Institutional Repository
= a freely-available web-accessible database in which university faculty are able to deposit their research outputs
Description
Richard Poynder:
"One of the primary tools of the Open Access (OA) movement is the institutional repository (IR) — a freely-available web-accessible database in which university faculty are able to deposit their research outputs, notably papers that they have published in scholarly journals, and also books and book chapters.
The genesis of the institutional repository can be traced back to a 1999 meeting held in Santa Fe New Mexico, where the so-called Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was formulated. The aim of the meeting was to create an infrastructure that could build on the success of the physics preprint repository arXiv.
Founded by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, arXiv had become an important resource for scholarly communication within the physics community, and there was a growing desire to replicate the model in other disciplines. During the Santa Fe meeting a strong case was also made for creating institutionally-based repositories that catered for all research areas in a single university, and over time the IR has become the dominant repository model. However, the primary aim of the Santa Fe meeting was to create a protocol to make repositories interoperable, regardless of whether they were central subject-based repositories or institutional repositories." (http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-access-interviews-bill-mortimer.html)
Discussion
Richard Poynder: Why repositories?
Why the need for repositories? After all, scholarly communication was outsourced to publishers long ago. The appeal of the model arXiv pioneered, however, was that it exploited the ability of the Internet to allow research results to be communicated much more rapidly than was possible with traditional publishing — where publishing a paper in a scholarly journal or book can take many months, or longer, a researcher can deposit a paper in an online repository the moment it is completed.
More importantly, traditional scholarly publishing was in crisis. Since the end of WWII an explosion of new scholarly journals, constantly rising subscriptions, and falling library budgets, had created a situation in which universities and other research institutions could no longer afford to buy all the journals their researchers needed. Moreover, even though publishers had begun migrating their journals to an online environment, subscription prices were not falling (as would have been expected, since traditional costs like printing and physical distribution go away on the Internet), but inexplicably continuing to rise. The suspicion was that the fundamental problem was publisher greed.
It should be noted that arXiv was intended to supplement the traditional model (by sharing preprints prior to publication), not to replace it. Nevertheless, its model was sufficiently compelling that some also viewed it as a solution to serial price inflation, and had begun to call on colleagues to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the Internet, by self-archiving them. If every researcher did so, it was reasoned, the research community's access problem would be resolved.
Again, the aim was still not to replace traditional publishing but to supplement it. In fact, the objective was quite simple: If researchers belonged to an institution that subscribed to the journal in which a particular paper they needed had been published they could access the publisher's version of the paper using their institution's subscription. If, on the other hand, their institution didn't have a subscription to the journal in question, they could use the author's self-archived version. In this way, it was assumed, all 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 scholarly journal each year would be freely available to all — in one form or another.
It was apparent, however, that if researchers simply dumped their papers hither dither on the Internet it would be difficult for others to locate them. What was needed was a custom-built software platform to allow universities to create a dedicated repository in which faculty could archive them. And as the emphasis shifted from central subject-based repositories to smaller cross-disciplinary repositories, it was realised that a low-cost solution would be needed. In 2000, therefore, the UK's University of Southampton released EPrints. The first dedicated repository software, EPrints was made available as freely downloadable Open Source software.
Importantly, EPrints was OAI compliant — which meant that EPrints repositories could expose standardised metadata descriptions of their contents on the Internet. These could then be collected by specialist harvesters and aggregated into a virtual cross-searchable global archive offering a single search interface. When a search was conducted the hits would then link back to the source material in the host repository. To this end in 2002 the University of Michigan launched the first OAI harvester, OAIster.
But while the objective of the self-archiving movement may have been simple, implementation has proved enormously difficult, and nine years after the Santa Fe meeting only around 1,000 of the world's 22,000 research institutions have yet to create an institutional repository. Moreover, those who have done so generally discover that only about 15% of their researchers will spontaneously deposit their papers in them." (http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-access-interviews-bill-mortimer.html)
More Information
- Extensive interview and profile of IR advocate Bill Mortimer at
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-access-interviews-bill-mortimer.html