, the reality is much simpler:
They have (and should have) no special interest in preservation for their authors' drafts. They do have an interest in citation, but not enough to bother self-archiving until/unless their institutions and funders require it. Silly, and short-sighted (sic) but there we are.
Let us hope that their institutions and funders will have the good sense to adopt policies that require (and reward) their researchers for doing what is in their own best interests (as well as the best interests of their institutions and funders) -- just as they already require and reward them to publish (or perish).
Nor is the reward the imperishability of those authors' refereed final drafts that they will be self-archiving (not the publisher's proprietary PDF), but their own scientific immortality (which would slip away fast if they were to keep waiting to immortalise their publishers' PDFs instead, as the preservationists -- embalmers? -- are imagining they are doing).
(Do I sound like an archivangelist whose remaining reserves of patients have taken flight?)
Stevan Harnad
