[GOAL] Re: Library Vetting of Repository Deposits

Tue Sep 23 16:51:25 BST 2014

Thanks for clarifying this Stevan. I am thinking that OA advocates really don’t want to alienate their main allies. 

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 23 September 2014 15:44
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Library Vetting of Repository Deposits

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Richard Poynder <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk <mailto:ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk> > wrote:

I suspect that Andrew Adams and Stevan Harnad may be asking for two contradictory things here. If I understand correctly, they want 1) as near 100% OA as soon as possible and 2) for librarians to get out of the way so that researchers can get on and self-archive. Given that many researchers have shown themselves to be generally uninterested in open access and, in some cases, directly antagonistic towards it, and given that over half of UK researchers appear to be unware of whether or not their future articles will need to be published in accordance with the RCUK policy or not (http://goo.gl/Y3Lyua) I cannot see how keeping librarians (who have done so much to fill repositories and to educate researchers about OA) out of the way (wish 2) is going to help achieve wish 1.

Not contradictory at all:

Librarians are invaluable in (1) advocating OA, (2) encouraging authors to deposit, and in (3) mediating deposit for those who won't deposit on their own.

We are talking here about a 4th contingency: Authors deposit on their own, but their deposit is not made OA until it has been vetted by a librarian. 

This is the contingency both Andrew and I are suggesting to scrap. Librarians can vet after the deposit has already been made, and been made immediately OA (if the author so chooses), but not in between the two,

But John Salter at Leeds has just made an even better proposal on JISC-REPOSITORIES:

On Sep 23, 2014, at 10:13 AM, John Salter wrote:

...
For a while I’ve been pondering our process:
Deposit -> Review -> Live.
I want to change it to:
Deposit (direct to live) with mediated access to full text (request button).
In parallel:
- Process full texts (whilst MD record is live) – opening up any that we can.
- Metadata validation/enrichment

Does that sound like a better model than we currently use?

Cheers, John, Repository developer, based in a Library

Direct live deposit by the author with the default set to immediate Button-mediated Restricted Access (RA) (till the library vetting clears it to Open Acess (OA)) would be absolutely splendid!

(It would be even better if authors who wished to do so could over-ride the RA default and set access to immediate OA. The result of the library vetting could then be communicated to the author directly once it’s done.)

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org <mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org>  [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org <mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org> ] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 23 September 2014 14:33
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex

Andrew is so right. 

We did the rounds of this at Southampton, where the library (for obscure reasons of its own) wanted to do time-consuming and frustrating (for the author) "checks" on the deposit (is it suitable? is it legal? are the metadata in order?). In ECS we bagged that right away. And now ECS has "fast lane" exception in the university repository (but alas other departments do not). Similar needless roadblocks (unresolved) at UQAM.

Librarians: I know your hearts are in the right place. But please, please trust those who understand OA far, far better than you do, that this library vetting -- if it needs to be done at all -- should be done after the deposit has already been made (by the author) and has already been made immediately OA (by the software). Please don't add to publishers' embargoes and other roadblocks to OA by adding gratuitous ones of your own.

Let institutional authors deposit and make their deposits OA directly, without intervention, mediation or interference. Then if you want to vet their deposits, do so and communicate with them directly afterward.

P.S. This is all old. We've been through this countless times before.

Dixit

Weary Archivangelist, still fighting the same needless, age-old battles, on all sides...

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Andrew A. Adams <aaa at meiji.ac.jp <mailto:aaa at meiji.ac.jp> > wrote:

The challenge now for UK Universities will be to keep librarians out of the
way of reserachers, or their assistants, depositing the basic meta-data and
full text in the repository. At the University of Reading, where I was
involved in early developments around the IR but left the University before
the final deposit mandate (*) was adopted and the process decided on, they
have librarians acting as a roadblock in getting material
uploaded.Thisistotheextentthat a paper published in an electronic proceedings
at a conference was refused permission to be placed in the repository, for
example, while there is a significant delay in deposited materials becoming
visible, while librarians do a host of (mostly useful but just added value
and not necessary) checking. Sigh, empire building and other bureaucratic
nonsense getting in the way of the primary mission - scholarly communications.

(*) They have a deposit mandate but refuse to call it that. I'm not sure why,
butthey insist on calling it a "policy". If one reads this policy, it's a
mandate (albeit not an ideal one). For a University with an overly strong
management team and a mangerialist approach, this unwillingness to call a
spade a spade and a mandate a mandate, seems odd. Perhaps it's that this
policy came from a bottom up development and not a senior management idea so
they're unwilling to give it a strong name.

--
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp <mailto: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/

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