Comments on: Canada joins PMC International

By: Jim Till

Jim Till — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:44:36 +0000

See also this blog post and attached comments: Hark - PubMedCentral Canada on the horizon! by Devon Greyson, Social Justice Librarian, July 15, 2009.

By: Jim Till

Jim Till — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:29:26 +0000

The News Release about PMC Canada has been noted in several FriendFeed entries.

By: Jim Till

Jim Till — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:15:17 +0000

The viewpoint of Francis Collins can be expected to be influential, if he indeed becomes the next NIH Director.

By: Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:05:41 +0000

Discussion will doubtless continue, relentlessly. What I was hoping to encourage was deeper reflection on the reasons already many times adduced but not appreciated — and then practical action.

By: Jim Till

Jim Till — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:15:28 +0000

Some history: There have been many posts about the subject "Central vs. Distributed Archives" to the American Scientist Open Access Forum (which Stevan Harnad moderates). Early ones can be found by searching for the key word "Distributed" in the archive American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum By Thread. (Posts dated between August 25, 1998 and June 23, 2006 are archived at this site). The first post found by such a search was Central vs. Distributed Archives, by Stevan Harnad, dated June 28, 1999. This same post, entitled "Central" vs. "Distributed" Archives: A Red Herring, is post #188 in another archive, American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum archives – 1999. So, the topic "Central vs. Distributed Archives" has been discussed for at least a decade. This discussion seems likely to continue.

By: Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:21:39 +0000

The value of PubMed Central (PMC) is great and indisputable. That is not what is at issue. What is at issue is (1) WHERE TO DEPOSIT (should researchers be mandated to deposit directly in PMC or in their own institution’s repository, from which PMC — and other central services — can harvest?) and (2) WHO SHOULD DEPOSIT (the author or the publisher?).

The links I provided above in — http://bit.ly/ECAuA — explain the reasons why (1) the locus of deposit for both funder and institutional mandates should be the institutional repository and not PMC or any other central service and the reasons why (2) deposit should be done by the mandatee author, and not a third party, such as a publisher. The reasons discussed are very specific and matter a great deal for the practical success and effectiveness of OA mandates. They deserve to be reflected upon in order to ensure that funder and institutional policies are compatible, coherent, and can systematically scale globally.

By: Jim Till

Jim Till — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:25:15 +0000

See PMC Overview for a concise statement about the value of PubMed Central.

By: Stevan Harnad

Stevan Harnad — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:18:09 +0000

What Canada needs is not yet another central repository, but more mandates by institutions (and funders) for their employees (and fundees) to deposit directly in their own institutional repositories (the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all subjects, biomedical or otherwise). The institutional deposits can then be harvested into whatever subject-specific central collections one wishes to create. Mandating direct central deposit simply makes funder mandates compete with institutional mandates, at the cost of needlessly slowing and handicapping instead of facilitating and accelerating progress toward universal Open Access to all research, funded and unfunded, across all subjects, biomedical or otherwise: http://bit.ly/ECAuA