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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

JISC report on subject and institutional repositories

Catherine Jones and four co-authors, Report of the Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions Study (SIRIS), from JISC and STFC, November 2008.  Excerpt:

This report was commissioned by JISC to produce a set of practical recommendations for steps that can be taken to improve the interactions between institutional and subject repositories in the UK....

Key findings

  • The majority of institutional repositories (IRs) are at an early stage of development and the desired ‘critical mass’ of content is far from having been achieved;
  • despite the declared interest of IR administrators in a co-ordinated approach to the gathering and sharing of information, there is in fact very little interaction between repositories;
  • most deposit is initiated and mediated by repository staff, while self-archiving is not yet embedded in author workflows. Technical and administrative solutions for management of research outputs, developments in reporting of article usage statistics, and the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are likely to drive cultural change;
  • content collection is strongest in established subject/funder repositories;
  • there may be scope for greater collaboration with publishers in the development of deposit and distribution procedures;
  • repository administrators struggle to identify relevant content/metadata in external sources because identification by author or organisational association is highly problematic;
  • content transfer between repositories requires a relationship of trust, which must in turn be based on explicit metadata standards, clear provenance and rights statements, and agreed protocols for transfer and updates to objects and metadata;
  • there is considerable interest throughout the community in creating aggregations of content held in repositories and other sources by linking to data and related items. The OAI-ORE web content aggregation specification represents one potentially valuable model of a user-centred content organisation technology;
  • there is no coherent approach to content preservation among repositories, and in many cases long-term preservation policy appears underdeveloped. This is a critical issue for the long term;
  • there is wide variation between repositories in metadata formats and quality;
  • for pragmatic reasons many IRs collect largely metadata-only records. The extraction of metrics to support local and national assessment and administration is an important driver for collection. There is a different imperative to acquire, preserve and make freely available full-text content. There is evidence of a trend towards integration of institutional repositories with research management systems.
  • Funding organisations and HEIs share many common purposes and would each benefit from collaboration. That such collaboration is not as yet taking place on any significant scale is attributable less to technical barriers than to the absence of any established structure for the negotiation of co-operative working practices.

Recommendations

We make a total of seven recommendations, which are intended to be achievable in whole or in part in the immediate future. They are variously addressed to a number of stakeholder groups: JISC, funding organisations, repository managers, software developers and creators of content.  This report recommends:

    with regard to standardisation

  1. that continued support be given to implementation of national standards for unambiguous identification of authors, funders and higher education institutions;
  2. that the community work towards the adoption of common information interchange standards;
  3. that a watching brief be kept on the Trusted Repository certification process and that all repository managers participate in this scheme when fully established;

    with regard to best practice

  4. that records transferred from one repository to another contain clear provenance information;
  5. that repositories implement version identification at object and metadata levels;

    with regard to community engagement and dialogue

  6. that a UK repository community forum be established where representatives of subject/funder and institutional repository communities can work to agree and implement standards and protocols for co-ordinated information management;
  7. that continued efforts be made to engage with users and ensure that developments address user needs in viable ways.

Also see the appendix of survey questions and responses.  The report and appendix are also available as DOC files.

Update (11/30/08).  Also see Stevan Harnad's comments:

The JISC/SIRIS report...fails to make clear the single most important reason why Institutional Repositories' "desired ‘critical mass’ of content is far from having been achieved."

The following has been repeatedly demonstrated (1) in cross-national, cross-disciplinary surveys (by Alma Swan, uncited in the report) on what authors state that they will and won't do and (2) in outcome studies (by Arthur Sale, likewise uncited in the report) that confirm the survey findings, reporting what authors actually do:

Most authors will not deposit until and unless their universities and/or their funders make deposit mandatory. But if and when deposit is made mandatory, over 80% will deposit, and deposit willingly. (A further 15% will deposit reluctantly, and 5% will not comply with the mandate at all.) In contrast, the spontaneous (unmandated) deposit rate is and remains at about 15%, for years now (and adding incentives and assistance but no mandate only raises this deposit rate to about 30%).

The JISC/SIRIS report merely states: "Whether deposit of content is mandatory is a decision that will be made by each institution," but it does not even list the necessity of mandating deposit as one of its recommendations, even though it is the crucial determinant of whether or not the institutional repository ever manages to attract its target content....

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