Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 10:43:13 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends:
Here is a brief summary of the Breakout session 7: "If you build it will
they come - filling an institutional repository", part of the CERN Workshop
OAI3 (in the series Innovations in Scholarly Communication), held last month
(12-14 February 2004) at Geneva.
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
--------
If you build it will they come - filling an institutional repository
Concerns raised by academic staff:
* Not willing to take on additional work.
* Copyright
* Fear of plagiarism.
* Benefits not immediately obvious - why deposit in an
institutional archive when their papers can be found on Google?
* Worries re prior publication - Ingelfinger rule (a paper
won't be commercially published if deemed to have been already published
elsewhere).
* Concerns re potential for harm to learned societies.
* Quality control (or perceived lack of).
Possible solutions:
* Need for dedicated support for the institutional repository
- establish a post to support advocacy, help authors with depositing papers,
handle metadata, convert file formats etc. Implications - ongoing role for
the Library.
* Work with your liaison librarians. They often have good
links into academic departments. If they are on board they can help spread
the message.
* Raise awareness of copyright issues - what authors can and
can't do with their works. Use the RoMeo database to identify where pre and
post prints can be deposited. Encourage authors to hang on to their
copyright.
* Explode the myth about prior publication. Ingelfinger is
very much in decline apart from in certain subject areas (mainly Medicine).
Make academics more aware of their rights.
* Use of plagiarism software to make it easier to detect
plagiarism.
* Sell the benefits of proper indexing, and the benefit of
papers appearing in a quality listing rather than in Google.
* Sell the benefits of archive as a preservation tool.
* Encourage academics to discuss the issues with their learned
societies.
* Consider that you may need departmental-level agreements on
content (what is deposited) rather than broad institutional agreements.
Different needs and requirements from discipline to discipline.
* Consider format issues - need to meet accessibility
legislation requirements as well as being suitable for long term
preservation.
* Use of national initiatives - such as the UK Research
Assessment Exercise - to force change.
