Friday, January 25. 20081st DRIVER Summit Report![]() "On 16 and 17 January 2008, DRIVER II successfully carried out its first Summit in Goettingen, Germany. Approximately 100 invited representatives from the European Community, including representatives of the European Commission, over 20 spokespersons of European repository initiatives as well as experts in different repository related fields from Europe, the U.S., Canada and South Africa came together to discuss their experiences and concrete actions with respect to the further building of cross-country repository infrastructures...From Norbert Lossau's Summary: "The conditions to populate repositories with content and to implement a coherent European and global digital repository based eInfrastructure are more favourable than ever before. The Council's Conclusions on Scientific Information, the European Research Council Open Access mandate and the current preparation of an Open Access mandate for all EC funded research publications can draw from the existing infrastructure efforts which must be accelerated in the coming months... Thursday, January 24. 2008The OA Self-Archiving Sweepstakes: One More University and One More Funder Mandate
One more Australian university Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate (CSU, Australia's 6th mandate: thanks to Arthur Sale for the news) and one Italian funder mandate (ISS, Italy's first: thanks to Valentina Comba via Peter Suber) have been announced. (Also a "strong encouragement" policy from Hokkaido University brings us closer to a first Japanese mandate.)
![]() 22 funder mandates, 12 institutional mandates, 3 departmental mandates, plus 5 proposed funder mandates, 1 proposed institutional mandate, 2 proposed multi-institutional mandates That's a total of 37 mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far = 45 (plus at least 31 registered self-archiving institutional and funder "OA policies" and probably many more unregistered policies -- all of them still shy of a mandate, encouraging/inviting/rquesting instead of requiring/mandating, but within easy reach of upgrading to a mandate, exactly as NIH did recently). = at least 76 known to be adopted, proposed, or poised See ROARMAP. (Arthur Sale whispers that we should expect more announcements soon, from Australia.)
The Self-Archiving Sweepstakes are on -- and let us hope for a planetary sweep in 2008, particularly from the sleeping giant: the university sector. (The world deserves at least a bit of good news for a change!) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, January 23. 2008Open Access and Open DataThe arch-analyst of apertivity, Richard Poynder, has published yet another excellent interview, this time time with Peter Murray-Rust, a dedicated advocate of Open Data (OD). Here are a few comments on some important differences between Open Access (OA) and Open Data (OD). The explicit, primary target content of OA is the full-texts of all the articles published in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. This is a special case, among all texts, partly because (i) research depends critically on access to those journal articles, because (ii) journals are expensive, because (iii) authors don't seek or get revenue from the sale of their articles, and hence have always given them away to any would-be user, and because (iv) lost access means lost research impact. Research data are also critical to research progress, of course, but the universal practice of publishing research findings in refereed journal articles has not extended to the publication of the raw data on which the articles are based. There have been two main reasons for this. One was the capacity of the paper medium: There was no affordable way that data could be published alongside articles in paper journals. The other was that not all authors wanted to publish their data, or at least not right away: They wanted the chance to fully data-mine the data they had themselves gathered, before making it available for data-mining by other researchers. The online era has now made it possible to publish all data affordably online. That removed the first barrier (although there are still technical problems, which Peter Murray-Rust and others discuss and are working to overcome). But the question of whether and when an author makes his data open is still a matter for the author to decide. Perhaps it ought not to be the author's choice -- but that is a much bigger and more complicated question than OA (for in OA all authors already want to make their published articles freely accessible online). That difference in scope and universality is one of the reasons the OA and OD movements are distinct ones: OD has both technical and political problems that OA does not have, and it is important that OA should not be slowed down by inheriting these extraneous problems -- just as it is important that OD should not be weighed down by the publisher copyright problems of OA (which do not apply to OD for the simple reason that the authors do not publish their data, hence do not transfer copyright to a publisher). So far, this is all simple and transparent: OA and OD have different target contents, with different problems to contend with. OA's solution has been for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the self-archiving of all of OA's target content, making it free for all online. But an interesting overlap region is thereby created between OA and OD: for article texts are themselves data! And one of the most important purposes for which the OD movement has sought to make data freely available online -- apart from the purpose of making it available for collaboration and use by all researchers -- is data-mining, by individuals as well as by software, and for re-publication in further 3rd-party online databases. Data-mining can be done not only on raw research data, but on article texts too, treating them as data: text-mining. Here too, the interests of OA and OD are perfectly compatible and complementary -- except for one thing: If text-minability and 3rd-party re-publication were indeed to be made part of the definition of OA (i.e., not just removing price barriers to access by making research free for all online, but also "removing permissions barriers" by renegotiating copyright) then this would at the same time radically raise the barriers to achieving OA itself (just as insisting on making the paper edition free would), making it contingent on authors' willingness and success in renegotiating copyright with their publishers. The online medium itself had been the critical new factor that had made it possible to remove price barriers to access, by making research articles toll-free online. But the price for going on to insist on the removal of both price barriers and "permissions barriers" jointly, as part of the very definition of OA, would have been to raise the problem of overcoming permissions barriers as a barrier to overcoming price barriers! For the new online medium that made toll-free online access possible, did not, in and of itself, redefine copyright, any more than it redefined ownership of the paper edition. Toll-free online access (OA) will lead to copyright reform (and publishing reform, and perhaps eventually also to the demise of the paper edition). But the online medium alone, in and of itself, simply made toll-free online access possible -- and that is hence the proper definition of OA. (After all, copyright retention by authors was perfectly possible in the paper era. In and of itself, it is not an online matter at all -- although the online medium, and OA itself, will eventually lead to it.) Peter Murray-Rust is right that there was some naivete about some of this at the time of the drafting of the BOAI definition of OA (which I signed, even though I later opted for an updated definition of OA, one that resolved this ambiguity in favor of immediate OA and its capacity to grow). More than naivete, there was ignorance and lack of foresight, both about the technical possibilities and about the practical obstacles. It was the online medium that had made OA possible: Toll-free access for all users had not been possible or even thinkable in the paper era, either to articles or to data, for both economic and practical reasons. But with the advent of the online era, toll-free access online became thinkable, and possible. Indeed it was already within reach: The only thing authors had to do was to make their articles and data accessible free for all, online. But most article authors did not make their articles freely accessible online -- even though they all, without exception, sought no income from them their sale, wanting them only to be used, applied, cited and built upon. Most authors remained paralyzed because (1) they were worried about copyright and because (2) they didn't know how to provide OA, imagining that it might require a lot of time and effort. ![]() The IDOA solution works for OA -- it provides immediate OA for all the articles that are published in the 62% of journals that already endorse immediate OA. And for the 38% that do not, the articles are deposited as Closed Access; the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button then provides users with almost-immediate, almost-OA during any embargo period. But this solution does not work for OD, because (a) depositing data cannot be mandated, it can only be encouraged and because (b) making article-texts re-usable by 3rd-party text-miners and re-publishers as data requires permission from the copyright holder. That is not part of IDOA, and the "email eprint request" button does not cover it either. So the strategic issue is whether to insist on something stronger than IDOA -- at the risk of not reaching consensus on any mandate at all -- or waiting patiently a little while longer, to allow IDOA mandates to become universal, generating toll-free online access (OA), with its immediate resultant benefits to research and researchers -- and to trust that the pressure exerted by those very benefits will lead to the demise of embargoes as well as to OD (for both data and texts) in due course. I would accordingly urge patience on the part of the OD community, as well as to the Gold OA (publishing) and copyright-reform communities (even though I am by no means patient by nature myself!). Their day will come soon too! But first, please allow Green OA to take the natural course that is now wide open for it, paving the way with universal IDOA mandates generating toll-free online access to research, and all its immediate benefits. The strategic course to take now is to allow those mandates to propagate globally. This is not the time for over-reaching, raising the ante for OA higher than what the mandates can provide, and thereby only jeopardizing their chances of being adopted in the first place. Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3).Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Sunday, January 20. 2008What About Open Access to Books?Les Carr (U.Southampton) wrote:"Do ERC (or other short-term funders') research projects result in books? I am only an engineer who gets a bit lost outside STM, but I thought that books were written independently by researchers and that funded research projects had papers (and similar low-investment texts) as explicit research outputs? ![]() (2) Insofar as OA (and Green OA self-archiving mandates) are concerned, however, the relevant question is not whether books count as the outputs of funded research. (OA is for the outputs of research, whether or not the research is funded. And Green OA self-archiving mandates apply to the research output of a university's salaried academics, whether or not their research receives external funding, just as the university's publish-or-perish mandate applies to publications irrespective of whether they are the result of external funding.) (3) Another way to put this is that even an academic who receives no external funding is institutionally funded to do research, inasmuch as research and publishing are part of his job-description. (4) So the relevant variable is not funding but whether the research publication is an author give-away, written purely for the sake of research uptake, usage and impact -- the way all peer-reviewed articles are written -- or whether it is also written in the hope of royalty income (as many books are -- even though their hopes are usually not realized!) (5) Perhaps trumping even the impact vs royalty question is the question of the cost of publication, and with it the question of whether a print run of the publication is desired. (6) For better or worse, books are still preferentially published and read as conventional print-runs, rather than online-only, plus local print-offs by users. (7) As long as that is true, the essential costs of producing and distributing a print-on-paper book will differ from the essential costs of producing and distributed a journal article (which can all be done online). (8) Those essential costs of book publication need to be recovered regardless of whether the author hopes for royalty revenues over and above them. (9) Some have suggested that making a book OA online will not hurt but help the sales of the print edition, but this is far from empirically established as the general rule (although it has happened in a few cases). (10) Hence, although funders and institutions can and should mandate the self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles, they cannot and should not mandate the self-archiving of books. (11) If it were proposed to extend Green OA self-archiving mandates to books, there would be (justified) resistance from both authors and publishers, and that would needlessly reduce the chances of adoption of what would otherwise have been an articles-only mandate. (12) Once the 2.5 million articles published annually in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals have been made OA by universal Green OA self-archiving mandates, the number of books and publishers that show an interest in pursuing a similar option will no doubt increase -- but that's not the same as subsuming books under the Green OA self-archiving mandates themselves. Klaus Graf wrote:Much as I may wish it were otherwise, Klaus Graf unfortunately has it exactly backwards:"Stevan Harnad wrote: '(9) Some have suggested that making a book OA online will not hurt but help the sales of the print edition, but this is far from empirically established as the general rule (although it has happened in a few cases).' The burden of proof is most definitely not on those who think that making books free online will hurt sales, to provide evidence that it is so. The burden is on those who think it is not so, to show that it is not. The default or null hypothesis -- not just in this instance, but in the much more general one, of which books are just a special case -- is that, ceteris paribus, yes, if you make a digital version of a product available free for all online, you will hurt its sales (digital and analogue). There may be exceptions, but they have to be demonstrated. And evidence is a tricky matter, especially for a negative hypothesis. It is not sufficient evidence that a platypus does not lay eggs, to show photos of some platypuses, not laying eggs. For journal articles, although the evidence so far seems to be that Green OA self-archiving has not caused cancellations, it remains a possibility that it eventually will. However, as has been pointed out repeatedly, in that very special case, it does not matter, either way: But none of that carries over to books and book publishing -- neither to books in general, nor to scholarly/scientific books in particular.i. because research usage and impact is far more important than sustaining the current journal-publishing cost-recovery model; Neither for journal articles nor for books can free online access be attained through wishful thinking and righteous indignation alone. Fortunately, for journal articles, it needn't be.(a) It is not true that books are mostly written only for research usage and impact. (Most are also written in the hope of royalty income.) Let us not, then, needlessly handicap the strong special case for OA -- which covers all of peer-reviewed journal articles and authors without a single exception -- with the unneeded extra baggage of the uncertain, untested and equivocal case of books. Some books may eventually go the way of OA too; but right now, when the research community is finally on the verge of successfully inducing its funders and universities worldwide to adopt Green OA self-archiving mandates, this is definitely not the time to try to change the rules, raise the stakes, and insist on mandating book-deposit too. Leave book-deposit as an author option, like access-setting itself, and give OA, already so grotesquely overdue, the chance to come into its own at long last. Klaus Graf wrote:I am afraid that Klaus Graf has not understood what is meant by the default or null hypothesis: To demonstrate [proof is possible only in mathematics] that the null hypothesis is false you need to provide compelling evidence to the contrary. The null hypothesis is that vitamin C does not cure cancer. The evidential burden is on those who think it does, to provide compelling evidence that it does, not on those who think it doesn't, to provide evidence that it doesn't. (Most things do not cure cancer, by default. No one has to give evidence that vitamin C does not cure cancer.) The occasional report that some people who were diagnosed with cancer took vitamin C and are still alive is not compelling evidence. The jury is still out on vitamin C. It has been out for a long time."Is there any empirical proof for this default hypothesis? There is only empirical evidence for the contrary. It's purely nonsense to state a "default hypothesis" if empirical facts should be given." (Apologies for the shrillness of the example. I did not want to use miracles or telekinesis, because that would be too exacting and dismissive. I just wanted to give an illustration of the evidential burden on the null hypothesis with a case where -- some believe -- closure has not yet been reached. Another example would be the legal presumption of innocence until compellingly "proved" guilty: There is no burden to "prove" innocence: it is the default hypothesis.) As with vitamin C, with book sales it is not sufficient merely to cite self-selected positive evidence; it is necessary to do systematic controlled comparisons, on sufficiently large and representative samples: N new books, selected at random, half of them then made freely accessible online, half not, and then a comparison of their sales for several years. Perhaps even a replication or two... Pablo Ortellado wrote:Mandatorily "in many cases"? How many? And which? and who decides, how?"You may call it OA or not, but books in many cases should be mandatorily made available on the Internet..." Please take a moment to reflect. The substantive issue is not what we do and don't call "OA." The issue is what we can and cannot consensually mandate (and what a mandate is). After much too long a delay, the momentum is finally gathering for funders and universities to adopt Green OA mandates to deposit all peer-reviewed research journal articles in OA repositories. (Not "in many cases": all, without exception: that's why/how it's a mandate.) The reason those mandates proved possible was that all the authors of all those articles (as well as their universities and their funders) without exception, wanted to give away those articles for free online. None of them sought royalty revenues or print sales -- they sought only maximal research impact. None of this is true without exception, or even majoritarily, of books. It is true of some authors of some books. And those authors are all free to deposit them in their OA IR if they wish. ![]() And as with Gold OA journal publishing, book publishers are more than welcome to experiment with offering free online access, as National Academies Press does, extremely successfully and valuably. But if you insist on including books in the deposit mandates, you will simply prevent the adoption of the mandates themselves, because they were predicated on consensus among authors, their institutions and their funders that their articles were intended as give-aways all along (even before the online era). There is no such consensus on books (in fact, I suspect, far from it). Hence on no account should we needlessly jeopardize the spread of Green OA self-archiving mandates today, just when adoptions are at last beginning to gather speed, by raising the goal-posts, this time to a height for which the research community can no longer sustain its natural consensus, by now declaring that book deposit is to fall under the OA mandates too. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Thursday, January 17. 2008Don't Conflate 3rd Party Fair Use and Course Packs with 1st Party Open Access Provision![]() Universities have long-standing frustrations about what 3rd-party buy-in content they can and cannot include in Course Packs for student use. That's an old story, and universities should continue to strive to get the best deal they can with AAP publishers for that, as Hofstra, Marquette, and Syracuse Universities have been trying to do. But on no account should this unending saga be conflated with Open Access (OA) provision (by those same three universities). Universities provide OA to their own research output, by self-archiving it in their own OA Institutional Repositories (IRs). That is 1st-party OA content. The connection between the two is this: In its efforts to strike a deal with AAP Publishers for their ("fair") use of 3rd-party content (originating, say, from, Hofstra University), Marquette and Syracuse need not worry about the content that they include in their course packs that consists of links to Hofstra's OA articles, deposited in Hofstra's IR. Nor vice versa. All they need do is link to it. And no need to download, print or photocopy it for with course packs. The link is enough, and the students can do the rest (if they lack affection for trees). And as Green OA self-archiving of 1st party content in authors' OA IRs grows, the frustrations of jostling for 3rd party content will simply shrink and disappear. So, in keeping with the Golden Rule, universities should be mandating Green OA self-archiving, alongside whatever deals they may be cutting for fair use in course packs. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Wednesday, January 16. 2008Critique of EU Council's Conclusions (again heavily influenced by the publisher anti-OA lobby)![]() Institutional Versus Central Deposit: Optimising DRIVER Policy for the OA Mandate and Metric Era Also to be discussed at the DRIVER Summit is this statement by the EU Council (not to be confused with the European Research Council (ERC), which has mandated OA self-archiving!) The EU Council's Conclusions show the tell-tale signs of penetration by the publisher anti-OA lobby; familiar slogans, decisively rebutted many, many times before, crop up verbatim in the EU Council's language, though the Council does not appear to realize that it has allowed itself to become the mouthpiece of these special interests, which are not those of the research community: Council of the European Union: Conclusions on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservationHere is my critique of this EU Council statement (all boldface quotes are from the Council's statement, the underscores have been added): "the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost to the reader under economically viable circumstances, including delayed open access"(1) 'At no cost to the reader' conflates site-licensing and Open Access (OA). This wording was no doubt urged by the publisher lobby. The focus should be on providing free online access webwide. That is OA, and that makes the objective clear and coherent. (2) 'Delayed open access' refers to publisher embargoes on author self-archiving. If embargoes are to be accommodated, it should be made clear that they apply to the date at which the access to the embargoed document is made OA, not to the date at which the document is deposited, which should be immediately upon acceptance for publication. The DRIVER network of Institutional Repositories (IRs) can then adopt the 'email eprint request' button that will allow individual users to request and receive individual copies of the document semi-automatically. (3) What should be deposited in the author's own institutional IR immediately upon acceptance for publication is the author's peer-reviewed, accepted final draft ('postprint'), not the publisher's PDF (or XML). There are far more publisher embargoes on the PDF/XML than on the postprint, and the postprint is all that is needed for research use and progress. The postprint is a supplementary version of the official publication, provided for OA purposes; it is not the version with the primary digital preservation problem. (4) Digital preservation should not be conflated with OA provision: There is a (separate) problem of the digital preservation of the publisher's PDF/XML, but this is not the same as the problem of providing OA to the author's postprint. The postprint, though it can and should be preserved, is not the canonical copy of the publication, so the two preservation tasks should not be conflated. (5) Self-archiving research data is also a different matter from self-archiving research publications. Data-archiving is not subject to a publisher embargo, and it needs independent preservation, but data-access and data-preservation should not be conflated with OA provision. (6) Deposit should be directly in each author's own IR: Distributed institutional depositing and storage should not be conflated with central harvesting and indexing: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally. (7) Direct central deposit should be avoided except in cases where the author is institutionally unaffiliated or the author's institution does not yet have an IR. For those cases, there should be at least one provisional default repository such as DEPOT. (8) Research (publications and data) should not be conflated with other forms of digital content. The problems of cultural heritage archiving, for example, are not the same as those of research publication archiving. Nor are the problems of archiving the same as the problem of access-provision (OA). "ensure the long term preservation of scientific information -including publications and data"This is an example of the complete conflation of OA-provision with digital preservation, including a conflation of authors' supplementary postprints with the publisher's original, as well as a conflation of research publications with research data. DRIVER will not have a coherent programme unless it clearly and systematically de-conflates OA-provision from digital preservation, primary publications from authors' supplementary postprints, and publication-archiving from data-archiving, treating each of these separately, on its own respective terms. "experiments on and wide deployment of scientific data infrastructures with cross-border, cross-institution and cross-discipline added-value for open access to and preservation of scientific information"This again conflates OA provision with digital preservation and conflates publications with data. It also conflates both of these with IR interoperability, which is yet another matter. (And webwide OA is, by definition, cross-institution, cross-border and cross-discipline, so that is a non-issue.) What is an issue, however, is institutional versus central depositing, and it is crucial that DRIVER have a clear, coherent policy (insofar as research archiving is concerned -- this does not necessarily apply to other forms of digital content): Deposit Institutionally: Harvest/Index/Search Centrally. The emphasis of DRIVER should accordingly be on ensuring that the distributed IRs have the requisite interoperability for whatever central harvesting, indexing, search and analysis are needed and desired. "promoting, through these policies, access through the internet to the results of publicly financed research, at no cost to the reader, taking into consideration economically sustainable ways of doing this, including delayed open access"Economic sustainability is again a red herring introduced by the publishing lobby into language that should only concern the research community and research access. The economic sustainability of publishing is not DRIVER's concern. DRIVER's concern should be interoperable OA-provision (plus whatever cultural-heritage and other forms of archiving DRIVER wishes to provide the infrastructure for). Nor are publisher access-embargoes DRIVER's concern: DRIVER should merely help ensure immediate deposit in IRs, and it should facilitate research usage needs through IR interoperability as well as the IRs' email eprint request button. "2008 working towards the interoperability of national repositories of scientific information in order to facilitate accessibility and searchability of scientific information beyond national borders"Insofar as research is concerned, it is not the interoperability of national repositories that is crucial but the interoperability of all OA IRs. "2009 contributing to an effective overview of progress at European level, informing the Commission of results and experiences with alternative models for the dissemination of scientific information."This is again a red herring (for both the EU and for DRIVER) introduced by the publishing lobby: Research archiving and OA-provision are neither a matter of alternative publishing models nor a matter of alternatives to the generic peer-reviewed publication model. Publishing reform and peer review reform are not DRIVER matters. They can and will evolve too, but DRIVER should focus on the deposit of current published research as well as research data in IRs, and the interoperability of those IRs. That is the immediate problem. The rest is merely speculative for now. "B. Invitation to the Commission to implement the measures announced in the Communication on "scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation", and in particular to: 1. Experiment with open access to scientific publications resulting from projects funded by the EU Research Framework Programmes by: defining and implementing concrete experiments with open access to scientific publications resulting from Community funded research, including with open access."This is a vague way of saying that the publishing lobby has persuaded the EU not to do the obvious, but to keep on 'experimenting' as if what needed to be done were not already evident, already tested, already demonstrated to work, and already being done, worldwide (including by RCUK, ERC, NIH, and over a dozen universities): The EU should mandate that all EU-funded research articles (postprints) are deposited in the fundee's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. Access can be set in compliance with embargoes, if desired. And data-archiving should be strongly encouraged. DRIVER's concern should be with ensuring that the network of IRs has the requisite interoperability to make it maximally useful and useable for further research progress. THE FEEDER AND THE DRIVER: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally Stevan Harnad DRIVER is designing an infrastructure for European and Worldwide Open Access research output, stored in institutional and disciplinary repositories, now increasingly under institutional and research-funder mandates. It is critical for DRIVER to explicitly take into account in its design (as some research funders have not yet done, because they have not yet thought it through) that institutional and disciplinary (central) repositories (IRs and CRs), although they are fully interoperable and at a par in that respect, nevertheless play profoundly different roles. Universities and research institutions are the FEEDERS-- the primary providers of research, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines -- for both kinds of repositories (IRs and CRs). This difference in role and function must be concretely reflected in the design of the DRIVER infrastructure. The primary locus of deposit for all research output is the researcher's own institution's IR (except in the increasingly rare case of institutionally unaffiliated researchers). Thanks to OAI-interoperability, the metadata for those deposits, or even the full-text deposits themselves, can also be harvested by (or exported to) any number of CRs -- discipline-based CRs, funder-based CRs, theme-based CRs, national CRs, European CRs, global CRs. Neither IRs nor CRs will fill without deposit mandates. This is a hard lesson, that has been learned very late (NIH, for example, made the mistake of requesting rather than requiring deposit, the NIH policy failed, and three years of research impact was consequently lost); but the lesson has now at long last indeed been learned. So the number of institutional and funder mandates is now set to grow dramatically. Institutions of course always mandate deposit in their own IRs. Many funders have mandated deposit, indicating that deposit can be in either IRs or CRs. But a few funders still stipulate, dysfunctionally, that deposit must be in CRs. This is a symptom of not having thought OA through. Funders are of course greatly to be commended for mandating OA, but their short-sightedness on the question of locus and means of deposit needs correction, and DRIVER can and should help with this, pre-emptively, rather than blindly following the unreflective and incoherent trends in the air today. Indeed DRIVER must take a coherent position, if it wants OA content to be provided and OA repositories to be filled, reliably and fully. The model that DRIVER should adopt in designing its infrastructure is "Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally." That is the way to scale up -- simply, swiftly, systematically and surely -- to 100% OA. I give the reasons in detail in my talk tomorrow, but for now, I just want to point out the principle points: Institutions (i.e., universities and research institutes) are the providers -- the source -- of all research. Institutions have a direct interest in showcasing and managing their own research output, but they have been even more sluggish than funders in adopting mandates. If funders mandate central deposit, they neither cover all of OA output nor do they collaborate coherently with the providers (the institutions) to scale up systematically to providing OA to all of their institutional research output. The OAI protocol makes it possible to harvest content from all OAI-compliant repositories. That is the coherent, systematic pattern of content provision for which DRIVER should be designed, not an incoherent patchwork of arbitrary institutional and central depositing and repositories that will neither scale up to all of OA nor accelerate its attainment. Not all research is funded; not all research fits into defined disciplines; disciplines are not all independent. Disciplines, being overlapping and redundant, would entail that discipline-based depositing had to be be overlapping and redundant. Depositing can be mandated once, but not multiply. The natural way to ensure that a paper is present in multiply loci (institutional, (multi)-disciplinary, national, etc.) is to deposit it at source – i.e., institutionally – and then harvest or import its metadata (or both its metadata and the paper itself) into whatever CRs we decide we need. That is what the OAI interoperability protocol itself was designed for. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the very notion of Central Repositories already betrays something of a misunderstanding of the online medium: Is Google a central repository? Is it a repository at all? Do people deposit directly in Google? OAIster, Citebase (and many other central OAI services like them) are an even better model: OAIster and Citebase were explictly designed to be OAI service-providers -- functional overlays on the distributed OA content-providers. Do CRs -- disciplinary, interdisciplinary, national and international -- really need to be any more than that? Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum First DRIVER Summit: Towards a Confederation of Digital Repositories![]() Towards a Confederation of Digital Repositories 16-17 January 2008 Goettingen, Germany DRIVER responds to the vision that all relevant scientific content should be easily accessible through internet-based infrastructures. Achieving this vision reaches beyond technology - it is also the organisational dimension that allows a stable and trusted network of content providers. DRIVER is working with repository federations in Europe, and reaches out to further international communities (for example in the US, China, India, and Africa) in order to determine the practical requirements for a confederation of digital repositories. Wednesday, January 16, 2008 13:00-13:15 Opening Address (Norbert Lossau, DRIVER) 13:15-14:00 Opening Keynote - EC Research Infrastructure & Digital Repository Roadmap (Mario Campolargo, EC) 14:00-14:30 Organising Infrastructures: Experiences from D-Space, Open Content Alliance and other community efforts (Michele Kimpton, D-Space Foundation) Chair: Sylvia van Peteghem, DRIVER 15:00-15:30 DRIV(ER)ing Research Infrastructures (Yannis Ioannidis, DRIVER) 15:30-16:00 Growing Repositories (Bill Hubbard, DRIVER) 16:00-16:30 Repository Landscape - DRIVER Studies (Kasja Weenink, DRIVER) Chair: Sijbolt Noorda, EUA 17:00-18:30 Panel Discussion "Open Access and Repository Infrastructures": Responding to the "Council Conclusions on Scientific Information" Thursday, January 17, 2008 Chair: Rüdiger Klein, ESF (tbc) 09:00-09:30 Institutional versus Central Deposit: Optimising DRIVER Policy for the OA Mandate and Metric Era (Stevan Harnad, Université du Québec à Montréal & University of Southampton ) 09:30-10:00 Challenges in DRIVER-II (Donatella Castelli, DRIVER) Chair: Carlos Morais-Pires, EC 10:00-10:30 Disciplinary Repository Projects EuroVO-AIDA: Astronomical virtual observatories, repositories and data access (Sebastien Deriere, Thomas Boch) METAFOR -- Climate Modelling (Michael Lautenschläger) 11:00-12:30 Disciplinary Repository Projects Genesi-DR -- Earth Science (Luigi Fusco, Donatella Castelli) D4Science -- Environmental Monitoring (Donatella Castelli) eCrystals -- Crystallography (Simon Coles, Liz Lyon) OLAC: The Open Language Archives Community (Gary Simons) Language Resource Management and Discovery in CLARIN (Peter Wittenburg) Nereus/Neeo -- Economists (Vanessa Proudman) Discussion Chair: Wolfram Horstmann, DRIVER 13:30-14:45 National & International Repository Networks EIFL -- Open Access Program (Susan Veldsman, Rima Kupryte) Open Access Repositories in Finland (Rita Voigt) OpenAccess.se (Jan Hagerlid) NORA - The Norwegian Experience (Jan Erik Frantsvåg) eLABa - Lithuanian Academic e-Library (Vilius Kuciukas) Local Integration, National Federation: TARA, TCD-RSS, IReL-Open, Expertise Ireland (Niamh Brennan) OAI Spain (Alicia Lopez-Medina) 14.45-15.50 Discussion: Building a Joint Digital Repository Infrastructure (Moderator: Carlos Morais-Pires, EC; Norbert Lossau, DRIVER) 15.50-16.00 Wrap-up (Norbert Lossau, DRIVER) Tuesday, January 15. 2008OA in India and beyond![]()
Sunday, January 13. 2008European Research Council Mandates Green OA Self-Archiving![]() "The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication[emphasis added]."Like the NIH mandate, the ERC mandate is also an immediate-deposit mandate, with the allowable embargo applying only to the date that the deposit is made OA, not to the date it is deposited (which must be immediately upon publication). The ERC embargo is also shorter (6 months, whereas NIH is 12 months). Better still, the deposit may be either institutional or central. The only way to improve on this nigh-optimal mandate is to require that the deposit itself be institutional -- "Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally" -- except if the grant recipient's institution does not yet have an institutional repository (in which case deposit should be in an interim generic repository such as the UK's DEPOT or Europe's EurOpenScholar). That is the way to ensure that research-funder and institutional self-archiving mandates systematically complement one another so as to scale up, as quickly and reliably as possible, to cover all of research output (virtually all of it institutional), from all disciplines and all institutions, worldwide. Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?Bravo to both the US and Europe. Now it is time for the other US and EC funding agencies -- and, even more importantly, all the US and European universities -- to follow suit with Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates of their own. Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Monday, January 7. 2008(1) Swan & Carr and (2) Bailey on Institutional Repositories and Open Access Mandates![]() Swan, Alma & Carr, Les (2008) Institutions, their repositories and the Web. Serials Review (in press).
« previous page
(Page 80 of 113, totaling 1129 entries)
» next page
|
QuicksearchSyndicate This BlogMaterials You Are Invited To Use To Promote OA Self-Archiving:
Videos:
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society. The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)
You can sign on to the Forum here.
ArchivesCalendar
CategoriesBlog AdministrationStatisticsLast entry: 2018-09-14 13:27
1129 entries written
238 comments have been made
Top ReferrersSyndicate This Blog |