After an unexpected evening in Philadelphia--caused because I missed my connecting flight by 12 minutes, after a delay leaving SFO--this morning I arrived in Baltimore for the SPARC Digital Repositories meeting.
Due to the delay I missed part of the opening keynote by John Wilbanks, the Vice President of Science at the Science Commons. The portion I attended was fascinating, so I wish I could have heard the entire talk. Wilbanks discussed the need to leverage the already large quantity of freely available life science data--life scientists are excellent contributors to GenBank--to further increase progress in science. G. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs at Johns Hopkins, amplified this point by noting how open access advocates tend to emphasize improved access to papers. While this is important, the core research data is already there to be leveraged, curated, and preserved.
The problem with institutional repositories, as ever, is that faculty members don't see the point of depositing into them. So even 5 minutes to upload a working paper is too much time. As several speakers have already emphasized, the librarian values of free availability and perpetual access--while vital to us, and key reasons to have an institutional repository--are simply not compelling to faculty members. (This may have the ring of the familiar for some of you, but it bears repeating.) Building services that solve tangible faculty problems, such as alleviating the demand for reprint requests, will be much more successful. Thus all institutional repositories should have easy mechanisms for storing key papers (either through automatic upload or library upload). Ideally the other key values (our values, principally) of openness and preservation will be naturally reinforced as a pleasant byproduct of practically motivated faculty participation in institutional repositories.
More later.
UPDATE: Dorothea Salo has posted a useful account of John Wilbanks's keynote on Caveat Lector.
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