Philip M. Davis
Cornell University
<pmd8@cornell.edu> (corresponding author)
Matthew J. L. Connolly
Cornell University
<mjc12@cornell.edu>
D-Lib Magazine March/April 2007 Volume 13 Number 3/4
Abstract
Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the development and implementation of institutional repositories, there has been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards to faculty participation.
Purpose: This article reports on a three-part evaluative study of institutional repositories. We describe the contents and participation in Cornell’s DSpace and compare these results with seven university DSpace installations. Through in-depth interviews with eleven faculty members in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, we explore their attitudes, motivations, and behaviors for non-participation in institutional repositories.
Results: Cornell’s DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Many of its collections are empty, and most collections contain few items. Those collections that experience steady growth are collections in which the university has made an administrative investment, such are requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace. Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace. Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories, which are perceived to have higher community salience than one’s affiliate institution. Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information, the learning curve, confusion with copyright, fear of plagiarism and having one’s work scooped, associating one’s work with inconsistent quality, and concerns about whether posting a manuscript constitutes “publishing”.
Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue. Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one’s faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity.
Read the article at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html
Related article:
Harnad: Mandates Would Empower Institutional Repositories
It was probably not much of a surprise to librarians to learn in a recent D-Lib article that Cornell’s DSpace institutional repository (IR) is not filling up very quickly or catching on with faculty; nor was it a surprise that self-archiving and open access champion Stevan Harnad quickly offered a point-by-point response to D-Lib authors Phil Davis and Matthew Connolly. However, the problem of filling IRs with content, Harnad maintains, has a surprisingly easy solution. “The finding is that faculty don’t self-archive spontaneously,” Harnad posited. “The remedy, which [Davis & Connolly] do not mention at all, is to mandate that they self-archive.”
Previous studies show that when mandated to do so, faculty will populate IRs, Harnad argues. “The Swan surveys had already reported that faculty say they will not self-archive on their own,” Harnad told the LJ Academic Newswire, “but 95 percent will self-archive if mandated, over 80 percent of them willingly.” Harnad also cited Arthur Sale’s April 2006 D-Lib article that found that, while “voluntary” policies resulted in repositories collecting less than 12 percent of the available theses, “mandatory policies were well accepted and cause deposit rates to rise towards 100 percent.” There are currently 12 university or departmental mandates adopted worldwide and 11 funder mandates, plus one multi-institutional mandate and six funder mandates proposed, Harnad noted, adding that “the remedy has been tried, a number of times, and it works each time.”
“It sounds simple enough,” responded Davis on Yale University’s Liblicense-L discussion list. “Make one’s faculty do what they don’t see as necessary themselves.” Davis says his and Connolly’s study aimed not to “demonstrate that IRs are a failure,” but by focusing on “non-use” aimed to find out why they are not growing more quickly. “If we are to work at an institution where our researchers have the freedom to choose how they disseminate and archive their work, then it is important to understand the beliefs and motivations behind their behaviors,” Davis continued. “These results may lead to building better services around repositories.”
Library Journal Academic Newswire, March 20, 2007
