(i) An Institutional Repository (IR) is not the same thing as a Central (uni-disciplinary or multidisciplinary) Repository (CR) like arXiv or PubMed Central. (ii) A pre-refereeing preprint is not the same as a refereed postprint. (iii) The first and most fundamental goal of the Open Access movement is to provide Open Access to the published, peer-reviewed research literature. (iv) Open Access to pre-refereeing preprints is and must remain an optional bonus that the author may or may not provide, temporarily or permanently, over and above access to the refereed postprint. (v) Open Access to the refereed postprint is a necessity, across all disciplines, to supplement Toll Access (via journal subscription/license/pay-per-view). (vi) Open Access to the unrefereed preprint is not a necessity, not necessarily discipline-universal, and should not be portrayed as such. (vii) Central Repositories (CRs) evolved on the basis of spontaneous, voluntary self-archiving, of both preprints and postprints. (viii) Institutional self-archiving is a matter of systematic institutional policy, and pertains specifically to refereed, published postprints. (ix) Institutional self-archiving is (largely) restricted to the institution's own authors self-archiving their own work: preprints and postprints. (x) Institutions can and should control the content of their IRs (mainly by restricting it to their own researchers' output and by ensuring that it includes all the institutional published postprint output). (xi) The fact that institutional employees are the self-archivers gives IRs a level of control and answerability that superordinate CRs like arxiv -- in which anyone in the world can deposit -- do not and cannot have (although research-funder CRs are a partial exception). (xii) But for neither IRs nor CRs should access-provision (self-archiving), be conflated with publication, nor preprints (provisional) with postprints (peer-reviewed, published, and permanent).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/12/2006 11:15:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
