[BOAI] Re: Comparing repositories - subject-based, institutional, research and national repository systems

[Prof. Tom Wilson]

A thoughtful analysis of the situation.  There's also another factor, which
might be labelled 'psychological' in character.  The task of the scholar is to
publish in the research literature; the task of archiving is usually associated
with an intermediary of some kind - authors do not perceive archiving to be
part of their task. Even when they may benefit from doing so - once they have
had a paper accepted their work is over.  This is a big hurdle to overcome and,
in my opinion, has been underplayed or even ignored.

Tom Wilson

Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, Hon.PhD
Publisher/Editor in Chief
Information Research
InformationR.net
e-mail: t.d.wilson at shef.ac.uk
Web site: http://InformationR.net/
___________________________________________________ 


Quoting "Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster at EUI.eu>:

> Jessica,
> 
> I think you will find that a fair number of open access advocates and many a
> person involved with repository development may share the vision of archiving
> everything. I did too, initially. After some years of research and experience
> I no longer do. Some of the reasons are: successful repositories have a clear
> and coherent collection policy; OA mandates overwhelmingly target research
> outputs in the form of peer-reviewed publications (not everything); scholars
> are apprehensive about what other material their own work appears alongside;
> relying on find and search through portals and search engines is not enough;
> convincing indexing entities have not emerged (yet); repositories with a
> clear and coherent collection policy have been able to build strong
> value-added services.
> 
> This is not to say that I fundamentally oppose archiving all kinds of
> scholarly (and student) output. Rather, it is about strategy. To clarify, let
> me use an analogy: A lot of repositories look to me like hotels that would
> like to offer everything from a no-star to a five-star room. They then find
> that they have very few guests and their only regular ones may be theses and
> dissertations. By contrast, those repositories that have a clear strategy
> benefit not only from voluntary deposits but also from acceptance by the
> scholarly community. Now, one may *fix* deposit through mandates, but you
> cannot fix acceptance, trust and so on. If you want the later too, I think
> repositories would be well advised to worry about the value and relevance of
> their collection. Once they have established rapport with the scholarly
> community, they may be able to extend the collection policy, though I expect
> that they may find that they need to demarcate channels (e.g. NARCIS in NL
> clearly distinguishes between Cream and Promise of Science).
> 
> Best, Chris
> 
> 
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: boai-forum-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk im Auftrag von Jessica Perry Hekman
> Gesendet: Di 11/24/2009 15:19
> An: boai-forum at ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Betreff: [BOAI] Re: Comparing repositories - subject-based,
> institutional,research and national repository systems
>  
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 06:19:50PM +0100, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
> 
> > - Armbruster, Chris and Romary, Laurent, Comparing Repositories Types: 
> > Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research 
> > Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional 
> > Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication (November 20, 2009). 
> > Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1506905
> 
> Although you are soliciting responses about your proposed distinction, I 
> was inspired to respond to this part of your paper:
> 
>   If the repository is to have any value over the long term, then a 
>   quality control system must be implemented and the integrity of the 
>   corpus preserved. One widespread misunderstanding is that repositories 
>   are there to archive 'everything' when, in fact, users are ever more 
>   concerned about the value and relevance of research results.
> 
> I am new to OA, and a student (though I worked in online publishing for 
> 15 years before returning to school), so I apologize if any of the 
> following is misguided; I hope the members of this list will point out 
> where I went wrong, if I did.
> 
> When I discovered OA, I envisioned a future world in which value and 
> relevance of research results is maintained by entities which provide 
> the same services as do journals today: facilitating peer review, 
> organizing publications by topic, and providing a statement of 
> legitimacy (the difference in how you value a paper that was published 
> in a very high quality journal with a high impact factor, vs. a paper 
> published in a journal which no one has ever heard of). These indexing 
> entities could be what journals become, or they could be something new, 
> or there could spring up a mix of both. Because the indexing entities 
> would provide this service, repositories wouldn't need to do so, and 
> would be free to archive everything. Users wouldn't have trouble 
> navigating through this deluge of information, because the indexing 
> entities would guide them. A user would follow the list of new articles 
> in his chosen indexing entities, just as today he reads Nature or the 
> New England Journal of Medicine. For hunting down a specific article, 
> he'd use PubMed or Google Scholar. Actually browsing a particular 
> repository directly for content would be a painful process that no one 
> would waste their time on.
> 
> I naively assumed that the OA community was envisioning this as well, 
> but given the bit of your paper that I quoted above, I'm now wondering 
> if I'm wrong.
> 
> You have said in other places in your paper that repositories, 
> especially institutional repositories, aren't particularly good at 
> providing this kind of indexing service, and I agree with that. What 
> repositories *are* good at is providing a place to maintain copies of 
> publications (whatever "publications" come to be in the vibrantly open 
> access future), and place for indexing engines to hunt for content. 
> Isn't there value in maintaining everything? The long tail phenomenon in 
> internet retail sales has allowed items of niche interest to be found by 
> their audience. Isn't that useful in scholarly publishing as well?
> 
> Of course, repositories will have to clearly mark content as peer 
> reviewed or not. Perhaps there is already a metadata standard for this 
> out there which I have not yet found, as I am very new to OA.
> 
> I do think that the role of indexing entities is an extremely important 
> one. Repositories are worthless if they can't be navigated. I just don't 
> believe that providing sophisticated navigation, indexing, adding 
> statements of legitimacy, etc., is the job of the repository. I believe 
> a third party can provide those services much more effectively.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jessica
> 
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