alternative models of scholarly communication: the "toddler years" for open access...

Alternative Models of Scholarly Communication: The "Toddler Years" for Open Access Journals

and Institutional Repositories

Greg Tananbaum

President

The Berkeley Electronic Press

LITA Forum, October 1, 2005

Session Overview

• What is an Institutional Repository (IR)? • What are some examples? • Why are they gaining in prominence?• What are the challenges facing IRs?• What is Open Access (OA)?• What are some examples?• How do the IR and OA movements overlap? • How do the IR and OA movements diverge?

What is an Institutional Repository?

• Institutional Repositories (IRs): “Digital collections that preserve and provide access to the intellectual output of an institution.”** Raym Crow The case for institutional repositories: a SPARC position paper (2002).

• IRs might contain:– Pre-prints (pre-refereed papers) or Post-prints (post-refereed

papers)– Theses and dissertations– Non-static resources (e.g., sound and video files)– Conference papers– Reports– Journals– Presentations

What is an Institutional Repository?

• Alternative definition: “Institutional Repositories, put more simply, are websites that display the depth and breadth of a university’s intellectual output.”** Greg Tananbaum, LITA 2005 conference

• IRs vary by content type and technical sophistication

• Common Denominator: presentation in an openly accessible manner of research conducted by members of the institution

Institutional Repository Examples

University of California’s eScholarship Repository

http://repositories.cdlib.org

Institutional Repository Examples

e-Prints Soton

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk

DSpace @MIThttps://dspace.mit.edu

Benefits of an Institutional Repository

• The University– Can manage and showcase institutional information assets

(articles, working papers, etc.) under one site

– Consolidates information silos created by the web activities of individual departments and centers

– Unified collection undoubtedly assists in the fundraising and recruitment activities so vital to all institutions

Benefits of an Institutional Repository

• The University Researcher (Authors)– Enjoys wide and rapid dissemination of content

– Easier and quicker posting to the web

– As the IR content is picked up by Google and other search engines (it is crawled automatically via the Open Archives Initiative, or “OAI” protocol), repository content receives great exposure

Benefits of an Institutional Repository

• The Research Community (Readers)

– Able to obtain scholarly information quickly and easily

– NOTE: most materials posted within institutional repositories are not peer-reviewed, so IRs at present do not obviate the need for the traditional journal

IRs: Early Lessons Learned

• Early Data– IR era began in earnest in 2002 with launch of DSpace

and Digital Commons platforms to complement ePrints

– ~500 institutions with IRs as of 2005

– See http://www.oaister.org for representative sample

IRs: Early Lessons Learned

• Early Takeaways– Majority of objects are text based (e.g., papers rather than

data sets or audiovisual files)

– Most papers are unvetted “grey literature”

– Materials cross disciplinary boundaries encompassing hard sciences, humanities, and the social sciences

IRs: Challenges

• Crossing the Chasm: Content Recruitment– Largest single issue facing IR organizers

– Median number of objects in IRs: 234** http://archives.eprints.org

– Possible solutions• Branded selected works pages for authors • Citation harvesting from PubMed and other sources • Library-as-poster services

What is Open Access?

• “An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:– The author…grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual

right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

– A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.”

– Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, 6/20/2003

Open Access Examples

See http://www.doaj.org/ for more complete listing of 1688 journals

Observations of the OA & IR Movements• Where Do OA and IR Movements Overlap?

• both eliminate the costs associated with accessing scholarly information

• both are made possible by the reduction in communication costs the internet provides

• both shift those costs to other actors (OA = authors, IR = university administration)

• Where Do OA and IR Diverge?

• OA primarily focuses on peer-reviewed journals

• IR materials are primarily grey literature (working papers, reports, etc.)

• OA “movement” vs. IR “implementation”

Greg Tananbaum

President

The Berkeley Electronic Press

greg@bepress.com