I knew that Roy would be likely to give a very practical nuts-and-bolts introduction to developing institutional repositories and I was certainly not disappointed.
Why do it?
Allows you to capture the intellectual output of an institution and provide it freely to others (pre-prints, post-prints, things that folks have the rights to archive). Many publishers allow authors to publish their work in archives either as a pre-print or after the fact.
To increase exposure and use of an institution’s intellectual capital. It can increase their impact on a field. More citations from open access and archived materials.
To increase the reputation of your institution.
How do you do it? ...
Software options....
Key decisions
What types of content do you want to accept (just documents? PPT files, lesson plans, etc?)
How will you handle copyright?
Will you charge for service? Or for specific value-added services?
What will the division of responsibilities be?
What implementation model will you adopt?
You will need to develop a policy document that covers these issues and more.
Implementation models
Self archiving – ceaselessly championed by Stevan Harnad. Authors upload their own work into institutional respositories. Most faculty don’t want to do this.
Overlay – new system (IR) overlays the way people normally do things. Typically faculty give their work to an administrative assistant to put it on the Web. Now, the repository folks train the admin assistant to upload to the repository instead. Content is more likely to be deposited than if faculty have to do it....
Service provider – not a model for a large institution. Library will upload papers for faculty. The positives is that works are much more likely to be deposited. The negative is that it’s a lot of work and won’t scale....
Discovery options: Most traffic comes from Google searches, but only for repositories that are easily crawlable and have a unique URL for each document. OAI aggregators like OAIster.org have millions and millions of records. They harvest metadata from many repositories. Some may come direct to the repository, but most people will not come there looking for something specific. Citations will drive traffic back to the repository.
Barriers to success:
Lack of institutional commitment
Faculty apathy (lack of adoption and use)
If it is difficult to upload content, people won’t use it.
If you don’t implement it completely or follow through it will fail.
Strategies for Success
Start with early adopters and work outward.
Market all the time. Make presentations at division meetings and stuff
Seek institutional mandates
Provide methods to bulk upload from things already living in other databases
Make it easy for people to participate. Reduce barriers and technical/policy issues.
Build technological enhancements to make it ridiculously easy for people to upload their content....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/26/2006 12:34:00 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.
