An unexpected characteristic (at least to me) of SPARC Digital Repositories was the representation of quite a few institutional repositories that were either brand-new or still in the planning stages....
“This is a great time to be starting an IR!” enthused one SPARC-DR speaker. “You get to learn from those who have gone before you.” And avoid their mistakes, understood. Believe it or not, this marks progress....I only heard “build it and they will come” in scare quotes, accompanied by polite derision.
So new repositories, those that manage to get themselves going in a budget environment where new services are a tough sell, will start on firmer ideological footing than the generation before them. That’s good....
What are existing repositories supposed to do, then? I asked this question at SPARC-DR....The answer I got was pretty mealy-mouthed: “Go find allies.” Um. Yes. What exactly do you think I have been trying to do for the last three years? ...
Given that my crystal ball cracked up in a big way last year, I’m a little hesitant to make the dire forecasts my gut is telling me are warranted… but only a little. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if last year’s prediction about a repository closure was correct, just premature.
What is clear to me at this juncture is that the repository world is split in two as regards the appropriate response to faculty apathy about deposit. One chunk of the world is gamely gearing up to take on mediated deposit of the peer-reviewed literature. The other chunk of the world is using the repository for lower-hanging fruit (ETDs, undergraduate research, collapsing it with the local digital library, whatever) and doing a fan-dance around its lack of commitment to green open access. All right, there’s a third chunk, too: those that are doing both.
However, it’s the second chunk that are the problem....Bluntly, these institutions love green open access —until it costs them resources beyond the mere provisioning of a repository. Since they are now uncomfortably aware that green open access costs more than that, they are sidling away from it in as delicate and face-maintaining a way as possible. The question for open access is how to keep its agenda alive in libraries that are no longer able or willing to dedicate specific resources to the green road.
There are options. One is to push harder on the gold road....
Another is to bypass outreach to libraries and work harder on faculty, in hopes of additional Harvards and Stanfords....
A third is to ’fess up about the real costs of green OA and provide libraries and struggling repositories with a realistic roadmap to achieving it....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/02/2008 05:10:00 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.
