[GOAL] PMC & UKPMC Should Harvest From Institutional Repositories

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-04-12, at 5:44 AM, Steve Hitchcock wrote:

> Do we know why Pubmed does not apparently link to papers in IRs?
> Is this Pubmed policy, or is there a technical reason?
> 
> Stephen Curry: PubMed, the first port of call for anyone searching
> the biomedical literature, frequently links to publisher’s site but
> never to institutional repositories
> http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2012/03/18/elsevier-the-research-works-act-and-open-access-where-to-now/

PubMed & PubMed Central are wonderful resources, but not nearly 
as resourceful or wonderful as they easily could be.

(1) PMC & UKPMC should of course be harvesting or linking 
institutional repository (IR) versions of papers, not just 
PMC/UKPMC-deposited and publisher-hosted papers.

(2) Funders should be mandating IR deposit and PMC harvesting 
rather than direct PMC deposit. By thus making funder mandates 
and institutional mandates convergent and collaborative instead 
of divergent and competitive, this will motivate and facilitate adoption 
and compliance with institutional mandates: institutions are the universal 
providers of all research output, funded and unfunded.

(3) IRs should mandate immediate deposit irrespective of publisher
 OA policy: If authors wish to honor publisher OA embargoes, they 
can set access to the deposit as Closed Access during the embargo 
and rely on providing almost-OA via the IR's email eprint request button

(4) Funder mandates should require deposit by the fundee -- the one 
bound by the mandate -- rather than by the publisher, who is not 
bound by the mandate, and indeed in conflict of interest with it.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/876-.html

(5) Publishers (partly to protect from rival publisher free-loading, 
partly to discourage funder mandates, and partly out of simple 
misunderstanding of network capability) are much more likely 
to endorse immediate institutional self-archiving than institution-external 
deposit. This yet another reason funders should mandate institutional 
deposit and metadata harvesting instead of direct institution-external deposit.

Stevan Harnad