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Creating an institutional repository is cheap, convenient, and takes little effort. It takes about $A3000 to $A10000 for hardware, nothing for the software since it is open-source, and say two to three week’s work to get the repository up and running. For the next two years, it may require say a half-time commitment by a librarian to manage and promote the repository, but thereafter the time requirement should be easily absorbable into the university’s budget. Of course, there is a major thinking re-orientation needed: the university library needs to get itself inserted into the scholarly research authorship process.
However, none of these issues are the key problem, even if they loom high on a librarian’s or vice-chancellor’s mind when thinking about institutional repositories. The key problem is that of populating a repository with content. This problem is so serious and so difficult, that it has its own page (this one).
There is overwhelming evidence that voluntary deposit by authors (academics and graduate students) does not work. Repositories with voluntary deposit policies collect a small fraction of an institution’s research output, generally under 10%, and the size of the database grows only slowly. Despite every effort to convince authors to deposit electronic copies of their research, they generally do not do it. The reasons are to be found in the extra work involved, slight though it is; in ignorance and confusion about copyright; and in ignorance of the literature on the value of self-archiving. Interestingly, researchers who become self-archivers seldom look back. The value of what they are doing becomes self-evident, especially through feedback and citations.
There is no possibility that any university or discipline is any different: all would benefit from self-archiving. The solution is accordingly straightforward: researchers must be required to deposit their research publications in a repository. A key paper that is compulsory reading is ‘Authors and Open Access Publishing’ (Swan & Brown, 2005, see Bibliography) where a JISC-funded (UK) research project analysed these attitudes, and showed that 95% of researchers would comply with such a requirement from their funders or employers (81% willingly, 14% reluctantly). The extra work was not seen as large, but without a requirement it was avoidable and was hence avoided.
This can be demonstrated using Australian universities with institutional repositories. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is the first and to date the only university in Australia to adopt such a policy, which has been in operation since 1 January 2004. Figure 1 shows the content in all the seven repositories that were in operation in both 2004 and 2005 and are harvested by the ARROW Discovery Service, as a percentage of the annual DEST-reportable research output for 2003, as a proxy for 2004/5 (source: Table 5). QUT stands out as the only one with significant content, and given that 2005 crop of publications is not fully in yet, may well reach 60% of the DEST publications. For more details see http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/ by Arthur Sale. Requirement policies work!
Figure 1 - Content for Australian universities 2004–2005
The conclusion is inescapable: any institution setting up an institutional repository should have the policy that all its researchers are required to deposit their refereed publications. This applies equally to journal articles, conference papers and higher degree theses. The appropriate time is when the author’s manuscript is finally “frozen”, as this is when the author has it to hand and self-archiving is the least burden. In the case of journal articles and conference papers, this instant is at the point of acceptance of the final refereed draft (called the postprint); for theses it is at the instant of submission of the print version of the final accepted thesis, prior to the award of the degree.
All the details have not been filled in, because deposit is all that is really required. Even if the full-text is not ‘open-access’, its metadata are still exposed to the Internet, and interested researchers can contact the author via email for an eprint. If you don’t have a requirement policy, or it is not your long-term goal, you are wasting money by having an open access archive. You won’t achieve any significant effect.
In some jurisdictions, the requirement stems from a grant-giving body rather than the institution itself. The National Institute of Health (NIH) (USA) and the Wellcome Trust (UK) have various forms of a requirement policy; the Research Councils of the United Kingdom (RCUK) are considering one at the present. An Australian or New Zealand Government might put self-archiving requirements on its future research grants or postgraduate awards (and this is highly desirable); however an institutional policy requiring self-archiving is still important to cover publications not associated with grants.
Recent News: 8 December 2005 - Arthur Sale: The NIH’s policy has proved to have a very low deposit rate, as it had been diluted to a weak encouragement of deposition within 12 months which was easily ignored by grantees http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm. This has attracted US Senators who understand OA, and there is now a bill in the US Senate (“CURES”) to strengthen the NIH requirements (amongst many other things) http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/bills/051207curessectionbysection.pdf. See Section 499H-1 (there aren’t 499 sections in CURES; this is just the number of a new section within the Public Health Services Act to be introduced by CURES).
Recent News: 13 December 2005 - Arthur Sale: The RCUK are close to announcing a new policy, maybe in the New Year. This seems likely to encourage all UK universities to create an open access institutional repository for holding all their peer-reviewed research output, and to require all grantees to deposit their peer-reviewed research arising from RCUK grants either in an open access institutional repository or an appropriate subject repository. There are however some unresolved differences with the Royal Society and with some of its FRS members. If approved in this form, the policy contrast with Australia will be stark.
A Model Policy is provided for adaption by any university or institution. Alternatively review Queensland University of Technology’s actual policy, in operation since 1 January 2004. We also try to keep the current state of mandatory policies in Australasia (the community willing).
Two model self-archiving policies for national, public and private research funders have been recently added as links to the sign-up page of the Institutional Self-Archiving Policy Registry:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/sign.php
The recommended policy model is the Stronger Version:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/stronger-OApolicy.htm
The Weaker Version is only intended in cases where there is delay in getting the Stronger Version adopted:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/weaker-OApolicy.htm
The policy models were drafted collaboratively by Alma Swan, Arthur Sale, Subbiah Arunachalam, Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad (UK, Australia, India, USA and Canada respectively) by modifying the Wellcome Trust Self-Archiving Policy
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD002766.html
to eliminate the 6-month embargo and the central archiving requirement.