Repositories remain an innovative but marginalised technology largely because there is no consensus about an agreed set of Performance Indicators (PIs) that demonstrate their overall impact on the research enterprise of our universities. A successful institutional repository (IR) should be evaluated in terms of the extent to which the open access repository builds a critical mass of scholarly content which is sustained and available through active university community engagement and ongoing scholarly contributions (faculty, researchers and students) that, when managed efficiently and effectively, ultimately strengthen, promote and give visibility to the research enterprise of the institution, and bring benefit to broader society. However, librarians are grappling with what and how best to demonstrate 'institutional good' but without clear evidence, assessment is fed by perception based on limited information which leads to diminished impact and value of the facility, a tyranny described as being caught between a rock and a hard place. Using Illuminative Evaluation to design a series of quantitative and qualitative metrics, it is proposed that a distinction be made between significant and secondary PIs where the former gather evidence to demonstrate the overall effect or impact of the IR on the individual and collective research community.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/21/2008 12:48:00 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.
