JISC/SIRIS "Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions Study"

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:07:31 -0500

The JISC/SIRIS "Report of the Subject and Institutional Repositories
Interactions Study"(November 2008) "was commissioned by JISC to
produce a set of practical recommendations for steps that can be
taken to improve the interactions between institutional and subject
repositories in the UK" but it fails to make clear the single most
important reason why Institutional Repositories' "desired 'critical
mass' of content is far from having been achieved."

The following has been repeatedly demonstrated (1) in cross-national,
cross-disciplinary surveys (by Alma Swan, uncited in the report) on
what authors state that they will and won't do and (2) in outcome
studies (by Arthur Sale, likewise uncited in the report) on what
authors actually do, confirming the survey findings:
      Most authors will not deposit until and unless their
      universities and/or their funders make deposit mandatory.
      But if and when deposit is made mandatory, over 80% will
      deposit, and deposit willingly. (A further 15% will
      deposit reluctantly, and 5% will not comply with the
      mandate at all.) In contrast, the spontaneous
      (unmandated) deposit rate is and remains at about 15%,
      for years now (and adding incentives and assistance but
      no mandate only raises this deposit rate to about 30%).

The JISC/SIRIS report merely states: "Whether deposit of content is
mandatory is a decision that will be made by each institution," but
it does not even list the necessity of mandating deposit as one of
its recommendations, even though it is the crucial determinant of
whether or not the institutional repository ever manages to attract
its target content. 

Nor does the JISC/SIRIS report indicate how institutional and funder
mandates reinforce one another, nor how to make both mandates and
locus of deposit systematically convergent and complementary (deposit
institutionally, harvest centrally) rather than divergent and
competitive -- though surely that is the essence of "Subject and
Institutional Repositories Interactions."

There are now 58 deposit mandates already adopted worldwide (28 from
universties/faculties,
including Southampton, Glasgow, Liège, Harvard and Stanford, and 30
from funders, including 6/7 Research Councils UK, European Research
Counciland the US National Institutes of Health) plus at least 11
known mandate proposals pending (including a unanimous recommendation
from the European Universities Association council, for its 791
member universities in 46 countries, plus a recommendation to the
European Commission from the European Heads of Research Councils).

It is clear now that mandated OA self-archiving is the way that the
world will reach universal OA at long last. Who will lead and who
will follow will depend on who grasps this, at long last, and takes
the initiative. Otherwise, there's not much point in giving or taking
advice on the interactions of empty repositories...
      Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim,
      C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S.
      (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access
      journal content in UK further and higher
      education. Learned Publishing, 18 (1). pp. 25-40.


Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Nov 30 2008 - 13:21:10 GMT