Re: Ann Okerson on institutional archives

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Of course Ann Okerson is correct.  Stevan Harnad's notion of an
institutional repository is his.  IRs are being built everywhere.  Many
are expensive, complicated, and hard to use.  DSpace, which is perhaps the
best known, requires sophisticated systems integration.  Furthermore, IRs
are NOT being built solely to further the kind of self-archiving that
Harnad advocates.  They are being built as institutional knowledge
management systems, with one aim being to do precisely what Harnad says
they are not being built for, which is to compete with the value that the
traditional publishing system adds.  I believe that this is a wholly
misguided effort, but let's describe it for what it is.

The problem here is the usual one with Harnad's comments.  There is a
party going on, but it is not entirely his party.  There is interest in
experimenting with digital media, but it is not all his experiment.  He
stands to lead a revolution, but the crowd disperses in numerous
directions.  He is without doubt one of the key thinkers, and perhaps the
leading activist, in the publishing industry today, but he is not the only
talented and creative individual in scholarly communications.

Why oh why would anyone want to stifle such a chorus of beautiful minds?

Joe Esposito

On Sun, 27 Mar 2005 22:06:05 EST, Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Mar 2005, Subbiah Arunachalam wrote:
> 
> > "Ann Okerson weighs the pros and cons of OA for US research libraries,
> >  noting that institutional repositories are likely to be expensive, and
> >  their focus in the U.S. is likely to be on locally produced scholarly
> >  materials other than articles. Consequently: "It is unlikely that
> >  under this kind of scenario in the US, scattered local versions of STM
> >  articles would compete effectively with the completeness or the value
> >  that the publishing community adds." She also suggests that library
> >  cost savings resulting from OA journals are "unlikely, unless
> >  substantial production cost reductions can be realised by many
> >  categories of publisher."  - in Serials: The Journal for the Serials
> >  Community 18(1)(2005).
> >
> > Why does Ann Okerson, a respected and knowledgeable US academic
> > librarian, think that institutional repositories will be expensive?
> > What are the facts? Will leading institutions that have set up
> > institutional archives tell her and others how much does it cost to
> > set up archives and run them.
> >
> > Arun
> 
> The facts are all contrary to what Ann Okerson states. Not only are
> institutional archives not *likely* to be expensive, those that actually
> exist are de facto not expensive at all (a $2000 linux server, a few
> days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year maintenance). Their focus
> in the US and elsewhere is likely to be exactly on what university
> policy decides it should be (and the Berlin 3 recommendation, likely to
> be widely adopted now, is that the focus should be on university article
> output). And the purpose of self-archiving is not and never has been to
> "compete effectively with the completeness or the value that the
> publishing community adds." It is to provide access to those would-be
> users whose institutions cannot afford the journal's official version.
> 
> Stevan Harnad