I hate it when I have to preface a post with “I’m not making this up.” It invariably means the WTF is flying thick and fast. But I’m not making this up.
There’s going to be a debate on institutional repositories, you see. Between a scholarly-communication czar and a library-school professor. Each of whom comes from a school that does not even HAVE an institutional repository, much less, y’know, a repo-rat or anything.
Am I the only person in existence who thinks this faintly ludicrous? I mean, sure, debate scholarly communication or open access, that’s fine, you don’t have to be a repo-rat to do that, you might not even want to be.
But as much as I respect both Smith (whose blog is good stuff) and Tibbo, I’m sorry, they have no business debating IRs without a repo-rat at the table. This is the same Big-Thinker-no-experience nonsense that got all of us into the IR mess in the first place. (And no, Dr. Tibbo, “helping to plan” doesn’t count, because I have yet to see an IR plan that didn’t crumble soon after contact with reality. IR plans never include repo-rats. They’re written before the repo-rat is hired.)
C’mon, everybody. It’s time to demand repo-rat representation in IR discourse. We can’t leave this to all the Big Thinkers, not to mention the research types who for some unfathomable reason now think that IRs are a sexy research topic. They do not help us. Time we helped ourselves.
Edited to add: Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of self-archiving cred Smith and Tibbo might have. Neither E-LIS nor DLIST turned up anything for Smith. Tibbo has two papers in one and three in the other. When I searched LISTA, I found 18 results for Tibbo, and five for Smith (but I don’t think all of them are actually his). Draw your own conclusions.
By the way, I think folks in the area should emphatically go to this—if only to ask why there aren’t any repo-rats at the table!
