[BOAI] Re: Questions concerning Cogprints

[Stevan Harnad]

   ** apologies for cross-posting **

On 5-Nov-09, at 4:00 AM, [Identity deleted] wrote:

> We [deleted] are informing researchers from the social sciences and  
> humanities in [deleted] about repositories in their domain.


I am happy to answer your questions about central disicplinary  
repositories in general and, in particular, about CogPrints http://cogprints.org/ 
, which I founded in 1997 as a conscious effort to extend to other  
disciplines the long-standing practice of physicists to self-archive  
their papers -- both before and after refereeing -- in what used to be  
called "XXX" and then became the Los Alamos (now Cornell) Physics  
Arxiv. http://arxiv.org/



The idea of CogPrints was to show that making one's papers freely  
accessible online was not just feasible and useful in physics, but in  
all disciplines. The idea was also (vaguely) that it could all be  
deposited in one global archive -- Arxiv, perhaps, eventually, but  
that first CogPrints needed to demonstrate the feasibility and  
usefulness of self-archiving in other disciplines, as evidence that  
the practice could be generalized and could scale.

But there was always some uncertainty about whether the self-archiving  
should be central or local (institutional). The original self- 
archiving proposal (1994) had been for local self-archiving: http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ 
.  Somehow, however -- perhaps because of the prominent success of  
Arxiv, which had launched in 1991, but preceded by similar practices  
by high energy physicists in the sharing and distribution of preprints  
in hard copy form, at central deposit sites such as CERN and SLAC --  
the local self-archiving proposal mutated, temporarily, into central  
self-archiving, and that was when CogPrints was created.

Since then, however, the OAI metadata harvesting protocol http://www.openarchives.org/ 
  (itself first inspired by Arxiv) was created (1999), making all OAI- 
compliant repositories interoperable, and the Budapest Open Access  
Initiative (2001) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ was launched,  
CogPrints was made OAI-compliant, and then used to create the first  
generic OAI-compliant, Open Access (OA) Institutional Repository (IR)  
software (EPrints) http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/, and the  
international OA IR movement began, and is now culminating in  
institutional mandates to self-archive in institutions' own IRs. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

So the tide has turned, functionally, to institutional rather than  
central self-archiving, with the OAI protocol making it possible to  
harvest the metadata data (or both the metadata and the full-texts)  
from all the distributed IRs into many discipline-based or geographic  
central repositories. http://bit.ly/2kheoh

This development was natural, and indeed optimal, because institutions  
(not disciplines) are the universal providers of all of OA's target  
content (refereed research), across all disciplines and nations, hence  
distributed local deposit and central harvesting is the most natural  
and universal way to ensure (and mandate) that all of OA's target  
content is systematically provided. That had been the gist of the  
original 1994 self-archiving proposal.

The notion of central deposit was made obsolete by the OAI harvesting  
protocol. (The idea is the same as with Google: we don't deposit  
centrally in Google; we deposit content locally, and Google harvests.  
With research, there are disciplines and countries and funders, and if  
any or many of them want their own entral collection, they need merely  
harvest it. No need to have researchers depositing willy-nilly here  
and there. Depositing once, in their own institution's IR is enough,  
and the rest is just a matter of automated import/export and/or  
harvesting. Moreover, IRs cost far less to create and maintain than  
central repositories, because they distribute the cost and the load.)

So CogPrints, and other direct-deposit central repositories are  
obsolescent, with good reason. It is institutional self-archiving  
mandates that will put an end to the direct-deposit central repository  
era -- but harvested central collections may still continue to  
flourish, until generic global harvesters manage to provide the same  
functionality or better, across disciplines and nations -- and  
institutions have a special interest in hosting and managing their own  
output.)


> We have 2 questions considering cogprints:
>
> 	• Are peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed documents available on  
> cogprints?

Yes, both unrefereed preprints and refereed postprints can be  
deposited in CogPrints -- and in IRs. But only refereed postprint  
deposit can be mandated by institutions (and funders). Whether  
researchers choose to make their unrefereed drafts public (as the  
physicists have found useful to do) must be left up to the individual  
researchers.

> If yes, do you control if documents from authors who say they are  
> peer-reviewed are really peer-reviewed? Is there such a control at  
> Cogprints?

CogPrints certainly does not fact-check whether papers deposited as  
having been published in a (named) refereed journal were indeed  
published in that refereed journal.

Institutions may choose to fact-check that for deposits in their own  
IRs (but I doubt it's necessary: publicly claiming to have published  
in a journal when anyone on the web can check and confirm that it is  
untrue would be a very foolish thing for an academic to do -- and the  
deception would not last long).

> 	• Is it free for authors to upload their documents on Cogprints or  
> do they have to pay something?

Of course it is free -- both to the uploading author and to the  
downloading user.

But it is not cost-free to maintain a central repository. (And  
maintaining Arxiv costs a lot of money; it doesn't cost much to  
maintain CogPrints simply because CogPrints -- and central self- 
archiving in general, apart from Arxiv, is either a failure or just a  
very minor and temporary success. The natural and optimal way to self- 
archive is institutionally, with central repositories being just  
harvested collections, not multiple off-site loci of remote deposit,  
competing for or overloading the poor depositing author's keystrokes,  
and discouraging institutional self-archiving mandates.) http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html

I hope this helps. It's a good idea to consider setting up central  
collections, but better to encourage local institutional deposit, and  
to harvest therefrom, rather than trying to get authors -- who mostly  
(85%) don't self-archive at all --  to deposit directly in yet another  
central repository.

Stevan Harnad

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