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.