Open Access News

The difficulties involved in establishing an IR are not economic or technological in nature. Rather, they are sociological and strategic, with organizational inertia being a large obstacle to this early phase of implementation. Here are a few suggestions for focusing initial efforts to get an IR off the ground.

Focus on Late-Career Faculty. In order to create a campus culture where faculty routinely deposit material in the IR, it is necessary to get some individual faculty to become early adopters....The youngest faculty are not necessarily the primary opinion leaders on a campus, in part because they have not been around long enough to have made sufficient connections to exert that kind of informal influence on a large scale....At Caltech, the most enthusiastic early adopter was a late career professor who wanted to document his oeuvre. He compiled a complete bibliography and pursued clearances from the publishers. He approached the library about digitization and participation in the IR. The project has been so successful, he has moved on to documenting the career of one of his early mentors at Caltech....

[A] practical solution to the "chicken or the egg" issue is to try to actively engage late-career faculty. This may seem counter-intuitive to many librarians, since so many new library initiatives are pitched to and eagerly adopted by the newest generation of academicians. The senior faculty may view the proposition as a capstone/culmination/collected works project for their career. They are also more likely to have a large enough publishing portfolio....

Focusing on content which is easy to incorporate into an IR (low-hanging fruit)....Ascertaining a publisher's policy with respect to the version of a paper which an author contributes to an archive is a tedious and expensive process [John Ober, SPARC/ACRL Forum, ALA Midwinter 2006]. An effort is underway [ASEE ELD Scholarly Communication Committee] to address more specifically the policies and conditions of science and engineering journal publishers.

A limited number of publishers/publications permit the use of the as-published PDF to be harvested and uploaded to an IR. The peer-reviewed material which an institution has produced and published within these enlightened journals is the low hanging fruit. Begin harvesting the intellectual heritage of your institution from the material which presents the least difficulties with respect to publisher permissions....

Other rich sources of readily available content include the institution's gray literature: technical report series, working paper collections, theses, and dissertations....