The focus of this report is consistency of practice between repositories in the ways they support the sharing (and, by implication, the reuse of) material....
This report is based on consultation and interviews with those involved in the development of repositories and their infrastructure in the UK and elsewhere....
In the UK, a large number of Institutional Repositories have been set up very recently. Often, it seems, they lack sufficient clarity of policy and purpose. In interviews with depositors and after conducting a case study of an Institutional Repository, we find different perceptions of the role of the repository, some seeing it mainly as an administrative tool for collecting and collating research at the institution and others believing it is a tool for sharing research and creating open access to the results of that research. If such perceptions are combined with weakly defined policies and/or unclear implementation procedures, then it would be unsurprising to find inconsistencies both within and between repositories. In fact, our respondents tell us that such inconsistency is widespread and are pessimistic that this will change, except where sufficient resources, shared objectives and strong relationships are in place.
In the wider environment in which JISC operates, it would be unwise to attempt to mandate specific technical or organisational approaches. This report instead makes more generic recommendations, although it does include some quite specific suggestions on policy and technical directions.
We strongly recommend that repositories, with the help of their target community, clearly define their purpose and share that definition widely so that there is a common view among that community of what the repository is there for and why it is a good thing. A repository’s policies on rights, legal issues and licensing, deposit, preservation and collection scope should similarly be clearly defined, stated and shared....In view of resource constraints which were often mentioned by our respondents, priority should be given to:
populating the repository with sufficient high quality material that your target audience will consider it a ‘critical mass’;
creating and exposing robust policies;
creating and maintaining machine interfaces to metadata, indexes and the full text of items held in repositories, particularly scholarly works;
creating minimal metadata for all items, with richer metadata for those items which cannot be efficiently crawled and indexed; automation should be used wherever possible to aid and supplement human intervention....
We make nine detailed recommendations (section 10) which are summarised here: ...
2. Clarify goals and purpose and realistically assess future role and likely costs....
4. Expose all repository content that it would be desirable to share, including material needing subscription or membership, to search engines and web crawlers as one route to discovery....
5. Produce human readable guidelines for those who will wish to build innovative services from your repository data....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/12/2008 11:31:00 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.
