---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 09:20:32 +1100
From: Arthur Sale <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: American Scientist Open Access Forum
     <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

I think there is some talking at cross purposes going on here. The term
'central repository' or CR is a misnomer and has led you astray, because
even so-called CRs are distributed repositories in the context of global
scholarly work. Better to talk about 'subject repository' or SR, to make it
clear that the discussion is simply about whether the world is divided up by
subject or by institution (or at the moment by both and neither).



Second point: a consortium of universities (even a whole country) can
establish a repository, which retains its IR characteristic of being
multi-disciplinary. It is an IR in style, and subject to exactly the same
benefits and disadvantages as a single institution IR. There are many
examples worldwide including Australia and the UK, so I hope that this
disposes of the small university problem cited in India. Such repositories
are collaborative IRs. There is no problem with establishing such
collaborative IRs.



The key issue in the discussion between SRs and IRs is that

(a) Subjects and disciplines do not provide a unique partitioning of
world research. Categories overlap and are blurred. The domain is confused.

(b) SRs in general have no secure funding source.

(c) SRs have no possibility of mandating deposit in that discipline. If
it occurs, great. If it doesn't, wring your hands.

(d) IRs of all types have mandatory mechanisms available to them.

(e) IRs of all types have secure access to the quite low level of funds
required to run them.

(f) IRs do not in general overlap, because they are defined by discrete
entities. If the few thousand research universities in the world had access
to an IR, the world's research could be 100% captured.



Summary - Any successful CR is to be applauded. However CRs do not provide a
scalable model for open access. Only IRs do.



Arthur Sale

University of Tasmania





From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Atanu Garai/Lists
Sent: Sunday, 9 March 2008 3:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] Central versus
institutional self-archiving



Thanks Stevan. These are key points that are coming to my mind.

Stevan Harnad wrote:

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote:




Dear Colleagues
This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are
developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs. On
the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and
consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive
their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and
cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or
consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more
advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking
cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations. Moreover,
knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the
participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this
advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so much
advocacy for building IRs in all institutions?

Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over institutional

repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh
those of CRs on every count:

This forum must have discussed this issue. Also, the objective of posing
this question should be made clear, so that you can find it in the right
context and spirit. At one point of time and still now, we wanted to have
disbursed information platforms and database. But with the emergence of
large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the advantages of having
a centralised global databases are becoming obvious. A choice between
'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy decision for a university or group
of universities and such a decision is driven by number of factors. Again,
the question is what are the sequence of events and rationale that led the
open access community to select IRs as primary archiving mechanism over CRs.
Institutions should be able to make a choice of their own, but if you want
to advise the institutions what should be the key criteria to advise them to
go for own IRs, over the CRs.



(1) The research providers are not a central entity but a worldwide
network of independent research institutions (mostly universities).

(2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a
direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating,
showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research
output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional
back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers
or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.)
http://roar.eprints.org/
http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/

Points 1 and 2 are essentially dealing with the notion of self-archiving
mandate that the institution may or may not invoke for its researcher. From
an institutional point of view, the choice of CR and IR will primarily be
driven by management, impact and effectiveness of the repositories. For
universities which produce a high number of research papers annually,
creating IRs may be sensible but there are universities in India that are
producing only a handful of research papers. My understanding is that for
such universities maintaining own repositories are less effective, even if
we take cost considerations alone. The issue of "a direct (and even
somewhat competitive) interest in archiving, evaluating, showcasing, and
maximizing the usage and impact of their own research output" does not
conflict with the choice of having a CR (or rather global repository).
Independent institutions can have both mandated self-archiving and
archiving, evaluating, showcasing, maximizing the usage etc. in CRs as well.




(3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed institutions'
repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or data) can all be

harvested into multiple central collections, as desired, and searched,
navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed archiving is also
important for mirroring, backup and preservation.)

(4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes institutionally
or centrally, so there is no difference there; but researchers normally
have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The
only "global" CR is Google, and that's harvested.)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

Technology is not a constraint in making metadata interoperable, though not
without some compromise in the data quality. For full text data,
interoperability is challenged by copyright restrictions. These dilemma are
avoided intrinsically in CRs. On the other hand, large scale CRs are having
the opportunity to make full text search and retrieval feasible. Volatility
of harvested metadata from IRs is avoided with the implementation of CRs.



(5) The distributed costs of institutional self-archiving are certainly
lower than than maintaining CRs (how many? for what fields? and who
maintains them and pays their costs?), particularly as the costs of a
local IR are low, and they can cover all of an institution's research
output as well as many other forms of institutional digital assets.

You may like to give some empirical data here to corroborate your statement.
Creating and maintenance costs of IR are minimal, but if you want to
advocate and popularise IRs, you will have a staff. There are some figures
that were submitted to UK parliamentary committee. CRs adopt all these costs
and institutions may or may not give the CRs same amount of subscription
costs. Preserving "as well as many other forms of institutional digital
assets" was not in the IR's mandate but obviously CRs can also do that
purely from tech point of view.

(6) Most important of all, although research funders can reinforce
self-archiving mandates, the natural and universal way to ensure that IRs
(and hence harvested CRs) are actually filled with all of the world's
research output, funded and unfunded, is for institutions to mandate
and monitor the self-archiving of their own research output, in their
own IRs, rather than hoping it will find its way willy-nilly into
external CRs.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Self-archiving and mandate is not a technological issue, it is a regulatory
one - hence, it can be done in IRs and/or CRs.
Best
Atanu Garai
Online Networking Specialist
Globethics.net
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