RE: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

["Michael Carroll" <Carroll@law.villanova.edu>]

As a Selected Works author, 
http://works.bepress.com/michael_carroll/, I agree wholeheartedly 
that it provides the incentive Aaron mentions.

The other option to consider to increase deposits in the absence 
of a mandate is to find an entry point for the repository into 
faculty members' existing practices concerning publication.  For 
example, either at the time of acceptance or publication, faculty 
have to update their list of publications on their C.V.s, bios, 
and web pages.  Repository managers or librarians could assist 
with this task in exchange for a copy of the author's manuscript 
and the citation metadata.

Best,
MC


Michael W. Carroll
Professor of Law
Villanova University School of Law
Research papers: http://law.bepress.com/michael_carroll
http://ssrn.com/author=330326
blog: http://www.carrollogos.org/

See also www.creativecommons.org

>>> edlin@econ.berkeley.edu 11/28/2007 7:50:47 PM >>>

My own thinking, and the philosophy of bepress, is that the 
university is filled with many interests and constituencies. The 
puzzle is getting them to work well together. Faculty seek to 
promote themselves individually, and seek control and identity; 
universities seek to promote themselves and grow; librarians seek 
to create useful order from chaos. These goals can, but need not, 
conflict.

As to mandates, I favor them.  As I see it, the university or 
government funds much of my research.  Why should they not demand 
and insist on a non-exclusive copy of my writings to preserve for 
posterity (for what posterity cares about my work) or to 
advertise to the world, should I be lucky enough that UC Berkeley 
could bask in the glory of my writing?

All that said, for various political and practical reasons, 
including lobbying by Elsevier, I don't see *effective* mandates 
coming for a little while yet.

In the meantime, the key for those who are pro-repository is to 
find a way to work with faculty.  How do you make faculty 
volunteer or indeed be eager? Convince them that their career 
will benefit and give them control and something to identify 
with.  Faculty want their own place...one they control... on the 
internet.  Many build sites themselves with cumbersome and kludgy 
tools.  These sites are highly idiosyncratic data structures. 
Better that they should be easy to use, beautiful, and easily 
harvestable (or automatically incorporated) into the 
institution's IR (or Research Showcase, as I like to call it).

For this, bepress developed SelectedWorks 
(http://works.bepress.com). D-space has developed personal 
research pages.  These, I predict, will be key to filling 
repositories until effective mandates arrive.

___

P.S. Please have a look at http://works.bepress.com/aaron_edlin/ 
and sign up for notifications of my new work! =A0 Aaron Edlin 
Chairman, The Berkeley Electronic Press Richard Jennings 
Professor of Economics and Law, UC Berkeley Homepage: 
http://works.bepress.com/aaron_edlin/

Co-Editor, The Economists' Voice, http://www.bepress.com/ev
Editor, The B.E. Journals of Theoretical Economics,
http://www.bepress.com/bejte


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony
Watkinson
Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2007 8:06 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

It is no point in Professor Harnad's coming out with a whole lot 
of references to assertions made by him or his friends and 
associates, almost none of which come from the peer-reviewed 
literature. I am only a part-time academic but to me there is a 
real difference between an institutional repository that exists 
to serve faculty and an institutional repository that is part of 
a mechanism telling me what I must do.