"I should be grateful if anyone can provide me some evidence to back the following statement:
'Concern of longevity has contributed to the lack of active engagement from many researchers [with institutional repositories]. Guarantee of long-term preservation helps enhance a repository's trustworthiness by giving authors confidence in the future accessibility and more incentives to deposit content'
"I guess longevity here also applies to the financial sustainability of the repository itself as a business operation, in addition to its content."
The statement is (1) not based on evidence at all, but pure speculation and (2) speculation not on the part of the content-providers (i.e. the authors...)...but on the part of others, whose a priori concept of an institutional repository is that it is for long-term preservation (rather than for immediate access-provision and impact maximisation)....[I]t would be absolutely absurd of their employers and funders to mandate self-archiving for the sake of long-term preservation! Preservation of what, and why? Articles are published by journals. The preservation of the published version (PDF/XML) is the responsibility of the journals that publish it, the libraries that subscribe/license it, and the deposit libraries that archive it. None of that is the responsibility of the author or his institution, and never has been. Hence it is ridiculous to think the reason authors are not self-archiving today is because they are fretting about preservation! Nor is there the slightest evidence that the 15% of articles that has been self-archived spontaneously in central or institutional repositories has vanished or is at risk! Arxiv content is still there today, a decade and a half since its inception in 1991, under nonstop use. CogPrints contents likewise, since its inception nearly a decade ago. Ditto for the IRs that have been up since GNU Eprints was first released in 2000....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/31/2006 05:31:00 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.
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.
