...When I got home [from the NISO/PALINET workshop], I took the opportunity to glance through Peter Suber’s annual predictions list. I am going to disagree slightly with one of his predictions and add another that I doubt he would make.
I do not think that there will be significantly more open-access institutional repositories in the United States at the end of 2008 than there are today. This is only a slight disagreement with Peter Suber, because he didn’t specify IRs, just open-access repositories, and there likely will be a few more of those, especially outside the States. I also think that if, as Suber suggests, self-archiving hits the tipping point once we get an NIH mandate and a few mandates like it, institutional repositories will not be winners. Nothing will counteract scholars’ natural gravitation toward their disciplines.
I also predict that there will be at least one high-profile IR failure in the United States before the end of 2008. The exact form of this failure I’m not sure about. It could be an outright closure, which will touch off a furious debate about repository succession planning that we really should have had years ago. It could be a more graceful handoff, or a consolidation into a consortial repository. It could be a major defunding; the repository’s materials will remain accessible, but staff time and money thrown at the repository will be reduced significantly or eliminated. (I add that this is most likely at schools that have zero to one dedicated repository-rats, rather than a team-based IR program involving digitization, mediated deposit, meaningful copyright assistance, software hacking, and all that good stuff. But most IRs have zero to one dedicated repository-rats, so I haven’t excluded much.) ...
And as is the way of these things, one high-profile failure really means ten more that nobody noticed....Look, it’s simple. Institutional repositories are money pits, and the returns are negligible. The cost-per-item-archived is absurd. Libraries may be idealistic, but they’re not stupid, and they do move on from failed experiments, especially when those experiments have a heavy technology component....
Consider the effects when my prediction comes true and a big IR folds. How likely do you think it is that libraries will take up a vastly larger project than an IR, with much more nebulous goals and means, once they decide (as I believe they will) that IRs burned them?
I would love to be patient, as Suber suggests I do. Unfortunately, if we’re going to keep even enough preservation infrastructure (by which I chiefly mean librarians engaged with these issues and employed specifically to deal with them) to start addressing digital collection and preservation in libraries, I just don’t think I can afford to be patient. My New Year’s resolution for 2008 is already made: yell about all this, yell loudly, and yell a lot until important decisionmakers actually start listening....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/06/2007 12:10:00 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.
