Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons, Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories, D-Lib Magazine, January 2005. Excerpt: 'The phrase "if you build it, they will come" does not yet apply to IRs. While their benefits seem to be very persuasive to institutions, IRs fail to appear compelling and useful to the authors and owners of the content. And, without the content, IRs will not succeed, because institutions will sustain IRs for only so long without greater evidence of success....Our key finding seems obvious in retrospect: what faculty members and university researchers want is to do their research, read and write about it, share it with others, and keep up in their fields. Many of our faculty members are outstanding teachers and some are skilled administrators; they provide service to their departments and fields. But even those who are most committed to the role of professor, broadly defined, complain of overwork, resist clerical responsibility, and resent any additional activity that cuts into their research and writing time....When we completed our research, we realized that our top priority was to recruit more content for the IR in the short term....In order to meet our short-term goal, we developed two strategies. One was to try a new strategy for recruiting faculty members, described below, in which we approach them on their own grounds and speak their language. The other was to enhance DSpace to make it much easier for our faculty members to submit their items to the IR and to showcase themselves and their research....By contrast to the language previously used to describe the features and benefits of the IR [language that most faculty did not understand], we are now describing the IR in language drawn from faculty interviews. Thus, we tell faculty that the IR will enable them to...[1] Make their own work easily accessible to others on the web through Google searches and searches within the IR itself, [2] Preserve digital items far into the future, safe from loss or damage, [3] Give out links to their work so that they do not have to spend time finding files and sending them out as email attachments, [4] Maintain ownership of their own work and control who sees it, [5] Not have to maintain a server, [6] Not have to do anything complicated.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/17/2005 02:50:00 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.
