ER&L 2008: Institutional Repositories

Dave Stout, Director
Bepress Services

"Institutional Repositories:
Using the IR to create scholarly assets"

IR issues:
-Faculty members don't contribute (McDowell, D-Lib Mag. Sept/Oct 2007 V.13 No.9/10)
-Positioning the IR is problematic - faculty don't understand terminology: "institutional repository", "digital preservation" - even though librarians believe preservation is best argument for IRs

IRs as publishing platforms:
-within the past month, 7 BEpress clients using Digital Commons began new e-journals.
Why?
-Publishing within the IR fills a vacuum in scholarly comm.
Other uses:
launch new peer reviewed journals
manage conferences & workshops
review grant proposals
review & publish student research
support small societies & associations

Examples of collaborations, emerging interest topics, regional journals, undergraduate research, niche topics:
Boston College's Cities and the Environment
Boston College's Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment
UC Davis's California Agriculture
Illinois-Wesleyan's Res Publica (had backfiles to load into new IR to "seed" content)
McMaster University's Bertrand Russell Studies (has varying access levels)

Presents abilities of an IR to faculty in a way they understand - in the context of research and publishing
Removes barriers of size and resources from ability to publish
Little content itself is managed by the library - library runs the framework while faculty and students manage their content, review, editorial needs, etc.

Ithaka's recent paper on Universities as publishers
Royster, Serials Review 2007 - article on using IRs for publishing platforms

Stout is doing a soft-sell of his product, Digital Commons, but the functionality he describes isn't limited to that product - OJS does the same thing for an open-access journal model. Management of a conference or workshop is a little different - don't know if OJS can do this.

Question - how are Bepress clients exposing their IRs for discovery?
Ans - Bepress indexes full text of all content and works their search algorithms to be compatible with Google. Also OAI-compliant, so clients can expose their content to OAI tools like Primo or similar (and presumably OAIster, although Stout didn't mention it).