Dr. Graf has provided an interesting anecdotal investigation of one of the authors in the DASH repository during its beta period. It may be helpful to go over some of the issues that he raises to place them in context.

Dr. Graf objects that DASH does not distribute the publisher's PDF of articles where publisher policies disallow such distribution, such as the article . But distributing such articles (unless separate arrangements have been made with the publisher) could be a violation of copyright. DASH policy is not, and should not be, based on violation of copyright. This issue is independent of questions about Harvard open-access policies, as this article does not fall under the policy; it was written before the policy took effect.

Dr. Graf notes that in many cases, free versions of the articles are available elsewhere on the web, sometimes at the publisher's own web site. We have made every effort to provide links to the definitive versions of articles where available, and have done so for the articles that Dr. Graf cites. Thus the free versions at publisher web sites are a click away from the DASH page. In the particular cases cited, however, the publisher does not permit the repository itself to distribute the paper. See the paragraph above.

Dr. Graf would prefer to see links to versions above and beyond the version at the publisher's site, and I would too. Indeed, we provide for such alternative links to be added to entries with an "Alternative links" field, and many entries already have them. (Of the particular links that Dr. Graf mentions, three were already in the corresponding DASH entries, two through the "Link to published version" field and one through the currently inaccessible "Alternative links" field. We are happy to take advantage of his efforts and add the remainder to their respective entries.) Unfortunately, the current beta version of the DASH user interface has not yet made these links public for technical reasons that we are actively repairing. DASH is, of course, a new repository and is still under development. This is one of several facilities that we are rolling out over time. Dr. Graf wonders whether "DASH is so courageous to link to free versions in the web." We are. We link to third-party web sites as a convenience to users, though we will not approve or otherwise vet the content available at those sites, as described in the DASH Terms of Use (paragraph 12).

Dr. Graf wonders why in a small number of cases DASH does not provide access to an article even though the publisher's policy would allow it. He pinpoints a single one of Dr. Knoll's articles , although there are, I believe, four such cases. We provide access to articles at the behest of the depositors, and verify with them the distribution regime that they prefer for their articles, in keeping with the principle that authors should have control over the distribution status of their writings. (For the same reason, our open-access policies allow authors free rein in waiving the license to Harvard for their articles.) In a small number of cases, depositors specifically request that we "downgrade" distribution from the normal access regime (see "Other Posted Material" at ) to a metadata-only regime, and we of course respect their wishes. (Similarly, by waiving the OA policy for an article, authors are in effect downgrading the rights status of the article from that for "OAP Articles" to that for "Other Posted Material".) The paper in question was one of these small number of cases.

Dr. Graf would like to see information about rights made available. Again, we have been working on this, and hope to make that information available through the DASH user interface and through an OAI-PMH feed.

Finally, and most importantly, Dr. Graf misunderstands the role of DASH (and similar repositories) when he declaims "Don't trust in DASH! Scholars should always search for free versions in Google Scholar and if not found there in the Google websearch." We have never thought of DASH as the primary location for searching the scholarly literature, nor is that the basis for developing institutional repositories. Repositories provide standard interfaces that allow search across the full range of sites for exactly this reason. DASH provides OAI-PMH feeds and allows web crawling that allow DASH entries to be found by search engines and other software facilities, including Google. As public access to DASH is only two days old, I urge a bit of patience for Google, OAIster, and other services to index its contents. Once they do, DASH will be searchable in an integrated form along with the many hundreds of other institutional repositories worldwide. (Very little patience is likely to be required; Google already seems to have indexed some of the DASH material. For instance, this Google search for one of Professor Knoll's papers provides the DASH entry as the first hit.)

I am pleased to see that Dr. Graf has made such a careful study of the DASH site during its beta-test period. I hope that over time he will appreciate the improvements that we are able to make and his disappointment will subside.