T. Scott Plutchak has blogged some notes on Susan Gibbons' presentation November 5 at the AAHSL conference.
An hour after Susan Gibbons started her presentation yesterday, I felt I knew twice as much about institutional repositories as I had beforehand. She's a very engaging speaker, very effective at taking the complicated issues and making them very clear. I particularly appreciated her anthropological approach to understanding the ways in which faculty might find IRs to be of some value. The technology issues are not a big deal -- it's the human factors that are daunting. The most surprising thing about the day overall was the decided shift in emphasis concerning the role of IRs. Many librarians initially got excited about them because of the potential for finding an open access mechanism to published research. But there was relatively little discussion of that, either in Susan's talk, or in the various discussions and presentations that occupied the rest of the day. It is clear that, in some institutions at least, the notion of depositing postprints of published articles is still met with indifference, if not outright hostility. The most promising approaches seem to be to look at a university's gray literature, or unique collections, and promote the IR as a way to give that stuff much more visibility and permanence. It may be that while we initially glommed on to IRs for one purpose, we will actually find that we use them (at least in the near term) for other worthwhile purposes altogether. As IRs become a more familiar part of the landscape, we will undoubtedly find other unexpected ways in which they can contribute to the work of the university.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/07/2005 10:12:00 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.
