On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
> Much hope and a lot of money has been invested in institutional
> repositories - but, for example, in the UK the significant mandates are
> now research funder mandates and all the life science RCUKs have joined
> UK PMC. It would thus seem important and urgent that IRs reconsider
> their strategy and take a closer look at the idea of being a research
> repository or joining forces for building a national (or regional) system.

Chris makes a good point. Lots of money is being spent on
institutional repositories and, so far, the return on that investment
is quite low. I am still optimistic that institutional repositories
will become more useful but for that to happen there need to be useful
worldwide (not just UK or European focused because that doesn't match
research communities) disciplinary services and portals built on top
them. The Catch 22 here is that disciplinary services have exactly the
same funding and sustainability issues that disciplinary repositories
have.

My group manages both Cornell's eCommons institutional repository and
the arXiv.org disciplinary repository. The effective cost per item (*)
submitted is more than 10 times higher for the institutional
repository than the disciplinary repository and the
benefit/utility/visibility is lower. However, I know exactly who
should and will fund eCommons (Cornell), and that nicely matches the
vested interest (Cornell). The community benefit from arXiv.org is
enormous and the effective cost per new item very low (<$7/item), but
given 60k new items per year that is a significant cost and
sustainability is a challenge.

I think the best example of a disciplinary service over institutional
repositories is RePEc in economics. This predates OAI and our current
conception of IRs but fits the model: institutions (typically
economics departments (**)) host articles and expose metadata/data via
a standard interface. The institutionally held content is genuinely
useful to the economics community because of the disciplinary
services.

At the end of the day, researchers want and will use disciplinary
services (look at usage stats for arXiv, ADS, SPIRES, RePEc, PMC, SSRN
vs IRs). They probably don't care whether the items themselves are
stored centrally or institutionally.

Some of Stevan's arguments miss key points:
 
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 08:10:59AM -0500, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> (1) Institutions are the universal providers of all research output --
> funded and unfunded, across all subjects, all institutions, and all
> nations.

Not true, researchers are the universal providers of research
output. They often work in teams that span multiple institutions and
their first allegiance is often to their discipline rather than their
institution.

> (3) OAI-compliant Repositories are all interoperable.
> 
> (7) The metadata and/or full-text deposits of any OAI compliant
> repository can be harvested, exported or imported to any OAI compliant
> repository.

Interoperable to a point, and I say that as one of the creators of
OAI-PMH. There is plenty of experience showing how hard it is to
maintain large harvested collections and merge varying metadata
(e.g. OAIster, NSDL). Institutional repositories are often managed
with scant attention to maintaining interoperability, managers change
the OAI-PMH base URL on a whim or do not monitor for errors. Full-text
often has copyright/license issues preventing import into other
repositories.
 
> (11) The solution is to fix the funder locus-of-deposit specs, not to
> switch to central locus of deposit.

The solution is to build disciplinary services (either on disciplinary
repositories or over harvested content) that are sufficiently useful
to motivate researchers to submit of their own free will.

Cheers,
Simeon




(*) I think effective cost per new item is a good measure of
repository cost because almost all effort beyond relatively fixed
costs of keeping the system going tends to be dealing with new
items. I calculate as operating budget over some period divided by
number of new items in that period.

(**) I'm pleased to say that the section of arXiv that overlaps with
RePEc -- Quantitative Finance (q-fin) -- is also included in RePEc
(http://ideas.repec.org/s/arx/papers.html).