Dear Chris,

RE: Changed material in repositories
> No doubt SHERPA has dealt with this already...

Thanks for the confidence Chris!

Yes, we do agree with you and your answer: our recommendation is for
items to become part of the record and so no changes should be made
without a trail to indicate when, what and why - and for the original to
always remain available.

In extremis, for legal reasons and not for vanity, then the material can
be withdrawn from the public archive, but a tombstone of metadata should
be left, to show that the material did indeed once exist, with as
complete a metadata record as the particular legal issue allows.

Where a new version is released, then this should be added as a variant
link onto the jump-off page of the original, and have a record of its
previous version on its own jump-off page. Depending on the way the
repository is structured, all variants may share a single jump-off page,
of course. The jump-off page is the key to assessing change records,
holding date-stamps, etc.

All of this is still (quite rightly) dealing with repository materials
as simple analogues of print materials, with error slips, revised
versions and sending the bailiffs around for removal, confiscation and
book-burning :-)

However, having a repository does make it possible for variants to be
seen and discovered as a whole associated cluster. Previously, in the
print world, if you find a copy of edition 3, can you be sure that there
is not edition 4? Chris raises an important point with c) revised
editions. If things pan out as they could, then the issues of
incremental change may become central to some of the electronic record. 

While most authors currently see articles as one-off productions (albeit
with a history of pre-print/working paper versions), as we know, some
book authors see themselves returning to their previous work in order to
produce subsequent editions. 
Being able to readily amend an article, with updates, additions, new
thoughts, reviews etc - and, critically, being able to have these
presented to the reader so the whole version-cluster is discovered by a
search for the original - this may encourage some authors or some fields
to see articles in a similar way to editions of a book, or as part of a
growing life's work of investigation in a particular area.

So two key issues for this to be possible - one practical and one
killer. Practically, the jump-off page has to be seen by all as
providing essential information about the material and its relations -
not just a library record to be skipped over en route to the "real
article". The killer for the development of this may be reward
structures:  how can an institution/funder assess the growth of an
author's version-cluster, with editions, links, additions, reviews etc?
Far easier to count discrete articles . . . .

Regards,

Bill

--

Bill Hubbard
JISC Research Communications Strategist
Head of Centre for Research Communications

SHERPA - www.sherpa.ac.uk
RSP - www.rsp.ac.uk
RoMEO - www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo
JULIET - www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet
OpenDOAR - www.opendoar.org

Centre for Research Communications
Greenfield Medical Library
University of Nottingham
Queens Medical Centre
Nottingham
NG7 2UH
UK

Email  [log in to unmask]
Tel  +44(0)  115  846 7657
Fax  +44(0)  115  846 8244

  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *    

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list 
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Rusbridge
> Sent: 18 February 2010 09:45
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Changed material in repositories
> 
> This has been an interesting thread on the relatively small 
> need for changes to versions in repositories (see James 
> Toon's 5% figure). It prompts me to wonder, and to ask, what 
> repository policies are towards changes represented by:
> 
> a) errata/corrections for minor errors
> 
> b) legal issues (including but not limited to copyright)
> 
> c) revised editions (not at all common for scholarly 
> articles, but common for some other kinds of works)?
> 
> Anything explicit? I would imagine the answer at (a) should 
> be to add a note on the erratum and a new version, retaining 
> the original marked as deprecated; for (b) either a similar 
> response (but probably with the original suppressed) or 
> complete withdrawal; and (c) probably a new record linked to 
> the old (I don't think most repository metadata is up to 
> describing two editions with perhaps different editors, 
> dates, ISBNs etc, but I could be wrong!).
> 
> No doubt SHERPA has dealt with this already...
> 
> --
> Chris Rusbridge
> Director, Digital Curation Centre
> Email: [log in to unmask]    Phone 0131 6513823
> University of Edinburgh
> Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
> 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered 
> in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
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