RE: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

["Aaron Edlin" <edlin@econ.berkeley.edu>]

My own thinking, and the philosophy of bepress, is that the
university is filled with many interests and constituencies.
The puzzle is getting them to work well together. Faculty seek to
promote themselves individually, and seek control and identity;
universities seek to promote themselves and grow; librarians seek
to create useful order from chaos. These goals can, but need not,
conflict.

As to mandates, I favor them.  As I see it, the university or
government funds much of my research.  Why should they not demand
and insist on a non-exclusive copy of my writings to preserve for
posterity (for what posterity cares about my work) or to
advertise to the world, should I be lucky enough that UC Berkeley
could bask in the glory of my writing?

All that said, for various political and practical reasons,
including lobbying by Elsevier, I don't see *effective* mandates
coming for a little while yet.

In the meantime, the key for those who are pro-repository is to
find a way to work with faculty.  How do you make faculty
volunteer or indeed be eager? Convince them that their career
will benefit and give them control and something to identify
with.  Faculty want their own place...one they control... on the
internet.  Many build sites themselves with cumbersome and kludgy
tools.  These sites are highly idiosyncratic data structures.
Better that they should be easy to use, beautiful, and easily
harvestable (or automatically incorporated) into the
institution's IR (or Research Showcase, as I like to call it).

For this, bepress developed SelectedWorks
(http://works.bepress.com). D-space has developed personal
research pages.  These, I predict, will be key to filling
repositories until effective mandates arrive.

___

P.S. Please have a look at
http://works.bepress.com/aaron_edlin/ and sign up for
notifications of my new work!
Aaron Edlin Chairman,
The Berkeley Electronic Press 
Richard Jennings Professor of Economics and Law, 
UC Berkeley Homepage:
http://works.bepress.com/aaron_edlin/
Co-Editor, The Economists' Voice, http://www.bepress.com/ev
Editor, The B.E. Journals of Theoretical Economics,
http://www.bepress.com/bejte


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Watkinson
Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2007 8:06 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: 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=3Dbrowse
>
>> 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
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