Open Access News

Hawkins: In 2005, CNI spent a lot of time exploring institutional repositories. How are institutional repositories currently being deployed in academia? What are the key national policies and strategies that are shaping this deployment?

Lynch: This is an interesting and rapidly changing area. Institutional repositories, at least in the way that I think of them, are services deployed and supported at an institutional level to offer dissemination management, stewardship, and where appropriate, long-term preservation of both the intellectual work created by an institutional community and the records of the intellectual and cultural life of the institutional community. Now, other people hold narrower views of institutional repositories, which they see primarily as places to store and from which to disseminate the traditional published output of institutions: copies or preprints or postprints of material such as journal articles or books or other manuscripts produced by the faculty of an institution. Again, my personal view of institutional repositories is much broader and is driven in part by the implications of e-science and e-scholarship and by our growing ability to capture in digital form various aspects of campus life, ranging from performances and symposia to activities that have historically gone on in the classroom and are now at least partially represented and recorded in learning management systems....

[T]he Netherlands and Germany have very high levels of deployment [of IRs]. The French seem to be pursuing a centralized national repository strategy, which is extremely interesting but quite different from the institutional efforts. In the United Kingdom, JISC and other higher education leaders clearly have an objective to set up a ubiquitous institutional infrastructure, but it still has a considerable way to go in deployment. Of course, in the United States, infrastructure in higher education typically emerges bottom-up, through the sum of many local choices and investments by colleges and universities....

When we talk about national policy with respect to institutional repositories, it’s important to recognize the depth and extent of the national policy debates that are taking place about open access to the scholarly literature and, closely related but really distinct, about whether public research funding should come with an obligation to make reports of the results and underlying data freely available to the public. These debates are happening throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, and many other nations. In the United States, there is a fairly soft mandate that “requests” publications resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health be deposited into the PubMed database at the National Library of Medicine within a year of publication. There is also discussion of stronger mandates. In the United Kingdom, there is serious discussion of very strong deposit mandates, and some major private foundations (the Wellcome Trust, for example) are establishing open-access requirements as part of their grants. Things are still fluid in this area, and I don’t want to get into the subject in depth here, since it’s likely the specifics will change by the time this interview is published. I mention it simply because institutional repositories are a natural infrastructure (but not the only one— national-level disciplinary repositories, like PubMed, are clearly another alternative) into which such deposits of publications might be mandated, so they can be viewed as enablers for much broader initiatives.

PS: I had to cut some very good comments on copyright and DRM. Read the whole interview.