A little while ago I made a post with the following rather provocative paragraph:
Confronting some home truths about the frustrating, dysfunctional on-the-ground reality of running IRs means confronting some home truths about myself and the career choices I’ve made. I am definitely suffering through uncomfortable “oh, great, I’ve found myself another bloody windmill” moments. I’m still convinced, mind you, that open access is not a windmill—it’s viable, it’s necessary, and it will happen under various guises. Institutional repositories… well, the doubts I’ve had all along about ’em are only intensifying as I write.
I followed up shortly thereafter with this graceless rant:
The elephant in the closet is that institutional repositories are in trouble. They haven’t done what everybody thought they were going to do, which was attract lots of shiny happy faculty managing all their shiny happy peer-reviewed content such that we could finally tell big-pig publishers to take their ridiculous journal pricing and shove it somewhere painful.
It didn’t work, okay? And it shows no signs of tipping into a workable state. That’s a damn scary thing to say, if you’re a repository-rat.
I hope I may be forgiven for suspecting that this post from Charles W. Bailey was written at least in part to respond to my momentary despondency. I do appreciate the gesture, and nothing I am about to say should be taken otherwise.
I hold to my thesis. Institutional repositories as a class are in serious trouble. They are not producing the outcomes they promised—or, indeed, much of any outcome in many cases. They are sucking up library staff time and development muscle, and libraries haven’t enough of either commodity to waste on a non-productive service.
Fundamentally, the value proposition on which IRs were sold to libraries was in error. Voluntary self-archiving in institutional repositories simply does not happen in the absence of deposit mandates. From a library perspective, this changes the picture from the original “build it, step back, and they will come” to “make a tremendous ongoing investment in marketing and library-mediated deposit services that may never pay off if other libraries at other institutions don’t do likewise.” It’s only sensible that many libraries back away from the latter commitment.
If we in the open-access movement don’t confront our error head-on and make plans for routing around it, I predict with unhappy confidence that many if not most IRs will wither and die, and few more will open. As I said, that’s not necessarily a deathblow for open access, not at all. I do think it would be a sincere pity.
We are not confronting our error. Except for Stevan Harnad and Arthur Sale, we are by and large not so much as acknowledging our error—instead, we are papering it over with happytalk case studies and the kind of thinly-disguised worry that earned my ire previously. As for Harnad and Sale, it’s well-known that I believe the call for institutional and even patchwork mandates to be a lovely but thoroughly impractical notion. I’m a lowly repository-rat. Who’s going to bell the faculty cat for me?
While I’m pleased at the adoption of the CIC Author Addendum by sundry faculty senates (including that of the flagship institution of the university system I work for), I don’t think it means too terribly much in practice. Most faculty won’t use it. Practically none will connect it with the concept of self-archiving via the institutional repository, not least since the Addendum itself doesn’t even fill in that particular blank. To the best of my knowledge, no provisions have been made at any of the universities adopting the addendum to track addendum uptake among faculty and publisher response thereto, which in practice means I have no way to find out which faculty have successfully employed the addendum so that I can retrieve and archive their articles. “But they can self-archive!” Sure they can. They won’t without a mandate. The addendum doesn’t change that.
So we’re in a bind of our own creation. If we keep dancing around the issue instead of stepping up to solve it, we’re hardly well-placed to hope anyone else solves it for us. We also risk widespread demoralization among librarians running these underutilized services. Pluralistic ignorance is corrosive; a librarian who assumes that everyone else’s IR is running great guns and it’s only hers having trouble is a librarian who will shortly look for another job. I’m not there yet, myself. I don’t mind saying I’m not too far away from it, however; data curation and other pieces of cyberinfrastructure are looking mighty tempting.
I take specific exception to this sentence from Bailey’s post: “I cannot say this enough: successful institutional repositories are not primarily determined by technical factors, rather they are determined by attitudinal factors.”
Who is to say? Perhaps if we had built repository systems that weren’t unusable lumbering dinosaurs, that were designed around daily faculty reality rather than the idealized vision of self-archiving, we might have earned some uptake on grounds of immediate practicality rather than hopes of changed attitudes. But we didn’t, so we’re stuck.
An example: mediated deposit. Repository systems blithely assume that the person pushing the buttons to make a deposit is the same person with authority to grant the repository’s license—that is, a person with intellectual-property rights over the content. This is wishful thinking. In most repositories, most deposits are done by a third party, be it a librarian, departmental staff, or a faculty member’s graduate-student assistants. None of the repository software packages or services I know of acknowledges this reality by separating the act of depositing content from the act of licensing it for preservation and display. I don’t even want to talk about how much time I have wasted building chicken-wire-and-duct-tape paper licensing workflows around this problem. Nor do I care to talk about how many faculty I’ve seen walk away from paper licenses they’d likely click through onscreen without a care in the world.
(In DSpace, it’s possible to skate around the issue with the batch-import tool, which allows any person registered with the system to be tagged as content depositor. Of course, the batch-import tool never verifies that the said person signed or even saw a content license, or did anything at all to authorize the deposit on his or her behalf!)
How much more uptake would we have if we could offer a service enabling departmental IT staff to batch-deposit papers which (once individual faculty have responded to the email requesting licensure) appear magically as prettily-formatted HTML citations on faculty and departmental web pages? It’s technically feasible. We haven’t done it because we’ve fixated far too strongly on the “self” in “self-archiving.”
How much more uptake would we have if we maintained a system that welcomes and cares for unfinished work as well as curating and displaying the finished products of that work? I can say with some authority that I’d have a great many more preprints and postprints if faculty could find their preprints and postprints in the first place!
In short: perhaps the attitudes that need adjusting are ours, not faculty’s.
All of this is elaborated upon at much greater length and with footnotes in “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel,” which currently amounts to twenty-one pages at one-and-a-half spacing and is still going strong. Still, I don’t care to wait for that to be published. These discussions need to happen now.
