Stevan Harnad wrote:
> But there is another reason for which it is extremely important to
> distinguish refereed from unrefereed research: Deposit mandates from
> funders and institutions.
Useful here would be to record grant information in the metadata in a
more consistent way, which is not done consistently in all repositories.
Although tools to implement SWAP need further work before it will be
easy to implement, this is one of the various aims that it had, as to
other application profiles.
> But OA Deposit mandates only make sense, and are only enforceable and
> are only taken seriously if their target is clear: refereed serial
> publications. If book deposit is required, authors will revolt and not
> comply. If unrefereed preprint deposit is required, many authors will
> likewise object that their unrefereed drafts are intended neither for
> the public eye nor for permanent archiving. If unrefereed newsmagazine
> or newsletter puff-pieces are required, it blunts the force of the OA
> deposit mandate, which derives from the importance of maximising the
> accessibility of reliable, validated research findings to all would-be
> users.
Indeed, but the debate did not seem to me about mandating these things,
only whether or not such content would be accepted by repositories.
> So I would suggest making as clear a distinction as possible between
> what kinds of content /must /be deposited, as required by
> institutional and funder OA mandates, and what kinds of content /may/
> be deposited, according to the judgment of the author and the policy
> of the author's institution.
Quite, as per the earlier discussion.
> Instead blurring the target of OA mandates to include contents that
> the author may not wish to deposit or make public would create a
> slippery slope that compromises the prospects of capturing the
> mandatory OA target content -- which is exclusively peer-reviewed
> articles.
I don't believe that there is any clear evidence for that conjecture,
which also contains an unhelpful generalisation. Repositories are
designed to contain content of any kind. Ask any learning materials
repository manager and they will have very different views. It is not
helpful to equate all repositories with those specifically intended as
IRs for scholarly works. In the case of the latter, and specifically in
the case of mandates, your remarks may hold true, although it would be
helpful if evidence were provided for the conjecture stated. But as I
understand it, this is a repositories list, not an OA list only.
Talat
--
Dr Talat Chaudhri
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