On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Talat Chaudhri <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Just a small enquiry:
>
> Why should we consider PMC's mandate to be a welcome approach, since it is a
> central repository, if we are to turn round and say, as below, that "The
> various national PMCs are a joke..." and if we ask, as below, "Why would any
> user... want to search the world's biomedical literature by country?"?
(1) PMC is extremely welcome and extremely valuable as a free,
searchable central biomedical database.
(2) The NIH and other biomedical funder mandates are extremely welcome
and extremely valuable for making so much biomedical content freely
accessible.
(3) The idea of national PMC's is of course completely silly and
completely unnecessary: PMC (and other free central biomedical
databases) should be the locus of the metadata (and, if desired, also
the full-texts, otherwise links to the free full texts are fine too)
of all the world's biomedical research; we don't need disjoint
national chunks of it (which then need to be "portalled" into some
global mega-PMC)
(4) The default locus of mandatory deposit for all this should be the
author's own institutional repository (or a provisional DEPOT, like
DEPOT, if the author's institution has no IR yet).
(5) The mandatory time of deposit should be immediately upon
acceptance for publication of the final, refereed draft -- not only
after an embargo of 6 months, a year or more. (Updates later if
desired.)
(6) The IRs should have and use "email eprint request" button to tide
over user needs during any embargo.
> Because the USA is bigger than these others?! (I'm sure nobody is arguing
> that any particular country's research is of inherently better overall
> quality than another.)
No, Talat, I didn't mean that at all! I must have expressed it badly:
There should only be one PMC, just as there is only one Arxiv (but
perhaps mirrored in multiple countries).
I certainly don't mean that US and/or NIH-funded research should have
a locus of its own (for worldwide user and search purposes: of course
harvesters can harvest any arbitrary subset of the OA biomedical
corpus they like, whether to track funder fulfillment, or national
output, or output from institutions beginning with the letter "M"...)
> I appreciate, of course, that a central or subject
> repository has to be in some country or other, and thus under its
> jurisdiction, likely to see its content from the point of view of that
> particular country's interests and so on.
I think national jurisdictions have (and should have) little impact on
Arxiv policy, for example, but I would be much happier to see Arxiv
evolve into a harvested collection, like Citeseer, rather than have it
at the mercy of one country or institution or archivist. Ditto for
PMC.
> In fact, isn't it true that the
> PMC approach simply conflicts with your overall message about institutional
> rather than central repositories being the best loci of deposit, Stevan?
The NIH mandate's central deposit requirement certainly conflicts with
it, and so does the embargo. PMC should be a harvester, not a locus of
direct deposit.
And I of course agree that PMC should harvest all the world's
biomedical research, not just US. (These ridiculous national PMCs
would do much better if they simply served as national harvester
helper-conduits to one global biomedical PMC -- all harvesting from
distributed institutional repositories where the direct deposits are
mandated by both institutions and funders. In fact, that's exactly
what they will no doubt end up being, once the nonsense about national
PMCs is swept aside -- and institutional deposit is made the norm.)
But right now, so many people are still happy to amuse themselves with
near-empty repositories (whether institutional or central) plus a lot
of theorizing and ideologising, I don't doubt that the many national
PMCs will keep merrily sleep-walking until the Slumbering Giant (the
world's universities and research institutions -- the providers of all
OA content) wake up and mandate local deposit for all of their own
research output. Then we will have the content, and we will no longer
be building castles in Spain...
> In which case, are you saying that the PMC mandate is ill-advised? This doesn't
> seem to fit. I seem to recall you welcoming the PMC mandate.
It's not a PMC mandate. (PMC is just a repository.) It's an NIH
mandate. Funders can mandate that their funded research outputs must
be made OA.
The NIH mandate (once it was indeed upgraded to a mandate, and not
just an invitation, as for the first two wasted years!) was certainly
not ill-advised. It was and is invaluable. But it was ill-formulated
(and can still be fixed -- and I hope will be, perhaps in conjunction
with the passage of the FRPAA): Funder mandates should stipulate
institutional, not central deposit. And the institutional deposit
should be immediate, not embargoed. If some authors elect to comply
with publisher OA embargoes, access to their deposit can be set as
Closed Access and the Button can tide over research needs during the
embargo.
Meanwhile, this allows immediate institutional deposit mandates by
both funders and institutions to scale globally and convergently,
which will soon spell the well-deserved death of embargoes of natural
causes...
> (I agree of course that the term "research repository" is quite imprecise
> and appears to cover institutional and central/subject repositories, so it
> is wrong to say that one of the latter two types can be "converted" into the
> former by a mandate, as you point out.)
The Armbruster/Romary paper is so hopelessly abstract and so blithely
oblivious to the real-world practical problem (filling repositories
with their target OA content) that it is only worth taking seriously
to the extent of pointing out that it represents yet another risk of
fanciful distraction from doing the concrete, practical thing that
needs to be done in order to bring us universal OA at last:
Institutions and funders convergently mandating immediate
institutional deposit.
> Just wanting to be clear about how PMC fits into this analysis. Perhaps I am
> overlooking a historical explanation for what might seem to be an anomaly.
No, I must have expressed myself unclearly.
Apologies and best wishes,
Stevan
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Talat
>>
>> This just repeats the very same incorrect analysis made earlier: PMC
>> is and always was a US central research subject repository for
>> refereed biomedical research publications (so are its emulators, for
>> their own "national" output). What changed was not that NIH rebaptized
>> PMC by "declaring" it a "research repository." What changed was that
>> NIH mandated deposit (after two years wasted in the hope that a mere
>> "invitation" would do).
>>
>> The rest is just monkey-see, monkey-do. What those aping the US
>> missed, however, was all the rest of OA's target content, funded and
>> unfunded -- across all nations, subjects and institutions -- and how
>> not only mandating deposit, but mandating convergent institutional
>> deposit is essential in order to have universal OA to refereed
>> research in all subjects, worldwide.
>>
>> (The various national PMCs are a joke, and will be quietly rebaptized
>> as harvested archival national collections -- if those are desired at
>> all -- once worldwide OA content picks up, as institutional deposit
>> mandates become universal. The global search functionality will not be
>> at the level of all these absurd and superfluous national PMC clones,
>> but at the level of global harvesting/search services. Why would any
>> user -- peer or public -- want to search the world's biomedical
>> literature by country (or institution, for that matter) -- other than
>> for parochial actuarial purposes?)
>> Stevan Harnad
>>
>
> --
> Dr Talat Chaudhri
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Research Officer
> UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, Great Britain
> Telephone: +44 (0)1225 385105 Fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
> E-mail: [log in to unmask] Skype: talat.chaudhri
> Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.chaudhri/
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
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