The SSRN Blog

As many of you know, we have worked closely with The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to create our Entrepreneurship Research & Policy Network (ERPN). Earlier this year, they held the first Economics Bloggers Forum and I was fortunate to be able to participate.  It was a wonderful event and a great opportunity to meet and learn from some very intelligent people, a few of which are included in the Renewal of Entrepreneurial Capitalism video below.  Other than my friends at the Kauffman Foundation inserting the wrong blog URL for me, I was very impressed with the quality of the videos and the professionalism of the staff.

Overview - Economic Bloggers and the Renewal of Entrepreneurial Capitalism

Gregg Gordon - Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network

Gregg Gordon - Building the Field of Entrepreneurship Research

Please let me know what you think about the videos and what changes are occurring in your discipline.

Dorothea Salo is the Digital Repository Librarian for the University of Wisconsin. She claims that, “[The institutional repository] is like a roach motel. Data goes in, but it doesn’t come out.” This description is much more derogatory than Geoffrey Bilder’s description of the Institutional Repositories (IR) as a silo. So what exactly is the problem with IRs that produces such critics?

There are many concerns but one of the basic underlying problems for IRs is a lack of funding to make them an outstanding operational unit.  Surveys from the Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States indicate that “funding comes or will come [for IRs] from the library… They also agree that funding is not coming from academic units.” This means that institutional libraries will have to balance an already strained budget to incorporate a new cost entity.

Another challenge that IRs face is the numerous different IR software that is available. These many software systems are not always interoperable with each other. In an Evaluation of Digital Repository Software at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), at least ten different IR software systems were evaluated in order to identify the system that will eventually be used by the NLM. Although all IRs must be OAI compliant – this compliance only guarantees that IRs will have interoperable harvesting of metadata. For a repository to be truly functional and highly valuable to researchers, the digital objects that they are storing (full text documents, etc.) need to be accessible and exchangeable. OAI has recently developed the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications to address this issue. But most of the available IR software was developed prior to the development of these specifications. Therefore, once an IR has begun to use such software, “… migrating existing items from any system or service to another – when migration is even possible… locks libraries into an initial decision that in hindsight may have been a poor one.” (Salo, 2007)

Unfortunately, due to these and other issues the IRs are largely empty and presently not for use or reuse to the general public. In a recent study done by Peter A. Zuber, out of 17 universities that had an IR, only 7 of them had over 1,000 holdings, the other 10 all had less than 1,000 holdings.  And the amount of holdings is not correlated to the age of the IR. (Markey, et. al., 2007)

Since most IRs do not have the critical mass to be a viable solution for sharing open access content, what are the alternatives? A solution that Salo proposed takes advantage of the success of disciplinary repositories:

Moreover, as funder mandates such as that of the National Institutes of Health become more numerous and cumbersome, a campus service automating the deposit process into disciplinary repositories (and incidentally snagging a copy for the institutional repository) should make friends quickly among beleaguered faculty. (Salo, 2007)

This combination approach seems to be the path that Columbia University has decided to take. Columbia University’s Economics Department joined NEEO and will be submitting their research to their repository too. Deputy University Librarian’s, Patricia Renfro, comment about this was:

Columbia has already found it very rewarding to be part of this innovative initiative and to have an opportunity to work with European colleagues who are exploring the harvesting of local institutional repositories into a subject-based resource.

A combination approach certainly allows the content to serve both disciplinary and institutional masters.

In the November 2002 Open Archives Forum’s Interim Review of Organisational Issues, a concern was raised about Europe’s role in adopting Open Archives Initiative’s (OAI) protocols and standards because of “the preponderance of U.S. members, and the dependence on U.S. sources of funding for the OAI.”  This concern appears to have been met head on as the European Union has taken the OAI baton and is running full speed with it.

The EU has established the Digital Repository Infrastructures Vision for European Research (DRIVER) “whose vision and primary objective is to create a cohesive, robust and flexible, pan-European infrastructure for digital repositories, offering sophisticated services and functionalities for researchers, administrators and the general public.”  DRIVER’s search portal contains documents “harvested’ from over 200 institutional repositories from 23 European countries in 25 languages. DRIVER is a large scale project that is funded by the European Commission under the auspices of the “Research Infrastructure” unit.  This collaborative and coordinated effort is an impressive one and appears to be lacking in the US.

In a paper written by Christopher Armbruster from the Max Planck Society, he states that this will give the EU a “competitive advantage” over the US:

“Strategy in the US is not as comprehensive as in the EU… Although innovation has occurred in the US (besides the repositories mentioned, JSTOR and ARTSTOR are also significant central solutions), the present situation is characterized by a lack of coordination and a multitude of solutions that make it difficult for anyone outside the cartel of participating institutions to launch new services. For the EU, this situation allows for the opportunity to increase its competitive advantage by coordinating and implementing a distribution of functions that enables more innovation to happen faster.” (A European Model for the Digital Publishing of Scientific Information?, p. 12)

While Kansas University became the first US public University to join Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others in adopting an OA policy, the question still remains if adopting OA policies and OAI protocols is enough to make the content readily available. As quoted in a previous post, “a huge challenge facing researchers today is gathering research that is now available from so many different sources. ‘Library silos aren’t much better than publisher silos,’ [Geoffrey Bilder commented during this year’s Society for Scholarly publishing meeting.]”  Although all OA through University repositories are OAI-compliant, there is still a lack of an united infrastructure in most countries to aggregate this data. In addition, there remains a question of who would fund such an infrastructure.

I guess the proof that Europe is taking the lead globally is in the OA pudding. Columbia University’s Economics’ Department joined a collection of European repositories, NEEO. When asked to comment on Columbia’s joining NEEO, Patricia Renfro, Deputy University Librarian of Columbia University, had this to say:

“A goal for NEEO and its related Nereus consortium is indeed to increase access to European research in economics, but the invitation to Columbia to join represented a decision to extend the scope of the group and of its developing product, Economists Online, worldwide. Nereus will be inviting other US institutions to join and to contribute to EO and already has one Australian member, Monash University.

Columbia has already found it very rewarding to be part of this innovative initiative and to have an opportunity to work with European colleagues who are exploring the harvesting of local institutional repositories into a subject-based resource. Economists Online will further expose full text Open Access economics content that we are adding to Columbia’s institutional repository, Academic Commons.”

SSRN supports OA, and I think it provides real value to the scholarly community, but have been concerned about making Open Access more Accessible. DRIVER and NEEO are exciting efforts in this very exciting area. I hope they continue to expand and spur others on to join them.

When John Palfrey wrote his keynote for this year’s Computer Assisted Legal Instruction’s (CALI) 19th Annual Conference for Law School Computing about the legal education revolution, I doubt he included anything about the technological revolution occurring in Iran. However, Palfrey, Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, as well as a Faculty Co-Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was obviously excited about what is happening in Iran and very effectively wove this into his presentation about the future of legal education and legal information.

As Dean of the Harvard University’s Law Library, he wants to “listen” to what students are doing. More and more students are acquiring information digitally, and no longer visiting the library’s stacks. They are the “digital natives” he spoke about in “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.” He said the role of the library and the librarian will change in the 21st century. The Library will be a place to “reintroduce contemplative spaces for students.” A message repeated from the celebration of the newly renovated and expanded space of Duke University’s J. Michael Goodson Law Library and included in “The 21st Century Law Library: A Conversation,” where Palfrey discusses the future of the library with Richard A. Danner and S. Blair Kauffman. In this conversation, Kaufmann refers to the 21st century law library as a “third place:”

“Interestingly, the born digital students tend to be even more frequent users of libraries. The people who guard the entrance to the Yale Law Library tell me that our current 1Ls are the heaviest library users they’ve seen yet. It’s an interesting situation that during the digital age, students are flocking to libraries. I think it’s because libraries, as Dick has pointed out in previous talks, are what architects call a ‘third place’ - where your home is your first place, an office or a classroom is a second place, and social places, like dining halls and lounges and coffee shops and bookstores and libraries are a third place.”

However, one of Palfrey’s greatest emphasis in his keynote speech was the library’s role in collaboration - in both research and in collecting and storing information. He called it “radical collaboration.” “What can we do together?” he asked. Instead of libraries competing on collection size - he says libraries should collaborate on what each buys and shares - especially during these economic times. This was once again a revisit to the conversation with Kauffman and Danner:

“Palfrey: Let’s say you’ve got an empiricist who is doing work on data sets related to something in the business world or corporate world, and the Yale School of Management has all the materials that they need. Do you buy it at the Yale Law School library, and likewise, do you repeat the things that the Yale School of Management has in skill sets?

Kaufmann: … we duplicate as little as possible, and we coordinate with the other libraries on campus to get those information resources where we can. And we think very carefully about how we expand our services.”

I found the use of new technology to further the revolution in Iran to be an effective beacon and metaphor for the change that needs to occur in the way we think about information collection and storage. Law schools shouldn’t follow the same old path of trying to win by having the most books in their law library. They need to see the light and win by producing the brightest minds that will make a real difference in the world … maybe even in Iran.

In scholarly research, there are many differences between the practices of the Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) disciplines and the Social Science and Humanities (SS&H) disciplines. According to a report commissioned by the JSTOR, “Scholarly Communications in the Biosciences Discipline,” journal articles are the primary focus of literature searches during research in the STM disciplines. On the contrary, Historians rely on books, and in that matter, primary sources are more important than secondary sources (“Scholarly Communications in the History Discipline: A Report Commissioned by JSTOR.”) Since many of the books and primary literature in the SS&H are not yet digitized, historians have not yet had an incentive to participate in digitization projects. In fact, many have been against digital or virtual libraries sprouting at Universities. For example, when a plan arose to tear down the Meyer Library, holding Stanford’s East Asian Collection, objection came, “Too much of the renowned East Asian collection would be available only by sending a page for a book, critics said. Humanists objected that the model of the sciences did not fit their needs.” Just last week, I was speaking with a large Humanities association about using our Conference Management Services. The major sticking point was how we were to handle their hard copy paper submissions. And this past Spring, Open Access publishing, although widely accepted at such schools such as Harvard and MIT, was voted down in a 37-24 decision during the University of Maryland’s faculty senate:

Senators criticized the proposal for its language, which they said did not accurately characterize the variations that exist between departments. Throughout the debate, science professors faced off against humanities professors - a rift caused by the vast differences between scientific journals and humanities journals.

“This is a proposal that does not take into account the needs of different disciplines,” history professor Gay Gullickson said. “[Open access] applies well to some disciplines and hurts others.” (”Faculty Sens. Battles Over Open Access“)

The STM disciplines are far out running the Humanities in digitizing scholarly literature. However, change is inevitable. Opportunities should not be avoided within the Humanities; they should be embraced. As University of Maryland Arts and Humanities’ Dean James Harris noted:

… libraries are slowly becoming virtual and the university will eventually have to transition with them.

‘This is happening,’ Harris said. ‘The train has left the station.’(”Faculty Sens. Battles Over Open Access“)

If there is one thing we can agree on it is that the humanities disciplines are a vast conglomeration of differing fields, each with their own fairly distinct personality. This variability is part of the Humanities’ greatest strengths. Encompassing a wide variety of fields, opinions, methods and personal backgrounds - it is a mosaic at its finest and a quagmire at its worst. As with the STM disciplines, these variations have allowed each of these fields to flourish. The initial proliferation of various and vibrant digital Humanities projects over the last decade has marked the Humanities’ progressive entrance into the digital world. Unfortunately, these projects and participation within the digital realm have not been widely adopted by the Humanities community. However, it is imperative that those scholars that have a stake in the humanities’ transition into the digital World let their voices and opinions be heard about what this transition should look like.

Eloquently expressed by Johanna Drucker in “Blind Spots: Humanists Must Plan Their Digital Future:”

The question cannot be answered in the abstract. The details that will bedevil this and other schemes for the next age of scholarly work and design of the environments to support it are not trivial. And here I come to the crux of my argument. The design of new environments for performing scholarly work cannot be left to the technical staff and to library professionals. The library is a crucial partner in planning and envisioning the future of preserving, using, even creating scholarly resources. So are the technology professionals. But in an analogy with building construction, they are the architects and the contractors. The creation of archives, analytic tools, and statistical analyses of aggregate data in the humanities (and in some other scholarly fields) requires the combined expertise of technical, professional, and scholarly personnel.

The task of modeling an environment for scholarship (not just individual projects, but an environment, with a suite of tools for access, use, and research activity) is not a responsibility that can be offloaded onto libraries or technical staffs. I cannot say this strongly or clearly enough: The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task. After all, what will such “research portals” do? What kinds of work will they be designed to support? Editing? Annotation? Aggregation of leaves of manuscripts scattered at remote institutions? Collaborative writing? Close readings? Data mining? Information display? Multimedia writing? Networked conversation? Publishing? Those are enormous questions, to which no scholar would have the same set of answers as another. No scholar would have the same requirements. But creating boutique, custom solutions on a project-by-project basis is not practical, and the labor involved is too costly. The scope of the task ahead is nothing short of modeling scholarly activity anew in digital media. To answer that challenge, humanists have to do more than wave their hands at the technical professionals.

Collaboration is critical in this endeavor. 1,000 different departments searching for 1,000 different solutions will not work. What we need is a dialogue among all potential stake holders, including the early adopters and those late to the party. We (academics, publishers, repositories and other stakeholders) need to work together and find the solutions to the somewhat unique needs of the discipline: what specific software and services do Humanities academics need in a digitized world that will help them accomplish and expand their goals? The conversation needs to be collaborative, but also the Humanities disciplines need to take advantage of the pioneers in the STM and the Social Science disciplines. A lot of disciplines have taken a lot of arrows, and the Humanities should be able to learn from them. Or at least look to see from which directions the arrows came.