[BOAI] Arxiv's Funding Pains May Be A Wake-Up Call: Distributed Versus Central Archiving

Sun Aug 14 14:28:16 BST 2011

*** Apologies for Cross-Posting ***

*
*

*Comments on:*

Ginsparg, Paul (2011) *Arxiv at
20*<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7359/full/476145a.html>.
*Nature* 476: 145–147 doi:10.1038/476145a

&

Fischman, Josh (2011) *Anonymous FTP Achives.** The First Free
Research-Sharing Site, arXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain
Future*<http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/the-first-free-research-sharing-site-arxiv-turns-20/32778#disqus_thread>.
*Chronicle of Higher Education* August 10, 2011

*Anonymous FTP archives. *Arxiv <http://roar.eprints.org/89/>(1991) was an
invaluable milestone on the road to Open
Access<http://www.soros.org/openaccess>.
But it was not the first free research-sharing site: That began in the
1970's with the internet itself, with authors making their papers freely
accessible to all users net-wide by
self-archiving<http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/i-overture-the-subversive-proposal.shtml>them
in their own local institutional "anonymous
FTP archives <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc959/2_Overview.html>."

*Distributed local websites. *With the creation of the world wide web in
1990, HTTP <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/> began replacing FTP sites for the
self-archiving of papers on authors' institutional websites. FTP and HTTP
sites were mostly local and distributed, but accessible free for all,
webwide. Arxiv was the first important *central* HTTP site for research
self-archiving, with physicists webwide all depositing their papers in one
central locus (first hosted at Los Alamos). Arxiv's remarkable growth and
success were due to both its timeliness and the fact that it had emerged
from a widespread practice among high energy physicists that had already
predated the web, namely, to share hard copies of their papers before
publication by mailing them to central preprint distribution sites such as
SLAC <http://www.slac.stanford.edu/> and CERN<http://roarmap.eprints.org/10/>
.

*Central harvesting and search.* At the same time, while physicists were
taking to central self-archiving, in other disciplines (particularly
computer science), distributed self-archiving continued to grow. Later web
developments, notably google and webwide harvesting and search engines,
continued to make distributed self-archiving more and more powerful and
attractive. Meanwhile, under the stimulus of Arxiv itself, the Open Archives
Initiative (OAI) <http://www.openarchives.org/> was created in 1999 -- a
metadata-harvesting protocol that made all distributed OAI-compliant
websites *interoperable*, as if their distributed local contents were all in
one global, searchable archive.

*No need for direct central deposit in google!* Together, google and OAI
probably marked the end of the need for central archives. The cost and
effort can instead be distributed across institutions, with all the
essential search and retrieval functionality provided by automated central
"overlay" services for harvesting, indexing, search and retrieval (e.g.,
OAIster <http://www.oclc.org/oaister/>, Scirus <http://www.scirus.com/>,
Base <http://www.base-search.net/> and Google
Scholar<http://scholar.google.com/>).
Arxiv continues to flourish, because two decades of invaluable service to
the physics community has several generations of users deeply committed to
it. But no other dedicated central archive has arisen since. Like computer
scientists, whose local, distributed self-archiving is harvested centrally
by Citeseerx <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/>, economists, for example,
self-archive institutionally, with central harvesting by
RepEc<http://repec.org/>
.

*Mandating self-archiving.* In biomedicine, PubMed
Central<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/>looks to be an exception,
with direct central depositing rather than local.
But PubMed Central was not a direct author initiative, like anonymous FTP,
author websites or Arxiv. It was designed by NLM <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/>,
deposit was mandated by NIH <http://roarmap.eprints.org/26/>, and deposit is
done not only by authors but by publishers.

*Institutions are the universal research providers.* Open Access is still
growing <http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-access-by-numbers.html>far
more slowly than it might, and one of the factors holding it back
might
be notional conflicts between institutional and central
archiving<http://bit.ly/INSTcentOA>.
It is clear that Open Access self-archiving will have to be universally
mandated, if all disciplines are to enjoy its benefits (maximized research
access, uptake, usage and
impact<http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html>,
minimized costs<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx>).
The universal providers of all research paper output, funded and unfunded,
are the world's universities and research institutions, distributed globally
across all scholarly and scientific disciplines, all languages, and all
national boundaries.

*Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally.* Hence funder self-archiving
mandates like NIH's and institutional self-archiving mandates like Harvard's
need to join forces to reinforce one another rather than to complete for the
same papers, and the most natural, efficient and economical way to do this
is for both institutiions and funders to mandate that all
self-archivingshould be done locally, in the author's institutional
OAI-compliant repository. The contents of the institutional repositories can
then be harvested automatically by central OAI-compliant repositories such
as PubMed Central (as well as by google and other central harvesters) for
global indexing and search.

*Distribute the archiving, rather than the cost.* In this light, Arxiv's
self-funding pains may be a wake-up call: Why should Cornell University (or
a "wealthy donor") subsidize a cost that institutions can best "sponsor" by
each doing (and mandating) their own distributed archiving locally (thereby
reducing total cost, to boot)? After all, no one deposits directly in
Google…

*Stevan Harnad*

*EnablingOpenScholarship* <http://www.openscholarship.org/>

*"**How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access
Mandates*<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.htm>
*"*

*SUMMARY: *
*Research funder open-access mandates (such as
**NIH*<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=National%20Institutes%20of%20Health%20%28NIH%29>
*'s) and university open-access mandates (such as
**Harvard*<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Harvard%20University%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences>
*'s) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them
synergistic and mutually reinforcing: *

*      Universities' own *
*Institutional Repositories (IRs)* <http://roar.eprints.org/>* are the
natural locus for the direct deposit of their own research output:
Universities (and research institutions) are the universal research
providers of **all** research (funded and unfunded, in all fields) and have
a direct interest in archiving, monitoring, measuring, evaluating, and
showcasing their own research assets -- as well as in maximizing their
uptake, usage and **impact*<http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html>
*. *

*      *
*Both** universities and funders should accordingly
**mandate*<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/>
* deposit of all peer-reviewed final drafts (postprints), **in each author's
own university IR, immediately upon acceptance for
publication*<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html>
*, for institutional and funder record-keeping purposes. Access to that
immediate postprint deposit in the author's university IR may be set
immediately as Open Access if **copyright
conditions*<http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php>
* allow; otherwise access can be set as **Closed
Access*<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html>
*, pending **copyright negotiations or
embargoes*<http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/nih/copyright.html>
*. All the rest of the conditions described by
**universities*<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/February_2008_Agenda.pdf>
* and **funders* <http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm>* should
accordingly apply only to the timing and copyright conditions for setting
open access to those deposits, not to the depositing itself, its locus or
its timing.*

*      As a result, (1) there will be a common deposit locus for all
research output worldwide; (2) university mandates will reinforce and
monitor compliance with funder mandates; (3) funder mandates will reinforce
university mandates; (4) *
*legal details concerning open-access provision, copyright and
embargoes*<http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/nih/copyright.html>
* will be applied independently of deposit itself, on a case by case basis,
according to the conditions of each mandate; (5)
**opt-outs*<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/364-guid.html>
* will apply only to copyright negotiations, not to deposit itself, nor its
timing; and (6) any central OA repositories can then
**harvest*<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/341-guid.html>
* the postprints from the authors' IRs under the agreed conditions at the
agreed time, if they wish.*
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