[Sigsti-l] AM 2007 IR Panel

[Robin Peek]

Hi Everyone,

We decided to blend two panels together and go for the quad SIG
sponsership. I hope you like it.

Would everyone who is submitting a proposal please send a copy to me.
Good luck everyone.

Cheers,

Robin Peek

Should Every University Have an Institutional Repository?  An Expert Debate.

Sponsors: SIG Social Informatics, SIG Digital Libraries, SIG LT,
SIG-Scientific and Technical Information

Format: Panel style debate with pre-published questions led by a moderator.

Moderator: Kristin Eschenfelder

Organizers: Kristin Eschenfelder & Anita Coleman (SIG SI, SIG DL)

Expert Panelists: Leslie Chan, Michael Leach, Kenneth Frazier, Robin Peek

Every university in the world can and should have its own open-access,
OAI-compliant repository..."  Suber 2006

Panel goals: Panel members, each of whom brings different expert
knowledge about institutional repositories (IR), will take turns
answering a set of provocative questions about the future of IR and
challenges inherent in ongoing management of IR. Panelists will also
be given an opportunity to respond to each others' comments. The
debate style format will give audience members a rich understanding of
the challenges related to IR.

The IR experts on this panel will debate the future of IR in academic
institutions globally.  Specific questions the moderator will pose to
the panelists include the following draft items (These are subject to
change based on new events or significant research findings in the IR
world):

How will IRs vary across small and large, teaching and research
universities in 10 years in terms of presence or absence, but also in
terms of the types of materials collected in IR (e.g., preprints
versus local digital collections)?
Under what circumstances will consortial or outsourced efforts become popular?
Under what circumstances should we expect increases in deposit
activity among researchers and faculty?
What will the relationship between university libraries and
disciplinary IRs be in 10 years? What will be the relationship between
IR and scholarly societies, especially those which publish journals?
Under what circumstances will IRs change the status of developing
nation scholars and the typical flows of scholarly communications?
How would our investments in IR be assessed? From an
economic/financial perspective? From a status perspective? From the
promotion and tenure perspective?  From an open access perspective?
How will IR be funded in the long term?

Panel schedule:

Moderator introduces panelists: 10 minutes; Question round table: 90
minutes; Closing statements by participants: 5 minutes each = 20
minutes.  Total = 120 minutes.

Expert Panelist bios:

Dr. Leslie Chan, New Media Studies University of Toronto (confirmed).

Dr. Chan is one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open
Access Initiative and has been active in experimentation and
implementation of open access publishing projects and with the set up
of open access archives using open source software applications. Since
2003, he has been testing and evaluating T-Space, an institutional
repository at the University of Toronto that is running the DSpace
software. The American Anthropological Association recently
re-appointed Leslie to a second term on the Steering Committee of
AnthroSource, an electronic scholar's portal that will eventually
include all publications from the AAA, as well as publications and
databases from federated organizations and cultural institutions.

Michael Leach, Director of the Physics Research Library and the Kummel
Library of Geological Sciences Harvard University and Harvard
Institutional Repository Working Group (confirmed)

Michael Leach, past president of ASIST, has been deeply involved with
the Harvard University Science Libraries Dspace-based institutional
repository, called the Harvard Sciences Digital Library (HSDL).  The
Harvard science libraries are actively collecting and supporting the
input of materials into the HSDL repository.  HSDL is experimenting
with the creation and support of virtual open access journals and
"intellectual genealogies" tracing faculty and graduate students over
time and generating "trees" of connections among dissertations and
publications.

Ken Frazier, Director University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library
System and Interim CIO of University of Wisconsin-Madison (confirmed)

Kenneth Frazier is a member and past-president of the Board of
Directors of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). He is also a
founding member and a former Chair of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition), an ARL sponsored initiative
dedicated to reducing the cost of research information by promoting
competition and technical innovation in scholarly publishing. Frazier
has been nationally active in issues related to the fair use of
copyrighted works for educational purposes and led critiques of "Big
Deal" licensing models. Frazier oversaw the creation of the UW Office
of Scholarly Communications which has managed the University of
Wisconsin System repository (Minds at UW), negotiated institutional
subscriptions to open access journals, and provided support for the
Journal of Insect Science, an open access journal. Frazier is founder
of UW-Madison Library's Parallel Press, a publisher of poetry
chapbooks and scholarly works in digital and paper formats.

Robin Peek, Associate Professor Simmons University

Professor Peek, an early advocate of the Open Access movement in
scholarly communication, has written over 125 articles on digital and
scholarly publishing.  She is active in the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, including serving on the editorial
board for the Journal of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology. Her current research interest is focused on the
history and evolution of the Open Access movement.

Alternatives in case of schedule changes: Dorothea Salo George Mason
University repository librarian; Anita Coleman institutional
repository editor-in-chief dLIST the Digital Library for Information
Science and Technology




Every university in the world can and should have its own open-access,
OAI-compliant repository..."  Suber 2006

Institutional repositories (IR) are institutional (i.e., university)
or disciplinary (i.e., scholarly community) digital collections of
pre-prints or post-prints of scholarly publications (eprints), theses
or dissertations,  learning objects, audio video or data files,
records, or other digital outputs of intellectual work  (Suber 2006;
Lynch & Lippencott 2005).   IR are one tool within the larger open
access movement used to increase access to information (Willinsky,
2006).  The IR based "green road" to open access facilitates access to
the works by persons not able to afford journal subscriptions or books
by facilitating the practice of self-archiving, the author depositing
his/her intellectual works in the OAI-compliant repository, thereby
providing open access to the self-archived research and other
literature of the discipline and institution.

Proponents tout benefits of IR including, but not limited to, low
operating expenses, more equitable access to research, promoting
research from developing nation scholars, rapid access to research
results, increasing the potential audience of works, and enhancing the
visibility of host institutions, discipline(s) and learned societies.
Others position IR more generally as newly essential
cyberinfrastructure for knowledge production and learning in an
increasingly digital world (Lynch & Lippencott 2005).

Research has pointed to many challenges associated with IR.   While
research suggest that IR adoption is expanding, at least within PhD
granting institutions (Lynch & Lippencott 2005; van Westrienen & Lynch
2005), and while numerous examples of widely used and influential IR
exist, some have pointed to the low deposit rate for eprints in IR and
suggested that most IR will not contain enough materials to justify
their expenses.  Further, while the costs of maintaining an IR are
low, they are not non-existent, and some have suggested
consortia-based IR or disciplinary repositories as a more
cost-effective means of obtaining IR goals. Finally, it is unclear by
what criteria investments IR should be evaluated. Current research
tends to emphasize number of items over how IR are used or the degree
to which IR change scholarly communication patterns or the scholarly
status hierarchy.

Given these challenges facing institutional repositories, is it
realistic to expect – as Suber suggests – every university in the
world to host its own IR?

Related sources:

Lynch, Clifford A.; Lippencott, Joan K. (2005) Institutional
Repository Deployment in the United States as of Early 2005.  DLib
Magazine 11(9).

Suber, Peter. (2006) Open access overview: Focusing on open access to
peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

Willinsky, John (2006) The Access Principle: The case for open access
to research and scholarship.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

van Westrienen, Gerard; Lynch, Clifford A. (2005) Academic
Institutional Repositories:

Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005.  D-Lib  11(9).

< http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/westrienen/09westrienen.html>