Allies
With allies like Dr. Stevan Harnad, do institutional repositories really need enemies?
(Repository Fringe wants me to be controversial. I’m practicing—er, practising. Hush.)
Nature Publishing Group just announced that since it’s building infrastructure to deposit postprints into PubMed Central on behalf of NIH-funded authors anyway, it’ll good-Naturedly throw open the doors to institutional repositories as well on campuses with institutional mandates.
This repository-rat was very happy to see that announcement. It doesn’t directly help me one bit at this juncture, because IR software is such a silo-by-design that until SWORD came about, none of it had decent remote-deposit APIs. However, thinking strategically, this announcement can only ratchet up the momentum behind the SWORD API and OAI-ORE, never mind institutional permission mandates, and that will be good for IRs, powerfully good, in the medium-to-long term. We have to de-silo-ize, and we should be pushing mandates. Anything that dangles a carrot at us for doing so (and NPG content is a big juicy carrot) is useful.
And of course once I have DSpace 1.5 running in production and can spare a few cycles to figure out how its SWORD implementation works, I’ll hop right in line at NPG, hat in hand. Please, sir, may I have some content? It’d be dumb not to. No, MPOW doesn’t have a mandate, and I don’t see one happening for three to five years at least (pace the murkiness of my personal crystal ball), but somehow I think NPG would work with me, if only to guinea-pig their setup.
Dr. Harnad, however, he is not happy. “If Nature really wants to help OA, then dropping its access embargo would be a lot more helpful than saving authors from having to do a few keystrokes.”
Wait a second. I thought keystrokes were the big limiting factor in reaching green-OA’s holy grail. A lot of keystrokes were just eliminated, and very likely more will be as other publishers (who watch NPG like hawks, because NPG is amazing) follow suit. Surely this is a good thing? Guess not.
Truthfully, though, it’s not the count-your-blessings aspect of this silly little kerfuffle that gets under my skin. It’s the pattern, the pattern of OA advocates thoughtlessly backstabbing their allies, with IRs being a favorite whipping-boy, and it’s of long standing. And yes, before you ask, I’m as guilty as anyone when my annoyance with DSpace boils over.
Dr. Harnad pillorying NPG for helping IRs stabs me and my fellow repo-rats in the back, because we need cooperative publishers and impetus toward interoperability. Noisy proclamations about how everybody wants open access likewise backstab repo-rats, because if library administrators believe this bushwa, they inevitably blame their local repo-rat for still-pathetic adoption and content-capture rates. Tarring all librarians, repo-rats included, with broadstroke brushes about nitpickiness and get-with-the-program-already—well, I need say no more. Ignoring librarian contributions to OA, particularly green OA, is worse. All of this harms IRs. If IRs are still important to OA (which is, I grant, arguable), it harms OA.
So could we all stop it, please? Myself included. We’re allies; let’s act like it. At the least, we could start considering the impact of our careless words on our allies.