[BOAI] Beyond Romary & Armbruster On Institutional Repositories

[Stevan Harnad]

** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Fullly hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/606-guid.html

Critique of: Romary, L & Armbruster, C. (2009) Beyond Institutional
Repositories. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1425692

________________________________

*R&A: "The current system of so-called institutional repositories, even if
it has been a sensible response at an earlier stage, may not answer the
needs of the scholarly community, scientific communication and accompanied
stakeholders in a sustainable way."*


Almost all institutional repositories today are near-empty. Until and unless
they are successfully filled with their target content, talk about their
"answering needs" or being made "sustainable" is moot.

The primary target content of both the Open Access movement and the
Institutional (and Central) Repository movement is refereed research: the
2.5 million articles per year published in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed
journals. (That is why R&C speak, rather ambiguously, about "Publication
Repositories.")

Institutions are the universal providers of all that refereed research
output, funded and unfunded, in all scholarly and scientific disciplines,
worldwide.

Institutions have a fundamental interest in hosting, inventorying,
monitoring, managing, assessing, and showcasing their own research output,
as well as in maximizing its uptake, usage and impact.

Yet not only is most of the research output of most institutions failing to
be deposited in the institution's own repository: most of it is not being
deposited in any other repository either. (Please keep this crucial fact in
mind as you reflect on the critique below.)

*R&A: "[H]aving a robust repository infrastructure is essential to academic
work."*


A repository, be its "infrastructure" as "robust" as you like, is of no use
for academic work as long as it is near-empty.

*R&A: "[C]urrent institutional solutions, even when networked in a country
or across Europe, have largely failed to deliver."*


Largely empty repositories, "networked" to largely empty repositories remain
doomed to deliver next to nothing.

*R&A: "Consequently, a new path for a more robust infrastructure and larger
repositories is explored to create superior services that support the
academy."*


Making largely empty repositories "larger" (by "networking" them) is as
futile as "making their infrastructure more robust": What repositories lack
and need is their target content.

The reason most repositories are near-empty is that most researchers are not
depositing in them.

And the reasons most researchers are not depositing are multiple (there
are at least 34 of them), but they boil down to one basic reason, and
researchers have already indicated, clearly, in international surveys, what
that one basic reason is: Deposit has not been mandated (by their
institutions or their funders).

Ninety-five percent of researchers surveyed across all disciplines,
worldwide, most of whom do not deposit, respond that they would deposit if
deposit were mandated, 14% of them reluctantly, and 81% of them willingly.
(Swan)

And outcome studies have shown that researchers do what they said they would
do: When deposit is mandated, they do indeed deposit, in high proportions,
within two years of adoption of the deposit mandate. (Sale)

Hence what institutions need in order to induce their researchers to deposit
is not larger or more robust repositories, but deposit mandates.

The number of mandates is growing, but there are still as yet only 90 of
them worldwide.

Hence what is urgently needed to fill repositories so they can begin
providing "superior services" for the academy is more mandates, not larger
repositories or "more robust infrastructure."

*R&A: "[F]uture organisation of publication repositories is advocated that
is based upon macroscopic academic settings providing a critical mass of
interest as well as organisational coherence."*


The only "critical mass" that repositories need is their missing target OA
content.

Researchers have an intrinsic interest in making their research output OA.
Institutions have an interest in making their research OA. Funders have an
interest in making their research output OA. And the tax-paying public has
an interest in making the research they fund OA.

In contrast, subscription/license publishers do not have an intrinsic
interest in making the research they publish OA except if they are paid for
it (via Gold OA publication fees). Publishers view Green OA (via repository
deposit) as putting their subscription and license revenues at risk. They
haven't much choice but to endorse deposit by their authors, given the
research benefits of OA, and particularly when it is mandated by their
authors' institutions and funders; but publishers themselves certainly have
no need or desire to do the depositing on their authors' behalf, for free.

The way to see this clearly is to realize that Green OA amounts to
repository deposit by authors, for free, whereas Gold OA amounts to
"repository deposit" by publishers, for a fee.

Most publishers are not depositing today because they are not being paid to
do it.

Most authors are not depositing today because they are not being mandated to
do it.

There is no solution in "amalgamating" these respective empty repositories
(unmandated Green and unpaid Gold). The solution is either more mandates or
more money.

As subscriptions/licenses are covering the costs of publication today, there
is neither the need to pay for Gold OA, pre-emptively, today nor the extra
money to pay for it: The potential money is tied up in paying the
subscription/license fees that are already covering the costs of
publication.

Mandates do not depend on publishers but on institutions and funders; nor do
mandates bind publishers: they bind only authors. It is hence incoherent to
imagine macro-repositories fed by both authors and publishers. Nor is it
necessary, since institutional (and funder) deposit mandates, along with
institutional repositories are jointly necessary and sufficient to achieve
100% OA.

*R&A: "Such a macro-unit may be geographical (a coherent national scheme),
institutional (a large research organisation or a consortium thereof) or
thematic (a specific research field organising itself in the domain of
publication repositories)."*


"Macro" organisations -- whether institutional consortia, national consortia
or disciplinary consortia -- do not resolve this fundamental contradiction
between free access and any scheme to pay for access.

(In principle, McDonalds and Burger King could give free access to
hamburgers if a global consortium of some sort were to agree to bankroll it
all up-front; however, that would hardly be free access: it would simply be
global acquiescence to a global oligopoly on the sale of a product.)

So forget about counting on publishers to deposit articles in OA
repositories -- whether institutional or central -- unless they are paid
up-front to do so. And paying them to do so via licenses is not
"organisational coherence" but what biologists would call an
"evolutionarily unstable strategy," doomed to collapse because of its own
intrinsic instability.

It is the articles' authors who need to deposit, and it is that deposit that
their institutions and funders need to mandate.

*R&A: "The argument proceeds as follows: firstly, while institutional open
access mandates have brought some content into open access, the important
mandates are those of the funders"*


This "argument" is demonstrably incorrect.

Not all or even most of research is funded, whereas all research originates
from institutions. Hence institutional mandates coverall research, whereas
funder mandates cover only funded research.

The NIH, RCUK and ERC funder mandates were indeed important because they set
an example for other funders to follow (and many are indeed following); but
that still only covers funded research. Funder mandates do not scale up to
cover all research.

The Harvard, Stanford and MIT institutional mandates were hence far more
important, because they set an example for other institutions to follow (and
many are indeed following); and this does cover all research output, because
institutions are the universal providers of all research output, whether
funded or unfunded, across all disciplines.

*R&A: "[Funder mandates] are best supported by a single infrastructure and
large repositories, which incidentally enhances the value of the collection
(while a transfer to institutional repositories would diminish the value)."*


This is again profoundly incorrect. The only "value enhancement" that empty
collections need is their missing content. (Nor are we talking about
"transfer" yet, since the target contents are not being deposited. We are
talking about mandating deposit.)

Funder mandates can be fulfilled just as readily by depositing in
institutional repositories or central ones. Repository size and locus of
deposit are completely irrelevant. All OAI-compliant repositories are
interoperable. The OAI-PMH allows central harvesting from distributed
repositories. In addition, transfer protocols like SWORD allow direct,
automatic repository-to-repository transfer of contents.

Hence there is no functional advantage whatsoever to direct central deposit,
since central harvesting from institutional repositories achieves exactly
the same functional result. Instead, direct central deposit mandates have
the great disadvantage that they compete with institutional mandates instead
of facilitating them.

Both the natural and the optimal locus of deposit is the institutional
repository, for both institutions and funders. That way funder mandates and
institutional mandates collaborate and converge, covering all research
output.

*Summary:*
(1) Repository size and "infrastructure" do not generate content.
(2) Empty repositories are useless.
(3) The only way to fill them is to mandate deposit.
(4) Not all or most research is funded.
(5) But all research originates from institutions.
(6) Institutions' interests are served by hosting and managing their own
research assets.
(7) Hence both institutional and funder mandates should converge on
institutional deposit.
(8) Any central collections can then be harvested from the global
distributed of institutional repositories.

And now an important correction of a widespread misinterpretation of the
relative success of institutional and central repositories in capturing
their target content:

The Denominator Fallacy. With one prominent exception -- which has
absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the exceptional repository in
question, the physics Arxiv, happens to be central rather than institutional
-- unmandated central repositories (and there are many) are no more
successful in getting themselves filled with their target content than
unmandated institutional repositories. The critical causal variable is the
mandate, not the repository's centrality or size. (HAL/CNRS
http://bit.ly/l0YIa)

The way to arrive at a clear understanding of this fundamental fact is to
note that the denominator -- i.e., the total target content relative to
which we are trying to reckon, for a given repository, what proportion of it
is being deposited -- is far bigger for a central disciplinary repository
than for an institutional repository.

For an institutional repository, its denominator is the total number of
refereed journal articles, across all disciplines, produced by that
institution annually.

For a central disciplinary repository, its denominator is the total number
of refereed journal articles, across all institutions worldwide, published
in that discipline annually (for a national repository, like HAL, it is the
total research output of all the nation's institutions, across all
disciplines).

So it is no wonder that central repositories are "larger" than institutional
ones: Their total target content is much larger. But this difference in
absolute size is not only irrelevant but deeply misleading. For the
proportion of their total annual target content that unmandated central
repositories are actually capturing is every bit as minuscule as the
proportion that unmandated institutional repositories are capturing. And
whereas the total size of a mandated institutional repository remains much
smaller than an unmandated central repository, the reality is that the
mandated institutional repositories are capturing (or near capturing) their
total target outputs, whereas the unmandated central repositories are far
from capturing theirs.

The reason Arxiv is a special case is not at all because it is a central
repository but because the physicists that immediately began depositing in
Arxiv way back in 1991, with no need whatsoever of a mandate to impel them
to do so, had already long been doing much the same thing in paper (at the
CERN and SLAC paper depositories), and necessarily centrally, because in the
paper medium there is no way one can send one's paper to "everyone," nor to
get everyone to access or "harvest" each new paper from each author's own
institutional depository (if there had been such a thing).

All of that is over now. And if physicists had made the transition from
paper preprint deposit to online preprint deposit directly today rather than
in 1991, in the OAI-MPH era of repository interoperability and harvesting,
there is no doubt that they would have deposited in their own respective
institutional repositories and CERN and SLAC and Arxiv would simply have
harvested the metadata automatically from there (with the obvious
computational alerting mechanisms set up for harvesting, export and import).

But that longstanding cultural practice of preprint deposit among physicists
would be just as anomalous if physicists had begun it all by depositing
institutionally rather than centrally, for no other (unmandated) central
repository (or discipline) is capturing the high portion of its annual total
target content that the physics Arxiv is capturing (in certain
preprint-sharing subfields of physics) and has been capturing ever since
since 1991, in the absence of any deposit mandate.

So the centrality, size and success of Arxiv is completely irrelevant to the
problem of how to fill all other unmandated repositories, whether central or
institutional, large or small, and regardless of the "robustness" of their
"infrastructure." Only the mandated repositories are successfully capturing
their target content, and there is no longer any need to deposit directly in
central repositories: In the OAI-compliant OA era, central "repositories"
need only be collections, harvested from the distributed local repositories
of the universal research providers: the institutions.

*R&A: "Secondly, we compare and contrast a system based on central research
publication repositories with the notion of a network of institutional
repositories to illustrate that across central dimensions of any repository
solution the institutional model is more cumbersome and less likely to
achieve a high level of service."*


The assumption is made here -- with absolutely no supporting evidence, and
with all existing evidence (other than the single special case of Arxiv,
discussed above) flatly contradicting it -- that researchers are more likely
to deposit their refereed journal articles in big central repositories than
in their own institutional repositories.

All evidence is that researchers are equally unlikely to deposit in either
kind of repository unless deposit is mandated, in which case it makes no
difference whether the repository is institutional or central -- except that
if both funders and institutions mandate institutional deposit then their
mandates converge and reinforce one another, whereas if funders mandate
central deposit and institutions mandate institutional deposit then their
mandates diverge and compete with one another. (And of course the natural
direction for harvesting is from local to central, not vice versa: We
deposit on our institutional websites and google harvests from there; it
would be absurd to deposit in google and then harvest back to our own
institutional website. The same is true for any central OAI harvesting
service.)

*R&A: "Next, three key functions of publication repositories are
reconsidered, namely a) the fast and wide dissemination of results; b) the
preservation of the record; and c) digital curation for dissemination and
preservation."*


Again, these functions in no way distinguish central and institutional
repositories (both can and do provide them) and have no bearing whatsoever
on the real problem, which is the absence of the target content -- for which
the remedy is to mandate deposit.

*R&A: "Fourth, repositories and their ecologies are explored with the
overriding aim of enhancing content and enhancing usage."*


You cannot enhance content if the content is not there. And you cannot
enhance the usage of absent content. Hence it is it not enhancements that
are needed but deposit mandates.

*R&A: "Fifth, a target scheme is sketched, including some examples."*


The target scheme includes a suggestion that publishers should do the
depositing, of their own proprietary version of the refereed article. This
is perhaps the worst suggestion of all. Just when institutions are at last
realizing that they can host and manage their own research output by
mandating that their researchers deposit their final refereed drafts in
their own institutional repositories, Romary & Armbruster instead suggest
"consolidated" central "publication repositories" in which publishers do the
depositing. (The question to contemplate is: If it requires a mandate to
induce researchers to deposit, what will it require to induce publishers to
deposit -- other than paying them to do it? And if so, who will pay for
what, and why?)

Most of the rest of the suggestions are superfluous, and fail completely to
address the real problem: the absence of OA's target content. You can't go
"beyond" institutional repositories until you first fill them.

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
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