For hyperlinked version of this posting see:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/519-guid.html

    ** Cross-Posted: Apologies if you receive more than one copy **

This is the English translation of yesterday's timely and incisive
analysis of what is at stake in the question of locus of deposit
(institutional vs. central) for open access self-archiving mandates
universities and research funders. It was written (and translated into
English) by Prof. Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège
and founder of EurOpenScholar. It is re-posted here from Prof.
Rentier's blog.

For more background on the important issues underlying the question of
institutional vs. central deposit mandates by institutions and
funders, click here.

Liège is one of the c. 30 institutions (plus 30 funders) that have
already adopted a Green OA self-archiving mandate.

________________________________
Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?

Posted by Bernard Rentier in Open Access

(Also recommended: a remarkable and very complete review of OA by Peter Suber.)

The "Green Open Access (OA)" solution, providing free access to
research publications in Institutional Repositories (IRs) via the Web,
is certainly the best one, but sooner or later it will face a new wave
of centralised thematic or funder repositories (CRs).

The latest initiative comes from the very active EUROHORCs (European
Association of Heads of Research Funding Organisations and Research
Performing Organisations), well known for its EURYI prizes and its
prominent influence on European thinking in the research area.
EUROHORCs is working to convince the European Science Foundation (ESF)
to set up, through a large subsidy from the EC, a centralised
repository (CR) which would be both thematic (Biomedical) and local
(European). The concept is inspired by PubMed Central, among others.

The EUROHORCs initiative is very well-intentioned. It is based on an
awareness that many of us share: It is of the utmost importance that
science funded by public money should be made freely and easily
accessible to the public (OA). But the initiative also reveals a
profound misunderstanding about what OA and researchers' real needs
are all about.

The vision underlying the EUROHORCs initiative is that research
results should be deposited directly in a CR. However, if research
results are not OA today, this is not because of the lack of a CR to
deposit them in, but rather because most authors are simply not yet
depositing their articles at all, not even in an IR.

Creating a new repository is hence not the solution for making
research OA. The solution lies in universal deposit mandates, from
both institutions and funding agencies. If this task is left to large
funders such as the European Community, their central repositories
will only contain publications of the research they have funded. From
this it is easy to see that researchers will ultimately have to
deposit their publications in as many repositories as there are
funders supporting their research. Not only is this not practical, it
is needlessly cumbersome.

The obvious solution is that both research institutions and funding
agencies should jointly require IR deposit. Once that systematic
coordination has been successfully implemented, if CRs are desired,
they can easily be created and filled using compatiblesoftware for
exporting or harvesting automatically from IRs to CRs.

What is worrisome is the needless double investment in creating two
distinct kinds of repositories for direct deposit. This trend seems to
rest on the naive notion that, in the Internet era, it is somehow
still necessary to deposit things centrally. But in reality, the
centralising tool is the harvester, and its search engine. Google
Scholar, for example, is quite efficient in finding articles in any
repository, institutional or central, yet no one deposits articles
directly in Google Scholar. The perceived need for direct-deposit CRs
is groundless, technically speaking. Such CRs even run the risk of
serving as hosts for only the publications funded by a single funder.
IRs guarantee OA webwide for all research output, in all disciplines,
from all institutions, regardless of where (or whether) it has been
funded.

It is understandable that funders may wish to host a complete
collection of the research they have funded, but nowadays that can
easily be accomplished by importing it automatically from the more
complete collections of the distributed IRs -- since institutions are
the universal providers of all research output, funded and unfunded --
as long as funders collaborate with institutions in first ensuring
that all the IRs are filled with their own institutional research
output.

Besides, the OA philosophy is global. It cannot be reduced to a single
continent. Science is universal.

Giving priority to creating more CRs for direct deposit today is not
only a waste of time: it is also counterproductive for the growth of
convergent funder and institutional mandates. It would generate
multiple competing loci of primary deposit for authors -- most of
whom, we must not forget, are still not depositing at all.

In conclusion, it seems far more efficient to focus first on filling
IRs at this time; once that is accomplished, if it is judged useful,
CRs can be configured to collect their data from IRs rather than being
used as divergent points of direct deposits themselves.

The potential success of OA, without conflicting head-on with
publishers, rests on the deposit of authors' own final drafts of their
published articles, through a one-time, simple action on the part of
the author. All research is generated from research institutions: IRs
are hence the natural locus for author deposit, providing optimal
proximity, convenience and congruence with the mission of the author's
own institution. The rest is merely technical: a matter of automated
data transfer to external CRs.

The EUROHORCs proposal is only worthwhile if it contributes to the
secondary harvesting of data from primary IRs. Otherwise, it is
missing the point of OA.

ORBi wins its challenge

U. Liège's IR "ORBi" (Open Repository and Bibliography) is fulfilling
its promise: over 4,000 references have already been filed since
November 26th and, in a happy surprise, 79% of these articles turn out
to be full text. This is thus ahead of schedule for our
institutionalGreen OA Mandate (announced in March 2007 to take effect
in October 2009): "Whenever the university reviews faculty
publications for promotion, tenure, funding, or any other internal
purpose, the review will be based exclusively on full texts deposited
in the IR."

This graph shows clearly how the IR contents are growing. And yet a
quick calculation also reminds us that we are still far from capturing
the actual number of papers published yearly by our university
authors.