While it’s an excellent example for institutions to follow, Boston University’s (and others) mandate plans still aren’t going to solve one of the largest fundamental issues I see as a repoman - the fact that publishers still own the final, authoritative document, and the vast majority of them aren’t going to allow these documents to be freely shared in an open access repository. So the documents going into the repositories are, by and large, preprints or (if one uses my quasi-legal method) documents created by repurposing the content in the publisher PDF. This creates a repository that is full of material that might be excellent, valuable, and worthy of reading, but still requires digging up the authoritative version in order to cite the darn thing. Sure, one could figure out a way to cite the document you pulled from the IR, but it’s certainly in one’s best interest to use the final version, if possible. Additionally, most authors you speak to will certainly agree that they would prefer individuals cite the published version, as well.
The argument can be made that the information being freely available might increase it’s scholarly impact and let people find it more easily, but I’m going to make the bold claim that most people doing research in a scholarly institution will likely have access to the authoritative version for the vast majority of things. Why would a researcher want to waste time with the IR middleman when they can go straight to the store and get the best version for “free” already? Why would an author be excited about making a cruddier version of their article available to the public when they are likely of the opinion that their research is just fine being published in a respected journal and likely available to nearly every other researcher they know through their own institution? (And if it isn’t they’ll just send over the published PDF anyway - it’s their article, right?)
The longer I do this thing the less it makes sense to me, and that’s just frustrating.
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[...] of those IRs. They all fail.” I didn’t make that quote up, folks.) Repo-rats who are ready to chuck the whole thing. Software developers who are still focused laserlike on the single-PDF use case. I think Dr. Lynch [...]