[GOAL] Re: On Open Access, Institutional Repositories and Prophecy

Wed Sep 17 15:50:13 BST 2014

SH: The same old motto: We need less definition and more open access provision...

RP: This, however, is difficult if there is no consensus on what exactly open access is. Likewise, it is difficult to say how successful an institutional repository has been if there is no consensus on what an institutional repository is, what it should be doing, and what it should contain!

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 17 September 2014 15:05
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] {Disarmed} On Open Access, Institutional Repositories and Prophecy

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at btinternet.com <mailto:richard.poynder at btinternet.com> > wrote:

Here, I fear, we bump up against another of the many confusions and disagreements surrounding open access: what is an institutional repository, and what should be its aims and purpose?

I do not think the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative uses the term “institutional repository”, rather it proposes that papers be deposited in “open electronic archives”. http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

Correct. There were no institutional repositories in 2002 -- and the word being used to designate them at the time was "open archives."

Tansley, R. & Harnad, S. (2000)  <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD> MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.dlib.org" claiming to be Eprints.org Software for Creating Institutional and Individual Open Archives D-Lib Magazine 6 (10) 

Then there was a bit of a terminological tiff for a few years, in which librarians argued that the term "archive" was inappropriate and already appropriated, so eventually the accepted term became "repository."

Stevan Harnad’s 1994 “Subversive Proposal” urged researchers to archive their papers in “globally accessible local ftp archives”.

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015034923758;view=1up;seq=24

Correct, and that was even earlier. (And by the time I wrote that, ftp archives were already superseded by websites...)

 I would think the seminal text on institutional repositories was the paper written by Raym Crow in 2002 (“The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper”).

Now I must demur, or at least question the meaning of "seminal": There is no doubt that Crow's paper was influential. But it got so many things so wrong, I hesitate to call it seminal (in any other sense than miscegenation!).

I tried at the time (as always, unsuccessfully) to head it off at the pass: 

Comments on Raym Crow's (2002) SPARC position paper on institutional repositories <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/671-guid.html>  (2002)

Crow defined institutional repositories as “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multiple-university community.”

Yes indeed he did. And I pointed out that the preservation function as well as the gray literature function were distinct from the OA function, and that the OA function needed special attention, with some urgency (that was 12 years ago!) for reasons that have since been oft rehearsed.

And, more important, I pointed out that Raym Crow's notion of institutional repository was also infected with the loopy notion of "disaggregated journal" (originating from JWT Smith <http://kar.kent.ac.uk/4/> )...

 Their role, he suggested, should be twofold. First: to “Provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication--a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them;

That's a lot of eclectic and inchoate ideology -- access, control, journal costs, library relevance-- but not a coherent notion of institutional repository.

 Second: to “serve as tangible indicators of a university’s quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution’s visibility, status, and public value.”

http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/media_files/instrepo.pdf

 Yes, repositories can showcase institutions' research output: but to do that better than a bibliography, they need to make that output OA. And doing that for the gray literature is a piece of cake. The challenge is only with the toll-gated refereed journal literature.

Back to the IR's special mission as OA-provider rather than merely a preservation-archive and showcase for other kinds of output.

 But today I would think that when defining the term “institutional repository” most people (especially librarians) refer to a document authored by Clifford Lynch in 2003 (“Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age”).

And that one (in the humble opinion of this unheeded lesser-prophet) was just as off-target:

Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2744.html>  (2003)

Cliff Lynch on Open Access <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/195-Cliff-Lynch-on-Open-Access.html>  (2007)

 Lynch described an institutional repository as “a set of 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 most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”

http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/arl-br-226.pdf

All fine, and unproblematic, for the institution's gray output. The challenge starts with the refereed journal article output. And Cliff does not provide any way to meet it.

(And we still have not met it, 11 years later.)

 The above, for instance, is how Cambridge University defines an institutional repository, see:

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/repository/about/about_institutional_repositories.html

All these stately definitions, while IRs are still mostly empty of their own refereed research output...

 Speaking to me in 2006, Lynch said, “If all you want to do is author self-archiving, I suspect that there are likely to be cheaper and more quickly deployed solutions” [than the definition of institutional repository he used in his paper].

http://ia700201.us.archive.org/13/items/The_Basement_Interviews/BlueWaterMain.pdf

Maybe, but then what are they, and let's get started so we can fill those XXs (whatever you want to call them, if they are not IRs!

The same old motto: We need less definition and more open access provision...

Harrumph,

Weary and wizened archivangelist

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