Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository?

Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository?  Richard Poynder. Blog: Open and Shut? September 22, 2016.
     In 1999, a meeting was held to discuss scholarly archives and repositories and ways in which to make them interoperable and to avoid needlessly replicating each other’s content. This led to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). One notion was that the individual archives "would be given easy-to-implement mechanisms for making information about what they held in their archives externally available".  Open access advocates saw OAI-PMH as a way of aggregating content hosted in local archives, or institutional repositories. This would "encourage universities to create their own repositories and then instruct their researchers to deposit in them copies of all the papers they published in subscription journals."

The interoperability promised by OAI-PMH has not really materialised, and author self-archiving "has remained a minority sport, with researchers reluctant to take on the task of depositing their papers in their institutional repository". Some believe the "IR now faces an existential threat". The interview and additional information are available in a separate PDFThis file looks at whether the IR will survive, be "captured by commercial publishers" or "the research community will finally come together, agree on the appropriate role and purpose of the IR, and then implement a strategic plan that will see repositories filled with the target content."

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