Dear All,

We would like to respond to this message, now that it has been posted
publicly.    I did see the message when it was sent to me personally - I
thank Stevan Harnad for this.  

We welcome Stevan Harnad's comments.   We also believe our deposit
policy is right, and can reassure Professor Colman that we are not being
"excessively cautious".   We are archiving material where publishers
permit, and as he and many colleagues here have found, that often means
that we cannot archive the published PDF file.   He is certainly not
alone in being required to deposit the final draft.  

We are working hard to get content.   We have publicised our repository
in many forums in the University in the year since we launched it, and
have had interest from many areas.   24 departments are now represented.


However, rapid growth of the repository is hindered by this matter of
the final draft - very often, people have published work in journals
that require us to archive that final draft.   People seem not to keep
those drafts, or not to be able to find them easily.    We are now
discussing mandating deposit of RAE submissions, although that may mean
archiving material in a closed access part of the repository, something
that we have not done up till now.

We are now working to approach people for work as it appears, and so our
information librarians (subject liaison staff) are running search alerts
to identify new work, and are approaching people quickly.   We are also
working to add material published by the University, in addition to
adding the "back catalogue" of work by people who archive their new
work.    We do encourage authors not to sign away their rights.   

We are also working to include the repository in training offered to
young researchers.

We believe our experience is not uncommon, and share Stevan Harnad's
hope that posting these messages may help others in our position.   We
would be interested to hear of approaches that others have found
helpful.

Best wishes,





Keith Nockels

Keith Nockels
Leicester Research Archive Manager
University of Leicester
Leicester, England - UK

Postal address: Clinical Sciences Library, University of Leicester,
RKCSB, PO Box 65, Leicester LE2 7LX, UK
Tel. +44 (0)116 252 3101
Email: [log in to unmask] 

Leicester Research Archive: promoting the University's research.  
Visit http://www.le.ac.uk/library/research/archive.html for more
information.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Repositories discussion list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 08 June 2007 12:19
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: University of Leicester's Self-Archiving Policy

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007, Prof A.M. Colman (Psychology, U. Leicester) wrote:

> The University of Leicester has finally set up an open-access archive.

The Leicester Research Archive was actually set up a year ago, in June
2006, but since then it has only 320 deposits: 

    https://lra.le.ac.uk/index.jsp

 
http://celestial.eprints.org/identifiers?baseURL=http%3A%2F%2Flra.le.ac.
uk%2Fdspace-oai%2Frequest&format=graph&svg=0&cumu=1&logy_cumu=0

    http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5545.html

That is less than one deposit per day, and, I am sure, far less than
Leicester's annual research output, even if those deposits were all just
2006-7 output (which is unlikely). 

The answers to the questions you raise may help remedy this shortfall,
for Leicester, and other Institutional Repositories in the same
condition::

> But when I submitted my journal articles to it, the librarians told me

> that none of them was eligible, because of publisher's restrictions, 
> and that I should archive the manuscripts instead. That's of limited 
> use, and I won't do it. Two of my colleagues in psychology had the 
> same experience. Apparently either psychology journals don't allow 
> self-archiving or our library is being excessively cautious.
> 
> I have self-archived my own articles on my personal web page, none the

> less, but they're unlikely to attract many readers at such an obscure 
> location. In fact, even minor university repositories are probably not

> the answer. What we need is a global archive like the physics one. Or 
> do you have a suggestion as to how we might solve this problem?
>
> Professor Andrew M. Colman
> School of Psychology
> University of Leicester
> email: amc--le.ac.uk
> web site: www.le.ac.uk/home/amc

There are three important points to be made here:

(1) U. Leicester's only omission in all of this is not yet having
mandated deposit; once it does that, all will go well.

    http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

(2) Apart from that, Leicester's deposit policy itself is *exactly*
right (and for very good reasons): Deposit your final, accepted,
peer-reviewed draft as the default option (except if you have your
publisher's blessing to deposit the publisher's PDF).

    http://www.le.ac.uk/li/research/archive.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

(3) Leicester's OAI-compliant institutional repository is only "minor"
in one respect: It only has 320 deposits. Once deposit is mandated,
however, and hence 100% of Leicester's current research output is being
systematically deposited, it will be a major archive, and all of its
contents will be picked up by all of the relevant harvesters and search
engines, especially OAIster, ROAR, and Google (Scholar). (See also the
comment, at the end of this message, from Professor Lossau, Technical
and Scientific Coordinator of the European DRIVER Project, about the
BASE search engine: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/projects/driver.html )

In our new era of distributed, OAI-interoperable Institutional
Repositories (IRs), all archives (IRs) are equal and there is no need
for, nor any added added benefit whatsoever from depositing in a central
archive like the physics Arxiv (which is now merely one of the web's
many distributed, interoperable OAI archives, all being harvested by
central harvesters). Central harvesting and search is the key, not
central depositing and archiving.

On the contrary, having to found and maintain a different central
archive for every field and every combination of fields would not only
be arbitrary and wasteful in the era of central harvesting and search,
but it would also be an impediment rather than a help in getting all the
distributed universities (and research institutions) to get all their
researchers to fill all their own IRs, in all disciplines, by mandating
and managing it, locally.  (University Research Institute output covers
all of research space, in all disciplines, and all combinations of
disciplines.)

The right strategy in your situation is hence to deposit your refereed
final drafts in the Leicester IR (except where the publisher endorses
depositing their PDF) *and* if you wish, you can *also* deposit the PDF
on your website, as you already do. The IR will list that as an
alternative location for your paper.

The purpose of an Open Access (OA) IR is to provide free access to an
institution's and individual's research output for those would-be users
web-wide who cannot afford paid access to the publisher's PDF version. 

It would be totally wrong-headed and counterproductive to deprive one's
potential users of access altogether if one's publisher does not happen
to endorse self-archiving the PDF! Far fewer publisher object to
self-archiving the refereed postprint in place of their proprietary PDF.

    To find out which journals are Green on immediate self-archiving
    of the postprint (62%) see:
    http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

    To find out which subset of those specifically endorse
self-archiving
    the publisher's PDF, see: 
    http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

If you want to self-archive the publisher's PDF too, over the
publisher's objections, that's up to you: you can do it on your own
website, as a supplement. No visibility or access is lost that way, and
the difference is a difference that makes no difference (to the
access-denied would-be
user):

    http://valrec.eprints.org/

I strongly urge you to deposit your postprints in Leicester's IR, as the
IR manager has requested. You have nothing to lose, and everything to
gain. (For earlier publications, for which you no longer have the
digital final draft, scan/OCR the published text and reformat it, or
reformat the publisher's PDF, if you have it.)

I also strongly urge U. Leicester to mandate deposit:

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html

What follows is Prof. Norbert Lossau's comment on DRIVER:

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007, Lossau, Norbert wrote:

> Dear Andrew,
> 
> Stevan is absolutely right, that at a time when we are building 
> trans-national networks of repositories there will be no "minor"
> archive. 
>
> DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European 
> Research) is the leading European repository infrastructure project, 
> connecting in phase one at least 50 repositories from 5 countries (BE,
FR, GE, NL, UK).
>
> DRIVER partners in the UK are the University of Nottingham and UKOLN 
> at the University of Bath:
>     http://www.driver-support.eu/en/index.html
> 
> DRIVER has set out a roadmap to connect ultimately all digital 
> repositories in Europe. Already now we have established contact to 
> representatives from each country in Europe and have liaised with 
> major academic and funding organisations like the European University 
> Association.
> 
> As addition to the search engines given by Stevan you may also want to

> check BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine):
>      http://www.base-search.net
> a key partner of DRIVER. 
> 
> Best
> Norbert
> 
> Dr. Norbert Lossau
> Goettingen State and University Library, Germany Director 
> [log in to unmask]

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-For
um.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
    
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access
journal
    http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
    BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal
if/when 
    a suitable one exists.
    http://www.doaj.org/
AND  
    in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
    in your own institutional repository.
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://archives.eprints.org/
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/