Library and Information Science Commons^™

Evolution Of An Institutional Repository: A Case History From Nebraska, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy. Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support. Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time. A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

Dissemination, Access, Preservation: A Case Study Of Publications From The Organic Agriculture Research And Extension Initiative, Leslie M. Delserone

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative, administered by USDA-NIFA, is the major federal funder of organic agricultural research. Analysis of 733 publications produced during the initiative’s first five years explored the dissemination of this research, and accessibility to and preservation of the publications. Publications associated with conferences (e.g., abstracts) were most numerous (36%). Many publications (69%) were openly accessible online in 2017 but fewer than 10% of these appeared in a stable digital repository. In four of the eight publication categories, access disappeared over time. No program exists to systematically collect and preserve these outputs of organic agricultural research. …

Open-Access Policies: Basics And Impact On Content Recruitment, Andrew Wesolek, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The allure of passing an institutional open-access (OA) policy as a strategy to populate an institutional repository is clear. After all, educating faculty to retain their rights to their scholarly publications through passage of such a policy, then requiring them to make those publications available through an IR seems a sure path to success. However, this approach of “if you pass it, they will comply” rings eerily similar to the early and decidedly misplaced optimism of populating institutional repositories through a “build it and they will come” proposition (Salo, 2007). The Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) …

Up From Under The “Open Access” Bus, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

For most of the past seven years I had thought I was working to promote open access to academic scholarship and creative works. I helped place more than 40,000 articles and documents in a freely accessible repository, from which they could be (and were) browsed, downloaded, saved, printed, and linked to.

But I find now that these efforts failed to meet the standards of the open access advocates as represented by (among others) SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a library membership organization formed and sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. As was made excruciatingly clear at …