A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline

Peter A. Zuber (Brigham Young University, not to be confused with Peter Suber of OA News) has published a paper on institutional repository holdings in D-LIB: A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline.

I find the binary, hypothesis-supported-or-not approach to the subject that is manifest in the article slightly problematical, for example in the way that incentives are counted, or the fact that the popularity of self-depositing in some disciplines is discussed in conjunction with the overall size of IRs, while the two can be seen in total independence from one another.

Still, some interesting points are made. From the article:

Another issue came from the difficulty in finding the institutional repository itself. In some instances, several searches within the institution’s website were required to discover if they indeed sponsored a site or if they were contemplating creating one. Typically, if a search contained any reference to an institutional repository, then in-depth reviews of the successful search returns were required to see if a link or URL was provided to the IR’s main page. Although content is individually searchable from various web engines, the lack of visibility within an institution’s own web site speaks to poor recruitment and incentive strategies. If contributions are desired from faculty, then a more visible presence on the institute’s main page, either in the form of a notice or a hyperlink, or on the institution’s library page may provide greater awareness and a willingness to contribute.

The main issue I see is how institutional repositories are conceptualized in completely different ways by those who run them (librarians/IT services people) and by those who are supposed to deposit in them (researchers). By and large researchers don’t want to deposit, store or archive their work, they want to publish it. Publishing serves the self-interest of researchers, while depositing, particularly in an institutional repository (versus a disciplinary one) mostly serves the interest of the institution and has very little (if any) benefit for the researcher.

I believe that this can be countered by combining the institution’s publishing service and the IR – have all content produced by researchers at X University electronically published by X University Press and professionally presented on XUP’s website. Print on demand services (which may be outsourced to various degrees) can be associated with the content, as well as social tagging/bookmarking tools, discussion etc. Optimal findability via both commercial and specialized search engines and use of feeds to enable access to all content on multiple levels (such as through mobile devices) should also be key goals.

In reality, the presentation of repository content and its distribution via the available channels is often sub-optimal from the perspective of the researcher (for example, I can’t seem to find any of the content in my own university’s repository via Google Scholar). The problem, at least that’s my impression, lies with the dominant emphasis on the archive as a sort of box that holds content, versus an emphasis of the content itself (without the box) and on marketing said content aggresively to potential readers.

While I’m quite aware that depositing in an IR and publishing are usually interpreted as two different processes, I believe that this is an unfortunate segregation, because it bears the risk of making IRs a content wastebasket for material that can’t be published elsewhere. Of course an IR can also be used to make available content that has already been published elsewhere, but once again the question is how much merit this has from the perspective of the researcher.

Deposit mandates and aggressive content collection are one approach, but I would argue that improved marketing of content could achieve a lot, possibly more, because it would create an incentive to publish as outlined above that is currently not given (see also my recent rant on creating incentives).