[Hyperlinked version of this posting:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/687-guid.html ]
The Undergraduate Science Librarian wrote:
"For a small institution like mine, having our own institutional
repository might not make sense. We probably don¿t have the library
staff to run it well... [F]or many of our faculty, their only way of
archiving their papers may be to post them on their own personal
website, where they might not be as easy to find..."
REPLY:
(1) If a campus has the infrastructure to host a website at all (as
SUNY GENESEO clearly does), it has the infrastructure to host its own
institutional repository (IR) for its own research article output. (If
not, it probably does not have the insfrastructure to conduct research
at all.)
(2) Library staff are not needed to host an IR.
(3) All that's needed is some disk space on one of the institution's
webservers, plus the installation of (free, open-source) IR software.
(4) Even individuals can install and host the IR software on their own
PCs or their personal websites. (There is even a (free) Microsoft
Windows version of EPrints.)
(5) All EPrints IR installations are OAI-compliant, hence harvested
for searchability by all of the major search engines: scirus, scopus,
citeseerx, citebase, oaister, base, etc., as well as google and google
scholar (the major ports of entry for all IRs). (Worries about IR
deposits not being "easy to find" are based on a profound
misunderstanding of search over distributed OAI-harvestable contents.)
(5) CalTech alone hosts 26 EPrints IRs.
(6) The importance of institutional IR installations is as the
convergent locus of deposit for Open Access self-archiving mandates
(without which all IRs, personal or institutional, are doomed to lie
fallow).
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat Jan 16 2010 - 19:03:22 GMT