[GOAL] Re: US Presidential Open Access Directive: 3 Cheers and 8 Suggestions

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Andrew A. Adams <aaa at meiji.ac.jp> wrote:

>
> Peter,
>
> Thank you for the correction. I mis-remembered the mandate from these (I
> think a bit confusingly named) systems.


It's even more confusing with Medline, PubMed and PubMedCentral all from
NIH.


>
> On your point on central deposit, I beg to differ, as you know. Deposit
> locally then harvest centrally is far more sensible than trying to mandate
> different deposit loci for the various authors in an institution.


This is not axiomatic. The protein community requires authors to deposit
sequences communally - and they do. The genome community requires genes
deposisted and they do. The crystallographers require crsytal structures
and it's 100% compliance. The astronomers...

Scientists do not see their institutions as a natural place to deposit
their output.

It's easy
> enough to automatically harvest/cross-deposit, and then one gets the best
> of
> all worlds.


If it's easy enough, why has it still not happened. We've been told for 10
years that if we deposit in IRs then we'll be able to discover all our
deposited scholarship. I've been faithful to this vision and deposited
200,000 items in DSpace at cam. There is no algorithm to get them out except
manually or writing my own programs.

A simple question I've been asking for at least 5 years: "Find me all
chemistry theses in UK repos". It's impossible and I suspect will not
happen in the next five years. "Find me all chemistry papers in UK repos"
is even worse (mainly because there aren't any).


> Central deposit and then local harvest


Why do we need local harvest? bioscientists search EuroPMC or ArXiV
directly. They don't harvest into local repos - there is no point.


> is the wrong workflow.
> It's trying to make a river flow upstream. Sure, you can do it, but why
> bother if all you need is a connection one way or the other. ALl the
> benefits
> you claim simply come from deposit, not direct deposit, in central
> repositories.


Deposit + indexing + search. At present we only have the first. And most
green cannot be indexed because (a) some is only metadata (b) some is
embargoed (c) we will be sued by the publishers.


> Which would you recommend for medical physics, by the way?
> ArXiv or PMC? Both surely, but that's much more easily achieved if the
> workflow is to deposit locally then automatically upload/harvest to both,
> than two central deposits or trying to set up cross-harvesting from ArXiv
> to
> PMC.
>

Quite the reverse. There's good dialogue between the bio-repositories and
arXiV. There's no problem  if there is duplication. At least it will be
easily discoverable.


> --
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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