I've been working on a [project](http://rubric.edu.au/) that deals with
Institutional repositories, but until last week I've never had anything
of mine **in** one. This is cause for celebration, but it raises some
questions.
Last week the AUSWEB '2006 conference committee accepted my paper on
ICE, so I now have a [pre-print in the USQ ePrints
repository](http://eprints.usq.edu.au/archive/00000697/).
The process for me was simple. I emailed the PDF file to the local
ePrints email address and an hour or so later it was in there. The
benefit of this is that my paper was deposited by a professional
cataloger – I would have put in messier metadata, not knowing how to
refer to the conference, for example. The downside is that catalogers do
not scale. The solution in the future will be a self-service system
where I can have a go at submitting my article, and the cataloger will
do quality control. The act of submitting should become a button on my
desktop, next to the 'Blog this' button that says 'Deposit this'.
Now that I have my own paper in ePrints I've been doing a bit of
exploring (not vanity searching, really, it's research).
Because the paper has been in USQ's ePrints for about a week I thought
that should mean that my paper is available via [Google
Scholar](http://scholar.google.com/) – only it doesn't seem to be yet.
The index must be out of date. Or is there something funny about my
paper?
A search for “The Integrated Content Environment” in Google Scholar did
not find my paper, but did turn up a paper at QUT's ePrints which
references the project. But QUT ePrints told me:
> 404 File not Found Could not find the file
> /archive/00003693/01/3693\_preprint.pdf
>
> The specified file could not be found on this server.
>
> If you reached this page by following a link within the repository,
> please contact the QUT | ePrints Archive administration. Otherwise,
> please check that you have typed the URL in correctly, or contact the
> person or site that supplied you with this URL.
> Source:
> <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003693/01/3693_preprint.pdf>
Next step was to go to the ePrints home page for QUT, and try searching
with the title of the paper I'd found, *The Rise of Open Access in the
Creative, Educational and Science Commons*. The resulting search found
two entries with the same title, apparently identical, both claiming to
be the latest version of this ePrint.
1. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003693/>
2. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003869/>
Neither my pre-print paper nor the QUT paper have a **persistent
identifier** that points to a canonical version of the paper. What will
happen to my pre-print? I don't know. When will Google drop the pre
print of Scott Keil-Chisolm and Brian Fitzgerald's article? What will
QUT do about this apparently duplicated record given that people may now
have linked to both versions?