BiorXiv: Deposit Institutionally, Export Centrally - Open Access Archivangelism
Amsciforum 2013-11-13
Summary:
Physicists have been spontaneously self-archiving in Arxiv since 1991, but most other disciplines have not followed suit, despite the demonstrated benefits of providing open access in terms of research uptake, usage and impact.
It is for this reason that research funders and institutions worldwide are (at last) beginning to mandate (i.e., require) that their fundees and faculty self-archive.
For open access mandates to work, however, it has to be possible to systematically monitor and verify compliance.
Not all research is funded (and there are many different research funders); but virtually all research comes from institutions (universities and research institutes), most of which now have institutional repositories for their researchers to self-archive in.
Institutions are hence the natural (and eager) partners best placed to fulfill the all-important role of monitoring and ensuring compliance with the requirements of their own researchers' grant requirements, via their own institutional repositories. (This also gives institutions the incentive to adopt open access self-archiving mandates of their own, for all their research output, funded and unfunded, in all disciplines.)
Researchers, in turn, should only need to deposit their articles once, institutionally -- not willy-nilly, and multiply, in diverse institution-external repositories.
The solution is simple, since all open access repositories are interoperable, meaning they share the same core metadata-tagging system, and hence each institution's repository software can automatically export its metadata to any other institution-external repository desired.
That way researchers need only deposit once, in their own institutional repository; institutional and funder open access mandates are convergent and cooperative rather than divergent and competitive; and mandate compliance can be reliably and systematically ensured by the author's institution.
So Biorxiv is a welcome addition to the growing list of disciplinary repositories for centralized search and retrieval, but deposit in Biorxiv should not be direct: researchers should export to it from their institutional repositories. (Biorxiv can also harvest from institutional repositories, just as Google and Google Scholar do.)