Institutional repositories were the stated topic for a workshop convened in Phoenix, Arizona earlier this year (April 17-19, 2007) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). While in their report on the workshop, The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship, Bill Arms and Ron Larsen build out a larger landscape of concern, institutional repositories remain a crucial topic, which, without institutional cyberscholarship, will never approach their full potential.
Repositories...extend the core missions of libraries into the digital environment by providing reliable, scalable, comprehensible, and free access to libraries' holdings for the world as a whole. In some measure, repositories constitute a reaction against those publishers that create monopolies, charging for access to publications on research they have not conducted, funded, or supported. In the long run, many hope faculty will place the results of their scholarship into institutional repositories with open access to all. Libraries could then shift their business model away from paying publishers for exclusive access....
Repositories offer one model of a sustainable future for libraries, faculty, academic institutions and disciplines. In effect, they reverse the polarity of libraries. Rather than import and aggregate physical content from many sources for local use, as their libraries have traditionally done, universities can, by expanding access to the digital content of their own faculty through repositories, effectively export their faculty's scholarship....
The repository movement has, as yet, failed to exert a significant impact upon intellectual life. Libraries have failed to articulate what they can provide and, far more often, have failed to provide repository services of compelling interest. Repository efforts remain fragmented: small, locally customized projects that are not interoperable--insofar as they operate at all. Administrations have failed to show leadership. Happy to complain about exorbitant prices charged by publishers, they have not done the one thing that would lead to serious change: implement a transitional period by the end of which only publications deposited within the institutional repository under an open access license will count for tenure, promotion, and yearly reviews....
The published NSF/JISC report wisely skips past the repository impasse to describe the broader intellectual environment that we could now develop....[I]ntellectual life increasingly depends upon open access to large bodies of machine actionable data....
To accomplish this goal [of green OA to publicly-funded research], the report proposes a detailed seven-year plan....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/17/2007 09:17:00 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.
