I question whether many, or even most, of these alleged benefits of IRs really are such. Why is an IR needed for any individual performance assessment? A faculty member simply submits relevant publications for the P&T committee to review; having them on an IR doesn't seem much of a benefit here. And why would anyone need to go to an IR to generate a CV? And window shopping? I submit that faculty, grad students, and researchers will go look for the work of the specialists in the areas they are most interested in, not canvass a wide swathe of an institution's publications, and then rely on more or less "objective" indicators of prestige ranking of departments by various bodies that conduct regular assessments. Who is going to try using an IR to measure "the usage and impact of the institutional research output" overall? As we all know, usage statistics are only one small part of an assessment exercise, and they do not even exist for large parts of a university's output outside the sciences. How does an IR help measure the success of an arts and architecture school, for instance? Given the widely disparate nature of materials that would be contained in any university-wide IR, I can't see how anyone could readily come up with an overall measure of a university's contribution to research and scholarship. This is pie-in-the-sky thinking, in my opinion.Stevan Harnad wrote:
OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed journal articles. The best and most likely way to find and access them is via a harvester/indexer that links to the item, not by directly searching the IR itself. (Direct searching of the IR is more relevant for (1) institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance assessment, (3) CV-generation, (4) grant application/fulfillment, and perhaps also some window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or (7) students.)
The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) to maximize their accessibility, so they are accessible to all would-be users, not just those whose institutions happen to have a subscription to the journal in which they were published. That way (9) the usage and impact of the institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10) overall research progress).
But I do continue to question what the institution gains from itsIt seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of institutional gains from their IRs.
IR.
To the contrary, Stevan, the peer-reviewed versions of articles you are talking about being deposited have not undergone any copyediting, and my guess is that most of what gets posted will be versions that have not had copyediting done on them. I keep beating this drum, but I need to remind people that unedited faculty prose is often not something they would want to have exposed to the wider world. You mentioned that high energy physics hasn't seem to have suffered any from its exposure on arXiv, but then how many people beyond specialists actually read anything on this site?> Harvard authors, on > the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I wouldThat may or may not be a good argument against depositing unrefereed preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA mandates, or the primary purpose of OA IRs.suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the institution.