1. Institutional Repositories
Presentation to the GT Faculty Executive Board
22 October 2002
Its unclear whether I need to sell you folks on the idea of a campus repostory (or collection of library managed repositorie) or just to tell you what the library is attempting to do to implement the obvious.
Let me ask; how many of you are members of an editorial board for an Elsevier, Kluwer, Wiley or similar commercial publisher? Have they taken you to dinner yet? If not, they will. And when they do, they are going to tell you that institutional repositories are a fad and unworkable.
So, this is intended to do a little of both selling you on the idea and sharing our intentions. I’ll share with you a brief part of the rationale behind the idea of digital repositories and also describe what we are working toward in the library.

2. What Authors Want Scholars publish: Not (directly) for money
To communicate with peers
For prestige
For career advancement
Not (directly) for money
In a very thorough study performed for a large consortium of American and English learned societies, what mamy of us recognize intuitively, was confirmed. Scholars do not publish to receive royalties or even to make money. They publish out of a desire to communicate what they have learned to build reputation and career. But, dollar opportunity is not the driver.
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. What Authors Want. Worthington, West Sussex, England: ALPSP, 1999.

3. Why Were Scientific Journals Created?
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665
Established a public registry of intellectual property
Provided the means to establish innovative claims in an orderly way
Provided the means to tame and police ownership of intellectual property
Essentially, scholars publish in order to acquire social capital. For some, it is entirely sufficient to accumulate this kind of capital – fame as it were. For others it is also important to trade some of the social capital for actual capital. The peer review process of measuring quality of intellectual output has nurtured this endeavor. Scholars can establish their credentials and utilize those credentials to elevate their standing in society as well as their financial position. The externality of this process has over time slowly created, but with explosive growth since WWII, a major private enterprise called commercial publishing. For example, Elsevier, which has maintained a 29% profit margin for over twenty years.
Jean-Claude Guedon. In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow. Wash., DC: ARL, 2001

4. Functions of the Publishing Process
Registration: establishes IP
Certification: certifies quality and validity
Awareness: ensures dissemination and accessibility
Archiving: preserves intellectual heritage
The print publishing process has for nearly 350 years provided four values to scholars.
Registration of their ideas in a way that establishes intellectual property ownership.
Certification of their intellectual property by peers for quality and validity.
Awareness that ensures the disseminatin and accessibility by others to their work.
Long term archival preservation.
In another taxonomy of these values you might registration and certification into one value and add the fact that the print domain also segregates scholarship into disciplines which help reduce information seeking costs.
Ryam Crow. A Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper. Wash., DC: ARL, 2002

5. Failure of the Print Paradigm
Diffuses institutional intellectual property through thousands of journals
Holds faculty indirectly and institutions directly hostage to publisher monopolies
Limits the range of media available to present imagery, data and user manipulability
Over time the mechanism based on the partnership between scholars, publishers and libraries has had some weaknesses. 1st, in addition to the time lag all of you who publish have experienced, print fails to concatenate all the output by any given individual or institution.
2nd, the separation of the library as the entity paying the bills, from faculty who create the demand, has caused publishing monopolies to flourish. Example: New England J of Medicine.
3rd, and as technology has advanced in offering more means to share intellectual output, print has failed to deliver due to the nature of the entity.

6. Just to give you a little clue to the results of the monopoly power of publishers, here’s a diagram updated yearly by the ARL.

7. Results of a Shift to Digital Form of the Scholarly Journal
Faster communication
Lower cost of distribution
De-coupling of the registration, certification, awareness and archiving
Potential to elevate institutional brand
Potential for peer review of learning objects
Multi-media augmentation available
Refer to Ryan Crow’s paper page 9 for two tables

8. National Trends
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
Open Archives Initiative
Metadata standards and harvesting portal implementations
ARL collective of digital repositories
MERLOT, SMETE, other initiatives

9. Why the Library Center of expertise on metadata
Database maintenance and migration expertise
Demonstration projects with multimedia online
Complementariety of repository and licensed digital collections

10. Components of GT Universe
ETD’s task force
Sponsored research task force
Server integrity and security being upgraded
Request to archive learning objects
New positions:
Associate Director
Digital Initiatives Manager