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JISC-REPOSITORIES  March 2006

JISC-REPOSITORIES March 2006

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Subject:

Formaldehyde and Function

From:

Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:11:42 +0100

Content-Type:

TEXT/PLAIN

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

TEXT/PLAIN (106 lines)

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Helen Hockx-Yu wrote:

> I should be grateful if anyone can provide me some evidence to back the
> following statement:
> 
> "Concern of longevity has contributed to the lack of active engagement from
> many researchers [with institutional repositories]. Guarantee of long-term
> preservation helps enhance a repository's trustworthiness by giving authors
> confidence in the future accessibility and more incentives to deposit
> content"
> 
> I guess longevity here also applies to the financial sustainability of the
> repository itself as a business operation, in addition to its content.

The statement is (1) not based on evidence at all, but pure speculation
and (2) speculation not on the part of the content-providers (i.e.,
the authors who are presently only spontaneously self-archiving their
published articles at about the 15% level) but on the part of others,
whose a priori concept of an institutional repository is that it is for
long-term preservation (rather than for immediate access-provision and
impact maximisation)

One pretty much gets out of such subjective speculations what one
puts into them (including the requisite confirmatory moans from
fellow-preservationists!).

JISC author surveys have given the empirical answer as to why only about
15% of papers are being self-archived in all today (although 49% of authors have
deposited at least once): Authors are too busy to do it until/unless their
employers and or funders make it a priority by mandating it -- and then
95% of them will do it: 

    Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction.
    JISC/ Key Perspectives Technical Report.
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

But it would be absolutely absurd of their employers and funders to
mandate self-archiving for the sake of long-term preservation!
Preservation of what, and why? Articles are published by journals. The
preservation of the published version is the responsibility of the
journals that publish it, the libraries that subscribe/license it, and
the deposit libraries that archive it. None of that is the
responsibility of the author or his institution, and never has been.
Hence it is ridiculous to think the reason authors are *not*
self-archiving today is because they are fretting about preservation!

Nor is there the slightest evidence that the 15% that *has* been
self-archived spontaneously in central or institutional repositories has
vanished or is at risk! Arxiv content is still there today, a decade
and a half since its inception in 1991, under nonstop use. CogPrints
contents likewise, since its inception nearly a decade ago. Ditto for
the IRs that have been up since GNU Eprints was released in 2001.
http://archives.eprints.org/

The pertinent features of all
of these archives (even the oldest and biggest) is the pathetically
small proportion of their total annual *target* output -- for Arxiv,
all of physics+, for CogPrints, all of cognitive science, for PubMed
Central, all of biomedical science, and for institutional IRs, all of
each institution's own annual research article output -- what a pathetic
proportion of their respective target outputs they are actually capturing.

But there are exceptions, and the biggest of them is CERN, which is far
above the spontaneous 15% self-archiving baseline and rapidly approaching
100% for its current annual output (while making remarkable progress
with its retroactive legacy output too):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Sotpolfiles/18mand-no-ut.jpg
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Sotpolfiles/19mand-no-qu.jpg
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Sotpolfiles/20mand-yes-qut.jpg
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Sotpolfiles/23cern.jpg

So is Southampton ECS, U. Minho, and QUT. And the reason is that these
four institutions (3 institutions plus 1 institutional department) have
*self-archiving mandates* for their own output. And the rationale for the
mandates is not long-term preservation but immediate access-provision
for the sake of maximising usage and impact before the authors' bones
are in preservation (although of course these archives, like all IRs,
are duly attending to the preservation of what contents they have!).

So while preservationists lose themselves in speculation about the fact
that maybe authors are not depositing because their secret yearnings for
preservation are even more exacting than the preservationists', so they
are abstaining until they can be absolutely assured of immortality for
their works and their institutions, the reality is much simpler:

They have (and should have) no special interest in preservation. They do
have an interest in citations, but not enough to bother self-archiving
until/unless their institutions and funders require it. Silly, and
short-sighted (sic) but there we are. 

Let us hope that their institutions and funders will have the good sense
to adopt policies that require (and reward) their researchers for doing
what is in their own best interests (as well as the best interests of
their institutions and funders) -- just as they already require and
reward them to publish (or perish).

Nor is the reward the imperishability of the authors' refereed final
drafts that they will be self-archiving (not the publisher's proprietary
PDF), but their own scientific immortality (which would slip away fast if
they were to keep waiting to immortalise their publishers' PDFs instead, as
the preservationists -- embalmers? -- are imagining they are doing).

Do I sound impatient?

Chrs, Stevan

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