Institutional Repositories

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SUMMARY: Individual departments should not sit and wait for their university to get its OA act together: Unless a consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide OA self-archiving mandate can be reached promptly, departments should go ahead and adopt their own bottom-up mandates (the "patchwork mandates" recommended by Prof. Arthur Sale), as Southampton's ECS did in 2003. Apart from maximising the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output, an OA Repository (with a self-archiving mandate) can serve as an institution's or department's internal record, ending its need to rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor and assess its own research output. (Southampton now has at least 13 EPrints Repositories to date; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.)

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On Mon, 1 Oct 2007, N. Miradon wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

NM: I know that Dr Leslie Carr wrote: "...we genuinely can't answer questions about the percentage of our research output that gets put into our repository, because we have [no] independent way of knowing what the size of our research output is!"

But a quick search in the staff publications site www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=nnnn (where nnnn is a random integer between 1 and 1890) gives many publications that do not seem to be available in http://eprints.soton.ac.uk

It would be interesting to know the % deposit rate in ECS from all faculties (Divisions, Research Centres) in Southampton University. Could someone do a quick spidering of allstaff/staffpubs.asp?

The ever-alert Napoleon Miradon, has raised two very important and valid questions in connection with my posting about Les Carr's estimates of the current deposit rate in the repository of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. One of the questions is an explicit empirical one, and the other is an implicit methodological one. I shall answer the methodological question first. Reformulated explicitly, the question is:

Since, apart from their Repositories themselves, there is today no record of their total research output, Southampton -- and most other universities and departments worldwide -- have no way of knowing what their total research output is:

So how can they determine what percentage of that total research output is being self-archived?

The answer is that that can only be estimated today by consulting external databases, such as ISI's Web of Science, or ACM's Digital Library (or Google Scholar), to sample what has been published, and then to check back to see whether they are in the Repository. That is what Les Carr did, and that is where his percentages come from.

The point to note here is that one of the added benefits of having an OA Repository and a self-archiving mandate is that once the deposit rate has been confirmed (by such external sampling) to be at or near 100%, the Repository itself can be used as the internal record of the institution's or department's research output. Count that -- alongside the fact that it maximises the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of departmental/institutional research output -- as yet another reason for having an OA Repository, and for mandating deposit: It is a very powerful and effective form of internal record-keeping, so an institution (or department) can track its own research productivity as well as submit it for external performance assessment. Having and filling its own OA Repository also releases the institution or department from the need to consult and rely on external proprietary databases in order to monitor its own research output.

But I think M. Miradon in fact understood the fact that Repository deposit rates currently have to be estimated through sampling; I have only made the methodological point explicit for readers who might have needed the clarification. We now move on to M. Miradon's empirical point: He has done a bit of random sampling himself, and indeed he has managed to do this using a Southampton-internal record of Southampton publications: He has sampled the staff publications list in Southampton's Department of Civil Engineering, and he has found many publications to be absent from Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science's IR: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

But the explanation for this is very simple: I was reporting the results for the 4-year-old Repository and mandate of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton (ECS), not the Department of Civil Engineering! I stressed -- in connection also with Arthur Sale's recommendation that universities should promptly proceed with adopting bottom-up departmental mandates ("patchwork mandates") until/unless they have rapid consensus on adopting a top-down university-wide mandate -- that ECS's mandate, the world's first OA mandate as far as I know, was a departmental mandate, not a university-wide mandate.

Which prompts me to describe a few more historical details about self-archiving policy at the University of Southampton: As anyone can see by consulting ROARMAP, Southampton does have another, bigger Repository, and another Repository policy: It has a university-wide Institutional Repository (IR) -- ePrints Soton -- and has had it for nearly as long as it has had the ECS Departmental Repository ("DR"). Southampton also now has a university-wide mandate proposal (not yet announced), one that has even been officially approved; but it has not yet been officially adopted.

(Don't ask me why it is taking Southampton so long to adopt its approved self-archiving mandate! I have no idea, except that I note that the delay is depressingly commensurate with similar bureaucratic delays at many other institutions. All the more reason for individual departments like ECS to push ahead with Arthur Sale's "Patchwork Mandate" rather than sitting around waiting for their university to get its act together: Southampton has at least 13 EPrints Repositories; Cal Tech has a whopping 25.)

Last point: I confidently count a self-archiving mandate a success if it generates a deposit rate of 100%. That means the keystrokes are getting done; and it is (and always was) keystrokes alone that have been standing between the research community and the 100% Open Access to its own research output that has been within its reach ever since the dawn of the online era.

Les Carr points out that some of the ECS Repository deposits are Closed Access (CA) rather than Open Access (OA). That is not a problem, because the Repository's semi-automatic "Email Eprint Request" Button (also known as the "Fair Use" Button) can provide almost-immediate, almost-OA during a Closed Access embargo period, providing for all user needs until either embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths under mounting webwide pressure from the increasingly palpable benefits of OA, or authors simply tire of performing the extra keystrokes involved in fulfilling individual eprint requests one by one, and hit the master key that transforms their deposit from "CA" to "OA" once and for all.

A slightly more problematic case is the one where the authors have only done the keystrokes to deposit their metadata, but have failed to do the last keystroke, the one that deposits their full-text (whether as OA or CA). There we have a visible but orphaned reference, with no text to request or send. The EPrints IR software has not implemented a second button, with which would-be users can prod the author to deposit the missing text (and then send it), because we are confident that this dysfunctional practice is becoming increasingly rare and will remedy itself with time and experience of its own accord -- inasmuch as it needs to be remedied at all: For there are cases where an author may legitimately wish to deposit only a paper's metadata, for record-keeping purposes, but not the text itself. Examples would be seminars and conference papers that are written but not published, being merely precursors of later published papers. And of course there are books, of which the author may not wish to deposit the full text! ECS's self-archiving mandate applies only to published, peer-reviewed articles (in journals or refereed conference proceedings). Authors are not obliged to deposit every text they have ever keyed, let alone make them all OA!

NM: I have received some results from a random spidering of staff publication lists at www.civil.soton.ac.uk/staff/allstaff/staffpubs.asp?NameID=nnnn
Here are the first three entries:

Prof. Mike McDonald: 307 publications (17 in ePrints Soton)
Prof. Chris Clayton: 221 publications (14 in ePrints Soton)
Prof. AbuBakr Bahaj: 155 publications (25 in ePrints Soton)

I am afraid I did not explain sufficiently explicitly: U. Southampton has a number of other Repositories (at least 13) besides that of the ECS Department. The biggest of them is the university-wide IR, ePrints Soton.

However, as explained in my reply above, whereas the departmental mandate of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) was officially adopted in January 2003, the university-wide mandate, though already officially approved some time ago, is still (for reasons unknown to me!) awaiting official adoption. In the meanwhile, the university as a whole has no self-archiving mandate yet, so whatever deposits you find in ePrints Soton will be the usual spontaneous (unmandated) ones (for which the worldwide baseline deposit rate is about 15%), probably increased in this case beyond that baseline also by library mediation and encouragement (which Arthur Sale's analyses show to produce a better deposit rate, but nothing anywhere near Alma Swan's predicted 80-90% for mandated deposit). The deposit of only a subset of a researcher's total publications reflects the fact that depositing current and future papers requires far fewer keystrokes and effort than depositing one's full prior opus (which may even require scanning and OCR) -- though eventually that should of course all be deposited too!.

I hope this dispels any further ambiguity!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: There is no problem at all with the visibility -- to their would-be users webwide -- of the 15% of articles that are already being self-archived in IRs. But there definitely is a problem with the visibility of that visibility and usage -- to the authors of those articles -- and especially to the authors of the other 85% of articles, the ones that have not yet been self-archived (as well as to their institutions and funders, who have not yet mandated that they be self-archived, to make them Open Access [OA]).
   Hence OA metrics -- the visible, quantitative indicators of the enhanced visibility and usage vouchsafed by OA -- have to be made directly visible to all, immediately and continuously (rather than just being published in the occasional study); and not only absolute metrics but comparative ones. That will make the greater visibility of the self-archived contents visible, thereby providing an immediate, continuous and palpable incentive to self-archive, and to mandate self-archiving.
   These are the kinds of visibility metrics that Arthur Sale at U. Tasmania, Les Carr at Southampton, Leo Waaijers at SURF/DARE and Tim Brody's citebase have been working on providing. The biggest showcase and testbed for all these new metrics of productivity and prestige, and of OA's visible effects on them, will be the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise. Then universities and research funders will have a palpable sense of how much visibility, usage, impact and income they are losing (absolutely, and to their competitors), the longer they delay mandating OA self-archiving.

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On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, my colleague Steve Hitchcock wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

Hitchcock: Yes, of course, mandates and content are the no. 1 priority. But that doesn't mean we should ignore anything else that might help facilitate more of both. We have enough content in IRs [Institutional Repositories] now for improved visibility to be an issue, and it's an issue that will become more acute as content continues to grow.

We don't, unfortunately, have enough content in IRs now! And for what we do have, google provides more than enough visibility. What's needed, urgently, is increased content, not improved visibility.

Yes, mandates are the no. 1 priority; but the reason they are still so slow in coming is because we keep getting distracted and diverted to priority no. 2, 3, 4... instead.

Harnad: IRs do not need "to do more to be highly visible." Their problem is not their invisibility, it is their emptiness. And Steve Hitchcock ought to know this, because his own department's IR is anything but invisible -- for the simple reason that it has content. And it has content because self-archiving is mandated!

Hitchcock: My point is not about one single IR, or any single IR, but about services that reveal IRs collectively. It's services that allow us to have effective IRs - OAI and interoperability and all that. And I didn't say they are invisible, but that they could and should be more visible. It's not just about search, it's about awareness and currency as well. Arxiv has that, IRs as a whole do not.

What Arxiv has is content (in one field); IRs as a whole do not (in any field).

The IRs' problem is not the visibility of what little they have, but how little they have.

If we keep on distracting the attention (of what I am increasingly coming to believe is a research community suffering from Attention-Deficit-Disorder!) toward the non-problem of the day -- this time the "discoverability/visibility" problem -- instead of staying focused on the only real, persistent problem -- which is providing that missing OA content -- then we are simply compounding our persistent failure to reach for what is already long within our grasp.

It is not sufficient to say that mandates are the no. 1 priority. We have to actually make them the no. 1 priority, until they are actually adopted. Then we can move on to our other pet peeves. Right now the ill-informedness, noise and confusion levels are still far too high to justify indulging still more distractions.

Hitchcock: I'm not arguing for central repositories, but others are. Critically, some mandates require them, e.g. Wellcome, while the RCUK mandates are more open. So the best we can say is that the most important mandates so far are ambivalent about [whether to deposit in central] subject [CRs] vs IRs. In that case some authors affected by the mandates have a choice, and this is a challenge to IRs now in which IRs can help their cause with better services.

Mandating CR deposit instead of IR deposit is simply a fundamental strategic and practical error, and can and should be dealt with as such, not as a fait-accompli motivating a detour into yet another irrelevancy ("discoverability").

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:
What? Where? When? Why? How?

And there is no point touting nascent IR functionalities that purport to remedy IRs' non-existent "visibility" problem when IRs' only real problem is their non-existent content -- for which mandates, not IR visibility-enhancements, are the solution. We don't solve -- or even contribute to the grasp of -- a real problem by diverting attention to a non-problem and its solution, as if it were all or part of the solution to the real problem. (There has already been far too much of that sort of wheel-spinning in OA for 13 years now and we need to resist another spell of still more of the same.)

There is, however, something that we can do that is not only complementary to mandates, but an incentive for adopting them -- and it just might serve to redirect this useless fuss about "visibility" in a more useful direction:

No, there is no problem with the visibility -- to their would-be users webwide -- of the 15% of articles that are already being deposited in IRs; but there definitely is a problem with the visibility of that visibility and of that usage to the authors of those articles -- and especially to the authors of the 85% of articles that have not yet been deposited (and to the institutions and funders of those authors who have not mandated that they be deposited).

I am speaking, of course, of OA metrics -- the visible, quantitative indicators of the enhanced visibility and usage vouchsafed by OA. It is not enough for a few of these metrics to be plumbed, and then published in journal articles and postings -- as admirably indexed by Steve Hitchcock's very useful bibliography of the effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact.

We have to go on to make those metrics directly visible to self-archivers and
non-self-archivers alike, immediately and continuously, rather than just in the occasional published study -- and not only absolute metrics but comparative ones. That will make the greater visibility of the self-archived contents visible, thereby providing an immediate, continuous and palpable incentive to self-archive, and to mandate self-archiving.

Those are the kinds of visibility metrics that Arthur Sale at U. Tasmania, Les Carr at Southampton, and Leo Waaijers at SURF/DARE have been working on providing.

And the biggest showcase and testbed for all those new metrics of productivity and prestige, and of OA's visible effects on them, will be the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise (although I rather hope OA will not wait that long!). Then universities and research funders (worldwide, not just in the UK) will have a palpable sense of how much visibility, usage, impact and income they are losing (and losing to their competitors), the longer they delay mandating OA self-archiving...

Harnad, S. (2007) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise. In Proceedings of 11th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 11(1), pp. 27-33, Madrid, Spain. Torres-Salinas, D. and Moed, H. F., Eds.

Some of the absolute visibility metrics are already implemented in U. Southampton's EPrints IRs:
as well as U. Tasmania's Eprints IRs.

A clever adaptation of Tim Brody's citebase, across IRs, could provide the comparative picture too.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Open Research: 3rd London Conference on Opening Access to Research Publications
Monday 11 June 2007, 13.00 - 16.30

Host: SHERPA-LEAP London Eprints Access Project
Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, University of London

Full programme here.

Among the speakers:

Dr Alma Swan, Director, Key Perspectives, UK
The present Open Access landscape and what might be over the horizon

Dr David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe, UK
Repositories and research publications: policies and politics

Dr Frank Scholze, Stuttgart University, Germany
Metrics in an Open Access environment: an infrastructure for collecting
and aggregating usage data

Excerpts from a summary of the JISC Conference on Digital Repositories (Manchester 6 June 2007):

'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK...

'Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director [said that] JISC's Digital Repositories programme... had given significant impetus to repository development in the UK...

'Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation gave the first keynote presentation on the "Repositories Roadmap"... The vision for 2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly outputs [are] made... open access. The situation now might therefore require us to set a more ambitious target than that of a "high percentage"... the Web['s] role as a means of discovery and access need[s] to be emphasised more... [C]onceptualising repositories as websites forces us to "think about their usability, their information architectures and their accessibility."

'Dr Keith Jeffrey of the Science and Technology Facilities Council gave the second keynote address. The benefits of open access repositories, he claimed, include faster "research turnaround", improved quality for the originators of research as colleagues were able review the research more easily, as well as improved quality for the community in general. They also support innovation, he continued, improve education and public engagement with science and research and enhance an institution's standing.

'In conclusion he said that the development of repositories and the wider access to research outputs they enabled should not be delayed by commercial interests.

'Dr Jeffrey then launched the Depot, a national repository open to all UK authors to submit their research papers and other outputs into [right now, if their institution does not yet have its own Repository]. Claiming that the Depot marked an "important milestone" in the development of a national infrastructure for repositories, Dr Jeffrey explained that the Depot constituted a national facility or set of services, including a reception service which redirects authors to an institutional repository where one exists, as well as ingest, storage, transfer and access services for the depositing of research outputs, principally post-prints.

'[In] a keynote presentation... Professor Drummond Bone, Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool and President of Universities UK... began by saying that Universities UK was "firmly behind" JISC's approach to the development of open access repositories, suggesting that repositories were "vital to universities' economies and to the UK economy as a whole."

'Like JISC, he continued, Universities UK believed furthermore that the benefits of repositories included improved efficiency of research processes, greater cooperation, improved learning and teaching, a commitment both to preservation and to wider access...

'Further details of the conference, including presentations, will be available shortly.'

In "Quantum Game Theory and Open Access Publishing," Hanauske et al (2006) try to use game-theoretic modeling -- pitting "author-reputation" (in the form of citations) against "journal-reputation" -- to show that authors will inevitably switch from "traditional publishing" to "open access publishing." This would be a welcome conclusion if Hanauske et al's underlying assumptions and their definition of OA publishing had been valid. But the article defines "Green OA" as self-archiving in an Institutional Repository, "Gold OA" as publishing in an OA journal, and "OA Publishing" as a "third option," with self-archiving in Arxiv (a Central Repository) as its prime example. In reality, of course, self-archiving in Arxiv is not OA publishing at all, but simply another example of OA self-archiving (Green OA). Hence the assumption that "OA Publishing" (in this incorrect sense) pits "author-reputation" (citations) game-theoretically against "journal-reputation" (with citations eventually winning) is invalid too. The correct conclusion, requiring no game-theoretic modeling at all, is that OA will inevitably win over non-OA eventually (especially once accelerated by Green OA self-archiving mandates), simply because more citations are better than fewer citations. Nothing to do with OA publishing (Gold OA) in particular, which also benefits from more citations, nor with traditional publishing, which likewise benefits from more citations.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H. and Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30(4).

Harnad, S. (2005) Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold. Ariadne 43.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Here are actual and projected growth rate statistics for France's national OA Repository, HAL, kindly supplied by HAL's architect and helmsman, Franck Laloe. France's annual research output is about 12,000 articles per month, so HAL's present spontaneous deposit rate of 1600 articles per month is about the same as the baseline of 15% for spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving worldwide today.
Monthly Deposits in HAL: Two Extrapolations
[Linearlog/log fit and projections done via Origin]
Spontaneous self-archiving in HAL seems to have begun in about 2002, so it is not clear whether the monthly deposit rate will continue to accelerate or was simply catching up with the baseline at which all other unmandated self-archiving rates have been idling for years now. If HAL's monthly deposit growth rate is indeed exponential, then HAL will reach 100% self-archiving in 5 years without a mandate; if it is a power curve ("puissance") it will take 15 years; if (like Arxiv) it is linear, it will take even longer. (Arxiv's power exponent has been unchangingly quadratic for 15 years, HAL's so far seems ternary)

Franck Laloe: [translated from French] "There are also some small research institutes in France which are already self-archiving 100% of their research output, for example IN2P3, a component (high-energy physics) of CNRS. A team of 3 documentalists deposits 100% of IN2P3 article output in Hal-IN2P3, because on a small scale this is possible. Another example is IFREMER, a small institute for research on seas and oceans. They have a small, well-done archive containing 100% of their output. As to my own field of research, it has been self-archiving at 99% in ArXiv for a long time…"

There seem to be two morals to this story: (1) Even a centralised national archiving system in a centralised country like France, cannot succeed without a national deposit mandate; (2) until France adopts a national deposit mandate, it too, like all other countries, will have to rely on individual institutional (and research-funder) mandates.

Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

Are things otherwise in France? (began May, 1999)
INIST/CNRS : nouveautés du site Libre Accès (Dec 2004)
France's INRIA Registers Commitment to Implement Berlin Declaration Self-Archiving Policy Recommendation (Mar 2005)
France's CNRS Registers Commitment to Implement Berlin Declaration Self-Archiving Policy Recommendation (May 2005)
Hélène Bosc et le progrès en accès libre en france (Mar 2006)
Guide juridique CNRS (Nov 2005)
CNRS position on OA : new details (Jun 2006)
Forthcoming OA Developments in France (Jun 2006)
France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories (Oct 2006)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Heather Morrison wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

HM:"arXiv is showing very healthy growth, around 20% annually. I've been tracking arXiv on a quarterly basis, starting Dec. 31, 2005: [here]."

Arxiv has been showing this same, steady, unswerving linear increase in the number of deposits per month (quadratic acceleration of the total content) since the year 1991, and Arxiv has been tracking its own growth, monthly, since then.



The year 2006 is hence not the one in which to fete this as "very healthy" growth -- unless we want to wait till doomsday to reach 100% OA.

At this rate, Ebs Hilf estimates that it would take till 2050 to reach 100% OA in Physics. And that is without mentioning that Arxiv-style central self-archiving has not yet caught on in any other field (except possibly economics) since 1991. In contrast, distributed self-archiving in, for example, computer science, has already long overtaken Arxiv-style central self-archiving. See Citeseer (a harvester of locally self-archived papers in computer science, already twice the size of Arxiv):

Logic alone should alert us that ever since Institutional IRs and Central CRs became completely equivalent and interoperable, and seamlessly harvestable and integrable, with the OAI protocol of 1999, the days of CRs were numbered.

It makes no sense for institutional researchers either to deposit only in a CR instead of their own IR, or to double-deposit (in their own IR plus CRs, such as PubMed Central). The direct deposits will be in the natural locus, the researcher's own IR. And then CRs will harvest, as Citeseer, OAister -- and, for that matter, Google and Google Scholar -- do.

OA self-archiving is meant to be done in the interests of the impact, visibility, and recording of each institution's research output. Institutional self-archiving tiles all of OA space (whereas CRs would have to criss-cross all disciplines, willy-nilly, redundantly, and arbitrarily).

Most important, institutions, being the primary research providers, have the most direct stake in maximising -- and the most direct means of monitoring -- the self-archiving of their own research output. Hence institutional self-archiving mandates -- reinforced by research funder self-archiving mandates -- will see to it that institutional research output is deposited in its natural, optimal locus: each institution's own IR (twinned and mirrored for redundancy and preservation). CRs (subject-based, multi-subject, national, or any other combination that might be judged useful) can then harvest from the distributed network of IRs.

- "Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)
- "PubMed and self-archiving" (began Aug 2003)
- "Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
- "Harold Varmus: 'Self-Archiving is Not Open Access'" (began June 2006)

- Optimizing OA - Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?
- Plugging the Loopholes in the Proposed FRPAA, RCUK and EU Self-Archiving Mandates
- Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA)

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.

ABSTRACT: A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals. Their relative merits were considered, addressing not only technical concerns but also how e-print provision (by authors) can be achieved ? an essential factor for an effective e-print delivery service (for users). A "harvesting" model is recommended, where the metadata of articles deposited in distributed archives are harvested, stored and enhanced by a national service. This model has major advantages over the alternatives of a national centralized service or a completely decentralized one. Options for the implementation of a service based on the harvesting model are presented.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Franck Laloë (2006) Les archives ouvertes (AO) et la communication scientifique directe (CSD). Une présentation à la réunion du CNRS sur les archives ouvertes (Paris, 16 novembre 2006). (blog Libre Accès INIST)

Bravo to France and to Franck Laloe for the progress of the French national repository, HAL! As noted before in the AmSci Forum, it just might be that France -- an exception among western nations in this regard -- is a sufficiently centralised country to be able to manage 100% self-archiving of its research output of 120,000 articles per year in a centralised national archive (HAL) instead of a distributed network of Institutional Repositories (IRs).

But what is unlikely is that France is so much of an exception that it will be able to do this without a national self-archiving mandate. (See the graphs of HAL's current and projected growth rate in Franck's presentation and draw your own conclusion about whether and when 100% OA is likely to be reached in France without a mandate. Its present desposit rate seems to be about 12% of French output, which is about the international average for spontaneous [unmandated] self-archiving.)

The advantage of such centralisation, however, is that one national mandate will be enough.

Here are some sentimental flashbacks:

Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads:

Are things otherwise in France? (began May, 1999)
INIST/CNRS : nouveautés du site Libre Accès (Dec 2004)
France's INRIA Registers Commitment to Implement Berlin Declaration Self-Archiving Policy Recommendation (Mar 2005)
France's CNRS Registers Commitment to Implement Berlin Declaration Self-Archiving Policy Recommendation (May 2005)
Hélène Bosc et le progrès en accès libre en france (Mar 2006)
Guide juridique CNRS (Nov 2005)
CNRS position on OA : new details (Jun 2006)
Forthcoming OA Developments in France (Jun 2006)
France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories (Oct 2006)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Here are two rather remarkable anecdotes about the recently created "EMAIL EPRINT" button that allows any would-be user webwide to email a semi-automatic "eprint request" to the author of any eprint in an IR that has been deposited as "Closed Access" rather than "Open Access" to request an individual copy for personal use. (The author need merely click on an "approval" URL in his email message in order to fulfil the request.)

Two recent "accidents," occurring independently at two different institutions, provide dramatic evidence of the potential power of this feature: The button is intended to tide over researcher usage needs during any embargo interval. As such, it is expected to apply only to a minority of deposits (as the majority of journals already endorse immediate Open Access-setting.

The two accident-anecdotes come from University of Southampton and Université du Québec à Montréal:

Southampton has many IRs: A departmental IR (Department of Electronics and Computer Science) already has an immediate full-text deposit mandate, but the university-wide IR does not yet have a mandate, so it has many deposits for which only the metadata are accessible, many of them deposited via library mediation rather than by the authors themselves. This will soon change to direct author deposit, but meanwhile, "The Button" was implemented, and the result was such a huge flood of eprint requests that the proxy depositors were overwhelmed and the feature quickly had to be turned off!

The Button will of course be restored -- using LDAP to redirect the eprint requests to the authors rather than the library mediators -- but the accident was instructive in revealing the nuclear power of the button! Authors, we expect, will be gratified by the countable measures of interest in their work, and we will make a countable metric out of the number of eprint requests. Authors will be able to opt out of receiving eprint requests -- but we confidently expect that few will choose to do so! (Our confidence is based on many factors, take your pick: (1) Authors' known habit of looking first at the bibliography of any article or book in their field, to see "Do they cite me?" (2) Authors' known habit of googling themselves as well as looking up their own citation-counts in Web of Science and now in Google Scholar. (3) Employers' and funders' growing use of research performance metrics to supplement publication counts in employment, promotion and funding decisions...)

Much the same thing happened at UQaM but this time it was while a new IR was still under construction, and its designers were still just testing out its features with dummy demo papers (some of them real!). "The Button" again unleashed an immediate torrent of eprint requests for the bona fide papers, so the feature had to be (tremulously, but temporarily) disabled!

Caveat Emptor!

Increasing Institutional Repository Content with "email eprint" Button
New Request Copy feature in DSpace

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In order to give everyone a clear update on progress in the growth of Instititutional Repositories (IRs) and in order to encourage others to create IRs, could you please register your IRs in the Registry of Open Access Repositories ROAR.

And if your institution has a self-archiving policy, please register it in ROARMAP.

Before registering your IR in ROAR, please check whether it is already registered! This is also a good time to try some of ROAR's powerful new features for monitoring IR growth.