Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, March 01, 2009

From containers to service providers

Andrew Albanese, Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box, Library Journal, March 1, 2009.  Excerpt:

In February 2008, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University made history, unanimously passing a revolutionary open access mandate that, for the first time [in the US], would require faculty to give the university copies of their research, along with a nonexclusive license to distribute them electronically....

If Harvard's vision portended a major role for IRs in the future, the reality today is that IRs remain largely empty, ineffective, and hobbled by everything from questions over their mission to lagging technology to the lack of meaningful institutional engagement. If they are to succeed as Harvard envisions, the next generation of IRs will require something of a reinvention—and a significantly higher level of institutional commitment. That will be no easy feat, given the current economic collapse, organized publisher resistance, institutional dysfunction, rapidly changing technology, and, most beguiling, the lingering confusion about exactly what IRs are and what they can —and should— do....

IRs have failed to catch on for a multitude of reasons, explains [Caveat Lector blogger Dorothea Salo], not the least of which is that the first generation was hopelessly passive about their collection activities....

If librarians have learned anything from the failure of IRs thus far, it is that “build it and they will come” is not a viable collection strategy, nor any way to foster the digital library of the future. The next wave of IRs, she stresses, must be reimagined around specific services that have value to faculty and can be marketed to them —and supported by an administrative mandate....

“Some IRs opened in the last year to 18 months are avoiding their predecessors' mistakes,” Salo says, “and in that I see the stirrings of hope.”

The University of Missouri, for example, recently launched its MOSpace repository, with librarians actively soliciting and depositing materials for faculty, thus increasing their authors' web profiles....

At the University of California (UC), California Digital Library's (CDL) eScholarship repository has, in the words of a recent Association of Research Libraries task force report, been “unusually” successful.

“I find the term successful fascinating when used around institutional repositories,” says eScholarship Publishing Group director Catherine Mitchell. “How do you even measure success with a repository? We have about 26,000 full-text objects in our repository. But our faculty produce 26,000 objects every year. By that measure, our numbers do not suggest we've done a good job integrating the repository into the scholarly workflow at UC.”

UC is now embarking upon an initiative to establish more deeply the eScholarship repository as a suite of publishing services—not an alternative publishing system, although it is open access and is alternative—but, just simply, a better one....

“It's hard to make the case for institutional repositories to faculty,” Mitchell says. “We've decided we don't even want to try.” In fact, eScholarship officials are so wary of the antipathy faculty seem to feel toward institutional repositories, they are planning to ditch the term entirely.

That's just fine with Salo....“It's not about 'the box' any more. We can't be talking about the box—we need to focus on all the stuff that can be in the box and the services we can offer [to faculty].” ...

[CNI's Clifford Lynch] says,...“I think the big, important mission for institutional repositories revolves around preserving access to underlying data and things that don't look very much like traditional publishing,” he says. “Open access is an important discussion,” he adds, but only a small slice of the role repositories must play.

“The monster I see coming,” Lynch says, “is that funding agencies, like the [National Science Foundation], [National Institutes of Health], or [Andrew W.] Mellon [Foundation], are recognizing that data is an important asset that they fund and are starting to get more formal about what's going to happen to that data, where it will be preserved, where it is going to be put. As this rolls forward, faculty will want help from their institutions in satisfying the requirements of their funding organizations. Well-designed institutional repository services can be the answer there.”

If Lynch is “queasy,” it's because he questions whether institutions —in particular, libraries— are biting off more than they can chew and swallow by conflating IRs with an alternative publishing mission....

Salo doesn't necessarily disagree with Lynch. IRs can —and should— serve as places for faculty to preserve and access all kinds of data. She came to IRs through the OA movement, however, and, given her experience, sees wisdom in repositories retrenching around meaningful publishing services. “It is a legitimate decision,” she says. “Sitting around and waiting for stuff to come in is not working, so becoming a publisher, offering services, and going out and getting this stuff make perfect sense.” ...

In his opening keynote at the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore, John Wilbanks, director of Science Commons, spoke about what would move IRs forward: incentives....

Salo says there are openings for IRs to make big strides in the coming years. “The key stumbling blocks,” she says, “are resources and will.”