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Re: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

I'm not really an OA zealot, but I'd like to address a couple of points in this post:

"And why would anyone need to go to an IR to generate a CV?"

Quite a lot of universities that I know of are using their IRs to generate CVs on the fly for researchers. This is useful to them in a couple of ways: 1) they don't have to keep it up to date themselves (and you only need to look a the many, many faculty websites that have CVs with no publications added since the site was set up or last reviewed, which reflects poorly on both the researcher and their institution) and 2)they then have a nice link to this CV _and their actual papers_ to share with colleagues and potential collaborators. These are both pretty clear benefits to time poor academics.

"unedited faculty prose is often not something they would want to have exposed to the wider world."

This may well be true, but there is more to academic papers than the prose. Peter Murray-Rust at Cambridge has been driving some really interesting work on data and text mining out of freely available papers on the web, to pull out all kinds of useful chemical data that would otherwise be underutilised. Mining theses alone has produced tons of stuff. But he constantly encounters road blocks where he can't mine the data or text behind subscription walls. Even Cambridge can't access everything. His recent blog post on the NIH gives a taster of what he is trying to do (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1128), but if you want to see some of the real potential of OA, checking out his work is worth the effort.

David Groenewegen
ARROW Project Manager & ARCHER Project Director
Monash University Library
Monash University
Victoria 3800
AUSTRALIA
David.Groenewegen@lib.monash.edu.au


Sandy Thatcher wrote:

Stevan Harnad wrote:

OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed
journal articles. The best and most likely way to find and access
them is via a harvester/indexer that links to the item, not by
directly searching the IR itself. (Direct searching of the IR is more
relevant for (1) institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance
assessment, (3) CV-generation, (4) grant application/fulfillment, and
perhaps also some window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6)
researchers or (7) students.)

The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) to
maximize their accessibility, so they are accessible to all would-be
users, not just those whose institutions happen to have a
subscription to the journal in which they were published. That way
(9) the usage and impact of the institutional research output is
maximized (and so is (10) overall research progress).


 But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its
 IR.

It seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of
institutional gains from their IRs.

I question whether many, or even most, of these alleged benefits of IRs
really are such. Why is an IR needed for any individual performance
assessment? A faculty member simply submits relevant publications for
the P&T committee to review; having them on an IR doesn't seem much of a
benefit here. And why would anyone need to go to an IR to generate a CV?
And window shopping? I submit that faculty, grad students, and
researchers will go look for the work of the specialists in the areas
they are most interested in, not canvass a wide swathe of an
institution's publications, and then rely on more or less "objective"
indicators of prestige ranking of departments by various bodies that
conduct regular assessments. Who is going to try using an IR to measure
"the usage and impact of the institutional research output" overall? As
we all know, usage statistics are only one small part of an assessment
exercise, and they do not even exist for large parts of a university's
output outside the sciences. How does an IR help measure the success of
an arts and architecture school, for instance? Given the widely
disparate nature of materials that would be contained in any
university-wide IR, I can't see how anyone could readily come up with an
overall measure of a university's contribution to research and
scholarship. This is pie-in-the-sky thinking, in my opinion.


Harvard authors, on
the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would
 suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the
 institution.

That may or may not be a good argument against depositing unrefereed
preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA mandates, or the
primary purpose of OA IRs.

To the contrary, Stevan, the peer-reviewed versions of articles you are
talking about being deposited have not undergone any copyediting, and my
guess is that most of what gets posted will be versions that have not
had copyediting done on them. I keep beating this drum, but I need to
remind people that unedited faculty prose is often not something they
would want to have exposed to the wider world. You mentioned that high
energy physics hasn't seem to have suffered any from its exposure on
arXiv, but then how many people beyond specialists actually read
anything on this site?

Harvard, on the other hand, is mandating deposit of the writings of its
faculty in the humanities and social sciences, which at least in
principle could be of interest and accessible to a nonspecialist public.
My contention is that Harvard will more likely be embarrassed by the
unedited writing of some of its faculty than gain anything in prestige
from it.

Indeed, I can see some bloggers starting to award annual prizes to the
worst writing on Harvard's site, along the lines of the Congressional
"golden fleece" awards or the "razzies" that are given out each year to
the worst movies. Really, believe me when I say, Stevan, that excellent
scholars are not always, or even often, the best writers; many a
reputation has been saved by the good work of unheralded copyeditors
working behind the scenes. To protect its reputation, Harvard might find
itself having to hire copyeditors itself to spruce up the articles
before they get posted, or at least proofreaders who could remove the
most egregious errors and typos.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press