Summary: Imre Simonasks: Why are Institutional Repositories (IRs) near empty unless mandated, whereas Central Repositories (CRs) like ArXiv and CiteSeerX appear to be full without a mandate? Here is the answer: (1) Authors deposit papers directly in Arxiv, whereas CiteseerX (like Google Scholar) is harvested from authors' websites. (2) The crucial factor is central vs. institutional locus-of-deposit.Search is always at the CR level. (3) These CRs (Arxiv for physics, Citeseerx for computer science) are fuller than IRs because: (3a) An entire discipline is bigger than an institution. (3b) The global unmandated deposit rate is about 15% of OA's total target: all annual journal articles, across all disciplines and institutions. (3c) But deposit rate is the ratio of deposits to total output, which is much bigger for an entire discipline than a single institution. Physics and Computer Science have been depositing, one centrally, one institutionally, unmandated, for years, but OA's problem is all the disciplines that are not. (4) Locus-of-deposit and mandates are closely related issues. (5) Deposit mandates can be either funder or institutional mandates. (6) Funder mandates only cover funded research, and not all research is funded. (7) But all research output is institutional. (8) So if all institutions mandated OA, that would generate universal OA. (9) So what is most needed is universal institutional OA mandates. (10) Funder mandates would help far more if they could facilitate the deposit not only of the research they fund, but all research. (11) To do this, funder mandates need only change one small detail. This would lose none of their funded content, but could help gain the rest of the output of each of its fundees' institutions. (12) Funders need to stipulate the fundee's own IR as the preferred locus-of-deposit for complying with the funder's deposit mandate. (13) The fundees' deposits can be harvested to CRs from IRs. (14) The issue of search and functionality at the harvester level is a red herring. (15) The special features of the few disciplines that began spontaneously self-archiving long ago, unmandated, have nothing to do with the IR vs CR deposit-locus issue; hence unmandated CRs do not offer a viable alternative to universal IR mandates.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/13/2009 01:17:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
