From: Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk <mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> >
On Sep 16, 2014, at 2:30 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardn...@unl.edu <mailto:sgardn...@unl.edu> > wrote: Stevan, Apologies for a delayed response. I have been meaning to reply, and now have time. You have asked some questions of us at UNL. Paul Royster may reply, as well. These are my thoughts. "(1) What percentage of Nebraska-Lincoln output of peer-revewed journal articles (only) per year is deposited in the N-L Repository? "(Without that figure, there is no way of knowing how well N-L is doing, compared to other institutional repositories, mandated or unmandated.)" You are requesting a certain metric and claiming that it is the only valid one. We have approximately 75,000 items in our repository, almost all of which can be read freely by anyone with an Internet connection. We also have several dozen monographs under our own imprint, and we host several journals. We don't devote too much of our time to analyzing our metrics, in part because we are a staff of three (as of two weeks ago--before which we were a staff of two), and we spend much of our time getting content into the repository in favor of administrative activities. Personally, I welcome anyone to analyze our output by any measure and I will be interested to know the result, but that information won't change our day-to-day activities, so it would remain off to the side of what we're doing. Sue, I mentioned it because UNL was being described as one of the biggest and most successful Institutional Repositories (IRs). This may be true if IR success is gauged by total contents, regardless of type. But if it is about success for OA’s target contents — which are first and foremost refereed journal articles — then there is no way to know how UNL compares with other IRs unless the comparison is based on the yearly proportion of UNL yearly refereed journal article output that is being deposited in UNC’s IR (and when). I might add that the question is all the more important as the success of UNC’s IR was being adduced as evidence that an OA mandate is not necessary for IR (OA) success. Stevan Harnad >> Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository, and what should be its aims and purpose? I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term “institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in “open electronic archives”. http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive their papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24 I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the paper written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”). Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university community.” Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them; Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public value.” http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf But today I would think that when defining the term “institutional repository” most people (especially librarians) refer to a document authored by Clifford Lynch in 2003 (“Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”). Lynch described an institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.” http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/arl-br-226.pdf The above, for instance, is how Cambridge University defines an institutional repository, see: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/repository/about/about_institutional_repositories.html Speaking to me in 2006, Lynch said, “If all you want to do is author self-archiving, I suspect that there are likely to be cheaper and more quickly deployed solutions” [than the definition of institutional repository he used in his paper]. http://ia700201.us.archive.org/13/items/The_Basement_Interviews/BlueWaterMain.pdf Richard Poynder
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