Let IR RIP

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Eric F. Van de Velde

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Jul 26, 2016, 1:29:22 PM7/26/16
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My latest blog post may not endear me to people on this list. I waited to post this for over a year. I finally decided to press the publish button.

I would prefer to send words of praise into the ether, but part of being a thinker is being an observer. When something has failed to live up to its mission, it is necessary to say so, even if difficult. 

My blog details why I think Institutional Repositories need to be phased out. I also opine on how I think universities need to proceed instead.


--Eric.


Meghan Banach Bergin

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Jul 26, 2016, 1:56:39 PM7/26/16
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Thanks for being brave enough to post this, Eric.  We need to think critically about the services we are providing and whether they are really what faculty need and want to use.  I think there are a lot of pros and cons to IRs, and you do a good job outlining some of their serious flaws.  It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next 10 or 20 years, but we should not stubbornly refuse to consider alternatives just because we have already invested so much in IRs.  Our goal should always be to provide services that our faculty actually want to use.  Whether it's IRs or disciplinary repositories or social networks for researchers, one thing is clear and that is that the current model of purchasing back the research our faculty produce from publishers at an ever increasing cost is not sustainable!  If we really want to change things we need to get faculty buy in and we need them to want to explore alternatives to the current model as well.  Since this is the ETD listserv, I will say that I do think IRs have been great for opening access to ETDs.

-Meghan

-- 

Meghan Banach Bergin
Bibliographic Access and Metadata Coordinator
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
University of Massachusetts
154 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003-9275
Phone: 413.545.6846
mbe...@library.umass.edu

Eric F. Van de Velde

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Jul 26, 2016, 2:07:58 PM7/26/16
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Meghan:
I did write the blog mostly with journals and scholarly papers in mind, not theses. Yet, thesis repositories are connected to this.

A thesis is the natural starting point for someone's personal repository. It would be quite natural to morph the IR-deposit requirement for ETDs into a requirement to set up an acceptable personal repository (whichever form that may take in the future). An IR could be maintained by linking to/harvesting from the personal repository.
--Eric.



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Meghan Banach Bergin

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Jul 26, 2016, 2:33:57 PM7/26/16
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True.  We have Selected Works pages here which is a Bepress service for creating a personal repository, however they are still institutionally branded.  Also, they don't have any features for liking or commenting.  They do have little buttons you can use to share via Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.  I don't know how they compare to other services like ResearchGate, Mendeley, or Academia.  I haven't used those sites myself, but they do seem to be gaining in popularity.

-Meghan


On Tuesday, July 26, 2016 at 1:29:22 PM UTC-4, Eric Van de Velde wrote:

Stephanie Davis-Kahl

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Jul 27, 2016, 3:17:08 PM7/27/16
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Re: sites like Research Gate and Academia.edu, I have found this piece by Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder helpful in explaining the difference between IRs and academic social networks to faculty: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/.

Stephanie Davis-Kahl
Illinois Wesleyan University

Eric F. Van de Velde

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Jul 27, 2016, 6:02:21 PM7/27/16
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Stephanie:
The report you point to is an excellent representation of the current status of repositories and academic social networks. I do not disagree with anything it says.

My point is that it is natural to combine social networks and archiving within the same system. This would decrease cost, increase use, and improve the archival function.

Personally, I am not averse to the idea of for-profit companies to take on these tasks, as long as a competitive market is established. This means a market in which companies compete for individual scholars. Only if end users have the ultimate power to choose systems and features will companies innovate in useful directions. (It would be appropriate for institutions to set minimum archival standards, etc.)

As explained in my blog, I understand why many academics are opposed to using for-profit companies to take on these tasks. In principle, it should be possible for non-profits to develop great platforms. However, experience tends to support the opposite: Current IR systems managed by nonprofit libraries have hardly changed since they were developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before social networks, before smart phones and tablets, before cloud computing, etc.

Except for libraries, I cannot think of any other information provider that has not kept up with technology for this long. It is quite impossible to cast this in a positive spotlight.

--Eric.










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Corbett, Hillary

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Jul 27, 2016, 6:25:16 PM7/27/16
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Hi, Eric —

I really have to take exception to your statement that IR technology has not changed in 10-15+ years — at my institution the difference between the repository platform we were using in 2005 and the one we rolled out last year is like the difference between a Model T and a Tesla in terms of functionality, appearance, and our ability to respond to our users’ needs. I’m confident I’m not alone among librarians in feeling this way. I understand that you may be speaking from the perspective of a computer scientist rather than an end user, but surely even so you must acknowledge that something like Hydra represents significant forward movement in repository framework development. 

(Your further generalization that libraries have failed to keep up with technology is also vastly incorrect. How, then, to explain the transition from collecting physical copies of theses and dissertations to ETD programs? Libraries made that happen, and that’s just one example that happens to be relevant to the focus of this listserv.)

Hillary


-------

Hillary Corbett

Director, Scholarly Communication and Digital Publishing

University Copyright Officer

Northeastern University Libraries

360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115

617.373.2352 | h.corbett@northeastern.edu




Eric F. Van de Velde

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Jul 27, 2016, 6:54:44 PM7/27/16
to Corbett, Hillary, ETD
Hillary:
Exception noted and accepted. There have been upgrades and improvements to IRs over the years. I should have acknowledged those improvements.

The problem, and the challenge, is that the world has moved on significantly since the introduction of IRs. Just about every student and academic is on a variety of social networks. That is their world. Over time, libraries will alienate their customers if they do not provide services in that world. Who even knows what the world will be in another five years. IRs have evolved, but they still live in the world of databases.

Libraries will have to figure out how to move to current technology together with their customers.
--Eric.




Mike Nason

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Jul 28, 2016, 7:34:03 AM7/28/16
to ETD, h.co...@northeastern.edu
I think this is a pretty fascinating discussion. On one hand, I sort of agree with Eric that IRs can be cumbersome, inevitably proprietary, and a lot of overhead for something that could probably be generalized by a larger organization. On the other hand, I think the idea that the future is social media is a flawed one. I'd say that thought is actually the one that's behind the curve here. We have seen a dramatic withdrawal from discourse between people on the web in things like comments (with many news organizations pulling the features entirely). Folks are burned out on Facebook. Twitter is losing ground to Instagram, which is losing ground to Snapchat. Social Media is for the ephemeral and impermanent (unless it's a skeleton you want in your closet, I suppose). That everyone is on Social Media sharing articles they think you should read – that they probably haven't read themselves – is no indicator of anyone's desire to interact with scholarship in the same way. 

But at the same time, whole generations (older ones, I'd argue) are just starting to understand the value of the web as a tool for sharing in their communities. And then they're logging into websites owned by the publishers who have us all hostage in outlandish pricing structures, where they'll share what they think is a legal copy of their content (and usually isn't), where they'll eventually be asked to remove it by those very publishers. 

I think there's a lot of potential for things like the Open Science Framework to blow these things open for researchers. To communicate more broadly. To share. And to have more concentrated discovery tools that spread out across repositories in general. But the tools for communication are not the same as the tools for distribution. A publishing industry holds the reins here, not libraries. We can respond and push, but we're not steering the ship. The technology isn't steering it either. 

Of course, the only rational actor that really matters in any of these discussions that really matters are the researchers themselves. They can choose where to publish (usually... I guess decreasingly so as mandates roll out). They can choose how they share and what they share. How they communicate. I just can't help but feel that a true hub... a real "Facebook for researchers" would have all of the issues we dislike about facebook. Privately owned. Mining your data. Not really open. And, realistically, owned by the very people who got us to the point of needing repositories in the first place. 

Anyway, I think it's an interesting subject, but I'll definitely echo Hillary's objections. 

Mike Nason
Scholarly Communications Librarian | UNB Libraries | PKP|PS


On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 19:54:44 UTC-3, Eric Van de Velde wrote:
Hillary:
Exception noted and accepted. There have been upgrades and improvements to IRs over the years. I should have acknowledged those improvements.

The problem, and the challenge, is that the world has moved on significantly since the introduction of IRs. Just about every student and academic is on a variety of social networks. That is their world. Over time, libraries will alienate their customers if they do not provide services in that world. Who even knows what the world will be in another five years. IRs have evolved, but they still live in the world of databases.

Libraries will have to figure out how to move to current technology together with their customers.
--Eric.


On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 3:25 PM, Corbett, Hillary <h.co...@northeastern.edu> wrote:
Hi, Eric —

I really have to take exception to your statement that IR technology has not changed in 10-15+ years — at my institution the difference between the repository platform we were using in 2005 and the one we rolled out last year is like the difference between a Model T and a Tesla in terms of functionality, appearance, and our ability to respond to our users’ needs. I’m confident I’m not alone among librarians in feeling this way. I understand that you may be speaking from the perspective of a computer scientist rather than an end user, but surely even so you must acknowledge that something like Hydra represents significant forward movement in repository framework development. 

(Your further generalization that libraries have failed to keep up with technology is also vastly incorrect. How, then, to explain the transition from collecting physical copies of theses and dissertations to ETD programs? Libraries made that happen, and that’s just one example that happens to be relevant to the focus of this listserv.)

Hillary


-------

Hillary Corbett

Director, Scholarly Communication and Digital Publishing

University Copyright Officer

Northeastern University Libraries

360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115

Eric F. Van de Velde

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Jul 28, 2016, 2:02:56 PM7/28/16
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Mike:

That is a valid criticism. It is entirely possible that we are at a moment of "peak social network." Many are turning away from it and are hungry for something new, whether it be something entirely new or an improved version of current systems.

I would answer with two thoughts:

1. Something like academia.edu, Mendeley, Zotero, etc. are professional networks in which people are not anonymous. This reduces a lot of the negative aspects of open networks like Twitter, which sometimes seems ruled by trolls. Also, social networking in all of its forms (from handwritten letters to conferences to listservs) has always been a crucial part of research.

2. I focus on social networks, because I make my arguments in the present. The more timeless (and more abstract) argument is that technology moves too fast for institutions to decide technology on behalf of users. This has been happening across the spectrum: corporations used to loathe the idea of "Bring Your Own Device." Now, thanks to cloud computing, they increasingly move away from imposing technology and, instead, impose minimum standards.

--Eric.




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