Dorothea Salo, What's an IR for?Caveat Lector, March 8, 2006. Excerpt:
Arthur Sale’s risk assessment for institutional repositories is every bit as good as everyone says it is. Should be in every repository-rat’s documents drawer. In it, however, we find repeated the assertion that an IR should limit itself strictly to the peer-reviewed research literature of its target population. I still think that’s deeply wrong, but it’s up to me to defend my belief. The cited concern is cost. Further details are sketchy, but the general idea seems to be that doing “digital-library stuff,” whatever that is, requires a lot of technical jiggery-pokery that costs a lot of money, and loading that into an IR’s budget makes the IR look cost-ineffective, which creates the impression that OA is cost-ineffective....To put it briefly: if what you want is Greenstone, don’t use DSpace....Still, it does not follow that an IR is intrinsically poorly-suited to every conceivable digital-library need beyond archiving peer-reviewed research. To be a good fit with an IR, a project should consist of individual, self-sufficient pieces of work that don’t really need to be seen next to each other or manipulated during viewing by the patron....To me it seems absurd and arrogant to forbid a library that’s undertaken an IR project to use it for purposes that otherwise make sense but don’t consist of peer-reviewed literature....[T]he alternative --I speak frankly-- is an empty repository. It’s dead simple to set up an empty repository. A lot of people have. An empty repository strikes me as far more likely to be accused of misallocation of resources, fold, and threaten OA by folding, than a repository that has made itself useful in other ways besides holding on to peer-reviewed research....[T]he only way we get [to better times] is by enduring the current grim times long enough. Which means we can’t --absolutely cannot-- sit around with our IR doors barred to everything but peer-reviewed research while we wait for mandates that may never come.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/10/2006 12:38:00 PM.
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.
