Dear Andy and all,
We are essentially talking about balancing central and institutional services.
The point has already been made here already that IRs (unlike CRs) have a means (mandates) to ensure that the content reaches the levels where academics will see OA as a sufficiently comprehensive resource that they will in the future have a reason to continue engaging with it on more a voluntary basis. Sadly, in the meantime, experiments with the voluntary method have not been overwhelmingly successful, and your proposal of a central service acting alone is only another such proposal. Publicly telling academics what to do is not good PR and is likely to be counter-productive (as we have already experienced when merely discussing mandates here in Aberystwyth), but the reality is that research reporting as has been going on since time immemorial is no different, and they do not object to that. Instead of talking about "mandates" as something new, we need to simply make arrangements that only research reported through the repository or research management back end (depending on the precise local set-up) will be considered, that is to say integrating reporting and repositories: effectively a mandate. We have a vicious circle: until the content is comprehensive, academics will not see the service as useful and will not deposit; the content will not be comprehensive enough until they deposit. So far only the mandate (our jargon) breaks the circle. However, this only needs to be reorganisation of research reporting, which is already mandatory. Furthermore, it is already a proven system that reaches all the content that we want.
It is perhaps paradoxical or even ironic to see the mandate as a means to make people engage voluntarily later, but we are dealing with human nature here! All the same, this is no new dictatorship: research reporting is already a fact.
(The suggestion earlier that we should call them SRs rather than CRs is a good one, as the term is more meaningful.)
On the other hand, if the content comes from IRs, there seems no earthly reason why we should not design better harvesters using the Web 2 "architecture" (in reality a mixture of the most recent new additional protocols and some presentational features, but only a small group of developments in a long line of many). After all, most content is found using harvesters, principally Google. My repository doesn't get a lot of hits referred from OAIster, I must say, although that is not necessarily a reflection upon OAIster, which will find it naturally hard to compete when Google can find the same papers. But let's not kid ourselves that any Web 2 OA harvester could compete with Flickr or MySpace. Simply, the content is of much less populist appeal. CiteULike is perhaps a more compelling model, since it is a service with certain similarities in terms of target users. If you can design such a central OA platform, it would be very welcome.
One solution does not necessarily have to exclude the other. The platform for delivery is clearly important. All the same, it won't get anywhere without a plausible means to get the content. As Stevan, Arthur and Les show us all the time, at present the only game in town that can show how to do this is the institutional mandate, however it may be presented.
Talat
-----
Dr Talat Chaudhri, Ymgynghorydd Cadwrfa / Repository Advisor
Tîm Cynorthwywyr Pwnc ac E-Lyfrgell / Subject Support and E-Library Team
Gwasanaethau Gwybodaeth / Information Services
Prifysgol Aberystwyth / Aberystwyth University
Llyfrgell Hugh Owen Library, Penglais, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion. SY23 3DZ
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-----Original Message-----
From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andy Powell
Sent: 10 March 2008 13:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
Hmmm... the fact that you "have never, ever, ever heard anyone refuse
to use our institution's timetabling software because the user interface
isn't good enough" rather misses the point - or my point at least.
This is not a discussion about whether the user-interface of each IR is
good enough or not.
It's a discussion about what makes one or more repositories grow into a
viable scholarly social network. The UI is a small facet of that...
what I'm suggesting is that the 'social networking' aspect is more
important and that we need to understand that aspect rather better than
we do now in order to understand why repositories remain unfilled.
Take something like Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) as a case study -
albeit one with significant differences to the scholarly repositories
space in terms of content, responsibilities and the surrounding
political landscape of scholarly publishing. But bear with me
nonetheless...
Ask yourself what makes Slideshare such a successful repository of
presentation-like material - i.e. such a compelling place to surface
that sort of content on the Web? Yes, part of the answer lies in UI
type issues. But more fundamentally the answer lies in the network
effects of a globally concentrated service. Could the functional
equivalent of Slideshare have emerged by getting people to put their
presentations on the Web in a distributed manner and then harvesting
them into a central service? I don't think so. Ditto Flickr, ditto
YouTube, ditto ...
Having said that, I accept that the blogsphere is a good counter case
study... because the blogsphere does give us an example of a healthy
social network built on a distributed based of content, using globally
concentrated services (Technorati, et al.) that harvest that content
into multiple single places. The interesting question is what makes
these approaches work (or not) and what we can learn from them to help
fill our repositories (centralised or distributed) without relying
solely an a "thou must deposit" type approach.
But as I said on eFoundations... imagine a world in which every
institution mandated to their academics that they must only blog using
an institutional blogging service - would that support or hinder the
development of a vibrant academic blogging environment?
And before you ask, I wouldn't mandate that people deposit in a globally
concentrated service either - for me, the only mandate that matters for
OA is one that says that scholarly output must be surfaced openly on the
Web.
Andy
--
Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
http://efoundations.typepad.com/
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+44 (0)1225 474319
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr
> Sent: 10 March 2008 10:30
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
>
> On 10 Mar 2008, at 09:55, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> > Brewster Kahle may have the disk space, but if his is to become the
> > global database, then why should individuals have local websites at
> > all? They could all set up shop in the Global Wayback
> Machine -- or,
> > for that matter, store directly in Google, saving it the trouble of
> > having to harvest!
>
> Brewster or Google can do all they like - if the content
> ain't there it can't be harvested. People often think that
> somehow "repositories"
> are failing, but they're no different from "web sites" in
> that respect. An examination of research and university web
> sites show that researchers have out-of-date, incomplete
> pages and sometimes no pages at all. My own Head of School's
> home page is just in the form of an FTP listing of some files
> he occasionally puts there. Others of my senior colleagues
> have home pages that are over three years old and miss out on
> describing an entire generation of projects and their outputs.
>
> The fundamental problem is not repository software, it is
> researcher's disinclination to disseminate. And I am
> convinced that the repository software isn't fundamentally at
> fault because I have never, ever, ever heard anyone refuse to
> use our institution's timetabling software because the user
> interface isn't good enough (though it is appalling), or
> because it doesn't integrate into their personal calendar (which it
> doesn't) - they just get on and use it because it does a job
> they need to do.
>
> But that isn't to say that we at won't be working our hearts
> out trying to make EPrints better and more functional!
> --
> Les Carr
>
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