FEATURE Institutional repositories
self-archiving or publishing of research papers and books to highly curated datasets, such as genomic data, Jones has seen it all. He adds: ‘There’s this second type of data that exists – non-structured data – which, quite simply, is everything else that researchers make. The number of data objects out there is just massive.’ (See ‘Repository appeal’.) Irene Kamotsky, director of strategic initiatives at US-based open access scholarly publisher, Bepress, and provider of the institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, tells a similar story. Like Jones, she now sees a pot-pourri of content being published, which she describes as ‘the longer tail of scholarly publishing’. ‘We see a lot of books, journals, conference presentations and posters as well as grey literature including unpublished research such as technical reports,’ she says. ‘We also see research data, images, audio, including, for example oral histories, administrative documents from campus newsletters to enrolment data, and also a lot of material from students.’
‘Any digital materials that need a place to be shared have definitely found a home in the institutional repository,’ she adds.
So with the flow of publishing data to the repository in full swing, how has this rising publication outlet affected local university presses? Historically in the US, the vast majority of universities have existed without a university press, so institutional repository platforms have enabled publishing services to be offered directly from the library. And, with the wealth of content that has ensued, several so-called digital native
Repository appeal
Over time, repository platforms have evolved and now include many of the features necessary to handle massive collections. Excellent standards in metadata are being developed and interoperability between systems is rising. Importantly, the major platforms are available as hosted services, with key software including Digital Commons, Dspace, EPrints, Fedora and Islandora, as well as Dryad and cloud-based solution, Figshare. Hosted services allow for automatic systems upgrades, provide consistent platform versions across the community, and free librarians to focus on content rather than managing installation and upgrades.
For the academic, discoverability is key, so work hosted in most repositories is allocated a DOI number and can be easily located by
32 Research Information AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015
a Google search. As Irene Kamotsky from Bepress puts it: ‘When faculty and authors put their work into a repository, what they really want is to be discovered in the disciplinary context of all their peers at all the universities around the world.’
And for Phill Jones from Digital Science, a developer of repositories including Figshare, interconnecting the repositories is also going to be vital, if these systems are to have a large impact on research communication. ‘By pooling metadata, repositories can become vastly more discoverable,’ he says. ‘We’ve developed an institutional version of [our repository] that’s supported by an Internet- based discovery layer and allows searching across repositories, published outputs and individual contributions.’
presses, that publish open access scholarly content, have emerged. ‘Thanks
to platforms such as Digital
Commons, many universities are creating presses where there had never been a press before,’ says Kamotsky.
New Prairie Press is one key example. Founded by Kansas State University in 2007, the press publishes open access journals, monographs or conference proceedings in a range of disciplines. Likewise, the Pacific University Press grew out of Pacific University Oregon library and
‘Many universities are creating presses where
there had never been a
press before’ Irene Kamotsky, Bepress
publishes open access e-books. ‘Here we will have seen interest on campus that kind of snowballed, and a digital native press was created,’ highlights Kamotsky. But digital native presses aside, the rise of the institutional repository has also led to the number of collaborations between library publishers and university presses growing. Indeed, some have highlighted this ‘convergence’ of the institutional repository and university press as an alternative publishing movement that complements, or
even threatens, traditional publishing models. Supplemental or detrimental, as Kamotsky puts it: ‘My theory behind what’s really driving this is a mutual recognition from the press and library that it would be better to collaborate. ‘Libraries have found themselves publishing more because institutional repositories have made this easier,’ she says. ‘So the press on campus has been thinking ‘well here I am, I’m also publishing, let’s get together and talk’.’ According to Kamotsky, the university presses that she has seen collaborating with libraries tend to be relatively small, and will use the institutional repository to publish backlists of books and journals. ‘These publications may have peaked, but this is a great way to bring them back online,’ she says. ‘Some press directors have carried out studies on how this impacts sales, and found it isn’t a problem – it’s great for readership and doesn’t harm sales.’ But it’s not just books and journals; these library-university press collaborations have also published a lot of content that is not part of a main press imprint. Kamotsky describes these as ‘more experimental collections of publications’ and ‘probably more significant than backlist books and journals’.
‘This could be full open access journals, student journals, or simply journals that don’t have the same kind of revenue as main-list journals,’ she says. ‘I have seen experimental books as well as beautiful books that are just too complicated, and books that are maybe even subsidised by the author.
‘The institutional repository gives these publications a second space that doesn’t harm the brand of the university press’s primary imprint, and also let’s the presses experiment,’ she says. And, importantly, Kamotsky is certain for
any university press, the institutional repository will remain supplemental to primary business. ‘The institutional repository complements what a press does and provides a means to do to something that isn’t revenue-oriented,’ she says. ‘Unless something very fundamental changes in the economics of presses, an organisation is not likely to move its business in that direction.’
Growing content
In 2011, Graham Stone, information resources manager at the University of Huddersfield, UK, along with colleagues, won JISC funding for an open-access publishing project that aimed to develop a low-cost, sustainable, open access journal publishing platform. Using EPrints’ institutional repository, the team migrated a university journal ‘Teaching
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