...Institutional repositories as a class are in serious trouble. They are not producing the outcomes they promised —or, indeed, much of any outcome in many cases. They are sucking up library staff time and development muscle, and libraries haven’t enough of either commodity to waste on a non-productive service.
Fundamentally, the value proposition on which IRs were sold to libraries was in error. Voluntary self-archiving in institutional repositories simply does not happen in the absence of deposit mandates. From a library perspective, this changes the picture from the original “build it, step back, and they will come” to “make a tremendous ongoing investment in marketing and library-mediated deposit services that may never pay off if other libraries at other institutions don’t do likewise.” It’s only sensible that many libraries back away from the latter commitment....
We are not confronting our error. Except for Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale, we are by and large not so much as acknowledging our error —instead, we are papering it over with happytalk case studies....
To the best of my knowledge, no provisions have been made at any of the universities adopting the [CIC author] addendum to track addendum uptake among faculty and publisher response thereto, which in practice means I have no way to find out which faculty have successfully employed the addendum so that I can retrieve and archive their articles. “But they can self-archive!” Sure they can. They won’t without a mandate. The addendum doesn’t change that....
An example: mediated deposit. Repository systems blithely assume that the person pushing the buttons to make a deposit is the same person with authority to grant the repository’s license—that is, a person with intellectual-property rights over the content. This is wishful thinking. In most repositories, most deposits are done by a third party, be it a librarian, departmental staff, or a faculty member’s graduate-student assistants. None of the repository software packages or services I know of acknowledges this reality by separating the act of depositing content from the act of licensing it for preservation and display. I don’t even want to talk about how much time I have wasted building chicken-wire-and-duct-tape paper licensing workflows around this problem. Nor do I care to talk about how many faculty I’ve seen walk away from paper licenses they’d likely click through onscreen without a care in the world....
How much more uptake would we have if we could offer a service enabling departmental IT staff to batch-deposit papers which (once individual faculty have responded to the email requesting licensure) appear magically as prettily-formatted HTML citations on faculty and departmental web pages? It’s technically feasible. We haven’t done it because we’ve fixated far too strongly on the “self” in “self-archiving.”
How much more uptake would we have if we maintained a system that welcomes and cares for unfinished work as well as curating and displaying the finished products of that work? I can say with some authority that I’d have a great many more preprints and postprints if faculty could find their preprints and postprints in the first place! ...
