Here, there, or even everywhere? Where researchers should deposit their articles

The issue of which model for Open Access self-archiving is best – asking researchers to deposit their work in centralised, subject-based repositories or in their own institutional repository – is again being discussed at length on the Open Access discussion lists. It is true that subject-based collections have been making the running and that until recently most institutions have seemed to be disinterested in supporting the efforts to make research more widely available and used.

Although Chris Awre and I argued three years ago, in our study on 'Linking UK Repositories' (and in a short paper from that study here) that distributed deposit was the best model to aim for, we were arguing from a theoretical standpoint. Only a handful of universities in the UK had at the time shown any sign of understanding what opportunities lay ahead in the way universities disseminate the results of their efforts, and of the responsibilities they have towards society. So we had a nice model, based on working with human nature (one deposit, multiple harvests) but the players who were needed to drive the deposit were otherwise preoccupied and disengaged from the discussion.

It was the funders who saw the potential, reflected upon the connection between paying for something from public money and handing over the results to a service industry whose business model was mostly predicated upon access control - and disconnected it. The universities continued to snore but while they did so at least the funders were out of bed, showered and breakfasted. Unfortunately, instead of nudging awake the universities - their partners in research endeavour and the employers of the people to whom they hand out funds – some big funders let them lie, circumventing them in the mechanics of the Open Access process. I would suggest that in doing this they were failing to take the whole research community's interests into account. But with loud snores still emanating from the universities, who could blame them? And that's where we were until quite recently.

Now there are stirrings in the academy. Stretchings and yawnings and comings-awake. I spent yesterday at a large London medical school to which I was invited to talk with the people involved in research policy about establishing a repository and making their research Open Access. The invitation included the phrase: "because it is time we organised our research better and allowed access to it". Last month I was at a university on the other side of the UK to do the same thing. Two days ago I received another invitation from a different London college in the same vein. In the last two years EPrints Services, the consultancy arm of the EPrints operation in Southampton, has had over 150 approaches from universities and research institutes around the world about setting up an open access research repository.

What does all this show? It shows that universities finally 'get it', which is great for them, for research and for society. Unfortunately, they are getting it later than would have been ideal. In our discussions yesterday we had to deal with the fact that while over 90% of UK biomedical research is now covered by funder OA mandates (good), many of those mandates stipulate UKPMC as the deposit locus (not so good for the employers of the fundees - the universities). It's not so good because although this medical school can harvest a considerable amount of the material published by its employees from UKPMC, thus finding an easy way to start filling its own repository, this does mean it has an extra job to do. It's not a disaster, and CERN has been doing the same thing with arXiv for years, but it's another task for the repository staff. It also means the medical school has to add a complication to a nice simple wording for its own policy, explicitly allowing those who are already under a funder mandate exemption from the medical school policy. For sure, it would be asking too much to demand that these people deposit BOTH in the institutional repository and in UKPMC. And the funders got there first.

True, we shouldn't get too wound up about this. Interoperability means that back-harvesting, forward-harvesting and upside-down-harvesting can go on wherever appropriate but it is a shame that we have arrived at a point where universities, the mainstays of our societies' research endeavours, have to develop more complex policies than would otherwise have been the case had funders simply directed their grantees to deposit their work in their institutional collections and harvested from there. The funders know where their grantees are, the repository software has a metadata field for funder, so the mechanics are simple. The benefit of such a move would have been to help the universities see the overall plan (earlier than they have done), ensure they put the right infrastructure in place and encouraged them to apply similar polices to cover all the research their employees do. The whole research community would thus be included and benefiting by this time, not just the biomedical community or other communities covered by big funder mandates. I would say that the research funders have rather let down their partners, the universities, in this sense.

Deposit rates for UKPMC are not yet all they should be. Only a minority of the articles expected to be in UKPMC by this time have been deposited, partly because the publishers who said they would do this on behalf of authors have not always done so and partly because some authors have not complied with the mandates from the UK biomedical funders. The UKPMC people are taking steps to remedy this, but how much easier it is for universities to attain a high level of compliance: they say, quite simply, that the repository is where they will be looking for material to be included in research assessment (and for staff appraisals, promotions boards, tenure committees ...). Yes, I know the funders could use this sort of stick to conjure up the spectre of future funding chances being low for non-compliers. But there is one thing more important to a researcher than a hypothetical risk of not getting future funding, and that is a non-hypothetical risk of not being employed for too much longer. It sharpens the focus just a tad.

The other strand of discussion on this topic is always about where users find the Open Access information they want. The argument goes that they want to find it in subject-specific collections. Of course they do. It was never expected that searching specific institutional repositories would be a common practice - the whole point of OAI-PMH was to build what is effectively a worldwide research database, free to use, and that services would harvest and offer the packaged content of that worldwide database in myriad ways. Les Carr's data show that only a very small percentage of visitors come into the Southampton repository through the front door: most are referred by Google and other web search engines, exactly as would be predicted from our own findings that more than 70% of researchers use Google as the tool of first choice when looking for articles they cannot access through their own library. In this sense, Google is a repository service provider, but there is room for many more, especially those providing a subject view on Open Access content. So subject-specific collections, which are lovely, should be harvesting from the university repositories all the material that is relevant to that subject. They can provide all manner of nice services on that collection, tailored to the needs of that particular subject community.

Distributed, local deposit works with human nature, researcher preferences and the structure of the international research system, which remains institutionally-based; and the universities - those large, expensive edifices we all pay for and wish to see operate at maximum efficiency - get to collect their own research together and use the collection to manage their research effort so much better than ever before.

Yesterday, the head of one research unit in the medical school, commenting on the figures on one of my slides, said "I think your figures for research papers published from here are a bit low. I know, for instance, that from my own unit we publish something like 100 articles or so a year". He didn't know exactly, he could only guess; but when his repository is up and running he will know precisely what is coming out of his unit and from the medical school as a whole. He will have a whole new box of tools to use in his job.