Re: Elsevier and IOP Still Fully Green and Onside With the Angels

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On 2011-06-24, at 9:13 PM, Mark Kille wrote:
> Steven Harnad writes:
>
> "This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website
> and your institutional repository are just institutional disk
> sectors with different (arbitrary) names."
>
> On this point, at least, he is completely wrong.
>
> 1) When a scholar ends his or her relationship with an
> institution, presumably their personal faculty page at that
> institution also goes away. An institutional repository is
> (theoretically) forever.

This is not relevant, and not at issue. Green publishers don't 
say "You may self-archive only as long as you are affiliated with 
your institution." They say you may self-archive.

(If you transfer to a new institution, self-archive there too.)

> 2) My understanding is that institutional repositories generally
> include a fairly sophisticated database structure that allows for
> searches of various kinds

Researchers don't search locally, in an institutional repository. 
They search at the harvester level (Google, Google Scholar)

> and they may expose their metadata as
> aggressively as possible to the Web as a whole. Personal faculty
> pages are discoverable through Google or, perhaps, Google
> Scholar.

Metadata are metadata, and the objective is to expose them, so 
they can be harvested by search engines and then searched and 
found by users.

> 3) Depositing into an institutional repository typically involves
> some kind of release, granting particular license/rights to the
> institution. Putting a link on a personal faculty page does not.

Some institutional repositories (advised by their IP 
know-naughts) insist on such a release ritual, yes, and it's a 
total waste of time. Moreover, the releases sometimes foolishly 
ask for more rights -- again needlessly -- than Green publishers 
have agreed to, thereby creating gratuitous obstacles to OA of 
their own making. Nothing to blame publishers for.

> 4) Given the increasing number of hosted services, an
> institutional repository could be on disk space somewhere
> completely different from the personal faculty page.

So could a personal faculty page. What is your point?

> I am all for reducing barriers to open access, but can we please
> be accurate about the statements we make in support of it?

Not just accurate but relevant.

Chrs,
Stevan Harnad