What is an eprint What are institutional eprint repositories What is selfarchiving What's it all abo

1
What is an eprint? What are institutional eprint
repositories? What is self-archiving? What's it
all about?

• Fytton Rowland,
• Department of Information Science,
• Loughborough University
• J.F.Rowland_at_lboro.ac.uk

2
Where did preprints start?

• In the old days of print, in some disciplines
  notably physics there was a tradition of
  authors sending copies of their papers around to
  others before publication. In other disciplines
  notably chemistry there wasnt!
• An effort was made to systematise this (the
  Smithsonian Information Exchange), but it was
  shot down by those disciplines that didnt do it
• People also sent round reprints (strictly
  offprints) of their published papers to their
  friends

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How this changed with electronic publishing

• Even before electronic publishing, in fact, but
  after the authors typescripts became electronic
• Paul Ginsparg started the arXiv service at Los
  Alamos to store and disseminate preprints of
  high-energy physics papers
• Others attempted similar exercises in other
  subjects

4
E-Prints Preprints, Postprints, or both?

• In addition to the preprints on arXiv, it also
  contains electronic copies of papers already
  published in refereed journals
• It is important that the distinction between
  papers that have passed a quality control
  process and those which still have to undergo one
  is carefully maintained, and that each papers
  status is indicated

5
The Subversive Proposal

• Ten years or so ago, people hoped that electronic
  publishing would bring down libraries costs
• It was suggested by Stevan Harnad and others that
  authors should mount their own published papers
  on webservers, to make them available free to
  everyone, regardless of the price the publishers
  might charge

6
Open Access Gold and Green

• A number of new electronic journals have started
  in the last 15 years that do not charge anything
  to readers (or libraries) for access to their
  papers (Open Access)
• This has been christened the Gold Road to Open
  Access
• Self-archiving by authors also provides Open
  Access to their papers this is the Green Road
  to Open Access

7
Institutional repositories

• Authors own sites are ephemeral they can
  disappear if the author moves job, retires or
  dies and dont ensure longterm preservation
• If universities (and other institutions) put
  their employees papers on an institutional
  repository, the chances of maintaining longterm
  access are much improved

8
Open Archives Initiative

• Just having an institutional repository is not
  enough papers may be there, but people need to
  be able to find them
• This requires metadata, and standards to enable
  searchers to look for material throughout the
  world in a single search
• Open Archives Initiative (OAI) technical
  standards achieve this compatibility

9
OAI is not necessarily OA

• OAI is a technical standard but does not require
  content necessarily to be free
• Open Access (OA) implies free access
• However, if an institution provides an OA server
  that is OAI-compliant, then Service Providers
  metadata harvesters will find free material from
  that institution for users
• Harvesters will find OA publications the Gold
  road and discipline-based servers like arXiv too

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And what do the publishers think about all this?

• Initially, established publishers in some fields
  were very hostile some said that even posting a
  preprint was prior publication and they would
  not even consider such a paper for publication in
  the first place the Inglefinger rule. No so
  many are this hawkish now
• Others notably in physics were more relaxed.

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ROMEO, SHERPA and now Blue and Yellow!

• The ROMEO project at Loughborough investigated
  publishers attitudes to mounting of pre- and
  post-prints on servers
• The SHERPA project at Nottingham has taken over
  and augmented the ROMEO data
• Yellow publishers allow preprints but not
  postprints blue ones postprints but not
  preprints green ones both white neither
• 61 of publishers on the current SHERPA list
  formally allow some form of self-archiving 38
  out of the 61 are green

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What of the future, though?

• At present the proportion of green journals is
  rising and many publishers are benign
• But what will publishers do if institutional OA
  really catch on?
• If we reach the point where a large proportion of
  the research literature is available free to
  users, will publishers sales drop dramatically,
  putting their viability in doubt?

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Final thoughts you can take a horse to water...

• An institution may provide a server but can it
  persuade its staff to mount their papers?
  Academics are overworked and dont need extra
  jobs so make it dead easy for them!
• Will Green and Gold converge?
• One strategy for publishers if institutional
  repositories threaten their revenues would be for
  them to convert to OA publication