From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
To: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2013 15:58:56 -0500

If the goal is Open Access (OA) to journal articles, nothing is more
urgent, important or effective than mandating the self-archiving of
journal articles in institutional repositories (Green OA).

We have already allowed ourselves to be distracted from mandating OA
for over a decade with countless minor desiderata that leave us next
to nowhere: improved research tools, enhanced metadata, CC licenses,
enhanced preservation tools, improved peer review, Gold OA journals...

Yes, Google Scholar is far from optimal but (1) it's far, far better
than any other means of finding and retrieving journal articles that
are OA today; and (2) the way to motivate Google Scholar (and others)
to improve their search capabilities is to make (much, much) more
journal article content OA -- by mandating self-archiving of journal
articles in institutional repositories.

Providing more improved search capabilities over the existing sparse
OA content will not make the content less sparse. Only mandating Green
OA will.

Stevan Harnad

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Robert Hilliker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Stevan,
>
> While I share your concern that the primary focus needs to be on enhancing open access to scholarly research--and that it can be easy to let bells-and-whistles distract us from that core mission--I frankly don't trust Google Scholar to "solve" all our access-and-discovery issues and believe that work on cross-repository discovery tools is actually an important piece of ensuring that OA has the largest possible impact on society.
>
> Given my own experiences working with the folks at Google to ensure our repository was "properly" indexed in Google Scholar, I can tell you that, while it has had massive benefits for us in terms of increased traffic, it has also exposed limitations and blind spots in Google's policies.  If anything, Google Scholar's indexing is more opaque than their WWW indexing, particular their inclusion/exclusion requirements, but also their relative weighting of OA versions of content as opposed to subscriber-only and/or PPV versions.
>
> As just a small example, our repository, which hosts only research outputs, has over 8,000 items in it, yet even after months of back-and-forth with the team at Google they still only index some 4,700 of those in Google Scholar.  Why?  Because they purposefully exclude datasets, video of conference presentations (though they're happy to take the "proceedings" versions), and so on.
>
> Moreover, why, once a user comes to our site from Google Scholar, should they not be presented with the option of seeing OA content from outside Columbia?  If your concern is "empty" repositories, then why shouldn't we seek to leverage the work (and success) of others and, at the same time, provide better access to OA scholarship to the broader community?  Cross-discovery could enrich small collections and provide additional, local incentives to OA for scholars at campuses where there is not the same groundswell of support for OA.
>
> Further, as initiatives like ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) begin to get off the ground, there are opportunities for repositories to play a key role in ensuring that these consortial efforts help us to further the goals of the OA movement by enhancing the accessibility of OA content and not just that of commercial publishers and content providers.  As the transformation of the PIRUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) Project into IRUS demonstrates, publishers and other commercial content providers continue to (by-and-large) be driven by bottom-line considerations (the PIRUS2 report makes this very clear).  Therefore, it is in the interests of the OA movement as a whole to ensure a robust--and open--ecosystem of discovery paths exist for OA content.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Rob
>
> ------------------------------
> Robert Hilliker, PhD, MLIS
> Digital Repository Manager
> Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
> Columbia University