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

[Andrew A. Adams]

>> 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.

Peter Murray-Rust replied:
> 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...

"The community requires"? How, exactly?

I do not dispute that there are a smal number of subfields where OA of papers 
has been successful without mandates, and in some areas instead of in 
addition there is deposit of certain types of research data unmandated. 
However, they are a tiny minority of academia. Do you disagree with this 
assessment?

The question then becomes how we get the rest of academia to do so. Despite 
the possibilities having existed for over twety years, the vast majority have 
yet to do so, despite it being in their interests.

Who can require them to do so? Their employers and funders.

What is the most efficient way for employers and funder to mandate deposit (a 
mandate requires at least some level of compliance checking otherwise it's 
really just a suggestion).

Since:

A. The funder alrady knows the institution of the researcher (in most cases 
the institution receives some funds as wlel as the individual) and virtually 
all funded research is to researchers within an institutional context.

B. the institution knows who the researchers are and knows what grants they 
hold.

C. Interdisciplinary research has no single natural home - does medical 
physics go to arXiv or PMC? Do we deposit in one and push to the other or 
deposit in both?

D. There are other institutional benefits to local deposit (all local papers 
are acessible locally without worrying about embargoes; publication lists for 
projects, researchers, departments, and the whole institution can be 
automatically generated) which can't so easily be gained from local 
harvesting from diverse central repositories.

>From a mathematical standpoint central and local deposit and harvesting are 
functionally equivalent if the technology is sufficiently advanced. But this 
abstracts away the very practical issue that researchers have a known (and in 
the vast majority of cases singular) institutional affiliation which the 
research, institution and funder all know about already, whereas in a large 
number of cases disciplinary affiliations are murky and hard to define.

It is entirely possible to set up a national repository instead of local ones 
with the log-in credentials of the researcher set to include their 
affiliation. This is very different from subject repositories and can easily 
be regarded as a set of institutional repositories sharing a back-end service.

Discipline boundaries are too fuzzy to be efficient as a mechanism for 
mandating and monitoring mandate-compliance. THey are much better situated as 
overlays providing viewpoints on the data sets (whether holding the full-text 
or just the meta-data at this point is a minor issue, since the problem at 
present is not incoherence but lack of content).

My published papers include references to, and/or publication in journals of 
computer science, mathematics, education, artificial intelligence, law, 
governance, history, psychology, sociology and others. What subject 
repository should I be depositing in? SHould my distance education papers be 
in both an educational and a computer science repository? Should my privacy 
papers be in law, sociology, psychology, economics and computer science? I 
have had three institutional affiliations and each paper was published when I 
was at one of another of these, giving clarity and a limit on where I should 
deposit.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/