Friends: In response to my question "Will it be better than each individual laboratory having its own archive in the long run? I welcome your views.", Stevan Harnad has sent this message. [I did not have any difficulty understanding Stevan's views; I circulated the exchange between him and the French OA expert among Indian OA enthusiasts just to gather their views on the issue of centralised vs distributed archives - Arun] Arun ----------- Arun, I'm afraid you may have misunderstood my message. The point was that unless a country already has a national, centralised research mega-institution distributed all over the country, as France does (CNRS), a national central archive is not a very practical proposition. In most countries, research institutions are independent local entities (mainly Universities or Labs). National research councils may fund their research, to be sure, but the entity that *provides* the research is the local institution, and it is that local institution that has the direct stake in maximising the usage and impact of its own research output by maximising its visibility and accessibility.=20 The best way research councils and government departments can help is by mandating that all funded research must be self-archived (and providing the funds to do so, if/when they are needed); further providing a central OAI-compliant archive (for those researchers whose local institutions cannot for some reason provide a local institutional one of their own) would be useful too. But the lion's share of the initiative for providing, monitoring and maintaining open access to their own local research output must come from the local research-provider institutions. OA is rather like the Internet itself in that respect. Please see the study of Swan et al., which analyses this matter in some depth: Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and O'Brien, Ann and Oppenheim, Charles and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Report. http://cogprints.org/4122/ Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and Oppenheim, Charles and O'Brien, Ann and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing. http://cogprints.org/4120/ Stevan Harnad Friends: In response to my question " Will it be better than each individual laboratory having its own archive in the long run? I welcome your views.", Stevan Harnad has sent this message. [I did not have any difficulty understanding Stevan's views; I circulated the exchange between him and the French OA expert among Indian OA enthusiasts just to gather their views on the issue of centralised vs distributed archives - Arun] Arun ----------- Arun, I'm afraid you may have misunderstood my message. The point was that unless a country already has a national, centralised research mega-institution distributed all over the country, as France does (CNRS), a national central archive is not a very practical proposition. In most countries, research institutions are independent local entities (mainly Universities or Labs). National research councils may fund their research, to be sure, but the entity that *provides* the research is the local institution, and it is that local institution that has the direct stake in maximising the usage and impact of its own research output by maximising its visibility and accessibility.=20 The best way research councils and government departments can help is by mandating that all funded research must be self-archived (and providing the funds to do so, if/when they are needed); further providing a central OAI-compliant archive (for those researchers whose local institutions cannot for some reason provide a local institutional one of their own) would be useful too. But the lion's share of the initiative for providing, monitoring and maintaining open access to their own local research output must come from the local research-provider institutions. OA is rather like the Internet itself in that respect. Please see the study of Swan et al., which analyses this matter in some depth: Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and O'Brien, Ann and Oppenheim, Charles and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton (2005) Delivery, Management and Access Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher Education. JISC Report. http://cogprints.org/4122/ Swan, Alma and Needham, Paul and Probets, Steve and Muir, Adrienne and Oppenheim, Charles and O'Brien, Ann and Hardy, Rachel and Rowland, Fytton and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing. http://cogprints.org/4120/ Stevan Harnad