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Thanks Stevan. These are key points that are coming to my mind.<br>
<br>
Stevan Harnad wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0803081122140.6790@login.ecs.soton.ac.uk"
type="cite">On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Atanu Garai/Lists wrote:
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Dear Colleagues
<br>
This question is very basic. Institutions all over the world are
<br>
developing their own repositories to archive papers written by staffs.
On
<br>
the other hand, it is very much feasible to develop thematic and
<br>
consortia repositories wherein authors all over the world can archive
<br>
their papers very easily. Both the approaches have their own pros and
<br>
cons. However, having few big thematic (e.g. subject based) and/or
<br>
consortia (e.g. Indian universities archive) repositories is more
<br>
advantageous than maintaining hundreds of thousands small IRs, taking
<br>
cost, management, infrastructure and technology considerations.
Moreover,
<br>
knowledge sharing and preservation becomes easier across the
<br>
participating individuals and institutions in large IRs. If this
<br>
advantages are so obvious, it is not understandable why there is so
much
<br>
advocacy for building IRs in all institutions?<br>
</blockquote>
Not only are the advantages of central repositories (CRs) over
institutional
<br>
repositories (IRs) not obvious, but the pro's of IRs vastly outweigh
<br>
those of CRs on every count:
<br>
</blockquote>
This forum must have discussed this issue. Also, the objective of
posing this question should be made clear, so that you can find it in
the right context and spirit. At one point of time and still now, we
wanted to have disbursed information platforms and database. But with
the emergence of large digitisation projects, notably Google Books, the
advantages of having a centralised global databases are becoming
obvious. A choice between 'central repository' and 'IR' is a policy
decision for a university or group of universities and such a decision
is driven by number of factors. Again, the question is what are the
sequence of events and rationale that led the open access community to
select IRs as primary archiving mechanism over CRs. Institutions should
be able to make a choice of their own, but if you want to advise the
institutions what should be the key criteria to advise them to go for
own IRs, over the CRs. <br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0803081122140.6790@login.ecs.soton.ac.uk"
type="cite">(1) The research providers are not a central entity but a
worldwide
<br>
network of independent research institutions (mostly universities).
<br>
<br>
(2) Those independent institutions share with their own researchers a
<br>
direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving,
evaluating,
<br>
showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research
<br>
output. (Most institutions already have IRs, and there are provisional
<br>
back-up CRs such as Depot for institutionally unaffiliated researchers
<br>
or those whose institutions don't yet have their own IR.)
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://roar.eprints.org/">http://roar.eprints.org/</a>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/">http://deposit.depot.edina.ac.uk/</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
Points 1 and 2 are essentially dealing with the notion of
self-archiving mandate that the institution may or may not invoke for
its researcher. From an institutional point of view, the choice of CR
and IR will primarily be driven by management, impact and effectiveness
of the repositories. For universities which produce a high number of
research papers annually, creating IRs may be sensible but there are
universities in India that are producing only a handful of research
papers. My understanding is that for such universities maintaining own
repositories are less effective, even if we take cost considerations
alone. The issue of "a
direct (and even somewhat competitive) interest in archiving,
evaluating,
showcasing, and maximizing the usage and impact of their own research
output" does not conflict with the choice of having a CR (or rather
global repository). Independent institutions can have both mandated
self-archiving and archiving, evaluating, showcasing, maximizing the
usage etc. in CRs as well. <br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0803081122140.6790@login.ecs.soton.ac.uk"
type="cite">(3) The OAI protocol has made all these distributed
institutions'
<br>
repositories interoperable, meaning that their metadata (or data) can
all be
<br>
harvested into multiple central collections, as desired, and searched,
<br>
navigated and data-mined at that level. (Distributed archiving is also
<br>
important for mirroring, backup and preservation.)
<br>
<br>
(4) Deposit takes the same (small) number of keystrokes institutionally
<br>
or centrally, so there is no difference there; but researchers normally
<br>
have one IR whereas the potential CRs for their work are multiple. (The
<br>
only "global" CR is Google, and that's harvested.)
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/">http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
Technology is not a constraint in making metadata interoperable, though
not without some compromise in the data quality. For full text data,
interoperability is challenged by copyright restrictions. These dilemma
are avoided intrinsically in CRs. On the other hand, large scale CRs
are having the opportunity to make full text search and retrieval
feasible. Volatility of harvested metadata from IRs is avoided with the
implementation of CRs.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0803081122140.6790@login.ecs.soton.ac.uk"
type="cite">
(5) The distributed costs of institutional self-archiving are certainly
<br>
lower than than maintaining CRs (how many? for what fields? and who
<br>
maintains them and pays their costs?), particularly as the costs of a
<br>
local IR are low, and they can cover all of an institution's research
<br>
output as well as many other forms of institutional digital assets.
<br>
</blockquote>
You may like to give some empirical data here to corroborate your
statement. Creating and maintenance costs of IR are minimal, but if you
want to advocate and popularise IRs, you will have a staff. There are
some figures that were submitted to UK parliamentary committee. CRs
adopt all these costs and institutions may or may not give the CRs same
amount of subscription costs. Preserving "as well as many other forms
of institutional digital assets" was not in the IR's mandate but
obviously CRs can also do that purely from tech point of view.
<blockquote
cite="mid:Pine.LNX.4.64.0803081122140.6790@login.ecs.soton.ac.uk"
type="cite">(6) Most important of all, although research funders can
reinforce
<br>
self-archiving mandates, the natural and universal way to ensure that
IRs
<br>
(and hence harvested CRs) are actually filled with all of the world's
<br>
research output, funded and unfunded, is for institutions to mandate
<br>
and monitor the self-archiving of their own research output, in their
<br>
own IRs, rather than hoping it will find its way willy-nilly into
<br>
external CRs.
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/">http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
Self-archiving and mandate is not a technological issue, it is a
regulatory one - hence, it can be done in IRs and/or CRs. <br>
Best<br>
Atanu Garai<br>
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