Born under the influence of the Open Access (OA) movement, Institutional Repositories (IRs) for digital content are now all the rage; but whether or not they work depends on their raison d'etre. There are many things one can do with an IR. One can use it for content management, preservation, internal data-sharing, record-keeping; the content itself can be anything digital, whether courseware, "gray literature," multimedia, in-house publishing, or even bought-in 3rd-party content. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with OA, however. OA is about maximizing accessibility to institutional peer-reviewed research output in order to maximize its research impact (25%-250% of it lost if non-OA), thereby maximizing institutional research productivity and progress (and prestige and research revenue). OA content in IRs is so far very low (averaging less than 15% of annual research output) -- partly because OA has been eclipsed by the many other items on the IR wish-list, partly because even where it is the only item, wishing is not enough: not if librarians wish it, not even if researchers wish it. The two international UK JISC surveys have shown clearly exactly what is needed to fill IRs with their annual OA content: An extension of institutions' and research funders' "publish or perish" mandate to: "publish but also self-archive in your IR". The 5 institutions that so far have such a mandate (CERN, U. Southampton ECS, U. Minho, Queensland U. Tech, and U. Zurich) are well on their way to 100% OA. After a crashing failure by NIH to mandate immediate OA self-archiving, and a halting half-step by the Wellcome Trust (6-month embargo), Research Councils UK (RCUK) looks poised to do the right thing at last, and once it does, the rest of the world's research funders and institutions will follow suit. The race is now to the swift, the battle to the strong, for the 25%-250% OA impact advantage is partly a competitive advantage.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/18/2005 11:03:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
