From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 09:35:37 -0400

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Andrew A. Adams <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The challenge now for UK Universities will be to keep librarians out of the
> way of reserachers, or their assistants, depositing the basic meta-data and
> full text in the repository. At the University of Reading, where I was
> involved in early developments around the IR but left the University before
> the final deposit mandate (*) was adopted and the process decided on, they
> have librarians acting as a roadblock in getting material
> uploaded.Thisistotheextentthat a paper published in an electronic proceedings
> at a conference was refused permission to be placed in the repository, for
> example, while there is a significant delay in deposited materials becoming
> visible, while librarians do a host of (mostly useful but just added value
> and not necessary) checking. Sigh, empire building and other bureaucratic
> nonsense getting in the way of the primary mission - scholarly communications.
>
> (*) They have a deposit mandate but refuse to call it that. I'm not sure why,
> butthey insist on calling it a "policy". If one reads this policy, it's a
> mandate (albeit not an ideal one). For a University with an overly strong
> management team and a mangerialist approach, this unwillingness to call a
> spade a spade and a mandate a mandate, seems odd. Perhaps it's that this
> policy came from a bottom up development and not a senior management idea so
> they're unwilling to give it a strong name.
>
> Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
> Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/


Andrew is so right.

We did the rounds of this at Southampton, where the library (for
obscure reasons of its own) wanted to do time-consuming and
frustrating (for the author) "checks" on the deposit (is it suitable?
is it legal? are the metadata in order?). In ECS we bagged that right
away. And now ECS has "fast lane" exception in the university
repository (but alas other departments do not). Similar needless
roadblocks (unresolved) at UQAM.

Librarians: I know your hearts are in the right place. But please,
please trust those who understand OA far, far better than you do, that
this library vetting -- if it needs to be done at all -- should be
done after the deposit has already been made (by the author) and has
already been made immediately OA (by the software). Please don't add
to publishers' embargoes and other roadblocks to OA by adding
gratuitous ones of your own.

Let institutional authors deposit and make their deposits OA directly,
without intervention, mediation or interference. Then if you want to
vet their deposits, do so and communicate with them directly
afterward.

P.S. This is all old. We've been through this countless times before.

Dixit

Weary Archivangelist, still fighting the same needless, age-old
battles, on all sides...