SPARC Position Paper: The Case for Institutional Repositories

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

G
See also the AmSci thread:
    "A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0697.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 20:06:18 +0100
From: Rick Johnson <rick@xxxxxxx>
To: SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: SPARC paper on institutional repositories

For Immediate Release July 29, 2002

For more information, contact: Alison Buckholtz  alison@xxxxxxx
http://www.arl.org/sparc

SPARC WHITE PAPER ASSERTS INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES' CRITICAL ROLE
IN REFORMING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Position paper outlines viability and long-term impact of
university-based digital collections which preserve faculty research,
scholarship

Washington, DC - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition) today released a major white paper, "The Case
for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper," which
examines the strategic roles institutional repositories serve for
colleges and universities.  The paper asserts that institutional
repositories are a natural extension of an academic institution's
role as a generator of primary research, and envisions such
repositories as critical components in the evolving structure of
scholarly communication.  It is available at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html and
http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Final_Release_102.pdf.

Institutional repositories -- digital collections that capture and
preserve the intellectual output of university communities -- answer
two challenges currently facing academic institutions.  First,
institutional repositories reform scholarly communication by
stimulating innovation in a disaggregated publishing structure.
Second, they serve as tangible indicators of an institution's
quality, thus increasing its visibility, prestige, and public value.

SPARC's white paper describes institutional repositories' role as a
catalyst for change and explores their impact on major stakeholders
in the scholarly communication process.  Stakeholders include
individual scholars and researchers, academic institutions and
librarians, scholarly and scientific society publishers, commercial
publishers, government institutions and others.

"A growing number of authors are already self-posting their work, and
institutional repositories channel and refine this trend, building a
stable, sustainable infrastructure to support global communication of
faculty research," said Herbert Van de Sompel, coordinator of Digital
Library Research at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory and co-founder of the Open Archives Initiative.
"Institutional repositories provide a logical component in a global
network of interoperable research repositories. Fundamental
components of the technical and standards infrastructure to support
the proliferation of such repositories are already in place today.
SPARC's white paper is an invaluable aid to institutions considering
concrete actions to optimize scholarly communication."

"Institutional repositories are a practical, cost-effective, and
strategic means for institutions to build partnerships with their
faculty to advance scholarly communication," said Rick Johnson, SPARC
Enterprise Director. "SPARC's paper guides higher education
administrators interested in learning why institutional repositories
make sense and how they affect key stakeholders. It demonstrates that
institutional repositories offer an immediate complement to the
existing scholarly publishing model while stimulating the emergence
of new structures that will evolve over time, offering expanded
benefits to institutions and scholars alike."

The white paper finds that the enabling technologies, standards, and
protocols to support institutional repositories already exist;
therefore, institutional repositories can be implemented immediately.
Moreover, colleges and universities need not act alone, because
library and institutional consortia will often provide economies of
scale for technical development and support.
Two upcoming workshops on institutional repositories may be of
interest to those considering implementation.  For more information:
http://www.arl.org/sparc.

###

SPARC and SPARC Europe are coalitions of research universities and
libraries supporting increased competition in scholarly publishing.
Membership currently numbers approximately 240 institutions and
library consortia in North America, the U.K. and Europe, Australia,
New Zealand and Asia. SPARC is also affiliated with major library
organizations in Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, Denmark, Australia and
the USA.  SPARC is located on the web at http://www.arl.org/sparc;
SPARC Europe is located on the web at http://www.sparceurope.org.

  Rick Johnson, Enterprise Director
  SPARC * The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition
  21 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20036 USA
  Tel + 202 296 2296 x157 / Fax + 202 872 0884
  E-mail rick@xxxxxxx

  Visit SPARC at: http://www.arl.org/sparc
  http://www.sparceurope.org / http://www.createchange.org

---------------

From: Leslie Carr <lac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: SEPTEMBER98-FORUM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives

At 15:57 26/07/2002 +0100, Tim Chown wrote:
>...what's the best way to get the institutions engaged?

You may be interested in the TARDIS project we are just starting up at
Southampton. Funded by JISC in the UK, its objective is to examine ways
of achieving cultural and institutional change in order to get academics
self-archiving.

Using a multidisciplinary institutional archive for Southampton University
as the focus, we are looking at various carrot-and-stick ideas to get
archives in general filled. Fronted by librarians calling on our technical
resources, we are looking at various forms of assisted self-archiving
as well as technical and administrative 'inducements'. Six departments
across the institution are being targetted; at one end of the spectrum
we are undertaking advocacy campaigns, at the other end we intend to
simply sit down with hundreds of individuals, help them fill out the
eprints forms and answer their questions.

Although our website isn't ready yet you can see the project details at
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/TARDIS/

Les Carr 
lac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Department of Electronics and     phone: +44 23-80 594-479
             Computer Science     fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton         http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/