... [I]t seems to me that the collection of material we are trying to put into institutional repositories of scholarly research publications is a reasonably well understood and measurable corpus. It strikes me as odd therefore that the metrics we tend to use to measure progress in this space are very general and uninformative. Numbers of institutions with a repository for example - or numbers of papers with full text. We set targets for ourselves like, "a high percentage of newly published UK scholarly output [will be] made available on an open access basis" (a direct quote from the original roadmap). We don't set targets like, "80% of newly published UK peer-reviewed research papers will be made available on an open access basis" - a more useful and concrete objective.
As a result, we have little or no real way of knowing if are actually making significant progress towards our goals. ...
Across the board we are seeing a growing emphasis on the individual, on user-centricity and on personalisation (in its widest sense). ... Yet in the repository space we still tend to focus most on institutional wants and needs. ... As long as our emphasis remains on the institution we are unlikely to bring much change to individual research practice. ...
Global discipline-based repositories are more successful at attracting content than institutional repositories. ... This is no surprise. It's exactly what I'd expect to see. Successful services on the Web tend to be globally concentrated (as that term is defined by Lorcan Dempsey) because social networks tend not to follow regional or organisational boundaries any more. ...
On the Web, the discovery of textual material is based on full-text indexing and link analysis. In repositories, it is based on metadata and pre-Web forms of citation. One approach works, the other doesn't. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/08/2008 01:34:00 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.
