Unweaving the Rainbow: Institutional Repositories and Other Destabilizing Influences

1
 Unweaving the Rainbow Institutional
Repositories and Other Destabilizing Influences

• Ann Okerson
• October 5, 2004
• STM Publishing -- At the Crossroads?
• STM - 36th General Assembly

2
Richard Dawkins and Rainbows

• Philosopher of Science, his widely read book,
  Unweaving the Rainbow (Boston, Houghton Mifflin,
  1998) captures both the magic and demystification
  of science at the same time.
• What was once magic risks losing its charm when
  rigorous analysis takes apart the constituent
  elements of the rainbow.
• But good science offers its own magic, the magic
  of understanding.
• Aim for this talk to analyze factors beneath
  some of the charm of today's wide-ranging
  discussions about forging brand new, inexpensive,
  highly functional journal and information systems
  that will serve the entire world in new, highly
  effective ways.

3
Two proposed systems for improved (i.e. less
costly) journal publication

• Lets repair the problems with todays journals
  This will happen via formal publication of
  journals under business models in which articles
  are paid up front by authors or others no
  revenue is collected ever again (a kind of
  endowment for each article)
• Lets self-archive This happens when works
  exist on fully searchable subject and/or
  institutionally based repositories (IRs), in
  which authors deposit works that may be headed
  for formal peer review and publication -- or
  which may already have been so published.
• Note IRs must be considered in the larger
  context of developing needs and technologies,
  changing roles, public policy goals, political
  rhetoric, and churn in a world where all are
  positioning our institutions

4
What is an Institutional Repository?

• Clifford Lynch (CNI)
• A set of online services that a university
  offers to the members of its community for the
  management and dissemination of digital materials
  created by the institution and its community
  members. It is .. an organizational commitment
  to the stewardship of these digital materials
  including long-term preservation where
  appropriate, as well as organization and access
  or distribution. ARL Newsletter, February 2003
• Attributed to Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC)
• Notes that at the moment IRs are darkness and
  confusion wrapped in a blanket surrounded by
  fog. Reported from a NELINET meeting in October
  2003

5
IR infrastructure possibilities 2003

• Dspace Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and
  Hewlett-Packard freely available to research
  institutions worldwide as an open source system
  that can be customized and extended 
• FEDORA An open source digital repository
  management system sponsored by Cornell and the
  University of Virginia
• Greenstone An open source digital content
  management system produced by the New Zealand
  Digital Library project, in cooperation with
  UNESCO and the Human Information NGO
• Common characteristics of the above
• Software is available to institutions of higher
  learning without charge
• None does the whole job (architecture,
  scalability, versatility, presentation)
• Staff costs for implementation have been reported
  as non-trivial
• Also reported has been tryout of a combination
  of open source and commercial solutions

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IR infrastructure possibilities 2004

• Open source systems joined in the past year by
  companies offering different levels of IR
  services, handling a wide variety of standard
  e-publication types for example
• ProQuest is marketing BePress (Berkeley
  Electronic Press) IR software and hosting
  services
• eBrary, an e-book publisher-aggregator, has begun
  offering its software and servers for IR purposes
• BioMedCentral, an e-journal publisher is offering
  to develop IR services press release of
  September 2004
• Open Repository Service for a one-off setup
  fee, BMC will build the institutional repository
  using DSpace with complete customization and will
  host or run the repository or turn it over to the
  institution
• There are others we can expect more commercial
  companies to offer these kinds of turnkey
  services

7
Survey of ALAs Big Heads of collection
development

• Informal e-mail survey 9-17-2004 (16 out of 40
  responses)
• 1. Do you now have an IR into which you are
  placing materials?
• Yes 6 (mostly very limited in content)
• No 10
• 2. If no, do you plan to do this?
• Within the next 1-2 years pretty sure 5
• Sort of/kind of/real soon/iffy/yes 3
• No plans 1
• 3. Are you partnering in this effort
• Not really library is doing this work 3
• If yes, then with whom?
• Library/IT 10
• Library/faculty 3
• As part of a consortial or regional effort 2 

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Survey what materials? (2)

• What kind of materials are you placing or will
  you be placing there? (more than one answer
  okay)
• Faculty and student scholarly projects 12
• Other "grey literature" created on campus 8
• Content the library staff digitizes or
  creates 7
• Articles faculty submit to journals, esp.
  STM 7
• University records 4
• Other
• Dissertations 3
• e-journals locally created 1
• Learning objects 1
• Faculty research data 1
• Videotape 1
• Out of print monographs 1

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Survey what objectives? (3)

• What are your objectives for the IR? What will
  it accomplish for you to feel it is successful?
  (More than one answer is acceptable.)
• And Can you indicate a general priority
  category for each item such as 1, 2, and 3? You
  can give more than one item the same priority.
• Note that some respondents ranked Items as 1-8
  or so, while
• others gave only Priority 1's, 2's, and 3s.
  Responses are
• ranked in an order that seems fairly clear -- if
  somewhat
• arbitrary!) 

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Survey what objectives? (4)

• Make widely available your institution's
  creations
• Priority 1 7
• Priority 2 4
• Priority 3 2  13
• Support local teaching and learning
• Priority 1 6
• Priority 2 3
• Priority 3 3 12
• Priority 5 1
• Priority 6 1

11
Survey what objectives? (5)

• Be part of an IR national or global institutional
  network
• Priority 1 3
• Priority 2 4
• Priority 3 3 10
• Priority 5 1
• Priority 6 1
• Priority 7 1
• Show Libraries potential to take on a new role
• Priority 1 2
• Priority 2 3
• Priority 3 3 8
• Priority 4 2
• Priority 6 1

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Survey what objectives? (6)

• Displace expensive for-profit and nfp publishers
• Priority 1 2
• Priority 2 1
• Priority 3 5 8
• Priority 4 1
• Priority 5 1
• Provide access to the IR materials for-free to
  all
• Priority 3 2 2
• Priority 4 4
• Priority 5 1
• Priority 6 2
• Priority 7 2
• Priority 8 1

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Survey key issues in 2004 (7)

• What are your key issues as you move forward?
• A. Technical infrastructure 11
• Generally 9
• Standards/compatibility 2
• B. Resources 8
• Funding 5
• Sustainability 1
• Staffing 2
• "Personally I am intimidated by the burden of
  preservation of
• archived materials, especially considering the
  wide variety of
• formats that are likely to be deposited."
• "Long-term sustainability is a daunting issue, as
  is a workable
• and compatible (with others) technical
  infrastructure."

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Survey (8)

• What are your key issues as you move forward?
• C. Buy-in 14
• Convince faculty 7
• Upper level support 5
• Educating institution generally 2
• The biggest issue of all is to convince the
  faculty that IRs are a
• good and necessary step. Their appreciation
  varies greatly.
• D. Policy issues 3
• Generally 1
• Who's in charge, responsible 1
• Scale to begin with 1

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Yales IR (discussion only beginning my
personal views only)

• 1 Goal (so it seems to me at this time) Meet
  stewardship and support responsibilities  
• Library is the campus organization responsible
  for all University archives in all formats
• Library is responsible for all digital material
  created by the library, i.e., our collections
  assets
• Library and ITS would like to accept
  responsibility for material that faculty and
  students create, which need support and
  preservation
• And materials to support teaching and learning
• I.e., I hope we will be less interested in
  archiving what will be archived by others we
  need initially to archive that which others will
  not archive for us

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Possible relationship of publishers to IRs

• Lament journals are going to the dogs
• A weak or inappropriate response
• Take a competitive position
• Move towards being actively complementary

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Journals are going to the dogs

• Henry Adams "And the world grew cheap, as
  worlds must" (From his Mont-Saint Michel and
  Chartres a study of the development of the
  Gothic cathedral, published in 1904)
• Describes a later Gothic cathedral that fails to
  measure up to the creative standards of earlier
  ones and attributes this to the cheapness of the
  new generation of builders
• The argument sometime after the generation of a
  very high standard of design and construction,
  comes the value engineering, i.e.,
  taking-out-costs generation
• (Example maximize travel from NY to Frankfurt
  on a 767 with 150 tickets, but the seats are 12
  inches wide with 10 inches between them)
• NOTE Remembering better days is by and large
  not terribly productive

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Do-little scenario

• Publishers may try to regulate use of IR
  materials
• Or mostly live with IRs because there is little
  choice
• Or may dismiss the potential impact of IRs IRs
  cant possibly replace the value that publishers
  add
• Because they are limited, by law (e.g.,
  anti-trust) and corporate goals from working
  together in the way that universities and
  libraries can, publishers might tend to avoid
  collaborative efforts (of course there are
  exceptions Cross-ref is one of these)
• NOTE In such a scenario, IRs inevitably
  undermine the publishers' current value
  propositions, which are currently heavily (though
  of course not entirely) based on content
  provision. The publishers worst fear..

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Competitive scenario

• Dr. Blenkinsop is a professor at University A.
  She archives her new article at the Universitys
  IR
• Dr. Fred at University B finds that article,
  through good metadata and search tools and uses
  it in class
• Dr. Blenkinsop next publishes her article in the
  Journal of Dazzing Discoveries (JDD) and is
  permitted by her publisher (Clem Company, Inc.,
  aka Clemco) to self-archive the article (from her
  own digital copy of the final text)
• Dr. Fred has access to this version as well.
  Voila! Possible competition between the two
  sites
• NOTE Not a winning proposition, particularly in
  days of tight budgets more of the publishers
  worst fear

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Complementarity looks like this

• The publishers strength is in access to capital
  create tools to deliver articles using
  ever-better tools and processes, i.e., superior
  and focused searching, indexing, cross-linking,
  open APIs to encourage tool development (many
  publishers already do some parts of this)
• Publishers efforts could include cooperative
  development with IRs this may include linking to
  works in IRs, validating the best articles,
  creating standards for handling or linking to
  complex materials (videos, datasets and other
  materials beyond articles)
• Publishers have already developed infrastructures
  for metadata, articles, and abstracts and might
  make platforms available to IRs
• Publishers and IRs can work together to address
  the complicated and costly problems of long-term
  archiving and preservation
• NOTE In this scenario, publishers move still
  further toward a service strategy, which
  recognizes that economic value is increasingly in
  providing ever-expanding context and services

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Useful URLs

• There is currently no definitive list of IRs
• But, one is planned by the University of Lund -
  Directory of Open Access Journals group
• Peter's Subers site of better existing lists 
• He recommends
• Tim Brody's Institutional Archives Registry (not
  the most comprehensive but provides description
  of each IR listed and a graphic display of
  growth)
  p 
• University of Illinois registry (most
  comprehensive built by a machine harvester, but
  contains some empty or defunct listings)
  
• OAIster list (all are limited to OAI compliant
  repositories)
  ewcolls.html

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Thanks to

• Joe Esposito, The Portable CEO, Publisher
  consultant, for insights on many publishing
  matters
• Arnold Hirshon, NELINET, for notes of the IR
  meeting in Fall, 2003
• Karen Hunter, Elsevier Science, for notes from a
  presentation at ALA Midwinter 2004
• Clifford Lynch, CNI, for articulating arguments
  for IRs
• Peter Suber, Free Online Science project, for
  sharing information about IR sites and much more
• My counterparts at Universities of Arizona,
  British Columbia, Columbia, Cornell, Duke,
  Harvard, Iowa, Indiana, Pittsburgh, Princeton,
  Rutgers, Toronto, Virginia, Washington (Seattle),
  Wisconsin -- for completing a very unscientific
  survey