Institutional Repositories: Content and Culture in an Open Access Environment

Citation

Scott, P. (2009), "Institutional Repositories: Content and Culture in an Open Access Environment", Library Management, Vol. 30 No. 4/5, pp. 354-356. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120910958075

Institutional repositories and open access are relatively phenomena, but have been quickly changing and require an understanding of a wide range of issues to appreciate their significance.

Catherine has indeed produced a primer that will assist the busy professional to understand well the many aspects that are involved. She works steadily and logically through most of the issues involved, and puts them into the context of changes in technology and the expectations of society.

Catherine covers a wide range of factors that have influenced the development of the institutional repositories in a logical dispassionate manner. With each factor she covers all aspects; every group of stakeholders, all material types are covered, and infrastructure, metadata, preservation, and possibilities of data interchange are aired.

She provides a table of the changes over the last 40 years in information behaviour, which provides a stark reminder of how far we have come and how expectations have changed. I found myself constantly nodding as she then describes the various developments that have come together to provide the open access and open source environment in which we are currently working.

With such comprehensive coverage something has to suffer. This work is a scholarly exposition and therefore not as practical as someone in the business of setting up a repository might like. For example, in her explanation of the publishing process I had hoped to understand clearly where the various versions we are offered by researchers fit into the process, and how this relates to the publisher's policies as set out in Sherpa RoMEO and many on publishers' web sites. Figure 4.3, journal article stages and possible names on p. 100 seems to go some way to answering the question, but without quite the granularity needed. What follows in the chapter is a comparison of different definitions from organisations that are trying to sort out nomenclature. This doesn't get to the nub of the problem from the repository side or the user's needs. Publishers for the most part allow self archiving of the author's final version in an institutional repository, and most do not allow the published version. So how much typesetting and copy editing makes a version cross the line from the author's final version to a publisher's version? I was also surprised that she found a repository that has blandly labelled a version “version of record” p. 105, rather than “published version” or “author's post print”. To me it is also almost as curious to think that the user might be able to discern, as she suggests, what version they are viewing once they have opened the document if not informed before. This is certainly a grey area that needs work, as she points out, and makes it clear that standards are not yet well defined here.

The section on open access is a clear summary of the events, covers the gold and green routes, as well as the main positions of a few key national and international bodies. However I felt it would have been useful here to cover in greater depth the principles behind the open access movement, the purpose of copyright and the tension between open access advocacy and publisher's policies. It seems to have been missed, though reference is made to the excellent toolkit approach offered jointly by JISC and SURF to mediate in this area. In terms of copyright, although there is mention of the need for author's to retain sufficient rights to enable them to deposit, there is no discussion of what an author might do to retain those rights, despite the work of bodies such as SPARC and various author addenda being available at the time this was written.

In an area that is fast changing the publishing process for a book is bound to create some issues in terms of currency. Published in 2007 one could reasonably expect to cover changes up to 2006. For example the accessibility framework cited as the basis of the repository programme in Australia was published in 2004 I would have thought that it was hard to miss the explosion of repository activity that accompanied the implementation of the Research Quality Framework that dominated the lives of Universities “down under” from 2006 onwards. But then, despite a generally good coverage of international issues, this is a largely British focused work.

The three practical case studies at the end are useful in that they highlight to commonality of the motives and issues facing repositories. The author was surprised at how similar their issues and experiences were, but with the wisdom of 2008 hindsight it is clear that there is a very familiar pattern worldwide.

The book is well structured and referenced. The style is clear and easy to read. There is a place for such an overview and this book goes a long way towards fulfilling its aim. It will provide a useful volume to pass to interested colleagues who want to know enough to put repositories into context, and to gain sympathy for the complexity and wide array of issues that need to be considered.