Open Access News

On Wed, 13 Feb 2006, Sarah Kaufman wrote in JISC-REPOSITORIES:

...having spoken to academics within this institution, it has become apparent that potential depositors may be wary of depositing into a digital repository as they fear that a repository that includes pre-prints may not appear 'credible'. Has anyone else dealt with this sort of concern, and how you responded to those that have voiced this concern? Do any repositories exclude items that have not gone through the peer-review process? If you accept items that have not gone through the peer-review process, do you apply any forms of quality control on the item?

The following may perhaps save people a lot of time that will otherwise be wasted re-inventing this superfluous wheel:

1. The right way to make the distinction between published, peer-reviewed material and unpublished material is the classical way: by tagging it as such.
2. The IR softwares have tags for peer-reviewed articles as well as for unrefereed preprints.
3. The scholarly/scientific community is quite aware of this distinction; it has already been dealing with it for years in the paper medium, in the form of published articles versus unpublished drafts.
4. An IR is not a publication venue -- it is a means of providing access to published -- and, if the author wishes, unpublished -- work.
5. Any user who wishes to reserve their time and reading to peer-reviewed, published work can do so; they need only note the tags (is it "peer-reviewed"? is it "published"? what journal is it published in?).
6. Disciplines differ in the degree to which they use pre-refereeing preprints: physics relies heavily on them, biology less. This is a choice for researchers to make, both as authors (deciding what to deposit) and as users (deciding what to read).
7. This decision cannot and should not be made a priori by IR managers. An IR deposit is not a publication, any more than a mailed first draft on paper is. It is a decision by an author to provide, and by a user to use, a document.
8. The most absurd thing of all would be to institute an IR-level system of "quality" control: Leave that to the peer specialists and the journals. IRs are just access-providers.
9. It can and should, however, be decided whether an IR is for research output only (documents and data, whether pre- or post-peer-review) or it is also for non-research output (e.g., teaching materials). Some IRs that are sectored by subject matter will also want to decide what disciplines they are catering for.
10. The right thing to tell naive researchers who have never self-archived or never used an OA IR is that an OA IR is neither a publication nor a library catalogue of publications: It is a means for researchers to maximize access to their research output, both before and after peer-reviewed publication.