Friends: Here is a comment by Peter Suber applauding the US NIH mandatory self-archiving plan and Stevan Harnad's response to it - actually suggesting that NIH should mandate self-archiving in the authors' own institutional archives. This appears to be something funding agencies in India [such as DST, DBT, DAE, CSIR, UGC] could follow. Now there are at least half a dozen studies showing that papers in the open access regime are cited far more often than papers in the toll-access regime. And, as has been pointed out by OA advocates, institutional archiving has many benefits apart from improving the visibility of the scientists and their work. Many of you might be interested in seeing Richard Poynder's 10-year history of the Open Access movement that has just appeared today in Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Peter Suber has written an excellent FAQ on the House Appropriations Committee/NIH mandatory self-archiving plan: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm The FAQ is clear, comprehensive and on-target. I highly recommend it to anyone who is having any difficulty understanding the House/NIH recommendations. There is only one point on which I would disagree. Peter's FAQ says: Why PubMed Central [PMC]? PMC is maintained by the NIH; it already houses a very large body of medical literature; it has benefited from years of infrastructure refinements; it is committed to open access, long-term preservation, and interoperability. Some publishers object to the use of PMC and would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere, either in multiple repositories or in any repository that meets certain conditions. If the report language were amended to meet these objections, open access would not suffer. At the same time, however, the high quality of PMC makes such amendments unnecessary. Peter is right that if the report were amended to allow grantees to deposit in any OAI-compliant archive, open access *to those papers* would not suffer. He is also right that this amendment would not be a *necessary* one. But such an amendment would make the recommendation a far *better* one. For it would generate far more Open Access (OA), in more disciplines and institutions, and sooner, if PMC were not stipulated as the mandatory locus of the self-archiving, only that the self-archiving must be done in an OAI-compliant OA Archive, preferably the author's own institutional OA Archive. The reason is that: (1) the self-archiving practice is far more likely to generalize to other disciplines at the same university if it is done at that university than if it is only done in PMC; (2) for functionality and quality the physical locus of the full-text makes no difference at all, as long as it is in an OAI-compliant OA Archive; (3) all OAI-compliant OA Archives (including PMC) are equivalent and interoperable; (4) the metadata of all OAI-complaint OA Archives are harvestable, hence they could be harvested into PMC too, if that was desired; (5) even the full-texts could be harvested into PMC, if that was desired; (6) PMC could (and should) be available as a backup locus for self-archiving for any grantee whose university does not yet have an OAI-compliant OA Archive. Another (very minor) reason for institutional rather than central self-archiving is that many of the 86% of journals that have already given their green light to author self-archiving have stipulated self-archiving at the author's own institution (so that their green light should not be legally construable as sanctioning 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers). The publishers' worry is silly, but mandating PMC self-archiving just makes it into a further needless obstacle. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So it is not just publishers who "would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere": It is also those OA advocates (like myself) who hope to see the House/NIH self-archiving mandate's effect propagate far beyond just the NIH-funded biomedical research papers to all of OA, in all fields. "In a study in the UK which we have just completed for the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC (a brief account of which will, referees permitting, be published in a forthcoming special issue of Serials Review), after quite exhaustive review of all aspects of e-prints archiving, we recommended a "harvesting model", in which full texts (and other digital objects) remain at distributed institutional (and other) archives, but metadata is harvested and processed centrally." --- Fytton Rowland http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html See also: "Central vs. Distributed Archives" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html "Central versus institutional self-archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html Stevan Harnad Open Access Institutional Archives for India Friends: Here is a comment by Peter Suber applauding the US NIH mandatory self-archiving plan and Stevan Harnad's response to it - actually suggesting that NIH should mandate self-archiving in the authors' own institutional archives. This appears to be something funding agencies in India [such as DST, DBT, DAE, CSIR, UGC] could follow. Now there are at least half a dozen studies showing that papers in the open access regime are cited far more often than papers in the toll-access regime. And, as has been pointed out by OA advocates, institutional archiving has many benefits apart from improving the visibility of the scientists and their work. Many of you might be interested in seeing Richard Poynder's 10-year history of the Open Access movement that has just appeared today in Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Peter Suber has written an excellent FAQ on the House Appropriations Committee/NIH mandatory self-archiving plan: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm The FAQ is clear, comprehensive and on-target. I highly recommend it to anyone who is having any difficulty understanding the House/NIH recommendations. There is only one point on which I would disagree. Peter's FAQ says: Why PubMed Central [PMC]? PMC is maintained by the NIH; it already houses a very large body of medical literature; it has benefited from years of infrastructure refinements; it is committed to open access, long-term preservation, and interoperability. Some publishers object to the use of PMC and would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere, either in multiple repositories or in any repository that meets certain conditions. If the report language were amended to meet these objections, open access would not suffer. At the same time, however, the high quality of PMC makes such amendments unnecessary. Peter is right that if the report were amended to allow grantees to deposit in any OAI-compliant archive, open access *to those papers* would not suffer. He is also right that this amendment would not be a *necessary* one. But such an amendment would make the recommendation a far *better* one. For it would generate far more Open Access (OA), in more disciplines and institutions, and sooner, if PMC were not stipulated as the mandatory locus of the self-archiving, only that the self-archiving must be done in an OAI-compliant OA Archive, preferably the author's own institutional OA Archive. The reason is that: (1) the self-archiving practice is far more likely to generalize to other disciplines at the same university if it is done at that university than if it is only done in PMC; (2) for functionality and quality the physical locus of the full-text makes no difference at all, as long as it is in an OAI-compliant OA Archive; (3) all OAI-compliant OA Archives (including PMC) are equivalent and interoperable; (4) the metadata of all OAI-complaint OA Archives are harvestable, hence they could be harvested into PMC too, if that was desired; (5) even the full-texts could be harvested into PMC, if that was desired; (6) PMC could (and should) be available as a backup locus for self-archiving for any grantee whose university does not yet have an OAI-compliant OA Archive. Another (very minor) reason for institutional rather than central self-archiving is that many of the 86% of journals that have already given their green light to author self-archiving have stipulated self-archiving at the author's own institution (so that their green light should not be legally construable as sanctioning 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers). The publishers' worry is silly, but mandating PMC self-archiving just makes it into a further needless obstacle. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So it is not just publishers who "would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere": It is also those OA advocates (like myself) who hope to see the House/NIH self-archiving mandate's effect propagate far beyond just the NIH-funded biomedical research papers to all of OA, in all fields. "In a study in the UK which we have just completed for the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC (a brief account of which will, referees permitting, be published in a forthcoming special issue of Serials Review), after quite exhaustive review of all aspects of e-prints archiving, we recommended a "harvesting model", in which full texts (and other digital objects) remain at distributed institutional (and other) archives, but metadata is harvested and processed centrally." --- Fytton Rowland http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html See also: "Central vs. Distributed Archives" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html "Central versus institutional self-archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html Stevan Harnad