To self-archive is to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible website. Depositing involves a simple web interface where the depositer copy/pastes in the ‘metadata’ (date, author-name, title, journal-name, etc.) and then attaches the full-text document. Self-archiving takes only about 10 minutes for the first paper and even less time for all subsequent papers. Some institutions even offer a proxy self-archiving service, to do the keystrokes on behalf of their researchers. Software is also being developed to allow documents to be self-archived in bulk, rather than just one by one.
1. What is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)?
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has designed a shared code for metadata tags (e.g., ‘date’, ‘author’, ‘title’, ‘journal’ etc.). The full-text documents may be in different formats and locations, but if they use the same metadata tags they become ‘interoperable’. Their metadata can be ‘harvested’ and all the documents can then be jointly searched and retrieved as if they were all in one global collection, accessible to everyone.
2. What is OAI-compliance?
OAI-compliance means using the OAI metadata tags. A document can be OAI-compliant and an Eprint archive can be OAI-compliant. All OAI- compliant documents in OAI-compliant archives are interoperable. This means distributed documents can be treated as if they were all in one place and one format.
3. What is the purpose of self-archiving?
The purpose of self-archiving is to make the full text of the peer-reviewed research output of scholars/scientists and their institutions visible, accessible, harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access to the Internet. The purpose of thus maximizing public access to research findings online is that this in turn maximizes its visibility, usage and impact –which in turn maximizes its benefits to research itself (and hence to the society that funds it) in terms of research dissemination,
application and growth, hence research productivity and progress. This is why Open Access is both optimal and inevitable.
4. What is the difference between distributed and central self-archiving? All OAI-compliant archives are interoperable. This means their contents are harvestable by cross-archive search engines into global virtual archives. Hence OAI has eliminated the difference between self-archiving documents in one central archive or many distributed archives. Users need not know where documents are located in order to find, browse and retrieve them (any more than they do when they are using commercial indexing or abstracting services); and the full texts are all retrievable. 5. Who should self-archive?
The Budapest Open Access Initiative is focussed specifically on the refereed research literature, across all disciplines. It is the authors of these articles who should self-archive them, in order to maximize the visibility, accessibility, uptake and impact of their work.
6. What should be self-archived?
All significant stages of one’s work, from the pre-refereeing preprint to the peer-reviewed, published postprint, to postpublication updates should be self-archived. The OAI tags keep track of all versions. (Note that the postprint need not be the publisher’s proprietary PDF: there should always be a link to the publisher’s official version, however, for scholarly purposes.)
7. Is self-archiving publication?
Self-archiving is definitely not publication. For purposes of establishing priority and asserting copyright, anything that is made public, even on a single piece of paper, meets the legal definition of ‘publication’. Hence so does self-archiving. But for scholarly and scientific purposes, only meeting the quality standards of peer review, hence acceptance for publication by a peer-reviewed journal, counts as publication. Self-archiving should on no account be confused with self-publication.
8. What about copyright?
The author holds the copyright for the pre-refereeing preprint, so that can be self-archived without seeking anyone else’s permission. Sixty-eight percent of journals already give their green light to postprint self-archiving. With the remaining 32%, the author can either try to modify the copyright transfer agreement to reserve the right to self-archive the postprint, or, failing that, can append or link a corrigenda file to the already self- archived preprint.
9. What if the publisher forbids preprint self-archiving?
The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter, because the copyright transfer agreement pertains to that text. But the pre- refereeing preprint is self-archived at a time when no copyright transfer agreement exists and the author holds exclusive and full copyright to that draft. So publisher policy forbidding prior self-archiving of preprints is not a legal matter, but merely a journal policy matter.
10. What can researcher/authors do to facilitate self-archiving?
Make sure that your university or research institution has installed OAI- compliant Archives. Self-archive your pre-peer-review preprints in your institutional (or central) Archives. Self-archive your post-peer-review postprints in your institutional (or central) Eprint Archives.
11. What can libraries do to facilitate self-archiving?
Digital librarians are the natural candidates for maintaining the Eprint Archives, their institution’s outgoing collection of peer-reviewed research output.
✦ Offer trained digital librarian help in showing faculty how to self-
archive their papers in the university Eprint Archive (it is very easy).
✦ Offer trained digital librarian help in doing ‘proxy’ self-archiving, on
behalf of any authors who feel that they are personally unable (too busy or technically incapable) to self-archive for themselves. Authors need only supply their digital full-texts in word-processor form: the digital
archiving assistants can do the rest (usually only a few dozen key/ mouse-strokes per paper).
The proxy self-archiving will only be needed to set the first wave of self- archiving reliably in motion. The rewards of self-archiving –in terms of visibility, accessibility and impact– will maintain the momentum once the archive has reached critical mass. And even students can do for faculty the few keystrokes needed for each new paper thereafter.
✦ Digital librarians, collaborating with web system staff, should be
involved in ensuring the proper maintenance, backup, mirroring, upgrading, and migration that ensures the perpetual preservation of the university Eprint Archives. Mirroring and migration should be handled in collaboration with counterparts at all other institutions supporting OAI-compliant Eprint Archives.
12. What can research funders do to facilitate self-archiving?
Mandate that the research that is publicly funded must not merely be published but it must be publicly accessible online (whether through self- archiving, open-access journals, or both) as recommended by the Berlin Declaration. Make it part of grant applications that CVs and bibliographies citing the applicant’s prior work should contain links to the online full-text (whether self-archived or in open-access journals, or both). Sign the Declaration of Institutional Commitment to Providing OA .