Re: Institutional repositories and digital preservation

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Richard Poynder wrote:

> [1] Should institutional repositories [IRs] be viewed as preservation tools?

Not primarily. IRs' primary function should be to provide open 
access [OA] to institutional research article output.

> [2] Should self-archiving mandates always be accompanied by a 'preservation
> mandate'?

Definitely not. (But IRs can, will, should and do preserve their 
contents.) For journal articles, the real digital preservation 
problem concerns the publisher's version-of-record. 
Self-archiving mandates pertain to the author's-draft.

> [3] Should Gold OA funds be used to enable preservation in 
institutional
> repositories?

Funds committed to Gold OA should be used any way the university 
or research funder that can afford them elects to use them 
(though does seem a bit random to spend money designated to pay 
for publishing in Gold OA journals instead to preserve articles 
published in subscription journals).

But on no account should commitment to fund either Gold OA or 
digital preservation of the version-of-record be a condition for 
mandating Green OA self-archiving.

> More, including an interview with digital preservation specialist Neal
> Beagrie, here: http://bit.ly/dur5EP

Richard Poynder's Interview is, as always, well worth reading. 
Comments follow (linked version is at 
http://bit.ly/DigPreservVSoa ):

Commentary on Richard Poynder's "Preserving the Scholarly Record: 
Interview with digital preservation specialist Neil Beagrie"

The trouble with universities (or nations) treating digital 
preservation (which is a genuine problem, and a genuine 
responsibility) as a single generic problem -- covering all the 
university's (or nation's) "digital output," whether published or 
unpublished, OA or non-OA -- is not only that adding an 
additional preservation cost and burden where it is not yet 
needed (by conflating Green OA self-archiving mandates with 
"preservation mandates" and their funding demands) makes it even 
harder to get a Green OA self-archiving mandate adopted at all. 
But taking an indiscriminate, scattershot approach to the 
preservation problem also disserves the digital preservation 
agenda itself.

As usual, what is needed is to sort out and understand the actual 
contingencies, and then to implement the priorities, clearly and 
explicitly, in the requisite causal order. The priorities here 
are to focus university (or national) preservation efforts and 
funds on what needs to be preserved today. And -- as far as 
universities' own institutional repositories (IRs) are concerned 
-- that does not include the publisher's official 
version-of-record for that university's (or nation's) journal 
article output. Preserving those versions-of-record is a matter 
to be worked out among deposit libraries and the publishers and 
institutional subscribers of the journals in question. Each 
university's own IR is for providing OA to its own authors' 
final, refereed drafts of those articles, in order to make them 
accessible to those users worldwide who do not have subscription 
access to the version-of-record. The author's draft does indeed 
need preservation too, but that's not the same preservation 
problem as the problem of preserving the published 
version-of-record (nor is it the same document!).

Perhaps one day universal Green OA mandates will cause journal 
subscriptions to become unsustainable, because the worldwide 
users of journal articles will be fully satisfied with just the 
author's final drafts rather than needing the publisher's 
version-of-record, and hence journal subscriptions will be 
cancelled. If and when we ever reach that point, the 
version-of-record will no longer be produced by the publisher, 
because the authors' drafts will effectively become the 
version-of-record. Journal publishers will then convert to Gold 
OA publishing, with what remains of the cost of publication paid 
for by institutions, per individual article published, out of 
their windfall subscription cancellation savings. (Some of those 
savings can then also be devoted to digital preservation of the 
institutional version-of-record.)

But conflating the (nonexistent) need to pay for this 
hypothetical future contingency today (when we still have next to 
no OA or OA mandates, and subscriptions are still going strong) 
with either universities' (or nations') digital preservation 
agenda or their OA IR agenda is not only incoherent but 
counterproductive.

Let's keep the agendas distinct: IRs can archive many different 
kinds of content. Let's work to preserve all IR content, of 
course, but let's not mistake that IR preservation function for 
journal article preservation or OA. For journal articles, worry 
about preserving the version-of-record -- and that has nothing to 
do with what is being deposited in IRs today.

For OA, worry about mandating deposit of the author's version -- 
and that has nothing to do with digital preservation of the 
version-of-record. Nor should the need to mandate depositing the 
author's version be in any way hamstrung with extra expenses that 
concern the publish's version-of-record, or the university's IR, 
or OA. (Exactly the same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, at the 
national preservation level, insofar as journal articles are 
concerned: A journal's contents do not all come from one 
institution, nor from one nation.)

And, while we're at it, let's also keep university (or national) 
funding of Gold OA publishing costs distinct from the Green OA 
mandating agenda too. First things first. Needlessly 
over-reaching (for Gold OA funds or preservation funds) simply 
delays getting what is already fully within universities' (and 
nations') grasps -- which is the newfound (but mostly unused) 
potential to provide OA to the authors' drafts of all their 
refereed journal articles by requiring them to be deposited in 
their OA IRs (not by reforming journal publishing, nor by solving 
the digital preservation problem).

Stevan Harnad