On 26-Jan-10, at 7:15 PM, Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:
> I don't expect local repositories to ever offer quality control.
Of course not. They are merely offering a locus for authors to provide
free access to their preprint drafts before submitting them to
journals for peer review, and to their final drafts (postprints) after
they have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by a journal.
Individual institutions cannot peer-review their own research output
(that would be in-house vanity-publishing).
And global repositories like arxiv or pubmedcentral or citeseerx or
google scholar cannot assume the peer-review functions of the
thousands and thousands of journals that are actually doing the peer-
review today. That would add billions to their costs (making each into
one monstrous (generic?) megajournal: near impossible, practically,
if it weren't also totally unnecessary -- and irrelevant to OA and its
costs).
> Also, users have said again and again that they prefer discovery
> by subject, which will be possible for semantic docs in local
> repositories or better indexes (probably built through better
> collaborations), but not now.
Search should of course be central and subject-tagged, over a
harvested central collection from the distributed local IRs, not
local, IR by IR.
(My point was that central *deposit* is no longer necessary nor
desirable, either for content-provision or for search. The optimal
system is institutional deposit (mandated by institutions as well as
funders) and then central harvesting for search. http://bit.ly/62M14a
> I agree that it would be great if
> local repositories were more used, and eventually, the systems
> will be in place to make it possible, but every study I've seen
> still shows local repository use to remain disappointingly low,
> although some universities are doing better than others.
"Use" is ambiguous, as it can refer both to author use (for deposit)
and user use (for search and retrieval). We agree that the latter
makes no sense: users search at the harvester level, not the IR level.
But for the former (low author "use," i.e., low levels of deposit),
the solution is already known: Unmandated IRs (i.e., most of the
existing c. 1500 IRs) http://roar.eprints.org/ are near empty (of OA's
target content, which is preprints and postprints of peer-reviewed
journal articles) whereas mandated IRs (c. 150, i.e.m 1%!) http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
are capturing, or on the way to capturing their full annual
postprint output.
So the solution is mandates. And the locus of deposit for both
institutional and funder mandates should be institutional, not
central, so the two kinds of mandates converge rather than compete
(requiring multiple deposit of the same paper). http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html
For the special case of arxiv, with its long history of unmandated
deposit, a university's IR could import its own remote arxiv deposits
(or export its local deposits to arxiv) with software like SWORD, but
eventually it is clear that institution-external deposit makes no sense:
Institutions are the universal providers of all peer-reviewed
research, funded and unfunded, across all fields. One-stop/one-step
local deposit (followed by automatic import. export. and harvesting to/
from whatever central services are needed) is the only sensible,
scaleable and sustainable system, and also the one that is most
conducive to the growth of universal OA deposit mandates from
institutions, reinforced by funder mandates likewise requiring
institutional deposit rather than discouraged by gratuitously
requiring institution-external deposit.
> Inter-institutional repositories by subject area (however broadly
> defined) simply work better, such as arXiv or even the
> Princeton-Stanford repository for working papers in the classics.
"Work better" for what? Deposit or search? You are conflating the
locus of search (which should, of course, be cross-institutional) with
the locus of deposit, which should be institutional, in order to
accelerate institutional deposit mandates and in order to prevent
their discourage adoption and compliance because of the prospect of
having to deposit the same paper in more than one place.
(Yes, automatic import/export/harvesting software is indifferent to
whether it is transferring from local IRs to central CRs or from
central CRs to local IRs, but the logistics and pragmatic of deposit
and deposit mandates, since the institution is always the source of
the content, makes it obvious that one-time deposit institutionally
fits all output, systematically and tractably, whereas willy-nilly IR/
CR deposit, depending on fields' prior deposit habits or funder
preferences is a recipe for many more years of the confusion,
inaction, absence of mandates, and near-absence of OA content that we
have now.)
> Currently, universities are paying external middlemen an outsized
> fee for validation and packaging services. These services can
> and should be brought "in-house" (at least as an ideal/ goal to
> develop toward whenever the opportunities can be seized) except
> in cases where prices align with value, which occurs still with
> some society and commercial publications.
I completely agree that along with hosting their own peer-reviewed
research output, and mandating its deposit in their own IRs,
institutions can also use their IRs (along with specially developed
software for this purpose) to showcase, manage, monitor, and measure
their own research output. That is what OA metrics (local and global)
will make possible. http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_6162/repositories
But not until the problem of getting the content into OA IRs is
solved. And the solution is institutional and funder mandates -- for
*institutional* (not institution-external) deposit.
> To the extent that an
> arXiv or the inter-institutional repository for humanities
> research which will be showing up in 3-7 years moves toward
> offering these services, they are clearly preferable to old
> fashioned subscription models (since the financial support is for
> actual services) and current local repositories which do not
> offer everything needed in the value chain (as listed in Van de
> Sompel et al. 2004).
(1) The reason 99% of IRs offer no value is because 99% of IRs are at
least 85% empty. Only the 1% that are mandated are providing the full
institutional OA content -- funded and unfunded, across all
disciplines -- that all this depends on.
(2) The central collections, as noted, are indispensable for the
services they provide, but that does *not* include locus of deposit
and hosting: There, central deposit is counterproductive, a disservice.
(3) With local hosting of all their research output, plus central
harvesting services, institutions can get all they need by way of
search and metrics, partly through local statistics, partly from
central ones.
> I remember when I first read an article
> quoting a researcher in an arXiv covered field who essentially
> said that journals in his field were just for vanity and
> advancement, since all the "action" was in arXiv (Ober et al.
> 2007 quoting Manuel 2001 quoting McGinty 1999) -- now think about
> the value of a repository that doesn't just store content and
> offer access.
This familiar slogan, often voiced by longstanding arxiv users, that
"Journals are obsolete: They're only for tenure committees. We
[researchers] only use the arxiv" is as false, empirically, as it is
incoherent, logically: It is just another instance of the "Simon Says"
phenomenon: (Pay attention to what Simon actually *does*, not to what
he says.) http://bit.ly/cYwed6
Although it is perfectly true that most arxiv users don't bother to
consult journals any more, using the OA version in arxiv only, and
referring to the journal's canonical version-of-record only in citing,
it is equally, and far more relevantly true that they all continue to
submit all those papers to peer-reviewed journals, and to revise them
according to the feedback from the referees, until they are accepted
and published.
That is precisely the same thing that all other researchers are doing,
including the vast majority that do not self-archive their peer-
reviewed postprints (or, even more rarely, their unrefereed preprints)
at all.
So journals are not just for vanity and advancement; they are for peer
review. And arxiv users are just as dependent on that as all other
researchers. (No one has ever done the experiment of trying to base
all research usage on nothing but unrefereed preprints and spontaneous
user feedback.)
So the only thing that is true in what "Simon says" is that when all
papers are available OA as peer-reviewed final drafts (and sometimes
also supplemented earlier by the prerefereeing drafts) there is no
longer any need for users or authors to consult the journal's
proprietary version of record. (They can just cite it, sight unseen.)
But what follows from that is that journals will eventually have to
scale down to becoming just peer-review service-providers and
certifiers (rather than continuing also to be access-providers or
document producers, either on-paper or online).
Nothing follows from that about the value of repositories, except that
they are useless if they do not contain the target content (at least
after peer review, and where possible and desired by authors, also
before peer review).
Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
[online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B.
(2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield.
Pp. 235-242. http://cogprints.org/1646/
> Do I think the financial backing will remain in place? It
> depends on the services actually offered and to what extent
> subject repositories could replace a patchwork system of single
> titles offered by a patchwork of publishers.
At the moment the issue is whether arxiv, such as it is (a central
locus for institution-external *deposit* of institutional research
content in some fields, mostly physics, plus a search and alerting
service), can be sustained by voluntary sub-sidy/scription -- not
whether, if arxiv also somehow "took over" the function of journals
(peer review), that *too* could be paid for by voluntary sub-sidy/
scription...
> Universities could
> save a great deal by refusing to pay the same overhead over and
> over again to maintain complete collections in single subject
> areas (not to mention paying for other people's profits).
I can't quite follow this: You mean universities cancel journal
subscriptions? How do those universities' users then get access to
those cancelled journals' contents, unless they are all being
systematically made OA? Apart from those areas of physics where it has
already been happening since 1991, that isn't going to happen in most
other fields till OA is mandated by the universal providers of that
content, the universities (reinforced by mandates from their funders).
Then (but only then) can universities cancel their journal
subscriptions and use (part of) their windfall saving to pay
(journals!) for the peer-review of their own research output, article
by article (instead of buying in other universities' output, journal
by journal): http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1
> More
> importantly, more could be done to make articles useful and
> discoverable in a collaborative environment, from metadata to
> preservation, so that the value chain is extended and improved
> (my sci-fi includes semantic docs, not just cataloged texts, and
> improved, or multi-stage, peer review, or peer review on top of a
> working papers repository).
All fine, and desirable -- but not until all the OA content is being
provided, and (outside of physics), it isn't being provided -- except
when mandated...
So let's not build castles in Spain before we have their contents
safely in hand.
> I think there's been plenty of
> 'chatter' to indicate that the basic assumptions in conversations
> between universities are changing (see recent conference
> agendas), so that we can expect to see more and more practical
> plans to collaborate on metadata, preservation, and , yes,
> publications.
I'll believe the "chatter" when it has been cashed into action
(deposit mandates). Till then it's just distraction and time-wasting.
> My head spins to think of the amount of money to
> be saved on the development of more shared platforms, although,
> the money will only be saved if other expenditures are slowly
> turned off.
All this talk about money, while the target content -- which could be
provided at no cost -- is still not being provided (or mandated)...
> Sandy mentioned in another post that she [he] would hope for arXiv
> like support for university monographs...
Monographs (not even a clearcut case, like peer-reviewed articles,
which are all, already, author give-aways, written only for usage and
impact) are moot, while not even peer-reviewed articles are being
deposited, or mandated...
> Open access and NFP publications which do offer the full value
> chain have been proven to have much lower production costs per
> page than FP publishers and they do not suffer any impact
> disadvantages -- and these are still operated on a largely
> stand-alone basis, without the advantages that can be gained by
> sharing overhead.
Cash castles in Spain again, while the free content is not yet being
provided or mandated...
> Maybe local repositories really are the way to go, since then
> each institution has more control over its own contribution, but
> the collaboration and the support will still need to occur to
> support discovery (implying metadata, both in production and
> development of standards and tools) and preservation.
No, search and preservation are not the problem: content is.
> I suppose
> another problem with local repositories, however, is that a
> consensus is far less likely to unite around local repositories
> as a practical option at this juncture -- the case can't just be
> made with words, you need the numbers and arXiv has them -- and
> while I am interested to see strong local repositories emerge,
> there is greater sense in supporting what can be achieved, since
> we need more steps in the right direction.
"The numbers" say the following:
Physicists have been depositing their preprints and postprints
spontaneously (unmandated) in arxiv since 1991, but in the ensuing 20
years this commendable practice has not been taken up by other
disciplines. The numbers, in other words, are static, and stagnant.
The only cases in which they have grown are those where deposit was
mandated (by institutions and funders).
And for that, it no longer makes sense (indeed it goes contrary to
sense) to deposit them institutional-externally, instead of mandating
institutional deposit and then harvesting centrally.
And the virtue of that is that it distributes the costs of managing
deposits sustainably, by offloading them onto each institution, for
its own output, instead of depending on voluntary institutional sub-
sidy/scription for obsolete and unnecessary central deposit.
Stevan Harnad
PS (See also the "denominator fallacy" http://bit.ly/brhkMD , which
arises when you compare the size of size of central repositories with
the size of institutional repositories: The world's 25,000 peer
reviewed journals publish about 2.5 million articles annually, across
all fields. A repository's success rate is the proportion of its
annual target contents that are being deposited annually. For an
institution, the denominator is its own total annual peer-reviewed
journal article output across all fields. For a central repository, it
is the total annual article output -- in the field(s) it covers --
from all the institutions in the world. Of course the central
repository's numerator is greater than any single institutional
repository's numerator. But its denominator is far greater still.
Arxiv has famously been doing extremely well for certain areas of
physics, unmandated, for two decades. But in other areas arxiv is not
not doing so well, relative to the field's true denominator; and most
other central repositories are likewise not doing well, In fact, it is
pretty certain that -- apart from physics, with its 2-decade tradition
of deposit, plus a few other fields such as economics (preprints) and
computer science, unmandated central repositories are doing exactly as
badly unmandated institutional repositories are doing, namely about
15%.)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 5:26 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv: Collaborative Business Model
> Changes
> Funding Structure
>
> Re: Cornell University Library Engages More Institutions in Supporting
> arXiv
>
> Collaborative Business Model Changes Funding Structure
> http://news.library.cornell.edu/news/arxiv
>
> On 22-Jan-10, at 11:10 PM, Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:
>
>> This is actually an Open Access sustainable funding model and
>> could very well become THE model (or one of the leading models)
>> for scholarly communications, depending on the enhancements
>> (say, if these included more formal quality control) eventually
>> ... although I expect the old dogs will keep circling around
>> the old models as long as there is anything to bark about.
>
> Voluntary institutional sub-sidy/cription as a sustainable model,
> through all economic times, tough and tender??
>
> Here's an alternative model whose sustainablity is less founded
> on blind faith:
>
> Institutions have many self-interested reasons for wanting to
> host, archive, manage, monitor, measure and showcase their own
> research article outputs. The annual scale of their own local
> article output is also manageable and sustainable at the
> institutional level, within its existing infrastructure:
>
> Carr, L. The Value that Repositories Add
> http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2008/11/value-that-repositories-add.html
>
> Swan, A. The Business of Digital Repositories
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14455/
>
> Harnad, S. Institutional vs. Central Repositories
> http://bit.ly/62M14a
>
> Hence what will happen is that instead of trying to sustain a
> central repository like Arxiv -- most of whose costliness derives
> from the fact that it is a single direct locus of deposit and
> archiving from all institutions, worldwide -- direct deposit and
> hosting will instead be offloaded onto the distributed network of
> institutional repositories, with Arxiv becoming merely another
> central harvester, providing global search services (sustainable
> if it provides functionality that can compete with other OAI
> services or Google Scholar).
>
> But voluntary sub-sidy/cription will no doubt sustain things for a
> while. (Things do seem to catch on rather slowly in this domain...)
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [log in to unmask]
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Philip Davis
>> Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:53 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model
>>
>> ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model The celebrated
>> e-print service will now rely on annual library donations, while
>> its long-term business plan is still in the works.
>>
>> see: http://j.mp/5dvINB
>
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