Caveat Lector

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.

So I was watching my birthday present, and I noticed something I’d never noticed before and that even the almighty Lurker’s Guide doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Spoilers ho. You have been warned.

In Day of the Dead, Zooty warns Sheridan about the Keepers. You try and tell me he doesn’t. “Why? Because it told me to.”

Damn, Neil Gaiman is too clever for his own good.

The reason we Frozen Northers put up with our unbelievable winters is that on July 4th we can legitimately expect a sunny day with low humidity and temperatures in the upper 70s (around 25 for you Centigraders). Can’t argue with that.

Alas, I have things to accomplish today: a chunk of red tape to deal with and at least two more pages of article to write. Still, I shall be accomplishing things in the comfort of my easy chair and with my birthday present, the final season of Babylon 5, on the DVD player, so I’m not grumbling. Much.

Besides, it’s hard to grumble when a small gray cat is contorting herself into bizarre and unlikely leaps to catch her thing-onna-string-onna-stick. The said Mouser-beastie has developed a bizarre and unlikely craving for human-edible greens, such that I have to kick her off the kitchen counter repeatedly in order to make a salad or a stir-fry. She did draw the line at kohlrabi greens, for some reason. Didn’t like those. But Chinese cabbage and leaf lettuce are apparently quite yummy.

(She also managed to catch a real live mouse and turn it loose in our bedroom, and… yeah, let’s not go there.)

The geese and rabbits have been prolific as usual this year. Goose day care contains some two dozen younglings in four different families, and I stopped on my walk to work one morning a few weeks ago to watch no fewer than three baby bunnies at breakfast together.

“I came back by the bay today,” said David yesterday evening.

“Did you see the green heron? I know there’s one out there.”

He looked smug. “I saw two.”

This is why we live where we do. In case you were wondering.

I am trapped between writing an article and a work report on the one hand and wanting to do right by Repository Fringe on the other, so blogging is liable to be light for the next few weeks. (Though the Repo Fringe talk is coming together nicely, I will say. All I can say about the article is argh, I hate and loathe and abominate writing.)

However, I did want to point out to CavLec partisans that there is now a commenting venue of sorts: my FriendFeed page, which imports CavLec’s RSS feed.

I’m okay with this, just as I’ve been okay with the LiveJournal feed as a solution to the oft-expressed desire of various CavLec readers to have a public place to shake me until my teeth rattle. Anonymous cowards need not apply; only FriendFeed subscribers can add comments. The comments don’t live in my living room, which I appreciate. Trolls can apparently be banned from further commenting, though I’m not quite sure of the mechanism there, not having had to employ it.

I hopped onto FriendFeed as part of an exodus from Twitter’s FailWhale. It turns out to be rather clever, especially in the design department. If you see something on your FriendFeed friends page that you don’t care to look at, you “hide” it. If you then ask to hide more things like that, AJAX dialog figures out intelligently what classes of things the thing you hid belong to, and offers you the chance to hide all of them. I don’t personally care about people’s Flickr feeds (yeah, sorry, not a visual person by nature), so I told FriendFeed not to show me them, and by gum it doesn’t. Clever and helpful. I like that in an app.

But anyway. You can now indulge your commenting urge. Go to it.