Richard Poynder, the astute, eloquent chronicler of scholarly communication in the online era has done it again, with a shrewd, original and insightful review of the short history of the institutional repository movement. His conclusions are surprising, but (I think) very apt. His analysis, among other things, goes some way toward explaining why on earth a "Repository Comparison" such as the one Rachel Heery cites [by Thom Hickey]..., would have left the first and most widely used Institutional Repository (IR) software (GNU Eprints) out of its comparison. The answer is simple: Eprints is and always was very determinedly focused on the specific goal of 100% Open Access (OA), as soon as possible; it can of course also do everything that the other IR softwares can do (and vice versa!), but Eprints is focused on a very particular and urgent agenda: generating 100% OA to each institution's own research article output. Those who prefer leisurely fussing with the curation/preservation of arbitrary digital contents of any and every description will of course have plenty to keep them busy for decades to come. Eprints, in contrast, has an immediate, already-overdue mission to fulfil, and it is becoming clearer and clearer that -- with some prominent and invaluable exceptions -- the library community has found other rows to hoe. Richard has accordingly proposed that it might be time for a parting of paths between the Generic Digital Curation/Preservation IR movement and the OA IR movement, and he might be right. One has a diffuse, divergent goal, the other a focused, convergent -- and urgent and immediately reachable -- goal, a goal that might now be hamstrung if it is subordinated to or subsumed under the diffuse, divergent goal of the other....I think the optimal strategy is latent in Richard Poynder's very timely and perspicacious article. We should especially recommend using Eprints modularly, at the departmental level, via computing-services and/or library support, along the lines CalTech are doing it with CODA: Instead of building one monster-archive, Dspace/Fedora style, and then partitioning it top-down into "communities", CalTech have made natural and effective use of the OAI interoperability to create lots of Eprints modules, all harvested and integrated bottom-up into CODA. The rationale to be stressed in this is that this easy, light modularity can be used to get OA-specific archives going even in institutions that are slogging away at their own monster-archive, in parallel.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/03/2006 08:44:00 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.
