[BOAI] Journal-mandated archiving

[Arif Jinha]

In regards to the discussion about preservation of DOAJ journals, as well as this discussion about Green and Gold Roads competing, I want to suggest a way in which they can cooperate, starting with the DOAJ journals leading the way.

Why don't the 4000 DOAJ journals mandate author-archiving of the refereed publication version in interopereable open access archives as a condition of publication.  So we would have journal-mandated author-self-archiving in OAI compliant interopereable institutional repositories, with archivists maintaining the integrity of those having the responsibility for preservation, this is their role.  If journals mandate archiving, that creates a redundancy in the case of an author that belongs to an institution that does not mandate.  But the primary redudancy important here in protecting against the failure of the information system, that is that a copy of the article is archived.  By archiving in interopereable open access archives and the use of CC license, many more layers of redundancy can naturally occur. Copies, copies, copies. 

Clearly the non-OA and mixed journals are not going to lead on this, but there seems no reason why the DOAJ cannot solve their preservation issue for its journals by journals mandating archiving.

I was thinking of my late father, who was an engineer and studied 'redundancy' in failure rates in areospace engineering.  You need to have a back-up, in this case is should be a sepearate system from the journal and publisher itself, in case that system fails.  For preservation, you need the archiving in interoperable open access archives.  

This would create a division of labur where library information scientists and archiving professionals would have copies of all the articles and be responsible for its preservation, and journals could focus on peer-review and publishing.  By mandating this, they create the needed redundancy for preservation without spending any money.

Arif Jinha
on the banks of the Mississipi River, Ontario, Canada
arif.jinha(skype)
www.stratongina.net 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Stevan Harnad 
  To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG 
  Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2009 6:13 PM
  Subject: On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA, Again!


  Pre-emptive Gold Fever seems to be spreading. 




  Following hard on the heels of University of California's Gilded New Deal with Springer -- UC subscribes to the Springer fleet of journals for an undisclosed fee, but, as part of the Deal, UC authors get to publish their articles as Gold OA for free in those same Springer journals -- now Universities UK (UUK) and the Research Information Network (RIN) are jointly dispensing advice on the payment of Gold OA fees (which is fine) but without first giving the most important piece of advice: 




  Universities should on no account spend a single penny on Gold OA fees until and unless they have adopted a Green OA mandate for all of their refereed journal article output.




  There is still time for UUK and RIN to remedy this, by prominently setting the priorities and contingencies straight. I fervently hope they will do so!




  (Peter Suber is expressing the very same hope, but in his characteristically gentler and less curmudgeonly way.)




  Stevan Harnad

  American Scientist Open Access Forum
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