--- Stevan Harnad wrote: > Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 09:52:07 +0000

From: Stevan Harnad Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving To:

AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG

"Central versus institutional self-archiving"

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3208.html

Depositing articles -- by authors who are immediately ready to deposit them today -- into existing Central Archives such as Arxiv, Cogprints or Bioline is a good idea, but it is extremely important not to let that replace systematic and general efforts to ensure that every institution also establishes its own eprint archives, and self-archiving policy (and policy fulfillment), and hence that Open Access (OA) grows and generalizes to all articles from all institutions in all disciplines worldwide.

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

It is universal institutional action that is needed: They (the universities and research institutions worldwide) are the sources of all the articles; they are the ones who need to establish their own systematic and monitored policy of self-archiving their own research; they produce research in all disciplines, not just physics, or cognitive science, or biology. Institutional self-archiving (OAI-interoperable) is the general solution for arriving at universal OA at last, the natural means, the one that fully engages institutions in open-access provision for all of their own output, in all of their disciplines; it is the means they can identify with, "own," and control.

http://software.eprints.org/handbook/departments.php

Offloading self-archiving on central archives like Bioline is a good immediate solution for those articles that their authors are ready and willing to self-archive today, when their institutions do not yet have eprint archives today. But in fulfilling this immediate need, it also risks joining the many, many factors (like an exclusive focus on OA journals) that slow and even impede the overall solution, producing limited OA for a special subset of articles, but failing to generalize to most or all of them.

So please continue to stress the universal institutional self-archiving solution, and treat central archiving as a provisional supplement to it, rather than a way of handling the easy cases now, and forgetting about the hard ones (the vast majority)!

Institutions all need their own eprint archives and their own eprint-archive-filling policies, for all of their research output, not just central archives in physics or biology for the output that some of their authors already happen to be ready to self-archive. Moreover, setting up, maintaining, and monitoring institutional eprint archives is so easy and inexpensive to do: it is important to cultivate the motivation and expertise to do it, rather than just to redirect existing motivation to central archives.

http://software.eprints.org/handbook/

In the end, of course, once all articles are being self-archived, the distinction between local and central archiving will not matter at all, because of OAI-interoperability.

"Central vs. Distributed Archives"

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html

But now, when most of it is not, the difference matters very much, for the growth of OA. Please don't let your efforts become diverted to a side-street!

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum:

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h...

Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org Hypermail Archive:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals

BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/

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