Dorothea Salo, Feeding Mr. Blue, Caveat Lector, September 9, 2008. Excerpt:
...I say “voluntary unmediated self-archiving is not a viable model for institutional-repository population” and for some reason people hear “IRs are not viable.” ...No. Look at those adjectives again....
The classical way to attack “voluntary” is to come up with a mandate. If you are a repository manager, forget about it. You can’t do this [alone]. If you are a library dean, university librarian, whatever your institution calls it —well, I’m sorry, but you probably can’t do it either. If you find a Stuart Shieber among your faculty, by all means put all your clout and your persuasive ability behind him, because he might be able to pull it off....
The one mandate that can be successfully imposed over time is an ETD mandate. Frankly, I think that’s the place to start for most self-respecting IRs at institutions with master’s and doctoral programs. Don’t pull an Iowa, and it’s probably wise not to start it off as a mandate, but otherwise, go to town. Part of the reason to do this is that it brings the repository (and its rat) to faculty attention in a context that won’t make most faculty uncomfortable or suspicious....
Try bribery....It doesn’t take much, I suspect, to create a bribe program faculty will pay attention to (though, again, I wish Minho had been more forthcoming about that in their article)....
Attacking “unmediated” takes staff and resources; there is no way around this. That is an unpalatable reality....
Faculty stick their stuff on their own websites. They stick it in disciplinary repositories. They stick it all over the place....The barriers to going out and getting it for the repository are permission from faculty and automation.
Now, it’s nominally reasonable to turn a repository-rat loose to get faculty permission to canvass their websites for archivable material. The problem is that it doesn’t usually work, partly because it doesn’t scale (one repository-rat, legions of faculty), but largely because faculty don’t know the repository-rat from a hole in the wall and so will not respond well to her request. There are three ways past this:
have the university librarian approach department chairs and deans for blanket permission
have liaison librarians approach the departments they work with (which, again, will require action from management; liaison librarians won’t just spontaneously do this, and they may not even do it as a favor to their repository-rat colleague without a nudge from above), or
most radically —don’t bother with permission, just give your repository-rat leave to go out and do it.
Faculty put this stuff on the public web. If they don’t mind Google and the Internet Archive picking it up, why are they going to mind you? Sure, sure, you want a backstop policy of pulling down something faculty have problems with until problems are resolved, and you may want a notification system as well, but how hard is that? I’ll tell you, it’s much less hard than getting permission! ...
Combining mediated deposit with a bribe program strikes me as promising. “We’ll toss your department a small grant if you let us turn our repository-rat loose on your material available on the public Internet” sounds like a winner—why would a department say no? ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/13/2008 11:11:00 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.
