Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Irene Perciali of BePress have written a sprightly and sensible article in Serials Review about where they believe IRs need to go:
What truly engages faculty� As self-archiving supporters have already pointed out, faculty want to disseminate their research broadly, and an open access repository would help with that. However, faculty also want to establish an intellectual profile, they want to display and to organize their research in a way that builds their profile, and they want to disseminate their research to the colleagues who matter to them. Faculty do want to create an online professional identity and to present it to the world. But they seek control and ownership over their online presence, and they want it to be visually appealing. They are not content to be the result of a database query on an institution-wide repository. Uploading to such a repository may be a duty to one’s campus, and it may be a way to get indexed in Google, but it is not a way to build and design one’s own scholarly profile.
It’s a genuine shame we didn’t start thinking this way until now… but if we move, we might be able to redress our early errors. I’m happy to see articles like this published. I hope the right people read them.
