Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving (fwd) Stevan Harnad 10 Aug 2004 08:28 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:30:01 +0200 From: hbosc@tours.inra.fr To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving A 14:28 08/08/04 +0100, Richard Durbin wrote: > The biological community is well on the way towards central archiving. The NIH is a very large, important organisation, but it is not "the biological community"! It is only a part of the biological community. One must also keep in mind, for example, the large French national biological institutes such as the Life Science portions of CNRS, INSERM, INRA, and Institut Pasteur, which collectively constitute about 10,000 biomedical researchers in France alone. (Germany has similar demography, with its network of Max-Planck Institutes. Other countries too.) "In response to the Berlin Declaration, the European Commission has begun a study of... access to published papers... Because 41% of scientific papers originate in Europe (compared with 31% in America), the results of this study could have a big effect..." http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id061258 The Economist, Monday August 9th 2004 Its seems logical that each institute should choose to have its own institutional archives, although PubMed Central could certainly serve as an important mirror site for French (and other national) research output. If centralism were really necessary, that would be only if there were substantive technical reasons for it. In France, we have excellent technical support from CCSD http://ccsd.cnrs.fr/ which is ready to help in the OA self-archiving of all of France's scientific output. Moreover, the OAI metadata harvesting protocol makes all the distributed institutional archives worldwide interoperable with one another. http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html So it is not at all clear that Richard Durbin's suggestion that the biomedical sciences are on their way toward central self-archiving is accurate: There is more likely to be a mix of institutional and central self-archiving, as there is in other disciplines. Fortunately, the OAI protocol will integrate all these distributed archives and make them all interoperable, so users worldwide need not worry about where the full-texts are actually located. Helene Bosc Bibliothecaire Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6175 INRA-CNRS-Universite de Tours-Haras Nationaux 37380 Nouzilly France http://www.tours.inra.fr/ TEL : 02 47 42 78 00 FAX : 02 47 42 77 43 e-mail: hbosc@tours.inra.fr