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.