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Repositories for Fun and Profit
Led by Dorothea Salo
Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this repository nonsense? What’s a repository, and how is it different from a website? What can a repository do for me? Why should I bother with them? Does anybody use them? What’s all this about metadata, anyway? Find out from a real live repository librarian!
Notes from Dorothea
I will NOT be limiting this workshop to institutional repositories. Indeed, one of the more important decisions scientists must make is which repositories to entrust their work to!
I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE attendees to bring material that they would like to deposit someplace. I hope we’ll find it a home by the end of the session!
1. Finding repositories: in your discipline, at your institution, for papers, for data.
2. Getting ready to deposit: preparing your material, thinking about copyright and other IP questions
3. Signing up to deposit
4. Depositing
5. Being a squeaky wheel where it will do the most good
Questions? Comments?
Feel free to ask questions and bring up things you’d like to cover here.
Hi, Dorothea. I am looking forward to your workshop. Could you please look at this:
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/10-1003.shtml
and the extensive discussion of institutional repositories here:
http://blog.ostp.gov/2010/01/01/policy-forum-on-public-access-to-federally-funded-research-management/
and address in your workshop the views of Heather Morrison and Stevan Harnad and give us your theories as to why there has been so little input from the library community on these important matters on this important forum. Very few science or medical librarians are weighing in and are therefore missing, I think, a major opportunity to help shape the debate on IRs and Open Access. Here is some of what I and others wrote:
Hope Leman said on January 6, 2010 at 2:24 pm:
Although Heather Morrison possesses great expertise in the area of Open Access and should be lauded for her tireless, outstanding leadership in this area, I would like to dissent from her rosy view of how easy it would supposedly be to set up a vast network of institutional repositories and suggest that all is not running as smoothly as she so cheerily suggests.
Morrison says, “For example, the vast majority of university libraries have functioning institutional repositories. Virtually all university libraries participate in consortial groupings that could quickly find means to collaborate to ensure that all researchers have a repository available. University libraries have a robust technological infrastructure, reflecting their current leadership roles in providing access to (and increasingly, creation of) electronic information, and knowledgeable professional staff with established liaison relationships across campuses, across the nation. Librarians also have long-established business relationships with scholarly publishers. Even where the locus of deposit is a central repository (as with the NIH policy), librarians have expertise in assisting researchers with questions surrounding author rights retention to ensure compliance, and with deposit.”
But the equally respected science librarian Dorothea Salo provides a less sanguine view of the value of institutional repositories in her article (and note the pungency of the title), “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.”
http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088?show=full
Salo’s article should be required reading for the policymakers who have set up this forum for she writes, “The “build it and they will come” proposition has been decisively proven wrong. Citation advantages and preservation have not attracted faculty participants, though current-generation software and services offer faculty little else. Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services have been wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management.”
We should not disintermediate librarians. But we should also listen to those who, like Salo, argue that IRs are not necessarily all they are cracked up to be in that they burden librarians with the task of marketing the value of the institution’s IR to skeptical faculty. Morrison says, “A full university IR will showcase the work of the university. Conceptually, there are strong reasons to believe that the IR will be a key evaluative component for universities in the very near future. For example, showcasing the work of a creative research department through the IR will only help to attract the best and brightest graduate students, and usage statistics for the IR will increase the university’s web presence, an emerging evaluative criteria for universities.” I would suggest that what would really showcase the work of a university’s researchers is the quickest and widest possible dissemination of their work—and that would be rendered possible by an easy upload process to a site such as PubMed Central via a simple button on a university library’s Web page or the site of its office of research administration. There is simply no need at this stage of Open Science, Science 2.0 and Web 2.0 for librarians to waste time evangelizing to cost-conscious university administrators and reluctant faculty about the supposed merits of the cockroach motel. What does increase a university’s Web presence is many, many mentions in Google and other search engines of the work of its researchers and that is far more likely to arise from fast uploads directly to PubMed Central and future similar sites than forcing visitors to snake through multiple pathways to where an article can finally be found in the cockroach motel (although, admittedly, I found Salo’s article on her institution’s very own IR). What researchers need is a mega site where they can quickly search for the work of scholars from many institutions and not have to plod through the many sites and their various interfaces of a plethora of IRs hither and yon. And such a site should have an upload button that would enable them to right there and then deposit their papers. Open Access can become a galvanizing force for science if we can combine search and self-archiving in one operation.
And while we are on the subject of search technology, whatever site is created should possess the powerful search features of PubMed and not resemble, say, the atrocious search mode of grants.gov.
* Flag as off-topic Stevan Harnad said on January 6, 2010 at 4:42 pm: Heather Morrison is right and Dorothea Salo is wrong. The proposition was never “build it and they will come” but “mandate it and they will come” — and that is exactly the proposition under discussion in this Forum. (About expenses, see earlier reply.)