Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories Ricky Erway Senior Program Officer OCLC Research A publication of OCLC Research Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories Ricky Erway, for OCLC Research © 2012 OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Reuse of this document is permitted as long as it is consistent with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 (USA) license (CC-BY-NC-SA): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. April 2012 OCLC Research Dublin, Ohio 43017 USA www.oclc.org ISBN: 1-55653-443-4 (978-1-55653-443-0) OCLC (WorldCat): 781442686 Please direct correspondence to: Ricky Erway Senior Program Officer [email protected] Suggested citation: Erway, Ricky. 2012. Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf. Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories Contents Introduction ................................................................................................. 5 Definitions ................................................................................................... 5 The Patchwork Landscape of Research Repositories .................................................. 6 Methodology ................................................................................................. 8 Repository Profiles ................................................................................... 9 AgEcon Search: Research in Agricultural & Applied Economics ............................... 9 arXiv.org ............................................................................................. 10 EconomistsOnline ................................................................................... 11 E-LIS: E-Prints in Library & Information Science ............................................... 12 PubMed Central ..................................................................................... 12 RePEc: Research Papers in Economics ........................................................... 13 SSRN: Social Science Research Network ......................................................... 14 Sustainability ............................................................................................... 15 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ 18 Notes ........................................................................................................ 18 References ................................................................................................. 18 http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf April 2012 Ricky Erway, for OCLC Research Page 3 Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories Tables Table 1. Repositories considered in this investigation ................................................ 8 Table 2. Overview of the profiled repositories ....................................................... 15 http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf April 2012 Ricky Erway, for OCLC Research Page 4 Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories Introduction Librarians need to be familiar with the evolving aspects of scholarly communication and the changing scholarly record. One component of that is the role of repositories. It’s crucial for anyone working in a research library to understand the repository landscape, both to advise researchers on where to look for information and how to disseminate their own research articles. Librarians should appreciate the nature of the leading disciplinary repositories and have a sense of their motivations, their scope, and how they operate. Before getting involved with a disciplinary repository, they should be familiar with the risks and opportunities in depending on the repository and, most importantly, they need to know if the repository has a sustainable model. For a library considering starting a disciplinary repository or taking on the operation of an existing one, these considerations are essential. Definitions For this report, I define disciplinary repositories as places where the findings of research in a particular field of study are made accessible. Any researcher in the field must be eligible for inclusion (i.e., the repository is not limited based on institution, nationality, journal publisher, or funding body). Disciplinary repositories provide access to journal articles (pre- or post- print), but may also provide access to other types of information and offer other services. Some of these repositories provide searching of metadata only and then offer links to the full text stored elsewhere; others offer searching of metadata and full text—and in those cases, the full text may be on the repository site or may be linked to elsewhere. Disciplinary repositories are not uniform in nature. Some disciplinary repositories accept additional types of content, such as datasets, presentations, and working papers. Some offer additional services, like RSS feeds, collaboration tools, and bibliography and curriculum vitae services. At a minimum, a disciplinary repository provides access to research articles in a particular field. As suggested above, some repositories store the articles and some merely link to them in other locations. Most researchers don’t know or care where articles are stored and therefore don’t differentiate between sties that consist only of metadata that points to articles elsewhere and true repositories that actually contain articles. For this reason, I included both of these types of repositories in this review. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf April 2012 Ricky Erway, for OCLC Research Page 5 Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories I define sustainability as the ability to keep an already successful repository running into the future. Sustainability in this case does not take into account past costs or return on investment. The Patchwork Landscape of Research Repositories Nearly every university has, or feels the need to have, an institutional repository. The usual purposes of an institutional repository are to preserve and to make accessible the articles written by those at the university. An ancillary use is to use the contents of the institutional repository to quantify the research output of the university. Some institutional repositories contain a variety of other materials beyond research articles, such as gray literature, institutional records, and digital library collections. Universities have met with varying degrees of success in realizing the goal of having all research outputs represented in their institutional repositories. Where there is a mandate to deposit, especially in nations where institutional funding is allocated on the basis of the research output assessment, there is greater compliance. For the most part, however, researchers aren’t very interested in the institutional repository. There are disciplinary repositories in many fields. They co-locate research articles in a particular subject area and are often researcher-initiated. These may be run by a scholarly society, a governmental agency, a university library, a commercial entity, or by researchers themselves. The usual purposes of a disciplinary repository are to provide a place for a researcher to find other researchers’ work in a given field and to provide a way for a researcher to improve the chances that his work will be found by others in the field. Disciplinary repositories tend to be more successful than institutional repositories in attracting researchers to use and contribute to the repository. Other components of the landscape are the repositories run by journal publishers, funding agencies, and those run by and for a particular nation. These tend to be populated by mandate, and have varying degrees of use. Researchers are just as passionate about disciplinary repositories as institutions are about institutional repositories. The central repository for a researcher’s field of study is where he goes for information, to see what’s been published, and to look for collaborators. It’s only natural that he would think of the same location when it comes time for him to deposit his work. The landscape of repositories has much overlap and many gaps. Collaborative work by researchers at multiple institutions and from multiple nations may appear in many http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf April 2012 Ricky Erway, for OCLC Research Page 6 Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories repositories. A scientific journal article reporting the outcomes of grant-funded research may be deposited as a preprint in one or more disciplinary repositories, in the journal repository when it’s published, in the funder’s repository and in the institutional repository as a post- print. In some fields, like high-energy physics, researchers have been sharing preprints among themselves for decades, long before most librarians thought about digital repositories at all. Other fields aren’t well-represented by repositories and some fields may primarily communicate through conference proceedings or another form of discourse. For researchers in disciplines that do not have disciplinary repositories, the institutional repository provides some recourse. A clean model would have researchers depositing their work in their institutional repository where it would