RE: Elsevier and IOP Still Fully Green and Onside With the Angels

[Mark Kille <mkille@naropa.edu>]

Steven Harnad writes:

"This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website 
and your institutional repository are just institutional disk 
sectors with different (arbitrary) names."

On this point, at least, he is completely wrong.

1) When a scholar ends his or her relationship with an 
institution, presumably their personal faculty page at that 
institution also goes away. An institutional repository is 
(theoretically) forever.

2) My understanding is that institutional repositories generally 
include a fairly sophisticated database structure that allows for 
searches of various kinds, and they may expose their metadata as 
aggressively as possible to the Web as a whole. Personal faculty 
pages are discoverable through Google or, perhaps, Google 
Scholar.

3) Depositing into an institutional repository typically involves 
some kind of release, granting particular license/rights to the 
institution. Putting a link on a personal faculty page does not.

4) Given the increasing number of hosted services, an 
institutional repository could be on disk space somewhere 
completely different from the personal faculty page.

I am all for reducing barriers to open access, but can we please 
be accurate about the statements we make in support of it?

Regards,
Mark Kille

*****

Mark Kille
Director, Library and Archives
Naropa University
2130 Arapahoe Ave
Boulder, CO 80302

303-245-4664

mkille@naropa.edu