Today was the second and last day of the SPARC Digital Repositories conference. Before the first session I strolled down the street to the University of Maryland Health Sciences & Human Services Library, which I'd last visited as an NLM Associate six years ago. It's a beautiful library and I had a nice time; thanks to Meredith for inviting me to visit.
Back at the conference, the first event of the day was about the current policy environment--in Europe, the US, and Japan--surrounding institutional repositories and open access. David Prosser of SPARC Europe pointed out that the ideal embargo period from an open access standpoint is no months. Immediate open access is the goal. During questions I pointed out that immediate open access conflicts with our message that even short embargos will not cause subscription cancellation; if we really want to end the current publishing model (and we do) we should say so to publishers and not just to ourselves. Prosser responded that he always stresses that no months is the goal, in any forum. The real endgame for publishers--from the standpoint of open access advocates--should be evolution of their business models, rather than restricting the core literature in various ways as they do now. On this point I agreed with Prosser wholeheartedly.
Following the policy discussion we learned about various campus strategies to support scholarly publishing. I'm especially impressed by the University of California's plans for a major renovation of the eScholarship Repository (and not just because I work for a UC campus!) The next iteration will have better searching capabilities, as well as improved tools for readers to grasp the context of what they're reading. Right now a search drops people right into a PDF, with no supporting information. Soon it will be much easier for people to orient themselves.
The afternoon was devoted to marketing, which is always a hard challenge for librarians because the value of our work is so evident to us. But the truth is that repositories will have much greater uptake if they solve practical problems for faculty, not merely further some abstract goal of "open access." To that end, we need to craft messages that are targeted, specific, and can explain succintly why people should use repositories rather than simply mounting files on their hard drive. This seems obvious when I write it up that way, but it's much easier said than done. So I appreciated the intensive focus on marketing this afternoon.
After two days at SPARC it was time to head down to Washington DC (our old home.) Tomorrow morning I'm up bright and early to present at a Society for Scholarly Publishing seminar, so I should be in bed already.
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