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Re: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

It is no point in Professor Harnad's coming out with a whole lot of references to assertions made by him or his friends and associates, almost none of which come from the peer-reviewed literature. I am only a part-time academic but to me there is a real difference between an institutional repository that exists to serve faculty and an institutional repository that is part of a mechanism telling me what I must do.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 4:01 AM
Subject: Re: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

On 21-Nov-07, at 7:53 PM, Anthony Watkinson wrote:


I cannot claim to be an expert on institutional repositories
and their history but the first time I became aware of them was
from a presentation by Ann Wolpert one the originators of
DSpace. It was my understanding then and it is my understanding
now that for some involved in the IR movement the purpose was
to provide a service to faculty. The DSpace mission from one of
the sites reads:

DSpaceT is a free, open source software platform that allows
research organizations to offer faculty and researchers a
professionally managed searchable archive for their digital
assets. DSpace focuses on simple access to these assets, as
well as their long-term preservation.

It is my understanding that DSpace development was in progress
by 2000.

At the end of 2000. IRs began in 1999-2000, with EPrints, at
Southampton, where CogPrints (designed by Matt Hemus, a
Southampton ECS doctoral student) was first made OAI-compliant
and then turned into EPrints generic IR software by Rob Tansley
(likewise a Southampton ECS doctoral student) in 2000:

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD

EPrints was widely adopted and Rob Tansley was then recruited by
MIT and Hewlett-Packard to create DSpace.

http://www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/speakers.htm

EPrints and DSpace are now the two most widely used IR softwares
worldwide.

http://roar.eprints.org/index.php?action=browse


In 2002 a very different definition was proposed by Raym Crow
in his SPARC position paper - see
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/ir_final_release_102.pdf. The
definition of IRs set out in his abstract is very different and
speaks of reforming scholarly communication in line with the
SPARC agenda.

IRs were originally on the right track: OA self-archiving. The
SPARC position paper scrambled that a little with some rather
quackish ideas about publishing reform.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/crow.html


My picture is that SPARC have attempted to hi-jack an agenda
which was faculty-centred into one which is library-centred,
some libraries that is. The mandates proposed are only
necessary because faculty persistently refuse to fit in with
this new agenda which does not represent their needs or wishes.

This is a misimpression. The mandates have nothing to do with
SPARC or a hi-jacked agenda.

http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

They have to do with the fact that busy faculty will not do
anything -- even something that is in their own interests --
unless it is required. But if self-archiving is required, Alma
Swan's surveys have shown that over 95% of faculty report they
will comply, over 80% of them saying they will comply willingly.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/

And Arthur Sale's studies on actual behavior confirm this:
Faculty do not self-archive in great numbers spontaneously, or if
merely invited, requested or encouraged to do it, whereas they
self-archive at substantially higher rates if it is mandated --
approaching full compliance within about 2 years.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/sale/index.html

This is not surprising, as faculty also comply with publish-or-perish
mandates -- and would publish a good deal less without them

http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw64/harnad.html

Stevan Harnad