On 18 Feb 2010, at 11:54, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
> There needs to be a distinction, for those repositories that seek to provide it, between a private or collaborative workspace, and public access.
and indeed what the distinction is between a workspace that is open to e.g. "the international physics community" and a "public space".
> Once in the public space, however, there has to be a question about whether, legal issues notwithstanding, the author should be able to choose to remove a document from a repository record.
And whether "remove" means "eradicate for all purposes" or "remove from the public gaze while retaining a reference copy for official purposes" or just "mark as superseded for convenience purposes and only make available if someone really really wants it"
> You mentioned Climategate, and Talat has expanded on that, so I won't go further here, apart from to say that we have to be concerned with the integrity of the public record, particularly once an item has entered into use, and particularly for the type of research materials that repositories are interested in.
We also have to agree on what constitutes the Public Record. I think I believe (this conversation is making me re-evaluate my stance, for which I am very grateful to all participants) that researchers need to have a degree of flexibility in their relationship with the repository or they will just scurry back to their laptop ghettos.
> Even on more prosaic grounds, the practicality of removal is questionable.
Quite. I didn't mean that authors should be afforded the power of hunting down and destroying copies of anything that they had previously released to public view. Just that they should feel confident that they weren't committing themselves to eternal verities, just by releasing the latest version of their latest work-in-progress.
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Les Carr
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