At the age of 92, Robert Katz is enjoying an unexpected scholarly renaissance. The emeritus professor of physics retired from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln 22 years ago. Lately, thanks to the university’s institutional repository, called the UNL Digital Commons after the software that runs it, people all over the world have been finding and downloading papers Mr. Katz wrote years or decades ago. His work on the biological effects of radiation has found a new and far-flung audience, making him the most-downloaded Nebraska at Lincoln faculty author represented in Digital Commons.
There’s been a lot of hoopla about institutional repositories in the last few years, as Harvard and other universities have adopted open-access policies and set up IR’s into which faculty members could deposit their work. That includes not just journal articles but so-called gray literature: working papers, data sets, lectures, and other material that publishers usually don’t touch.
The heady rhetoric of the early days—that the repository model would help spread the gospel of open access and end publishers’ stranglehold on scholarly output—has not quite panned out. After a period of uncertainty and angst, repository managers have been turning to a quieter, more practical emphasis on serving scholars, making their work accessible, and preserving it for the long term.
The Full-Service Model
Mr. Katz’s experience with Nebraska’s Digital Commons demonstrates how well a service-oriented repository can work for a scholar. “I’m 92 years old. I thought, Well, hellfire, that stuff hasn’t been done for 30 or 40 years,” he says. “But Paul Royster and the library publishing it have essentially resurrected it.”
Mr. Royster, coordinator of scholarly communications at the UNL Libraries, oversees Digital Commons. He and his staff offer the repository equivalent of a full-service gas station. They will take care of almost everything: checking publishers’ contracts, uploading documents, even copy-editing and proofreading. No fancy formatting or technical savvy is required of authors. “We want to make it as easy as possible,” Mr. Royster says.
There is one basic requirement, however: Anything that goes into Digital Commons must be written or co-written by someone with a Nebraska at Lincoln affiliation. Adjuncts and students as well as full-time faculty members qualify. “We’re very open-minded about who can participate,” he says.
All a would-be depositor has to do is send Digital Commons a CV or publications list. “We do the hunting and gathering and uploading,” Mr. Royster explains. The staff checks publishers’ Web sites and an online database of copyright and self-archiving policies maintained by a group called Sherpa, in Britain, to make sure an author’s contract allows for an article to be made publicly available.
Every month, authors get a report that shows how many times their work was downloaded. “It’s a great incentive,” Mr. Royster says. “People are just astonished that someone is interested in a 15-year-old article.”
All the services are provided by Mr. Royster, with the help of a part-time librarian and about four work-study students. “It keeps us busy, but the faculty really appreciate it, and it’s made a lot of friends for the library at a time when budgets are tight and subscriptions are being canceled,” he says. “We’re giving them an opportunity to expand the audience for their work.”
He estimates that he and the staff add 7,000 to 8,000 items a year to Digital Commons, which as of late May contained more than 41,500 items in all. Almost anything can be deposited. “It needs to have your name on it,” Mr. Royster says. “But if it’s a working paper or a technical report that wasn’t peer-reviewed, that’s fine with us. It’s your reputation and your name at stake. If you want to publish your paper on how you saw Big Foot powered by cold fusion, it’s your cow.”
Readers and Tractors
The approach appears to have had a magnetic effect. Mr. Royster estimates that 35 to 40 percent of the university’s faculty members have put something in the repository. At many repositories, faculty participation of 10 to 15 percent is more the norm.
To get people to contribute to Digital Commons, Mr. Royster relies on faculty ambassadors like Guy J. Reynolds, a professor of English at Nebraska. A Willa Cather specialist, Mr. Reynolds is a good example of a midcareer scholar who is not tech-obsessed but welcomes what the repository can do for him.
“Once you’ve got a number of things on the site—10 or so pieces, as I’ve got—you’re steadily accumulating readers,” he says. “This is not the world of the mass-market thriller, is it? You’re not going to be getting 10,000 readers. But each month I probably get a hundred or so downloads. It just steadily accumulates, and people mention these things to you, and it’s continually in the scholarly eye, readily accessible.”
Mr. Reynolds believes that the repository could be used in many ways: as a place to try out work in progress, as a teaching resource, even as a site for distance learning. “I could very easily see this thing merging with outreach classes and online classes,” he says. “I could see it possibly becoming a way to rival something like the University of Phoenix.”
Institutional repositories have become a reminder that it’s hard to predict what products of academe the world at large will want access to. The flashiest research may not be the most popular. Digital Commons’ most popular series is reports from the university’s test laboratory for tractors.
“Back in 1910, the legislature got mad that some fast-talking tractor salesman had sold a bad tractor to a hard-working Nebraska farmer,” so it created the lab, Mr. Royster says. “Every tractor manufactured anywhere in the world in the last 100 years has been tested in this lab.” He adds, “There’s lots of people interested in tractors.”
Digital Commons is also taking shape as a publisher in its own right. “If the thing doesn’t fit publishers’ packages, if it’s too long or if it’s got too many images or it’s too esoteric and nobody wants to touch it, that doesn’t bother us,” Mr. Royster says. A former director of the University of Nebraska Press, he understands traditional scholarly publishing but says he does not miss it. Now the library has begun the process of creating an electronic imprint for original publications.
If Mr. Royster has his way, repositories like Digital Commons will eventually help create what amounts to a revolution in the scholarly communications system—the original promise of repositories. “I envision the day when the universities take back scholarly communications from the publishers, and we don’t have to ransom our content back from for-profit companies,” he says. “And that’s our long-range goal here. That’s probably not going to happen until well after I retire, but we see ourselves moving that way.”
Scholarship Far and Wide
Repositories have not yet brought about an open-access revolution, but they have had some success making scholarship more accessible and visible. Sarah L. Shreeves, an associate professor of library administration, is the coordinator for Ideals, the repository of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The focus has become less about filling the repository and open access, and more about what we can provide with the repository,” she says.
Ideals contains about 13,500 items, much of it gray literature, according to Ms. Shreeves.
That has not made Ideals a graveyard of unwanted scholarship. She notes that Ideals has been most successful as a “distribution mechanism for unique materials.” For instance, Ms. Shreeves heard from a ham-radio operator in Texas who was interested in a report from Illinois’s Mid-America Earthquake Center; he wanted to use it as part of an emergency-response training exercise for other radio operators. “It’s a nice example of some of the unexpected users of material in an IR,” she says.
Repositories’ contents are visible to search engines, which means that people far removed from academe can explore the literature and download what interests them. (Authors can opt to keep their material “dark,” meaning that it cannot be viewed or downloaded without permission.) “I would say we get the majority of our downloads from elsewhere,” meaning off the campus, Ms. Shreeves says. “Right now, approximately 70 percent of our downloads are being directed from Google searches.” A user taken directly from a Google search to a PDF in the repository might not even realize that he or she is tapping into Ideals.
The biggest problem isn’t finding users for a repository’s contents; it’s getting authors to contribute material in the first place. Nebraska’s Digital Commons is a notable exception, in part because of its unusually full-service approach.
“The old if-you-build-it-they-will-come model has not had the level of success people hoped for,” says Ann C. Riley, associate director for access, collection, and technical services at the University of Missouri Libraries. Ms. Riley oversees MOspace, the university’s repository.
She estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the university’s faculty has deposited something in MOspace, which now contains about 7,000 items. (There is no hard-and-fast number that defines a successful repository; 10,000 is considered by many managers a good benchmark for a collection.) Like Nebraska’s Digital Commons, MOspace is rich in gray literature. And like other repository managers, Ms. Riley has noticed that some disciplines and departments are more likely to deposit than others. Just who’s depositing will vary from institution to institution and field to field. At Missouri, for instance, agricultural economics and public policy and administration have been especially strong participants.
Junior faculty members concerned with tenure and promotion tend to be wary of repositories, Ms. Riley has found. “They may be very committed to open access, but they’re still very much in the place where they’re being pushed to publish in high-impact journals,” she says. “Until we reform the tenure-and-promotion process, open access will always be problematic.”
The Harvard Model
As Mr. Royster has demonstrated at Nebraska, a voluntary, full-service model helps overcome faculty reluctance or ignorance about repositories. Another option is the so-called Harvard model, which works on an opt-out rather than an opt-in basis. It may be effective in drawing deposits. It’s also tougher to put into place because it depends on faculty champions to persuade colleagues to adopt it in the first place.
At Harvard, Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science, was that on-campus proselytizer. Repositories got a big public-relations boost when Mr. Shieber helped persuade Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to pass an open-access resolution in 2008. It requires faculty members to allow the university to make copies of their scholarly articles freely available online. Several other Harvard faculties have since passed similar resolutions.
Harvard’s move led to the creation of DASH, which stands for Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard. That repository went live in September 2009. Mr. Shieber is now director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, which oversees DASH. Faculty members may choose to opt out, but Mr. Shieber says very few have.
Mr. Shieber does not like the word “mandate.” “When you’re talking about a university telling its faculty to do something, there’s no such thing as a mandate,” he says. “There’s no way to force faculty to do what they don’t want to do.”
More than 40 percent of faculty members in the arts and sciences have deposited at least one article in DASH, he says. Unlike other repositories, DASH is not set up to include gray literature yet, but it eventually will, according to Mr. Shieber.
At Harvard, scholars in the sciences have the highest participation rates. “A lot depends on the publishing characteristics of the field,” Mr. Shieber says. Topping the list is the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; it’s followed by economics, organismic and evolutionary biology, earth and planetary sciences, and psychology. Among humanities departments, linguistics, classics, philosophy, and English participate most actively in DASH.
The Regional Angle
For most repositories, the future probably looks less like Harvard’s model and more like Nebraska’s: service-oriented, heavy on gray literature, and not necessarily aligned with a formal open-access policy. Expect to see more IR’s that serve multiple campuses or institutions and that focus on long-term preservation and the management of big data sets even as they play up local and regional holdings.
Dorothea Salo is the digital-repository librarian in charge of Minds, the University of Wisconsin’s institutional repository, which serves the entire Wisconsin system. Minds now contains about 12,000 items, including electronic copies of theses and dissertations written by students in the system. She gets many requests for research that focuses on Wisconsin history. “If it’s local, there’s an incredible demand for it,” she says.
Ms. Salo has been one of the most outspoken participants in the evolving conversation about repositories, some of which has centered on their perceived failures. That rhetoric frustrates her no end.
The idea that repositories could fix the serial crisis—caused by the high prices many publishers charge for journals—"was always kind of a pipe dream,” she says. “Institutional repositories have succeeded at a lot of things. We are making the theses and dissertation material a lot more accessible, and I can tell you that stuff is being used.”
The regional angle also fits into the mission of a public university. “The idea is that the work we do here is supposed to benefit all the residents of the state,” she says. “Institutional repositories can do a lot of wonderful outreach work, making and deepening ties between the institution and the community.”
Ms. Salo describes herself as more optimistic about repositories’ future than she was in 2007, when she wrote a much-talked-about essay for the journal Library Trends called “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” In it, she lamented the lack of faculty participation in repositories, the failings of the software used to maintain them, and IR managers’ sense of being isolated from the rest of the library community.
“‘Roach Motel’ is actually showing its age now,” she says. “It’s showing that whatever our initial stumbles, we are picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, and moving on. I’m thrilled by that.”
