On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Richard Poynder wrote:

> [1] Should institutional repositories [IRs] be viewed as preservation tools?

Not primarily. IRs' primary function should be to provide open access [OA] to
institutional research article output.

> [2] Should self-archiving mandates always be accompanied by a “preservation
> mandate”?

Definitely not. (But IRs can, will, should and do preserve their
contents.) For journal articles, the real digital preservation problem
concerns the publisher's version-of-record. Self-archiving mandates
pertain to the author's-draft.

> [3] Should Gold OA funds be used to enable preservation in institutional
> repositories?

Funds committed to Gold OA should be used any way the university or
research funder that can afford them elects to use them (though does
seem a bit random to spend money designated to pay for publishing in
Gold OA journals instead to preserve articles published in
subscription journals).

But on no account should commitment to fund either Gold OA or digital
preservation of the version-of-record be a condition for mandating
Green OA self-archiving.

> More, including an interview with digital preservation specialist Neal
> Beagrie, here: http://bit.ly/dur5EP

Richard Poynder's Interview is, as always, well worth reading.
Comments follow (linked version is at http://bit.ly/DigPreservVSoa ):

Commentary on Richard Poynder's
"Preserving the Scholarly Record:
Interview with digital preservation specialist Neil Beagrie"

The trouble with universities (or nations) treating digital
preservation (which is a genuine problem, and a genuine
responsibility) as a single generic problem -- covering all the
university's (or nation's) "digital output," whether published or
unpublished, OA or non-OA -- is not only that adding an additional
preservation cost and burden where it is not yet needed (by conflating
Green OA self-archiving mandates with "preservation mandates" and
their funding demands) makes it even harder to get a Green OA
self-archiving mandate adopted at all. But taking an indiscriminate,
scattershot approach to the preservation problem also disserves the
digital preservation agenda itself.

As usual, what is needed is to sort out and understand the actual
contingencies, and then to implement the priorities, clearly and
explicitly, in the requisite causal order. The priorities here are to
focus university (or national) preservation efforts and funds on what
needs to be preserved today. And -- as far as universities' own
institutional repositories (IRs) are concerned -- that does not
include the publisher's official version-of-record for that
university's (or nation's) journal article output. Preserving those
versions-of-record is a matter to be worked out among deposit
libraries and the publishers and institutional subscribers of the
journals in question. Each university's own IR is for providing OA to
its own authors' final, refereed drafts of those articles, in order to
make them accessible to those users worldwide who do not have
subscription access to the version-of-record. The author's draft does
indeed need preservation too, but that's not the same preservation
problem as the problem of preserving the published version-of-record
(nor is it the same document!).

Perhaps one day universal Green OA mandates will cause journal
subscriptions to become unsustainable, because the worldwide users of
journal articles will be fully satisfied with just the author's final
drafts rather than needing the publisher's version-of-record, and
hence journal subscriptions will be cancelled. If and when we ever
reach that point, the version-of-record will no longer be produced by
the publisher, because the authors' drafts will effectively become the
version-of-record. Journal publishers will then convert to Gold OA
publishing, with what remains of the cost of publication paid for by
institutions, per individual article published, out of their windfall
subscription cancellation savings. (Some of those savings can then
also be devoted to digital preservation of the institutional
version-of-record.)

But conflating the (nonexistent) need to pay for this hypothetical
future contingency today (when we still have next to no OA or OA
mandates, and subscriptions are still going strong) with either
universities' (or nations') digital preservation agenda or their OA IR
agenda is not only incoherent but counterproductive.

Let's keep the agendas distinct: IRs can archive many different kinds
of content. Let's work to preserve all IR content, of course, but
let's not mistake that IR preservation function for journal article
preservation or OA.
For journal articles, worry about preserving the version-of-record --
and that has nothing to do with what is being deposited in IRs today.

For OA, worry about mandating deposit of the author's version -- and
that has nothing to do with digital preservation of the
version-of-record.
Nor should the need to mandate depositing the author's version be in
any way hamstrung with extra expenses that concern the publish's
version-of-record, or the university's IR, or OA. (Exactly the same
thing is true, mutatis mutandis, at the national preservation level,
insofar as journal articles are concerned: A journal's contents do not
all come from one institution, nor from one nation.)

And, while we're at it, let's also keep university (or national)
funding of Gold OA publishing costs distinct from the Green OA
mandating agenda too. First things first. Needlessly over-reaching
(for Gold OA funds or preservation funds) simply delays getting what
is already fully within universities' (and nations') grasps -- which
is the newfound (but mostly unused) potential to provide OA to the
authors' drafts of all their refereed journal articles by requiring
them to be deposited in their OA IRs (not by reforming journal
publishing, nor by solving the digital preservation problem).

Stevan Harnad