On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Armbruster, Chris wrote:

> Much hope and a lot of money has been invested in institutional
> repositories - but, for example, in the UK the significant mandates are
> now research funder mandates and all the life science RCUKs have joined
> UK PMC. It would thus seem important and urgent that IRs reconsider
> their strategy and take a closer look at the idea of being a research
> repository or joining forces for building a national (or regional) system.

(-2) It is not at all clear that the "significant mandates" are the funder
mandates, especially in view of the past year's burst in institutional
mandates (UCL, Harvard, MIT, Stanford...):
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/alma-mand1.png

(-1) The ones who need to reconsider their strategy are the (few) research
funders who have needlessly and counterproductively stipulated that
locus of deposit should be central rather than institutional.
http://bit.ly/6tmeUl

(1) Institutions are the universal providers of all research output --
funded and unfunded, across all subjects, all institutions, and all
nations.

(2) Institutions have a vested interest in hosting, monitoring,
showcasing and archiving their own research output.

(3) OAI-compliant Repositories are all interoperable.

(4) Either funders or institutions can in principle stipulate any locus
of deposit for a mandate, either institutional or central.

(5) But mandates are still growing too slowly, and one big reason is
that *no one wants to do -- or mandate -- multiple deposit*.

(6) There are potentially multiple, diverse and divergent central loci for
any piece of research output: subject collections, national collections,
funder collections, multidisciplinary collections, etc.

(7) The metadata and/or full-text deposits of any OAI-compliant repository
can be harvested, exported or imported to any OAI-compliant repository.

(8) The natural, economical, rational and systematic solution
(one-to-many, unitary-local --> multiple-distal) is for all researchers to
deposit *locally*, in their own institional repository -- and for distal
central collections to harvest, import or export -- not the reverse
(many-to-one, distal to local, willy-nilly, back-harvesting one's own
output from here, there and everywhere!), or both, or neither.

(9) The only thing that stands in the way of that optimal solution --
whereby institutional and funder mandates can collaborate, converge,
and mutually reinforce one another instead of diverging and competing --
is the arbitrary and ill-thought-through requirement by some funders
(but by no means all) to deposit centrally instead of institutionally.

(10) This obstacle is neither a functional one (it has nothing
*whatsoever* to do with the relative functionality of institutional
and central repositories -- they are interoperable and equipotent in
every respect) nor a "cultural" one (since self-archiving culture is
still very new and all too rare): the problem is simply the needless
adoption of arbitrary and ill-thought-out locus-of-deposit requirements
by some of the initial funders.

(11) The solution is to fix the funder locus-of-deposit specs, not to
switch to central locus of deposit.

(12) Prediction: The notion of a "central repository" -- new as it is --
is already obsolescent: Is Google a "central repository" or merely a
harvester of local content?

Stevan Harnad

> Armbruster, Chris and Romary, Laurent, Comparing Repository Types: Challenges
> and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National
> Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly
> Communication (November 23, 2009). Available at SSRN:
> http://ssrn.com/abstract=1506905
>
> Regards, Chris
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: American Scientist Open Access Forum im Auftrag von Leslie Carr
> Gesendet: Di 11/24/2009 18:11
> An: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Betreff:      Re: Comparing repositories - subject-based, institutional,
> research and national repository systems
>
> On 23 Nov 2009, at 17:22, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
>> After two decades of repository development, some conclusions may be drawn
>> as to which type of repository and what kind of service best supports
>> digital scholarly communication, and thus the production of new knowledge.
>>
> I think "two decades" is a bit misleading: although what we think of as the
> big subject-based repositories may predate the Web itself it's only just 10
> years since the conception of OAI-PMH and (just) less than 8 years since the
> Budapest Open Access Initiative. Even the notion of an Institutional
> Repository is still relatively young - and when did we start calling them
> "repositories" rather than "archives"? I'm sure that the archives of this
> list will have the answer!
> --
> Les Carr
>