Mark Ware's report on institutional repositories is a balanced, thorough and welcome review that has some features not found in other reports of this sort.
See full record in Perspectives in Electronic Publishing (short review reproduced below) http://aims.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pep.nsf/cc4a508424b9c3ff802566dc004e42ff/5c4d447fc4fdeecf80256e46003c0c0e?OpenDocument This report doesn't have any dramatic new insights on open access, but it is a pretty thorough review of institutional repositories (IRs). Surprisingly, given the author's publishing background, and that of the report's backers, it is remarkably focussed on IRs and, section 9 apart (notwithstanding its brief mention PeP), the report doesn't grind any publishing axes. There is an emphasis on repositories built with DSpace because the report largely adopts the DSpace/Cliff Lynch philosophy on IRs, that is, they are for storing all the outputs of an institution, not just copies of refereed journal papers, or eprints. So it doesn't have the benefit of the more focussed Harnad analysis of institutional eprint archives to cut through most of the issues it raises. Section 8 is a quantitative analysis of repositories, largely based on data and charts from work at Southampton by Tim Brody and based on Eprints.org data. This is a welcome (if inadequately referenced) and unusual feature to date in reviews such as this. It's disappointing to see section 8.2 open by stating that background research had "produced a list of some 45 IRs", since the Metalist of Open Access Eprint Archives would have revealed more than this (although for some reason Eprints archives are omitted here). The conclusions seem rather positive for IRs: "The case for the benefits to a research organisation of an institutional repository providing a set of infrastructural digital services including uploading/hosting, organising (metadata), disseminating and long-term preservation seems compelling. ... What is far less clear is whether IRs will develop large, interoperable collections of published literature, as hope the advocates of open access." For those new to the open access phenomenon, and who may be puzzled by the lack of coverage of IRs in the currently publishing-dominated open access agenda in some forums and news services - there are of necessity two complementary paths to open access: journal publication and author self-archiving in repositories - this report is worthwhile indeed. Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 At 12:57 23/02/04 +0000, Mark Ware wrote:
PALS (The Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions working group) has recently published a report (which I authored) on Institutional Repositories. The report is freely available from the PALS website at <http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/>http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/ (follow the link for Pathfinder research on web-based repositories ). PALS is running a conference based on this research in London on 24 June 2004 entitled Institutional Repositories and Their Impact on Scholarly Publishing . Details of this are also available on the PALS website (follow the link for PALS Conference 04 etc. ). [About PALS: The Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) working group is an ongoing collaboration between UK publishers (represented by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and the Publishers Association) and further and higher education (represented by JISC). The group aims to foster mutual understanding on topics of interest to both parties, and work collaboratively towards the solution of issues arising from electronic publication. For more see: <http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/>http://www.palsgroup.org.uk/] Regards -Mark Ware ------------------------------------------------------------ Director Mark Ware Consulting Ltd 14 Hyland Grove Westbury-on-Trym Bristol BS9 3NR T: +44 (0)117 959 3726 E: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] W: <http://www.markwareconsulting.com>www.markwareconsulting.com
