SPARC (North America)

Panel on Global Repositories at the Digital Repositories Meeting 2010, featuring Dr. Neil Jacobs, Jun Adachi, and Clifford Lynch.

The Innovation Fair at the Digital Repositories Meeting 2010.

George Strewn at the Digital Repositories Meeting 2010.

Jim Neal at the SPARC-ACRL Forum 2009 (Jul).

Ivy Anderson at the SPARC-ACRL Forum 2009 (Jul).

Kim Douglas's introduction at the SPARC-ACRL Forum 2009 (Jul).

Emma Hill at the SPARC-ACRL Forum 2009 (Jul).

Charles Lowry, PhD at the SPARC-ACRL Forum 2009 (Jul).

To connect with your community about open access, you need to think like a marketer. In his keynote luncheon address, Bob Witeck, chief executive officer and founding partner of Witeck-Combs Communications Inc., said he wanted to deliver confidence to the SPARC meeting attendees as fellow marketers telling them: Go forth and evangelize. By sharing the key messages about messaging, Witeck explained what it takes to market a product, service and, more importantly, an idea. To successfully communicate the value of open access, the following questions must be answered: Who cares? The answer is: Everyone does. Open access is about extraordinary reach of information and the new culture that hungers to set it free. It?s about people and process. It?s meant for individuals who want to unlock information. The challenge for every communicator is to know your audience. Talk directly to them and explain your unique value. Use plain English. Avoid the word ?institution.? Eventually you have to connect with people how they talk and how they live. Use a story - something authentic to talk about ideas, people and change. Don?t talk about a sterile process. Make it compelling. Access is not just for geeks. Science is about sharing. Why does it matter? For most of the world, science has been kept a secret. There are appropriate concerns. It has divided the world into those who know and who can?t find out. The digital age has turned that on its head. With the cumulative imbalances in the economy, and the interconnected global market, now is the time to move the open access message with urgency. Is comes down to money, doesn?t it? With public sector budgets at risk, you need to find ways to continue to make the case for investments in digital repositories. The concept of investing more with less in tight economic times may be the perfect storm of opportunity to make public research online for free in the future. It?s all about trust, isn?t it? In this exploding digital age, not all information is equal. Whether you are a scholar or an 8th grader doing a science project looking for knowledge, you have one thing in common: You want a trusted source. Clearly, as a repository, you must be the trusted nexus for all your stakeholders and targets. The challenge for all our institutions is to advocate in a marketing sense, to partner with researchers and to be the trusted connectors of knowledge that improves all our lives. Tap into others to tell the story Enlist colleagues with marketing gifts to gets ideas that are out of the box. Ask undergrads to do digital videos. Get a teaching assistant, a bright young star on campus, a visiting professor or a department chair to be an effective third party to tell the story about the merits of open access. Ask the business school to be part of the solution in creating a class of workers that are focused on contributing to the information economy. Emphasize that this is a global story now with rich resources from around the world connecting in this authentic movement.

While the concept of a digital repository is embraced by many academics ? particularly those designing the systems - getting the information deposited is difficult. ?There seems to be a disconnect between the discussion of people planning to share the information and the amount of information being shared, ?said Wilbanks at the opening keynote. One of the main reasons that it?s hard to get content posted is because stables systems ? in this case, generally universities ? are resistant to change on multiple levels. As a result, we are getting incremental innovation when it comes to digital scholarship. Copyright laws work to protect creativity. It may lock the paper up in a container, of sorts, but it doesn?t lock up the facts and ideas contained in the work. In the pre-network culture, copyright protected publishers and authors in a way that they felt comfortable. Now many are trying to expand their power and put copyrights on databases, which are not creative products and not intended to be covered by copyright. As organizations push to extend digital repositories, copyright law will likely get more complex, not less. Wilbanks cautions that if a digital repository is just a giant digital box of journals that an opportunity would be lost. But to expand the potential of the system also means overcoming some difficult hurdles. There is the issue of incentives. ?My experience is that faculty don?t like being hit with sticks, they prefer carrots,? he said. While it might just take a few minutes to do a simple repository upload, faculty don?t always see the benefit for them. The perception is that it is not something that helps with getting tenure or grant, so why spend the time depositing. A library can assist, but it takes staff and resources to add content and provide service. Wilbanks said he is hopeful that as universities begin to adopt policies modeled after Harvard?s open access policy that there will be some standardized methods for depositing works. ?What we don?t want is dozens of universities using different flavors of open access policies,? he said. As open source data becomes integrated, it can be helpful to the community looking for information. It solves a retrieval problem with useful information, rather than getting 80,000 results from a search on Google. As databases become more visible and people find the systems useful, the incentive problem will be solved naturally. Scholars will want to participate in a repository so their work is seen. Simple systems that are open and create competition will win. ?If you take research from the walled gardens and if you do it right, you don?t have locks ? that?s the opportunity,? Wilbanks said. Because of interconnected capabilities, we can build a stable reinforcing system of our own that will be more powerful over time than the closed systems. If faculty members find a repository solves a particular problem for them, then they are more apt to participate. ?The key part of incentive change is letting the people who want to share outcompete those who don?t want to share - giving them better answers is the best way,? he said. ?If person sitting next to me is using a repository and is getting more out of it than me using Google ? I?m going to copy them.?

While the concept of a digital repository is embraced by many academics ? particularly those designing the systems - getting the information deposited is difficult. ?There seems to be a disconnect between the discussion of people planning to share the information and the amount of information being shared, ?said Wilbanks at the opening keynote. One of the main reasons that it?s hard to get content posted is because stables systems ? in this case, generally universities ? are resistant to change on multiple levels. As a result, we are getting incremental innovation when it comes to digital scholarship. Copyright laws work to protect creativity. It may lock the paper up in a container, of sorts, but it doesn?t lock up the facts and ideas contained in the work. In the pre-network culture, copyright protected publishers and authors in a way that they felt comfortable. Now many are trying to expand their power and put copyrights on databases, which are not creative products and not intended to be covered by copyright. As organizations push to extend digital repositories, copyright law will likely get more complex, not less. Wilbanks cautions that if a digital repository is just a giant digital box of journals that an opportunity would be lost. But to expand the potential of the system also means overcoming some difficult hurdles. There is the issue of incentives. ?My experience is that faculty don?t like being hit with sticks, they prefer carrots,? he said. While it might just take a few minutes to do a simple repository upload, faculty don?t always see the benefit for them. The perception is that it is not something that helps with getting tenure or grant, so why spend the time depositing. A library can assist, but it takes staff and resources to add content and provide service. Wilbanks said he is hopeful that as universities begin to adopt policies modeled after Harvard?s open access policy that there will be some standardized methods for depositing works. ?What we don?t want is dozens of universities using different flavors of open access policies,? he said. As open source data becomes integrated, it can be helpful to the community looking for information. It solves a retrieval problem with useful information, rather than getting 80,000 results from a search on Google. As databases become more visible and people find the systems useful, the incentive problem will be solved naturally. Scholars will want to participate in a repository so their work is seen. Simple systems that are open and create competition will win. ?If you take research from the walled gardens and if you do it right, you don?t have locks ? that?s the opportunity,? Wilbanks said. Because of interconnected capabilities, we can build a stable reinforcing system of our own that will be more powerful over time than the closed systems. If faculty members find a repository solves a particular problem for them, then they are more apt to participate. ?The key part of incentive change is letting the people who want to share outcompete those who don?t want to share - giving them better answers is the best way,? he said. ?If person sitting next to me is using a repository and is getting more out of it than me using Google ? I?m going to copy them.?

As much as we would like, universities don?t fund themselves. In the closing keynote, David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), offered practical advice on how to make digital repositories more visible to the public in hopes of winning over taxpayer support for educational institutions. ?A digital repository is the most effective way to make information free and the public wants and desperately needs to have it,? he says. The public is eager to have the fruits of the scholarship they funded available because they know the right information at the right place can change lives. The job of a digital repository is to ensure that the extremely value scholarship paid for by taxpayers ultimately ends up accessible to them, as well as students, faculty and others. Shulenburger contends the focus has been about sharing information within the academy with little talk about access beyond campuses. It?s a challenging time with universities more uncertain about the future than ever before - endowments are tumbling, building plans postponed, hiring on hold, aid restricted to truly needy students. Public universities have seen funds in real terms fall over 20 years and now reductions of 10-20 percent over the next few years will not be unusual. All this is happening at a time when many universities want to embark on a new activity of building or expanding a repository. Given this, why should faculty and staff care about having a digital repository? ?The answer is pretty simple: Because the folks who pay our bills need to and want to know how those investments in the university are benefiting them. Unlike most of other enterprises, universities do a lousy job of letting their investors know what they are getting from their investment,? he says. When universities promote themselves, too often they stress value only of the most identifiable products to certain audiences ? education products to students, research expertise to funding agencies, and value of attracting new firms to chambers of commerce, says Shulenburger. The result of that specific selling is that the people come to the erroneous conclusion that only those beneficiaries should pay for the university ? not the general public. To get the message across to the taxpayers about the value of the university, Shulenburger encouraged the audience to imagine all the products of a university (refereed publication, dissertations, extension publications, theater productions, images of objects from the campus museum, etc.) freely available on a digital repository and clearly labeled as products of the university. Then, the public becomes accustom to searching the university site for information. The searches would probably yield overwhelming results on information useful in their daily lives. ?This is powerful,? he says. ?Imagine the reward for knowing that people close to home care about these problems and their taxes are doing something to invest in them.? A well-populated digital repository should be promoted as a resource to citizens of state to enhance the value and funding of a university, Shulenburger maintains. Rather than talking about a digital repository helping build the career faculty members or preserving scholarship, Shulenburger suggests it can also enhance the financial health of universities over time. It?s time to let the light of universities shine and allow digital repositories to entice additional funding, he says. In closing, Shulenburger suggests seven steps to move forward: 1. Make sure there is a digital repository available for deposit work of your university?s faculty. 2. Work with the president, provost and faculty to show real benefits of broadening distribution of scholarly product. 3. Initiate discussions with administration and faculty to modify current practices and intellectual property policy so university retains certain rights. 4. Support efforts to spread public access policies, such as those of NIH, to all funding agencies and foundations. 5. Work to educate campus units to convince them to support, not to oppose the best interest of members. 6. Work with departments and faculty to develop habits of depositing into digital repository. 7. While information in a digital repository and search engines may sell itself, brand the information in your repository as information your university created or made available to the public. Work with your university public relations unit to spread the word so the public looks first to your repository for reliable information. ?Digital repositories can make cultural contributions of scientific knowledge generated on campuses widely available and have profound effects,? Shulenburger says. ?This is a case of doing good, while doing well.?

Sarah Shreeves says one of the key things she has learned in her work as IDEALS Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is that ?involving library liaisons in the [repository development] process as early as possible can create some really big wins. Our most successful communities are the ones that the subject selectors are really spearheading? by talking with faculty about scholarly communication issues, author rights, and data storage and management opportunities while also identifying gray literature for addition to the repository. She credits library subject selectors with helping to build a sense of community and spreading the responsibility for building relationships that support repository growth.

Sarah Shreeves says one of the key things she has learned in her work as IDEALS Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is that ?involving library liaisons in the [repository development] process as early as possible can create some really big wins. Our most successful communities are the ones that the subject selectors are really spearheading? by talking with faculty about scholarly communication issues, author rights, and data storage and management opportunities while also identifying gray literature for addition to the repository. She credits library subject selectors with helping to build a sense of community and spreading the responsibility for building relationships that support repository growth.

?If you?re first coming into this arena, you have so much more to work with than you did a couple of years ago as an early adopter,? says Michelle Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation. She cites a number of encouraging trends, including the introduction of services that bring together content from across many repositories, the growing end-user focus of development activity, and expanding collaboration within and across institutions. She says open access to repository content?not just to metadata?is unlocking the potential of Web 2.0. ?We?re finally at a point where we can actually do more with this content than we could even imagine four or five years ago.?

?If you?re first coming into this arena, you have so much more to work with than you did a couple of years ago as an early adopter,? says Michelle Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation. She cites a number of encouraging trends, including the introduction of services that bring together content from across many repositories, the growing end-user focus of development activity, and expanding collaboration within and across institutions. She says open access to repository content?not just to metadata?is unlocking the potential of Web 2.0. ?We?re finally at a point where we can actually do more with this content than we could even imagine four or five years ago.?

Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian at University of Alberta, says that institutional repositoriy development ?brings [libraries] right back into the mainstream of providing services to our faculty and graduate students.? During this period of tight budgets, libraries must decide whether supporting a digital repository is an ?add on? or an ?instead of? in their resource allocations. ?In my opinion, institutional repositories are here to stay," says Ingles. If new funds cannot be found to support them, "they have to be considered an 'instead of' because?it?s all about [the library?s] relevancy.?

The University of California is moving away from the concept of a repository??we?ve erased the word from our conversation??and instead is focused on providing digital publishing services for faculty authors and developing a robust access interface for these publications, according to Catherine Mitchell, Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at California Digital Library (CDL). ?We?re moving away from the notion of ?deposit.? In fact, deposit becomes a by-product of the services we?re providing.? Mitchell says CDL has forged a new alliance with the University of California Press to offer a suite of publishing services for works ranging from gray literature to books.

Bonnie Klein, Information Collection/Copyright Specialist at the US Defense Technical Information Center, points to the long experience of government agencies in capturing and preserving their intellectual assets in repositories so information can be reorganized, reduced, and recombined. ?Without the repositories, these reports would sit in somebody?s office?and this information would be lost,? says Klein. She urges universities to ?collect the corporate output of the institution? to support accountability and show ?patterns in the development of where the institution has been and where it?s going.?