From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Mar 18 19:23:56 2003 return-path: received: from krichel by openlib.org with local (masqmail 0.2.16) id 18vM5t-0da-00; Tue, 18 Mar 2003 20:45:49 +0200 date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 20:45:49 +0200 from: Thomas Krichel to: September 1998 American Scientist Forum cc: OAI Eprints List , BOAI Forum subject: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives message-id: <20030318184548.GA2413@openlib.org> references: <20030318115607.GA494@openlib.org> mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii content-disposition: inline in-reply-to: user-agent: Mutt/1.5.3i x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum Stevan Harnad writes > Thomas gived exactly the correct answer to Chris! I didn't know this was a quiz :-) > What is needed is institutional self-archiving, distributed across its > departments interoperably, but customized to the different needs of the > different disciplines. That is a tall order. > (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot. Cliff imagines that they can, but in practice, it will be tough. You can not put a KGB officer in every academic's office! > (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all. Sure, but all have some ways to communicate informally, and many have innovative channels. Sure, many of them stay small, but there is not technical obstacle to a meaningful aggergation. > (4) There are many other potential uses for institutional research > archives (apart from open access). I agree. If I would run an institution's archive I would back up all the web sites each year. In 20 years time, you would get a fascinating picture of the development of the institution. > (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary > self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but > aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary > OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than > aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional > OAI archives. no, it is easier to construct feature-rich datasets out of disciplinary archives, because some of them will be prepared with the specifics of an aggregator in mind. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Mar 18 19:23:56 2003 return-path: received: from 134.117.201.73 ( [134.117.201.73]) as user raduluc@mailhosting.linuxmotor.com by hosting.linuxmotor.com with HTTP; Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:08:22 -0500 message-id: <1048018102.3e777cb6b4b0f@hosting.linuxmotor.com> date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:08:22 -0500 from: Radu to: BOAI Forum , Christopher Gutteridge , Thomas Krichel cc: September 1998 American Scientist Forum , oai-eprints@fafner.openlib.org, OAI-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu, SPARC-IR@arl.org subject: Re: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives references: <20030315204900.GA29147@openlib.org> <20030318080934.B26931@ecs.soton.ac.uk> in-reply-to: <20030318080934.B26931@ecs.soton.ac.uk> mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 content-transfer-encoding: 8bit user-agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 3.1 x-originating-ip: 134.117.201.73 x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum Quoting Christopher Gutteridge : > What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways > of smoothing over this duplication of effort? Possibly some > negotiated automated process for insitutional archives > uploading to the subject archive, or at least > assisting the author in the process. If peer-to-peer 'open' music sharing software like Napster and the like managed to get set up so quickly and be so successful, I wonder what the problem is within the academic circles. Is it the inertia of 'researching the best standard'? Why don't we simply adopt one of the successful models already at work in the 'fringe industry'? Why do we have to develop yet another standard? - Is it for the sake of credit? Think about it. Are citations a good measure of credit? When you cite an article that simply describes someone else's work, who gets the credit? How far can one follow back the syntopical chain of citations? Just because a paper is cited a lot does it mean it's influential or plain wrong and lots of people jumped in the water to retrieve the stick? - Because of reliability? That would be solved by someone investing in some servers that will be always up and which will selectively duplicate the works which get good 'marks' from their users. Make the system 'credit-based', allow the researchers to just place the work they want to make public on dedicated machines within their Universities and other research venues. And please: - stop creating all-new standards. Before you start standardization, look around and see if the same functionality is not already available. - stop fragmenting the digital world into exclusivist 'servers' and 'services'. Are we striving for open or closed access? - stop looking for the 'final ontology' for classifying stuff. The world is not perfect. People are not perfect. And good indexing/search facilities are more efficient than any ontology. I could dig up references for most of my assertions, but I bet most of you are already aware of them. We just need access to each-other's work, so that our ideas grow in the fertile land of other minds. Cheers, Radu (www.monicsoft.net) From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Mar 18 21:55:00 2003 return-path: received: from pandora (pandora [152.78.68.157]) by pigeon.ecs.soton.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id UAA00500; Tue, 18 Mar 2003 20:37:18 GMT date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 20:37:18 +0000 (GMT) from: Stevan Harnad x-sender: harnad@pandora to: BOAI Forum cc: September 1998 American Scientist Forum , OAI Eprints List subject: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives in-reply-to: <20030318184548.GA2413@openlib.org> message-id: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: >sh> (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot. > > Cliff [Lynch] imagines that they can, but in practice, it will be tough. > You can not put a KGB officer in every academic's office! You're on the wrong track. Self-archiving can and will be mandated by researchers' instituitions by and for *exactly* the same reasons and methods as publishing-or-perishing is mandated by institutions. No KGB, just the simple carrot/stick career consequences of research and research impact. Once the direct causal connection between access and impact is shown and known -- e.g., http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html -- everyone will find it as natural that research institutions should reward their researchers for maximizing the impact of their publishing (by self-archiving it) as to maximize the publishing itself. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling >sh> (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all. > > Sure, but all have some ways to communicate informally, and many > have innovative channels. Sure, many of them stay small, but > there is no technical obstacle to a meaningful aggregation. Here is the point on which Thomas and I part ways (profoundly). I agree completely that where papers have not yet been self-archived in OAI-compliant Archives (whether institutional or disciplinary) it is highly desirable to find, link, metadata-enhance or harvest any discoverable online papers that already exist on arbitrary websites webwide. This is the invaluable service Thomas's RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is performing for over 86,000 non-OAI papers that would otherwise be very difficult to find and use http://repec.org/ But the objective of OAI-compliant institutional self-archiving (and a systematic policy mandating it) is to get away as soon as possible from having to resort to these makeshift solutions for arbitrary web content. (Nor is any of this relevant to what I said, which is that most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all, and disciplines are in no position to mandate self-archiving, whereas institutions are.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi >sh> (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary >sh> self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but >sh> aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary >sh> OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than >sh> aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional >sh> OAI archives. > > no, it is easier to construct feature-rich datasets out of > disciplinary archives, because some of them will be prepared > with the specifics of an aggregator in mind. I regret I couldn't follow the logic of this at all. First, there are almost no disciplinary OAI archives. Second, makeshift measures with arbitrary web content are exactly that: makeshift, interim measures. Third, from the fact that "some" arbitrary content may happen to have "some" desirable specific features, nothing whatsoever follows. And fourth, whatever are the specific features desired, they can be systematically included (and mandated) in the institutional OAI archives (parametrized to fit each discipline). Aggregation is not the objective: Interoperable content is; and (mandated) institutional OAI self-archiving is the most direct, fastest and surest way to generate it. Stevan Harnad From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Mar 18 19:23:56 2003 return-path: received: from 134.117.201.73 ( [134.117.201.73]) as user raduluc@mailhosting.linuxmotor.com by hosting.linuxmotor.com with HTTP; Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:38:32 -0500 message-id: <1048019912.3e7783c86de85@hosting.linuxmotor.com> date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:38:32 -0500 from: Radu to: BOAI Forum subject: Re: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives references: in-reply-to: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 content-transfer-encoding: 8bit user-agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 3.1 x-originating-ip: 134.117.201.73 x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum I would like to suggest a FAQ for people new to the list like me who come and don't know what issues have already been discussed and in what forum they should be discussed. If such thing exists already and I didn't find it, please point me to it. Cheers, Radu (www.monicsoft.net) From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Mar 18 21:52:10 2003 return-path: received: from CRPB058.earlham.edu (du038.richmond.parallax.ws [12.161.109.38]) (authenticated bits=0) by ke.earlham.edu (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id h2ILVjLq028226 for ; Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:33:14 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from peters@earlham.edu) message-id: <5.1.0.14.0.20030318162211.02bf4788@pop.earlham.edu> x-sender: peters@pop.earlham.edu x-mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:26:15 -0500 to: BOAI Forum from: Peter Suber subject: [BOAI] BOAI Forum and FAQ [was: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives] in-reply-to: <1048019912.3e7783c86de85@hosting.linuxmotor.com> references: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=====================_80179441==_.ALT" x-sanitizer: This message has passed the MIMEDefang sanitizer. x-sanitizer-url: http://www.earlham.edu/~ecs x-sanitizer-version: MIMEDefang/ECSanitizer $Revision: 1.16 $ x-sanitizer-config-version: $Revision: 1.48 $ x-scanned-by: MIMEDefang 2.30 (www . roaringpenguin . com / mimedefang) x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum At 03:38 PM 3/18/2003 -0500, you wrote: >I would like to suggest a FAQ for people new to the list like me who >come and don't know what issues have already been discussed and in >what forum they should be discussed. > >If such thing exists already and I didn't find it, please point me to >it. > >Cheers, >Radu > >(www.monicsoft.net) Radu, The BOAI Forum is just a few days more than one month old. The number of topics already discussed is very small. See the archive of past postings at . The BOAI has a general FAQ, , and a more specialized Self-Archiving FAQ, . But the BOAI Forum does not have its own FAQ. Peter Suber (moderator of the BOAI Forum) ---------- Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374 Email peters@earlham.edu Web http://www.earlham.edu/~peters Editor, Free Online Scholarship Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/ Editor, FOS News blog http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html THREADER-LINK: message.html From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Mar 19 14:20:33 2003 return-path: received: from krichel by openlib.org with local (masqmail 0.2.16) id 18vPn9-0wS-00; Wed, 19 Mar 2003 00:42:43 +0200 date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 00:42:43 +0200 from: Thomas Krichel to: Stevan Harnad cc: OAI Eprints List , BOAI Forum , SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG subject: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives message-id: <20030318224243.GA3518@openlib.org> references: <20030318182637.GA1985@openlib.org> mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii content-disposition: inline in-reply-to: user-agent: Mutt/1.5.3i x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum Stevan Harnad writes > > Success here depends on selling the idea to academics, and that > > depends crucially on what business models are followed. > > I have no idea what "business models" have to do with demonstrating to > academics that increasing research access increases research impact. > http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html For self-archiving, abstract understanding is not sufficiont. You need action by academics. If you want to have an intermediated process (by means of an achive) then it will crucially depond on the behaviour of the intermediary, in this case of the archive managemnt. This is what I mean here by the business model of the archive. You have changed your mind twice on what the optimal business model is. You will change it again... Until then, I shall keep a bit more quiet. When I return to NYC, I will have web access again, and find other things to do. Just for correction > online papers that already exist on arbitrary websites webwide. This > is the invaluable service Thomas's RePEc (Research Papers in > Economics) is performing for over 86,000 non-OAI papers RePEc does not index arbinary website, but archive sites. They have the same functioality as OAI archives, in fact OAI was modeled after RePEc. The whole OAI concept was first implemented there. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Mar 19 14:20:33 2003 return-path: received: from pandora (pandora [152.78.68.157]) by pigeon.ecs.soton.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA28899; Wed, 19 Mar 2003 13:44:28 GMT date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 13:44:28 +0000 (GMT) from: Stevan Harnad x-sender: harnad@pandora to: SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG cc: OAI Eprints List , BOAI Forum subject: [BOAI] The RePEc (Economics) Model in-reply-to: <20030318224243.GA3518@openlib.org> message-id: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum [Subject header changed from the Cliff Lynch paper to RePEc to reflect the change in focus.] On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: > For self-archiving, abstract understanding [by academics] > is not sufficient. You need action by academics. > If you want to have an intermediated > process (by means of an archive) then it will crucially depend > on the behaviour of the intermediary, in this case of the archive > management. The Repec model is one in which many distributed institutions, each having archives of multiple economics papers of their own, have their metadata gathered together and enriched to provide OAI-like interoperability: http://repec.org/ Instead of using the OAI protocol, Repec uses the "Guildford" protocol -- ftp://netec.mcc.ac.uk/pub/NetEc/RePEc/all/root/docu/guilp.html -- but it has been announced that Repec plans to become OAI-compliant eventually. (Repec does *not*, as I had wrongly assumed, cover individual websites too, as ResearchIndex/citeseer http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs does, only multi-paper institutional archives.) Repec is accordingly a form of institutional self-archiving, pre-dating the OAI, but (1) focused on one discipline only (economics), and (2) not requiring the individual archives to be OAI-compliant (but Guildford-compliant). It is a very activist project, "a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 30 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics." It should be noted at once that if every discipline had its own institutional Guildford-compliant archives and volunteers, as Economics has, then I and many others would today be promoting Institutional Guilford-compliant repositories rather than Institutional OAI-compliant repositories (and the free software that Southampton designed for creating OAI-compliant institutional repositories for self-archiving http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html would have been Guildford-compliant software). As it happened, it is OAI that prevailed (inspired partly by Guildford and Repec), with Thomas Krichel as one of its co-founders, and still a member of the OAI technical committee. What distinguished Repec is hence not its interoperability protocol (since it plans to become OAI-compliant anyway) but (a) its activism and (b) its discipline-specificity. If there were a way to spread Repec's activism from economics to the other disciplines, it would certainly be very welcome, just as it would be very welcome if there were a way to spread ArXiv's central-archiving tendency to the other disciplines. Unfortunately, no such generalization of either Repec or Arxiv to the other disciplines has taken place (Repec began in 1997, Arxiv in 1991). http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm It is for this reason that it is OAI-compliant institutional self-archiving that I happen to be promoting. And this is at last showing signs of generalizing http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm though still not fast enough. It is for that reason that various forms of activism need to be promoted too, especially institutional activism: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi > You have changed your mind twice on what the optimal business > model is. You will change it again... I have changed my mind in response to specific empirical changes that have taken place across the years. (I would hope everyone else has done so too.) For me, the first major change was the Internet itself, converting me from conducting most activities on-paper to on-line: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/81/ I even founded an online-only journal (1989): http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk Then came Ann Okerson's suggestion that information should be free, which I initially dismissed as unrealistic, but then realized that it could be turned into something that made excellent sense on condition that it was applied very specifically only to *author give-away* information (of which the refereed research literature is the main representative), rather than all information (or even all scholarly information): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis.html That was what then prompted the "subversive proposal" that researchers should self-archive their give-away research (1994): http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html At first, FTP sites and Web sites seemed the simplest, fastest and most direct way for researchers to self-archive, on a distributed, institutional basis; but then the slow progress in this, and the success of the physicists' centralized disciplinary model suggested that centralized, discipline-based self-archiving might be faster, with the Physics Arxiv itself perhaps subsuming it all http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/99/ (Thomas Krichel argued against central archiving, and in favor of distributed archiving at the time, but at that time, pre-OAI, and with Arxiv looking as if it would scale up, it was not at all clear why distributed archiving was preferable.) I even founded a central disciplinary archive modeled on the Physics Arxiv, (Cogprints, designed by Matt Hemus, 1997 and later Rob Tansley) with a view to Arxiv's eventually subsuming it: http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ But central archiving did not catch on (Cogprints has only reached 1500 papers in 2003) or generalize to other disciplines, and Arxiv itself kept growing at only an unchanged linear rate from year to year: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions And then came the OAI protocol in 1999, making distributed self-archiving equivalent to central (because of interoperability) http://www.openarchives.org/documents/index.html which immediately prompted me to ask Rob Tansley to redesign the Cogprints software to make it OAI-compliant and then turn it into free generic OAI archive-creating software for institutions http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html Next came the Budapest Open Access Initiative, uniting the two roads to open access (BOAI-1: self-archiving; BOAI-2: open-access journals) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ And the self-archiving momentum has been growing ever since: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm But I am still ready to change my mind if any new developments call for it. (I hope you are too!) The momentum is still not nearly as great as it could and should be. > RePEc does not index arbitrary website, but archive sites. > They have the same functionality as OAI archives, in fact > OAI was modeled after RePEc. The whole OAI concept was > first implemented there. I think I now understand this. See above. Both Repec's aggregation of institutional multi-paper archives in economics and Citeseer/ResearchIndex's harvesting of arbitrary individual websites in computer science are welcome interim measures for increasing the visibility and usability of what open-access content already exists online -- while the institutional OAI-compliant self-archiving momentum grows. Anything that helps fast-forward us toward universal open-access to the entire refereed research literature (2,000,000 papers per year, across all disciplines) is welcome and should be embraced by all who are open-minded among us, regardless of which open-access route they happen to favor. Stevan Harnad From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Mar 19 19:00:31 2003 return-path: received: from 134.117.201.44 ( [134.117.201.44]) as user raduluc@mailhosting.linuxmotor.com by hosting.linuxmotor.com with HTTP; Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:34:10 -0500 message-id: <1048091650.3e789c0299da4@hosting.linuxmotor.com> date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:34:10 -0500 from: Radu to: BOAI Forum subject: Re: [BOAI] The RePEc (Economics) Model references: in-reply-to: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 content-transfer-encoding: 8bit user-agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 3.1 x-originating-ip: 134.117.201.44 x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum Excellent historical FAQ/timeline. Could you please put it up on the BOAI site and update it given other individual points of view of the people involved? Thanks, Radu (www.monicsoft.net) From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Mar 20 14:40:22 2003 return-path: received: from krichel by openlib.org with local (masqmail 0.2.16) id 18vjzF-2nF-00; Wed, 19 Mar 2003 22:16:33 +0200 date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 22:16:33 +0200 from: Thomas Krichel to: September 1998 American Scientist Forum cc: OAI Eprints List , BOAI Forum subject: [BOAI] Re: The RePEc (Economics) Model message-id: <20030319201633.GA10447@openlib.org> references: <20030318224243.GA3518@openlib.org> mime-version: 1.0 content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 content-disposition: inline content-transfer-encoding: 8bit in-reply-to: user-agent: Mutt/1.5.3i x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum Stevan Harnad writes > The Repec model is one in which many distributed institutions, > each having archives of multiple economics papers of > their own, have their metadata gathered together and > enriched to provide OAI-like interoperability: http://repec.org/ The interoperability is more complicated then in a conventional OAI setting, because the structure of the data exchanged goes will beyond what can be done with oai_dc. > Instead of using the OAI protocol, Repec uses the "Guildford" > protocol -- ftp://netec.mcc.ac.uk/pub/NetEc/RePEc/all/root/docu/guilp.html -- > but it has been announced that Repec plans to become OAI-compliant > eventually. I already operate a gateway at http://oai.repec.openlib.org. It's oai_dc data may be a bit thin, but there is plenty of AMF metadata. > (Repec does *not*, as I had wrongly assumed, cover individual > websites too, as ResearchIndex/citeseer > http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs does, only multi-paper institutional > archives.) Departmental archives, as distinguished from institutional archives. Some archives serve special purposes, they hold no docuemnt data at all. > Repec is accordingly a form of institutional self-archiving, > pre-dating the OAI, but (1) focused on one discipline only > (economics), and (2) not requiring the individual archives to be > OAI-compliant (but Guildford-compliant). Correct, which is basically just a way to dump files on a disk, nothing more. > It is a very activist project, "a collaborative > effort of over 100 volunteers in 30 countries to enhance the dissemination > of research in economics." Correct, and almost all are economics faculty. Some folks do little, but the construction of the whole enterprise means that even if they do little, since there are many > It should be noted at once that if every discipline had its own > institutional Guildford-compliant archives and volunteers, as Economics > has, then I and many others would today be promoting Institutional > Guilford-compliant repositories rather than Institutional OAI-compliant > repositories (and the free software that Southampton designed for creating > OAI-compliant institutional repositories for self-archiving > http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html would have > been Guildford-compliant software). The technical protocol for the transport matters little. This really (!) is a technical matter. We continue with what we got because we can not rearrange 250+ archives that otherwise do just fine. > What distinguished Repec is hence not its interoperability protocol > (since it plans to become OAI-compliant anyway) but (a) its activism > and (b) its discipline-specificity. and (c) its metadata model. This is by far the most important, but least well understood distinction. > If there were a way to spread Repec's activism from economics to the > other disciplines, it would certainly be very welcome, just as it > would be very welcome if there were a way to spread ArXiv's > central-archiving tendency to the other disciplines. Could not agree more. > Unfortunately, no such generalization of either Repec or Arxiv to the > other disciplines has taken place (Repec began in 1997, Arxiv in 1991). RePEc has its origin in a project called WoPEc that I started on February 1, 1993. In 1997, RePEc was born essentially out of WoPEc and some other partners, but WoPEc had the lion's share (I am simplifying here a bit.) > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm It is for this > reason that it is OAI-compliant institutional self-archiving that I > happen to be promoting. And this is at last showing signs of > generalizing http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm > though still not fast enough. It is for that reason that various > forms of activism need to be promoted too, especially institutional > activism: There is no contradicition between institutional and departmental archives, and aggregator strutures. It is by no means an either or choice. And let me emphasise again: having discipline-based aggregators will be the best way to stimulate institutional and departmental archiving. The problem is, of course, that there are not many aggregators around. Therefore I have been argueing for a while thet the institutional self-archiving community should stick together to elect one area of discplinary priority. That is rather that to fight a war on all fronts, concentrate the effort and build systems that are interoperable beyond the unqualified DC data model. The DC data model is too simple for academic self-documentation. > At first, FTP sites and Web sites seemed the simplest, fastest and > most direct way for researchers to self-archive, on a distributed, > institutional basis; They still are, just look at the amount of stuff that is on the web. There are so many grass-roots initiatives. The larger public is not aware of them because they serve specific communities. This is where I get so angry with Clifford and his---implicit---call to shut them down, to fit all publishing activities into a central straightjacket. > but then the slow progress in this, and the success of the > physicists' centralized disciplinary model suggested that > centralized, discipline-based self-archiving might be faster, with > the Physics Arxiv itself perhaps subsuming it all > http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/99/ (Thomas > Krichel argued against central archiving, Nope. I simply argued that the centralized model would not carry through to many disciplines. Where it worked it was certainly an extremely good model. But you insisted that because the Physcists had done it everyone could and would, it was the optimal way (your flavour of the day). But I am still right. arXiv has a very unequal distribution of papers even in sub-areas of Physics, I am told. Ebs will know better. arXiv is still growing and that is a good thing. > But central archiving did not catch on (Cogprints has only reached > 1500 papers in 2003) or generalize to other disciplines, Exactly as I had forecasted! And that, depite the fact that it was a project subsidized by public funds. When WoPEc became a funded project, by the same funders, it had around 5,000 papers accumulated as a labor of love, only. Much of that work was done by José Manuel Barrueco Cruz. > and Arxiv itself kept growing at only an unchanged linear rate from > year to year: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions Sure, but it is still is the finest self-archiving project on the planet. But it really is self-archiving. Self-archiving is only a part of what I call self-documentation. > And then came the OAI protocol in 1999, making distributed > self-archiving equivalent to central (because of interoperability) > http://www.openarchives.org/documents/index.html They are not quite, but that is a matter for another email... > which immediately prompted me to ask Rob Tansley to redesign the > Cogprints software to make it OAI-compliant and then turn it into > free generic OAI archive-creating software for institutions > http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html And I think your team are doing a very good job with this. > I think I now understand this. See above. Both Repec's > aggregation of institutional multi-paper archives in economics and > Citeseer/ResearchIndex's harvesting of arbitrary individual websites > in computer science Citeseer are a truely fab project. The material that is there should become part of new, RePEc-like data structure called rclis and pronounced "reckless". Watch out for it over the next few years. With greetings from Minsk, Belarus, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Mar 22 02:47:28 2003 return-path: received: from login.ecs.soton.ac.uk (login [152.78.68.162]) by pigeon.ecs.soton.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id CAA19806; Sat, 22 Mar 2003 02:10:48 GMT date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 02:10:48 +0000 (GMT) from: Stevan Harnad to: Thomas Krichel cc: September 1998 American Scientist Forum , OAI Eprints List , BOAI Forum subject: [BOAI] Re: The RePEc (Economics) Model in-reply-to: <20030319201633.GA10447@openlib.org> message-id: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: > There is no contradiction between institutional and departmental > archives I agree completely. In fact, departmental archives *are* institutional archives (as opposed to centralised, disciplinary ones, like the Physics Ar Xiv or Cog Prints). > having discipline-based > aggregated will be the best way to stimulate institutional > and departmental archiving. The problem is, of course, that > there are not many aggregateness around. Therefore I have been > arguing for a while that the institutional self-archiving > community should stick together to elect one area of disciplinary > priority... [R]aether than to fight a war on all fronts, > concentrate the effort and build systems that are inter operable > beyond the unqualified DC data model. The DC data model is too simple > for academic self-documentation. I have no problem with elaborating the MAI protocol if it is necessary and useful (I am not technically qualified to judge one way or the other). But I *definitely* disagree that the institutional self-archiving immunity should "elect one area of disciplinary priority"! Repacks aggregating and enriching efforts with what Economics web content exists already, and Cite seer's harvesting and enriching efforts with what Computer-Science web content exists already are both invaluable interim contributions to making existing web content more inter operable and usable, but what is urgently needed is (much, much) more content, in all disciplines! That is what the (AI) self-archiving movement is about. And this can and will be done in parallel, for all disciplines. There is no sense in waiting to do it one-by-one serially, whether discipline by discipline or journal by journal! > just look at the amount of stuff that is on the web. There are so many > grass-roots initiatives. The larger public is not aware of them because > they serve specific communities. This is where I get so angry with > Clifford and his---implicit---call to shut them down, to fit all > publishing activities into a central straight jacket. Cliff Lynch is not calling -- explicitly or implicitly -- for fitting "all publishing activities into a central straitjacket"! He is simply supporting self-archiving by institutions (which includes self-archiving by their departments!) And when I look at the web I am of course struck by how much is on it, but for more struck by how much could so easily be on it, but is *not* -- across all disciplines. The target is the 2,000,000 papers published annually in the planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals. > you insisted that because the Physicist's had done [centralisers > self-archiving], everyone could and would, it was the optimal way No Thomas, what I said and wrote (many times) is "optimal and inevitable," is *open access* (i.e., free on line full-text access to all refereed research). That is the *end.* Centralized Arxiv-style self-archiving is merely one of the candidate *means,* and it did look like it was headed toward prevailing for a while; but then it became clear that faster means were needed. And with OAI-compliant institutional (including departmental) self-archiving I think those faster means are at hand, the ones that can and will at last scale up to the whole corpus, across disciplines. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm >sh> central archiving did not catch on > > Exactly as I had forecasted! Dear Thomas: *Nothing* has so far caught on, in over 10 years of having open-access within reach! So it was always the safer bet that any new candidate means would fail too! Don't be too proud of having predicted that central archiving would not catch on. The challenge is still to find a means that *will* catch on, and to *make* it catch on. (And the Big Koan is still: Why is it taking so long, given that the outcome is optimal and inevitable and reachable?) >sh> The Big Koan is: "Why aren't all researchers self-archiving yet, given >sh> its benefits and feasibility?" >sh> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html > > One answer that I have is that the benefits of doing > self archiving have to be demonstrated to the invidual > level of each researcher. Agreed. And we, and you, and others are working on doing exactly that. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm Stevan Harnad From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Mar 26 18:48:20 2003 received: from pandora (pandora [152.78.68.157]) by pigeon.ecs.soton.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id SAA09508; Wed, 26 Mar 2003 18:07:30 GMT newsgroups: bionet.journals.note date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 18:07:29 +0000 (GMT) from: Stevan Harnad x-sender: harnad@pandora to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org cc: SPARC-IR@arl.org, boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk subject: [BOAI] 3 forthcoming talks on open access through self-archiving (April-May) message-id: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum Here are three forthcoming talks on open access through self-archiving (plus a related workshop): Symposium on Scholarly Publishing and Archiving on the Web University of Albany 7 April 2003. KEYNOTE ADDRESS: "Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional Self-Archiving" http://library.albany.edu/symposium/program.html Council of Science Editors (CSE) Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh PA 4 May 2003. KEYNOTE ADDRESS: "Author/Institution Self-Archiving and the Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals" http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/events_03Program_Schedule.shtml International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers "Universal Access: By Evolution or Revolution?" Amsterdam, 15-16 May 2003. INVITED ADDRESS: "Open Access by Peaceful Evolution" http://www.stm-assoc.org/infosharing/springconference-prog.html International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) (with partial support of the European Union) Workshop on "Peer Review in the Age of Open Archives" Trieste (Italy) 24-25 May 2003. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the BOAI Forum: http://www.eprints.org/boaiforum.php/ the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the SPARC position paper on institutional repositories: http://www.unites.uqam.ca/src/sante.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/ From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Mar 27 15:22:06 2003 received: from warlock.cs.uct.ac.za ([137.158.96.41] helo=cs.uct.ac.za) by casper2.cs.uct.ac.za with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 18yRdh-0007A4-00; Thu, 27 Mar 2003 09:17:29 +0200 message-id: <3E82A5A0.4070708@cs.uct.ac.za> date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 09:17:52 +0200 from: Hussein Suleman user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 x-accept-language: en-us, en mime-version: 1.0 to: Christopher Gutteridge cc: BOAI Forum , September 1998 American Scientist Forum , oai-eprints@fafner.openlib.org, OAI-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu, SPARC-IR@arl.org subject: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives references: <20030315204900.GA29147@openlib.org> <20030318080934.B26931@ecs.soton.ac.uk> content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed content-transfer-encoding: 7bit x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum hi this may be stating the obvious, but why not use sets for the separate disciplines, aimed at particular service providers? i say it that way because some disciplines are not well-defined (namely, computer science) so such archives may want to play ball with multiple service providers and hence may need different sets. in any event, for something like physics, a simple set might do the trick at the source. then, somewhat in keeping with the Kepler model (as published in DLib a while back), the service provider can provide an interface for potential data providers to self-register. i know this sounds dodgy, but think of it as an alternative mechanism for contribution. either individual users submit individual papers or groups submit baseURLS - both go through some kind of review and while one leads to once-off storage, the other leads to periodic harvesting. what remains a difficult problem, however, is how to recreate the metadata used by the service provider as its native format. so, for a typical example, if arXiv classifies items using a specific set structure, this is certainly not going to be the default for an institutional archive. does the service provider automatically or manually reclassify? or does it not allow browsing by categories? in either event, the quality of the metadata from the perspective of the service provider may be an impetus for potential users to want to replicate their effort rather than rely on the automated submission from their own institutions ... this needs more thought ... ttfn, ----hussein Christopher Gutteridge wrote: > Disciplinary/subject archives vs. Institutional/Organisation/Region based > archives. This is going to be a key challenge now open archives begin > to gain momentum. > > For example; we are planning a University-wide eprints archive. I am > concerned that some physisists will want to place their items in both > the university eprints service AND the arXiv physics archive. They may > be required to use the university service, but want to use arXiv as it > is the primary source for their discipline. This is a duplication of > effort and a potential irritation. > > Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that diciplinary archives will be replaced > with subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting from the institutional > archives. But there is going to be a very long transition period in which > the solution evolves from our experience. > > What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing > over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated process > for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least > assisting the author in the process. > > This isn't the biggest issue, but it'd be good to address it before it > becomes more of a problem. > > Christopher Gutteridge > GNU EPrints Head Developer > http://software.eprints.org/ > > On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 02:15:56 +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote: > >>On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: >> >> >>> Stevan Harnad writes: >>> >>>sh> There is no need -- in the age of OAI-interoperability -- for >>>sh> institutional archives to "feed" central disciplinary archives: >>> >>> I do not share what I see as a blind faith in interoperability >>> through a technical protocol. >> >>I am quite happy to defer to the technical OAI experts on this one, but let >>us put the question precisely: >> >>Thomas Krichel suggests that institutional (OAI) data-archives >>(full-texts) should "feed" disciplinary (OAI) data-archives, >>because OAI-interoperability is somehow not enough. I suggest that >>OAI-interoperability (if I understand it correctly) should be enough. No >>harm in redundant archiving, of course, for backup and security, but not >>necessary for the usage and functionality itself. In fact, if I understand >>correctly the intent of the OAI distinction between OAI data-providers -- >>http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl >>-- and OAI service-providers -- >>http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html >>-- it is not the full-texts of data-archives that need to be "fed" to >>(i.e., harvested by) the OAI service providers, but only their metadata. >> >>Hence my conclusion that distributed, interoperable OAI institutional >>archives are enough (and the fastest route to open-access). No need >>to harvest their contents into central OAI discipline-based archives >>(except perhaps for redundancy, as backup). Their OAI interoperability >>should be enough so that the OAI service-providers can (among other things) >>do the "virtual aggregation" by discipline (or any other computable >>criterion) by harvesting the metadata alone, without the need to harvest >>full-text data-contents too. >> >>It should be noted, though, that Thomas Krichel's excellent RePec >>archive and service in Economics -- http://repec.org/ -- goes >>well beyond the confines of OAI-harvesting! RePec harvests non-OAI >>content too, along lines similar to the way ResearchIndex/citeseer -- >>http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs -- harvests non-OAI content in computer >>science. What I said about there being no need to "feed" institutional OAI >>archive content into disciplinary OAI archives certainly does not apply >>to *non-OAI* content, which would otherwise be scattered willy-nilly >>all over the net and not integrated in any way. Here RePec's and >>ResearchIndex's harvesting is invaluable, especially as RePec already >>does (and ResearchIndex has announced that it plans to) make all its >>harvested content OAI-compliant! >> >>To summarize: The goal is to get all research papers, pre- and >>post-peer-review, openly accessible (and OAI-interoperable) as soon as >>possible. (These are BOAI Strategies 1 [self-archiving] and 2 >>[open-access journals]: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml >>). In principle this can be done by (1) self-archiving them in central >>OAI disciplinary archives like the Physics arXiv (the biggest and >>first of its kind) -- http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions >>-- by (2) self-archiving them in distributed institutional OAI >>Archives -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim.ppt -- by (3) >>self-archiving them on arbitrary Web and FTP sites (and hoping they >>will be found or harvested by services like Repec or ResearchIndex) >>or by (4) publishing them in open-access journals (BOAI Strategy 2: >>http://www.soros.org/openaccess/journals.shtml ). >> >>My point was only that because researchers and their institutions >>(*not* their disciplines) have shared interests vested in maximizing >>their joint research impact and its rewards, institution-based >>self-archiving (2) is a more promising way to go -- in the age of >>OAI-interoperability -- than discipline-based self-archiving (1), even >>though the latter began earlier. It is also obvious that both (1) and >>(2) are preferable to arbitrary Web and FTP self-archiving (3), which >>began even earlier (although harvesting arbitrary Website and FTP contents >>into OAI-compliant Archives is still a welcome makeshift strategy >>until the practise of OAI self-archiving is up to speed). Creating new >>open-access journals and converting the established (20,000) toll-access >>journals to open-access is desirable too, but it is obviously a much >>slower and more complicated path to open access than self-archiving, >>so should be pursued in parallel. >> >>My conclusion in favor of institutional self-archiving is based on the >>evidence and on logic, and it represents a change of thinking, >>for I had originally advocated (3) Web/FTP self-archiving -- >>http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html -- then switched allegiance >>to central self-archiving (1), even creating a discipline-based archive: >>http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ But with the advent of OAI in 1999, >>plus a little reflection, it became apparent that >>institutional self-archiving (2) was the fastest, most direct, and most >>natural road to open access: http://www.eprints.org/ >>And since then its accumulating momentum seems to be confirming that this >>is indeed so: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2212.html >>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim.ppt >> >> >>> The primary sense of belonging >>> of a scholar in her research activities is with the disciplinary >>> community of which she thinks herself a part... It certainly >>> is not with the institution. >> >>That may or may not be the case, but in any case it is irrelevant to >>the question of which is the more promising route to open-access. Our >>primary sense of belonging may be with our family, our community, >>our creed, our tribe, or even our species. But our rewards (research >>grant funding and overheads, salaries, postdocs and students attracted >>to our research, prizes and honors) are intertwined and shared with our >>institutions (our employers) and not our disciplines (which are often >>in fact the locus of competition for those same rewards!) >> >> >>> Therefore, if you want to fill >>> institutional archives---which I agree is the best long-run way >>> to enhance access and preservation to scholarly research--- [the] >>> institutional archive has to be accompanied by a discipline-based >>> aggregation process. >> >>But the question is whether this "aggregation" needs to be the "feeding" >>of institutional OAI archive contents into disciplinary OAI archives, or >>merely the "feeding" of OAI metadata into OAI services. >> >> >>> The RePEc project has produced such an aggregator >>> for economics for a while now. I am sure that other, similar >>> projects will follow the same aims, but, with the benefit of >>> hindsight, offer superior service. The lack of such services >>> in many disciplines, or the lack of interoperability between >>> disciplinary and institutional archives, are major obstacle to >>> the filling the institutional archives. There are no >>> inherent contradictions between institution-based archives >>> and disciplinary aggregators, >> >>There is no contradiction. In fact, I suspect this will prove to be a >>non-issue, once we confirm that (a) we agree on the need for >>OAI-compliance and (b) "aggregation" amounts to metadata-harvesting and >>OAI service-provision when the full-texts are in the institutional >>archive are OAI-compliant (and calls for full-text harvesting only >>if/when they are not). Content "aggregation," in other words, is a >>paper-based notion. In the online era, it merely means digital sorting >>of the pointers to the content. >> >> >>> In the paper that Stevan refers to, Cliff Lynch writes, >>> at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html >>> >>>cl> But consider the plight of a faculty member seeking only broader >>>cl> dissemination and availability of his or her traditional journal >>>cl> articles, book chapters, or perhaps even monographs through use of >>>cl> the network, working in parallel with the traditional scholarly >>>cl> publishing system. >>> >>> I am afraid, there more and more such faculty members. Much >>> of the research papers found over the Internet are deposited >>> in the way. This trend is growing not declining. >> >>You mean self-archiving in arbitrary non-OAI author websites? There is >>another reason why institutional OAI archives and official institutional >>self-archiving policies (and assistance) are so important. In reality, >>it is far easier to deposit and maintain one's papers in institutional >>OAI archives like Eprints than to set up and maintain one's own website. >>All that is needed is a clear official institutional policy, plus >>some startup help in launching it. (No such thing is possible at a >>"discipline" level.) >>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html >>http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling >>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm >>http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi >> >> >>>cl> Such a faculty member faces several time-consuming problems. He or >>>cl> she must exercise stewardship over the actual content and its >>>cl> metadata: migrating the content to new formats as they evolve over >>>cl> time, creating metadata describing the content, and ensuring the >>>cl> metadata is available in the appropriate schemas and formats and >>>cl> through appropriate protocol interfaces such as open archives >>>cl> metadata harvesting. >>> >>> Sure, but academics do not like their work-, and certainly >>> not their publishing-habits, [to] be interfered with by external >>> forces. Organizing academics is like herding cats! >> >>I am sure academics didn't like to be herded into publishing with the >>threat of perishing either. Nor did they like switching from paper to >>word-processors. Their early counterparts probably clung to the oral >>tradition, resisting writing too; and monks did not like be herded from >>their peaceful manuscript-illumination chambers to the clamour of >>printing presses. But where there is a causal contingency -- as there is >>between (a) the research impact and its rewards, which academics like as >>much as anyone else, and (b) the accessibility of their research -- academics >>are surely no less responsive than Prof. Skinner's pigeons and rats to >>those causal contingencies, and which buttons they will have to press >>in order to maximize their rewards! >>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm >> >>Besides, it is not *publishing* habits that need to be changed, but >>*archiving* habits, which are an online supplement, not a substitute, >>for existing (and unchanged) publishing habits. >> >> >>>cl> Faculty are typically best at creating new >>>cl> knowledge, not maintaining the record of this process of >>>cl> creation. Worse still, this faculty member must not only manage >>>cl> content but must manage a dissemination system such as a personal Web >>>cl> site, playing the role of system administrator (or the manager of >>>cl> someone serving as a system administrator). >>> >>> There are lot of ways in which to maintain a web site or to get >>> access to a maintained one. It is a customary activity these days and >>> no longer requires much technical expertise. A primitive integration >>> of the contents can be done by Google, it requires no metadata. >>> Academics don't care about long-run preservation, so that problem >>> remains unsolved. In the meantime, the academic who uploads papers to a web >>> site takes steps to resolve the most pressing problem, access. >> >>Agreed. And uploading it into a departmental OAI Eprints Archive is >>by far the simplest way and most effective way to do all of that. All it >>needs is a policy to mandate it: >>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html >> >> >>>cl> Over the past few years, this has ceased to be a reasonable activity >>>cl> for most amateurs; software complexity, security risks, backup >>>cl> requirements, and other problems have generally relegated effective >>>cl> operation of Web sites to professionals who can exploit economies of >>>cl> scale, and who can begin each day with a review of recently issued >>>cl> security patches. >>> >>> These are technical concerns. When you operate a linux box >>> on the web you simply fire up a script that will download >>> the latest version. That is easy enough. Most departments >>> have separate web operations. Arguing for one institutional >>> archive for digital contents is akin to calling for a single web >>> site for an institution. The diseconomies of scale of central >>> administration impose other types of costs that the ones that it was to >>> reduce. The secret is to find a middle way. >> >>I couldn't quite follow all of this. The bottom line is this: The free >>Eprints.org software (for example) can be installed within a few days. It >>can then be replicated to handle all the departmental or research group >>archives a university wants, with minimal maintenance time or costs. The >>rest is just down to self-archiving, which takes a few minutes for the >>first paper, and even less time for subsequent papers (as the repeating >>metadata -- author, institution, etc., can be "cloned" into each new >>deposit template). An institution may wish to impose an institutional >>"look" on all of its separate eprints archives; but apart from that, >>they can be as autonomous and as distributed and as many as desired: >>OAI-interoperability works locally just as well as it does globally. >> >> >>>cl> Today, our faculty time is being wasted, and expended ineffectively, >>>cl> on system administration activities and content curation. And, >>>cl> because system administration is ineffective, it places our >>>cl> institutions at risk: because faculty are generally not capable of >>>cl> responding to the endless series of security exposures and patches, >>>cl> our university networks are riddled with vulnerable faculty machines >>>cl> intended to serve as points of distribution for scholarly works. >>> >>> This is the fight many faculty face every day, where they >>> want to innovate scholarly communication, but someone >>> in the IT department does not give the necessary permission >>> for network access... >> >>I don't think I need to get into this. It's not specific to >>self-archiving, and a tempest in a teapot as far as that is concerned. An >>efficient system can and will be worked out once there is an effective >>institutional self-archiving policy. There are already plenty of excellent >>examples, such as CalTech: >>http://library.caltech.edu/digital/ >>See also: >>http://software.eprints.org/#ep2 >> >>Stevan Harnad > > -- ===================================================================== hussein suleman ~ hussein@cs.uct.ac.za ~ http://www.husseinsspace.com ===================================================================== From owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Mar 27 15:22:06 2003 received: from host213-122-210-68.in-addr.btopenworld.com ([213.122.210.68] helo=DESKTOP2002.btinternet.com) by carbon.btinternet.com with esmtp (Exim 3.22 #24) id 18yUDM-0002UD-00 for boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk; Thu, 27 Mar 2003 10:02:28 +0000 message-id: <5.1.0.14.0.20030327095908.022f5eb8@mail.btinternet.com> x-sender: peter.j.murray@btinternet.com@mail.btinternet.com x-mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 10:01:32 +0000 to: BOAI Forum from: Peter Murray subject: Re: [BOAI] 3 forthcoming talks on open access through self-archiving (April-May) in-reply-to: mime-version: 1.0 content-type: multipart/mixed; x-avg-checked=avg-ok-FEA4232; boundary="=======37B28ED=======" x-ecs-mailscanner: Found to be clean sender: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk precedence: bulk reply-to: BOAI Forum A related event on Open Access with particular interest to UK health=20 community may be the following (although it doesn't seem to be on=20 self-archiving): http://www.hi-europe.info/meeting/announce/9933.htm a Forum on Open Access in Medical Research Publishing at the British=20 Library in London on Monday April 14th 2003. Co-hosted by the NHS, the British Library and BioMed Central, this event=20 will provide an afternoon of talks and open discussion on developments and= =20 issues in new models of scholarly publishing. If you are involved in=20 medical research, and are in a position to publish your findings, you will= =20 need to know about these new developments, as they will directly affect the= =20 visibility and citability of your work. In addition, the NHS has recently=20 become a member of BioMed Central, which is of direct benefit to=20 researchers =97 come and find out why! Regards, Dr Peter Murray