Commentary on:
Jan-Gabriel Bankier & Courtney Smith. "Digital Repositories at a
Crossroads: Achieving Sustainable Success through Campus-wide
Engagement" VALA2010 Conference Proceedings (2010).
http://works.bepress.com/jean_gabriel_bankier/8
Institutional Repositories at Cross Purposes
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/720-guid.html
"...many traditionalists still believe in the post-print driven
approach. Stevan Harnad, the “archivangelist,” recently argued that
the “main raison d’etre” of the IR is to capture the institution’s own
“institutional refereed research journal article output” (Harnad,
2009). To solve the engagement problem, these traditionalists espouse
mandates as the only viable solution...
"...we find that the most successful IRs are those that strive to
engage a diverse set of groups across campus, specifically liaising
and serving both academic and non-academic units, accepting a wide
scope of content, aligning repository services with the mission of the
university, and facilitating new opportunities for knowledge
production and publication." [Bankier & Smith 2010]
(1) It's rather early to be described as a "traditionalist" in a field
(Open Access, OA) that has yet to get off the ground!
(2) The problem that both OA and Institutional Repositories (IRs) were
invented to solve was the problem of providing access -- to the 2.5M
articles published annually in the planet's 2.5K peer-reviewed
journals -- not only for those users whose institutions can afford to
subscribe to the journal in which an article happened to be published,
but for all would-be users.
(3) The purpose of OA is to maximize research uptake, usage, impact
and progress, to the benefit of research, researchers, their
institutions, and the tax-paying public that funds much of research
and research institutions.
(4) There was indeed a link between OA, institutional libraries'
"serials crisis," but only in the sense that no institution could
afford subscription access to all or most of the 2.5M annual articles
that were OA's primary target.
(4) The institutional libraries worked on trying to lower journal
subscription prices so as to make journals more affordable, and they
also flirted with the idea of trying to help convert journals from
charging institutional subscription fees for access to instead
charging institutional article fees for publication ("Gold OA"
publishing) by providing funds for it.
(5) But a conversion to Gold OA publishing was largely in the hands of
publishers, and while scarce institutional funds were still heavily
committed to paying for costly subscriptions, there was not much spare
cash available to pay for Gold OA publishing fees.
(6) Nor did there need to be spare cash, since all researchers could
provide OA to their own articles cost-free by depositing them in their
institutional OA repositories (IRs) immediately upon acceptance for
publication ("Green OA" self-archiving).
(7) It soon became evident that despite the demonstrated benefits of
OA for both usage and impact, IRs were remaining largely empty
(baseline spontaneous deposit rate: 15%) because, as authors indicated
in worldwide, cross-disciplinary surveys, most would (because of
uncertainties about legality and about the effort involved) only
provide Green OA if deposit was mandated by their institutions or
funders.
(8) So now we "neo-traditionalists" are working on getting
universities and funders to mandate Green OA (as over 100
institutions, including Harvard and MIT, and over 40 funders,
including NIH and all the UK funders, have already done).
(9) What BE Press seems to be advocating instead is to set aside
filling IRs with the target OA content and focus instead on other
useful things one can put into them and use them for.
(10) Well, by all means do other useful things with IRs too, if you
like, but do it in addition to doing the most useful thing a
university can do -- which is to mandate Green OA -- not instead.
(11) Perhaps it is not so surprising that this recommendation to
change the objective for success comes from BE Press.
(12) After all, BE Press is in the IR business, not in (Green) OA
provision (which is not a business, and is in the hands of
researchers, their institutions and their funders)...
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Apr 07 2010 - 21:32:35 BST