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Assessment of Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories:
Depositorship and Full-Text Availability
Jingfeng Xia and Li Sun
Serials Review 2007; 33:14^Ö21.
Mark Twain allegedly responded to an untimely obituary with the
comment "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated". This article
posts an obituary for self archiving after evaluating a small number
of repositories against two criteria (depositer identity and full
text percentage); my response is that Self Archiving is making real
gains in a successful but frustrating long and drawn-out process!
The article highlights the difficulty of understanding repositories
"due to time constraints" without (a) casting ones net widely enough
to insulate from national difference, (b) undergoing an in-depth
analysis of data and (c) attempting an intimate understanding of the
processes that are manifest in each repository. A much fuller
analysis will be soon forthcoming from the European DRIVER project,
which has devoted resources to these factors.
Comments about Southampton:
> The success of the Soton database is primarily because
> Southampton is the inventor of the EPrints application
> and the home of an enthusiastic self - archiving
> advocate^×Stevan Harnad. For many years, the uni-
> versity has made tremendous endeavors to encourage
> self-archiving among its faculty.
The second sentence is true; the first sentence is not. The
establishment of the Southampton repository is due almost entirely to
the library staff at Southampton, and principally the efforts of
Pauline Simpson and Jessie Hey, two of the librarians. Mark Brown,
the chief librarian and Wendy White, the repository manager have
become responsible for the repository's current success as it has
moved from pilot to production status. Stevan, myself and EPrints
have had relatively little to do with the institutional repository,
dealing mainly with the school repository for (their own) School of
Electronics and Computer Science. I sit on the University's
repository steering committee, but have no operational commitment to
the repository which also has its own independent support staff.
[Incidentally, the ECS school repository is about half the size of
the current institutional repository, has a full text deposit rate
of around 70% and consists of almost entirely author deposits. More
of this later.]
> It is worth noting that author self-archiving is not the
> major way of contribution to the accumulation of the
> content in Southampton^Òs Soton repository. The findings
> reveal that the majority of existing documents are not
> deposited by authors. In other words, for most docu-
> ments, the name appeared in the ^ÓDeposited By^Ô field of
> a document is not found in the authors of the document.
Since its beginning, the University repository has offered "mediated
deposit", ie librarian assistance for users depositing their items.
This "mediation" may be light-touch (editorial corrections) or more
substantial (with the researcher indicating the existence of a new
paper, and the librarians filling in all the details). A spectrum of
assistance has been in operation, although the development of the
service is moving the responsibility from the library staff to the
schools, if not completely to the faculty themselves. In tandem with
this natural development, the University management is shortly to
require all researchers to deposit their research in the repository.
So I am not entirely sure whose name appears in the "Deposited By"
field - I will investigate and report back!
At the moment the repository is still dealing with a backlog of
several years' research. Each school is managing its backlog in a
different way - some are relying on individual researchers to enter
their data, some have an individual, some are using their own
(legacy) databases.
Many of the deposits will therefore not have a single individual who
is named as the depositor, but instead it may be the school liaison,
or the library staff who are named.
The picture is further complicated by the national Research
Assessment Exercise, which requires every researcher to have their
best papers from the last 6 years made available in the repository.
The level of detail required is quite excessive (accurate months of
publication, journal ISSNs and DOIs) but ironically, full texts are
specifically not required. This has meant that although the
repository is gaining in size, it is suffereing from a lack of full
texts (postprint PDFs) which will be adressed after the RAE
collection period has finished later this year. The RAE processing
led to a period of excessive sustained deposit, which peaked at 300
items per day in the early summer of 2006.
The current state of play is that the repository is receiving 30-50
spontaneous daily self-deposits, independently of the backlog and RAE
processing.
> Table 3 shows that lack of full text is obvious in IRs in
> the European institutions except for the University of
> Trento, based in Italy.
Although I can't comment on non-Soton repositories in general, I can
say that a study that had included any of the Dutch repositories
would have found a much higher rate of full text deposit. As I have
already stated, full texts are much more common in the ECS repository
at Southampton (about 70% compliance with the school mandate) and are
expected to be so in the institutional repository (a) after the
debilitating effects of the UK RAE and (b) after the adoption of the
University's new policy of "requirement" rather than "support". I'm
afraid that it's all a matter of MANDATE - the difference between a
desirable but ultimately optional task and one that you will be
expected to accomplish.
> Self-archiving as a revolutionary way of publishing has
> been a myth for a long time.
It's been an actuality in many fields for many years - Physics,
Economics, Computer Science. The institutional response to Self
Archiving has been slow to develop - in a sustainable, supported and
scalable way. And this is probably to be expected (though
frustrating) when one considers how many years the issues can take to
be discussed, agreed, adopted, tested, piloted and migrated through
the whole of the University committee, management and faculty
structures!
--
Les
Received on Sun Mar 04 2007 - 23:02:29 GMT