How long is long term?
There is currently some discussion (on this list) about how long items
should be able to be accessed from a repository. It is an interesting
question, and opens up larger ones such as what responsibilities do journals
have for ensuring the archiving and perpetuality of papers they have
published in a digital-only format? If libraries are simply licensing their
subscriptions (which are for a finite period), and not maintaining a paper
copy in their libraries (the LOCKSS principle) then long-term archiving
issues must be addressed by the publishers.
The logical forward argument from that is that the open access copy of a
paper sitting in a repository is only needed until the electronic copy of
the publisher's version goes open access (as increasingly they are after
some embargo period, often 1-2 years, sometimes as short as six months after
the publication date).
If that is the case, 'long-term' responsibilities of an institutional
repository only exist for this short timeframe, and energy expended on
longer archiving roles would be wasted.
But this cuts down to the even bigger question of what the institutional
repository exists for. Even once the decision is made to separate the roles
of a 'digital library' and an 'institutional repository', there is a further
required distinction. If we define the institutional repository as being
soley for preprints, postprints and supporting datasets, there are two
choices for the required length of archiving, depending on the purpose of
the repository.
The first instance is where the institutional repository is simply in place
as a tool to facilitate open access to the publication output of the
institution. In this situation, the items in the repository are only
required to be there and accessible until they become freely available over
time, as publishers open up access to back copies of publications. This is
even more pertinent in disciplines where papers have a short half-life, such
as biomedicine. Some papers are obsolete within a very short time-frame,
which means their citation rates will stop altogether, obfuscating the need
for them to remain in the repository other than as an historical oddity.
The second instance is where the repository is used as a record of scholarly
output by the institution for reporting purposes, such as for DEST funding
in Australia. This is a likely scenario in the future, as one way of
ensuring material is deposited in the repository is to tie the process into
that of grant applications.
Again, the question of the definition of the institutional repository
becomes essential before decisions can be made and time invested in trying
to solve problems that might not really exist.
Danny Kingsley
PhD Student (part-time)
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