RE: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

["Sally Morris \(Morris Associates\)" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

Here's what Cliff Lynch said in 2003:

"The development of institutional repositories emerged as a new 
strategy that allows universities to apply serious, systematic 
leverage to accelerate changes taking place in scholarship and 
scholarly communication, both moving beyond their historic 
relatively passive role of supporting established publishers in 
modernizing scholarly publishing through the licensing of digital 
content, and also scaling up beyond ad-hoc alliances, 
partnerships, and support arrangements with a few select faculty 
pioneers exploring more transformative new uses of the digital 
medium."

Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Watkinson
Sent: 22 November 2007 00:53
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: NIH mandate - institutional repositories

I cannot claim to be an expert on institutional repositories and 
their history but the first time I became aware of them was from 
a presentation by Ann Wolpert one the originators of DSpace. It 
was my understanding then and it is my understanding now that for 
some involved in the IR movement the purpose was to provide a 
service to faculty. The DSpace mission from one of the sites 
reads:

DSpaceT is a free, open source software platform that allows 
research organizations to offer faculty and researchers a 
professionally managed searchable archive for their digital 
assets. DSpace focuses on simple access to these assets, as well 
as their long-term preservation.

It is my understanding that DSpace development was in progress by
2000.

In 2002 a very different definition was proposed by Raym Crow in
his SPARC position paper - see
http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/ir_final_release_102.pdf. The
definition of IRs set out in his abstract is very different and
speaks of reforming scholarly communication in line with the
SPARC agenda.

My picture is that SPARC have attempted to hi-jack an agenda
which was faculty-centred into one which is library-centred, some
libraries that is. The mandates proposed are only necessary
because faculty persistently refuse to fit in with this new
agenda which does not represent their needs or wishes.

Anthony Watkinson