[Dspace-general] Version Control

[JQ Johnson]

> The more difficult problem is where the author himself posts
> variant version without indication of which represents the
> final draft; I can even envision a situation where a
> multi-author team writes a paper, and the  different authors
> post different final versions, with possibly very substantial changes.

One would hope that in many contexts it would be common for authors to
make multiple drafts of a work available simultaneously.  Much of the
excitement of self-archiving is the opportunity for other scholars to see
the evolution of an idea.  This may be of particular interest when the
work is something other than a typical research paper, e.g., an IRB
research protocol, a coursesite, a computer program, or a creative work.

For other scholarly works (preprints of peer-reviewed articles), the
"final version" is for most faculty the version that is accepted by a
journal.  That version typically has its copyright transferred to the
journal, has been modified (e.g., copyedited and typeset) by the journal,
and will typically be archived by the journal.  In this common case --
arXiv perhaps to the contrary -- we should explicitly assume that the
latest version deposited in an IR is *not* the final version.

As Goodman notes, it is important that metadata, especially date stamps
and provenance information, be available as part of each edition that
allows the reader to discriminate among them (including links to other
editions).  Seems to me the main role of a DSpace is to provide a good
user interface that collects the appropriate metadata at the time of
deposit.  But if it's going to be more than that, let's use something
like CVS rather than reinventing the wheel.

One general issue, though, is that the metadata changes retrospectively.
An author may claim at the time of deposit that this is the "final
version" only to change her mind later.  That's why an IR needs a
mechanism to allow authors to edit the metadata from their
already-deposited works.

JQ Johnson                    	Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator	e-mail: jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon     	1-541-346-1746 (v); -3485 (fax)
Eugene, OR  97403-1299        	http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj