NYTimes.com Article: In DSpace, Ideas Are Forever

["Gerry Mckiernan" <gerrymck@iastate.edu>]

DSpace Article in NY Times

/Gerry 

Gerry McKiernan 
Spaced Librarian 
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck@iastate.edu 
_____
In DSpace, Ideas Are Forever

August 3, 2003
By VIVIEN MARX 

A number of universities are creating "institutional repositories" 
designed to harness their own intellectual output. 

The libraries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are 
earnestly bookish (2.6 million volumes and 17,000 journals) but 
increasingly digital (275 databases and 3,800 electronic journals). And 
just as e-mail dealt a blow to snail mail, digital archives are 
retooling scholarly exchange. A number of universities, from the 
California Institute of Technology to M.I.T., are 
creating "institutional repositories" designed to harness their own 
intellectual output. M.I.T.'s archive, perhaps the most ambitious, is 
called DSpace (www.dspace.org). 

Scholarly Storage

Traditionally, journals make research public after peer review, which 
can take months, sometimes years. Archives like DSpace, however, 
collect unpublished work -- documents of any length, lecture notes, 
photos, videos, computer simulations, blueprints, software -- in all 
disciplines and make most of it available to anyone as soon as it's 
received. . 

Here to Eternity "Loss" is propelling the movement. When a grant 
fizzles, when a professor resigns, retires or just buys a new computer, 
work can get lost. University libraries hope to preserve this material 
forever -- not exactly a common time span in the digital fast lane, 
where hardware and software sunset soon after reaching the marketplace. 
And unlike library stacks or hard drives, DSpace won't run out of 
storage space. 

"Everyone has lost something," says Ann Wolpert, director of M.I.T. 
Libraries, which has designated two full-time librarians to DSpace's 
dedicated computers. "We have already lost NASA data, Census data. 
Early digital work is gone because tapes were corrupted or not 
maintained properly."

Who Has It?

Soon after DSpace was made public last November, a federation of 
universities (M.I.T., Columbia, Ohio State, Rochester, Washington and 
Toronto) formed to further the system's evolution and see what it was 
capable of -- for instance, the University of Toronto wants bilingual 
searching. M.I.T. estimates that the free software has been downloaded 
3,400 times and is aware of 100 research institutions that are 
evaluating DSpace to archive their own faculty's work. 

The Journal Backlash

Institutional repositories are novel in that much of their content 
sidesteps academic publishers, which have come under attack from the so-
called open-access movement. Some scholars complain that journals delay 
publication of research and limit the audience because of their soaring 
costs. The Association of Research Libraries says library costs on 
journals rose 210 percent from 1986 to 2001 -- an average year's 
subscription might cost $5,000, with some as high as $15,000. 

Out of frustration with journals' limitations, some scientists have 
started their own archives. This fall, the new Public Library of 
Science will begin making peer-reviewed articles accessible free to all 
online.  Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of 
Quebec, started a digital archive for his field in 1997. He  says that 
the subscription-based model "holds peer-reviewed articles hostage."  
He advocates that scholars put their work in online archives first so 
it can be available immediately and free. 

Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, 
argues that his readers want information "that is highly meritorious 
and rigorously reviewed so that they don't make patient treatment 
decisions based on premature findings." But he acknowledges the self-
archiving movement and says the journal is rethinking its rules that 
prevent it from considering material that has been made public in a 
digital archive. 

Archives like DSpace "build on a growing grassroots faculty practice of 
posting research online," says Rick Johnson, a director of the 
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. He doesn't think 
they are a substitute for journals but offer "the best of both worlds: 
you get the work certified by a journal and the benefit that provides 
for promotion and tenure. At the same time you get your work exposed 
more broadly than in a journal alone."

DSpace Sampler

At M.I.T., each academic department exercises quality control and 
determines what is to be sent to DSpace. Among current offerings: 
working papers on campaign contributions (from the Sloan School of 
Management), on amphibious assault ships for the 21st century (from the 
Department of Ocean Engineering) and on traffic emissions (from the 
Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development). M.I.T. 
expects to have 5,000 items archived by the fall, and will add 7,500 
theses later this year. And that, they promise, is just the beginning. 

Vivien Marx is a freelance writer in Boston.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/edlife/03EDTECH.html?
ex=1060922358&ei=1&en=262cf6a5774edd97

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company