Re: [EP-underground] EPrints Handbook

On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, David Cahill wrote:

> Chris,
> sounds like an excellent idea. Some things you might want to deal with,
> based on my own experience establishing an archive here at NUI
> Maynooth:

I can also echo these points.  At Bath the concerns of academics seem to
fall into three main areas:

1) Copyright - i.e. does my publisher allow self-archiving after
   publication?
2) Impact of pre-print on future publication - i.e. will my publisher
   be willing to publish if I've self-archived a pre-print?
3) Quality control - i.e. do I want my peer-reviewed material to appear
   in an e-rpint archive alongside non-peer-reviewed material?

To try and help with concerns 1) and 2) we plan to maintain a table
listing key publishers (i.e. the most used publishers for publishing by
University of Bath staff) with a summary of, and links to, their attitutes
to self-archiving.  If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how
this table changes over the next few years...

To help (a little) with 3), we have modified the default 'abstract' view
to explicitly indicate whether the publication has been peer-reviewed or
not.

On top of this, there is some general confusion about whether an
institutional e-print archive is intended as an alternative to current
publishing practice.  (E.g. what happens to peer-review if everything is
only published in an institutional archive?).  We are now very careful
*not* to use the word 'publish' when we talk about depositing materials
with the archive.

The library at Bath have recently undertaken a small-scale survey (about
100 people) of academic attitudes to e-print archives (both subject-based
and institutional) and hope to summarise it in a forthcoming Ariadne
article.

Also, as mentioned below, general confusion about impact of OAI-PMH.  The
general assumption is that if material is deposited in a University of
Bath e-print archive, then it will only be found by people directly
searching the archive using the University of Bath Web site.  (And
therefore that it is not worth depositing anything because no wider
exposure is gained).

In a UK context, one would hope that some of the initiatives funded under
the JISC FAIR call, e.g. ePrints-UK

  http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/proposal/

will help to raise awareness of some of the possibilities for
cross-archive discovery services.

Finally, I have also heard concerns about the legal status of e-prints, if
ideas are stolen from pre-prints in institutional archives and then
'formally' published by a third-party more quickly than by the original
author.  Related to this, I guess, are concerns over the impact of
self-archiving on future patent applications.

Andy.

> * A summary of the techncial issues in "manager-speak". One thing I've
> noticed is that management don't realy seem aware of what's invloved
> (technically) in setting up an archive, how it works, or how long it
> takes. It might be worth giving some kind of summary of these issues,
> at least so managers will have some idea of who to hire, how to
> schedule the project, etc.
> 
> * Copyright. This is one of the most common issues I've been asked
> about. I know Prof Harnad has written some comebacks for this one, but
> some more information/reassurance might be useful:) This definetely
> strikes me as one of the trickier issues involved.
> 
> * Getting people to use the damn thing:) As you say, this is the main
> obstacle to setting up an archive. One thing that has struck me is the
> lack of concrete backup for all the vague assurances I've been handing
> out about increased exposure, readership, etc. The OAI is a great idea,
> but in practical terms, what good is it currently doing? I know that
> might seem a bit cynical, but other than the experimental ARC service,
> I haven't really seen any examples of the 'value-added' aspect of the
> OAI. I'm well aware the system is in an embryonic stage, but that's not
> going to be much use when persuading hard-pressed academics to submit
> their papers. Fortunately no one has actually raised this question yet,
> but when they do, I'm not sure what I'll be able to say.
> It might be worth devoting some space in the handbook to this topic, as
> the OAI would appear to be one of the main selling points of the
> archive system as a whole.
> 
> * Maintenance + support. I know this is verging on a technical issue,
> but another question that pops up pretty often is the issue of support
> - how much work is it going to take to keep the thing going? -
> inlcuding both technical and editorial work, etc. Some kind of general
> discussion of the issues involved could be useful.
> 
> That's all I can think of offhand.
> Cheers,
> 
> David Cahill
> NUI Maynooth Library.
> 
> 
> 
> --- ePrints Support <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi, We've been given some funding for a colleague of mine to write
> > some more (better?!) documentation for eprints.
> > 
> > The provisional plan is to aim this at the project manager and leave
> > me doing the technical documentation still.
> > 
> > I think there is a real need for a guide to setting up an
> > institutional
> > archive as there are so many recurring (non technical) issues and
> > problems 
> > which we've encountered - policy, metadata decisions, getting people
> > to fill 
> > the damn data etc.
> > 
> > I think it would be most useful if it has an eprints bias, but deals
> > with
> > the general process of setting up an archive (eprints or otherwise).
> > 
> > So what I'm asking is for suggestions and comments really. This would
> > in effect be the "eprints-underground" manual, rather than the
> > current
> > one which could be considered the "eprints-tech" documentation.
> > 
> > -chris
> > 
> > -- 
> > 
> >  Christopher Gutteridge                  
> > [email protected]
> >  ePrints2 Coder, Support and Stuff        +44 23 8059 4833
> > 
> 
> 
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Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell       +44 1225 383933
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