1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

Institutional repositories, scholarly communication and open access

The changes discussed in this section will have a profound impact on the creation, communication and reuse of research and learning outputs. This in turn will have a profound impact on how libraries are organized and the services they provide.

Institutional repositories19

There is an growing interest in the more coordinated management and disclosure of digital assets of institutions—learning objects, data sets, e-prints, theses, dissertations and so on. This movement is in early stages and there are no settled patterns or standards. Recently, the term “institutional repository” has emerged as a general summary label for a range of supporting services the library might offer in this environment, working with faculty to provide curatorial attention to a dispersed, complex range of research and learning outputs. DSpace is an initiative of MIT and Hewlett-Packard, providing open-source software for institutional repository development, and importantly, a policy framework for thinking about the development and management of such repositories. Many academic libraries are planning institutional repository initiatives, and many of them are using DSpace.

The most significant challenge facing academic libraries undertaking these institutional repository projects is not technical, however. The major challenge is cultural. Too few initiatives include all the stakeholders—faculty, library staff, IT staff and instructional designers—and there is no common view of what an institutional repository is, what it contains and what its governance structure should be. Faculty have rarely involved librarians in developing teaching materials, digital or otherwise, and have not routinely made these available within the library infrastructure. Librarians have not routinely created metadata for such material.

Scholarly communication

Clifford Lynch directs our attention to the rapid rise in prominence of institutional repository technology as a primary signal of the changing needs of supporting scholarly communication. He applauds these developments, but also points to some of the inherent dangers that attend the evolution of new technology models. High among the risks he sees is the danger of broken promises—the possible discrepancy between the institutional commitments and organizational limitations.20

A major issue here is that the outputs of digital scholarship are often in complex and nonstandard forms. We do not have routine ways of managing new media. The academic community will need to develop a better understanding of ways in which scholarship and learning activities are created, used, reused and preserved in the digital environment, and of the relationships and infrastructure necessary to sustain these activities.

Open access

The institutional repository discussion is sometimes connected with an “open access” discussion. Open access is concerned with better and broader access to research and learning outputs. More specifically, it is interested in reducing the economic barriers to such access. Examples are:

• SPARC, the ARL-initiated effort to facilitate competition in scientific communication through the creation of high-quality alternatives to commercial titles and SPARC Europe, recently launched to provide a European operational arm for SPARC activities.

• The establishment of institutional- and discipline-based archives that allow public access to content and employ the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol.

• PLoS, the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making medical and scientific research publicly searchable and accessible.

The open access community is a broad-based movement with significant library support. See in particular the work of ARL in supporting SPARC, and the formation of the International Scholarly Communications Alliance (ISCA) by major library organizations worldwide that are dedicated to the pursuit of Open Access. The development of systems of e-print archives is supported by national initiatives in several countries.

Finally, we note a related set of discussions about access to the outputs of publicly funded research, and a strong desire to see those freely available to those whose tax dollars have supported the research in the first place. In the U.S. this discussion has been focused by the legislation introduced in Congress in June 2003 by Rep. Martin Olav Sabo (MN) to make papers written to report results of work funded by federal agencies free of copyright. Needless to say, this has generated a good deal of both pro and con discussion.

It is worth keeping in mind that the revolution in scholarly publishing and communication is now almost 15 years old. So far, the system of measuring and rewarding academic staff at universities has changed very little. This is a very complex ecosystem and adjusting one part of it does not necessarily yield the desired results. As one former academic pointed out in an interview with OCLC staff: scholarly publishing in journals has an archival function to it overlooked by many debates about open access to scholarly research. Researchers in specific fields do not rely on published articles to keep up. “Keeping up” is done through preprints, e-mail and personal Web sites.

Research and Learning Landscape: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8