Institutions, Their Repositories and the Web

Alma Swan and Leslie Carr

Available online 1 February 2008

Swan is Visiting ReScience, UniversityFellow, MarketingBusiness School, UUK; and, Director,e-mail: a.swan@taCarr is Senior LecScience, Universitylac@ecs.soton.ac.u

0098-7913/$–see frodoi:10.1016/j.serrev.

It will soon be rare for research-based institutions not to have a digital repository.The main reason for a repository is to maximize the visibility of the institution’sresearch outputs (provide Open Access), yet few contain a representative proportionof the research produced by their institutions. Repositories form one part of theinstitution’s Web platform. An explicit, mandatory policy on the use of therepository for collecting outputs is needed in every institution so that the full researchrecord is collected. Once full, a repository is a tool that enables senior managementin research institutions to collate and assess research, to market their institution, tofacilitate new forms of scholarship, and to enable the tools that will produce newknowledge. Serials Review 2008; 34:31–35.© 2008 Alma Swan. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Over the last couple of years, there has been considerabledevelopment and progress in the world of institutionalrepositories. We have seen their numbers rising at anaverage of one per day around the world. At nationallevels, there have been large programs of investment insome countries as the potential of networked repositoriesfor improving the communication of research and en-hancing the productivity of the research community hasbeen understood, for example, the UK’s Joint Informa-tion Systems Committee’s huge Repositories Programme(Joint Information Systems Committee RepositoriesProgramme, 2005–2007) and Repositories and Preserva-tion Programme (Joint Information Systems CommitteeRepositories and Preservation Programme, 2007–2008)and the Australian Scheme for Higher Education Re-positories (Australian Scheme for Higher EducationRepositories, ASHER, 2006–2008). It is unlikely thatany serious research-based institution will not have itsown digital repository by the end of this decade. Thisarticle looks at the current value of repositories to their

searcher, School of Electronics and Computerof Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK; Associateand Strategic Management Group, Warwickniversity of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL,Key Perspectives Ltd, Truro, TR3 6ET, UK;lk21.com.turer, School of Electronics and Computerof Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK; e-mail:

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nt matter © 2008 Alma Swan. Published by Elsevier In2007.12.006

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institution and what promise repositories hold for thefuture of research and learning.

Institutional Repositories—What Are Theyfor?

So what are repositories for? What place do they occupyin the life of the institution? What place should theyoccupy? So far, repositories are not being used to theirfull potential and institutions are falling into the samethinking trap about repositories as they have about theWeb itself. Institutions have so far treated the Weblargely as a digital version of what they have alwaysdone, when its potential – for them and for their re-searchers – is so much greater. Digital repositories shouldbe one of the institutional Web-based tools that takeresearch into places it has not been able to reach before.One important issue in the context of this discussion is

that the primary reason for establishing a digital repo-sitory is to increase the visibility of the institution’sresearch output by making it Open Access. Just aboutevery institution with a repository cites this as a reasonfor having set it up according to our own small survey ofEuropean repositories (unpublished). Certainly, therepository is the ideal vehicle for making the work ofthe institution visible. Relying on pages on the institu-tion’s Web site is not satisfactory. Departmental andresearch Web pages are frequently out of date orincomplete. Indeed, our own informal study on thisrecently revealed that even in computer science depart-ments, where one might expect maximal and optimal useof the Web, this is the case: in the School of Electronics

c. All rights reserved.

Alma Swan and Leslie Carr Serials Review

and Computer Science at Southampton (UK), one thirdof researchers have no working home page and the figurefor the world’s premier computer science researchdepartment – at MIT – the situation is not much betterwith twenty percent of professors (of all grades) lacking aWeb page.

With these sorts of statistics regarding the currencyand completeness of author home pages, it is absolutelyclear that the place for collecting and disseminating theoutputs of a research-based university is the institu-tional repository. At the moment, however, very fewinstitutional repositories are being successful in amas-sing a sizeable proportion of the institution’s currentresearch output, though this will change as the benefitsof doing this become apparent to senior researchmanagers. They will see that the way to achievegrowing repositories with more than the “baseline”15–20 percent of potential content is to put in placewell thought-through, mandatory policies on deposi-tion. The big research funders have already seen thisand produced such policies; eventually, universities andresearch institutes will see the light and follow suit,reaping the benefits of maximal visibility for theirresearch outputs as a result.

One tale may be salutary in this respect. It is what wecall The University of Southampton Conundrum.Southampton University is a fairly large UK “RussellGroup” institution. The Russell group is an associationof twenty research-intensive British universities thatbetween them are awarded two thirds of the nationalresearch funding budget allocated by the UK ResearchCouncils, thus comprising the cream of British research-based higher education establishments. Southamptoncan therefore be assumed to be strong in research andits teaching merits high ranking in the UK nationalleague tables too: a worthy institution all round. In theTimes Higher Education Supplement (Times HigherEducation Supplement World University Rankings) andthe Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Shanghai Jiao TongUniversity Academic Ranking of World Universities)annual rankings of world universities, Southamptoncomes somewhere between the 100th and 200th placeseach year. Yet it appears in 25th position in the G-Factor ranking (The G-Factor International UniversityRanking), calculated each year by measuring thenumber of hyperlinks on the sites of the world’sleading universities to other universities’ Web sites. Apeer-reviewed measure of presence, in other words.Why does Southampton do so well here? Certainly, theuniversity has a large research program which inevi-tably encourages linking from other institutions, butundoubtedly the fact that it has a digital repositoryhousing thousands of contemporary research articleshas most to do with it. Southampton simply has a hugeonline presence because of this (Harnad, 2006; Brodyet al., 2007).

Other universities could easily boost their visibility inthe same way. The trouble is that except for a smallnumber of institutions around the world that have big,growing repositories containing current research arti-cles (rather than just theses, grey literature, or legacy

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literature from the past) most repositories are, to allpractical purposes, empty. They are not only not en-hancing their institution’s online visibility, they are alsoactively projecting a very poor image of their institu-tions to the world. The shop window is empty.In our survey of European repositories, over 60 per-

cent of repository managers reported that recruitingcontent to their repository has been possible but not easy:one third said they have found it difficult or very difficult.The Southampton repository would not be full withoutthe mandatory policy introduced in 2004: that much isnot only borne out by the evidence about the effective-ness of policies and mandates (Sale, 2006, 2007) but isalso openly acknowledged by the researchers workingthere. All the evidence shows that advocacy and media-ted deposit by library/repository staff can be effectivetools in recruiting content, but only in the presence of amandate from senior management. Without the latter,making the case to researchers and gathering their out-puts from them is extremely labor-intensive and ulti-mately not very successful.Senior management arguably have the most to gain

from ensuring that their shop window to the worldlooks full and enticing. Around one-third of repositorypolicies have been reviewed and approved by the vicechancellor (rector or provost) and a further 10 percentby his/her deputy with research responsibilities, yet sofew of these senior managers have had the mettle totake it all the way to mandatory status. This is despitethe fact that, having risen from the ranks themselves,they know only too well the mentality of busyresearchers, who can always find priorities for theirtime other than administrative tasks like depositingtheir articles in their repository. As one Research GroupLeader in the School of Electronics and ComputerScience at Southampton put it:

I have seen all the benefits of using our repository in thefour years since the mandate was developed. I rememberhow we used to get constantly asked for lists ofpublications for administrative purposes and howtedious and time-consuming it was to create a list ofall my research last year, or a list of every publication onwhich I had collaborated with people inside the univ-ersity but outside our school, or every publication whichcame from such and such a source of funding, or a list ofmy CV or a Web page. Now it’s simple—you just say“go and look in eprints.” Even the RAE. So the repo-sitory is really, really useful and well worth it…. BUThaving experienced all those benefits and with all that inmind, if the mandate wasn’t in place I still wouldn’t usethe repository because I just don’t do things.

The dearth of mandatory policies for filling universityrepositories is therefore bemusing to say the least.

An Institutional Investment

The bemusement grows when the investment that univ-ersities are putting into their repositories is considered.

Institutions, Their Repositories and the WebVolume 34, Number 1, 2008

Our own small sample of European repositories revealedthat the average amount spent on setting up therepository was about €10,000, with a labor investmentof some one or two FTEs to keep the repository runningonce established. The study conducted by the Associa-tion of Research Libraries (on U.S. repositories) reportedan average start-up cost for a repository of $183,000(€125,000) (Association of Research Libraries, 2006);the Primary Research Group study (on repositoriesworldwide) found that the average cost of setting up arepository was $79,000 (€54,000) (Primary ResearchGroup, 2007). These are not huge sums in the context ofoverall university budgets, but they nevertheless repre-sent a noticeable investment, especially when ongoingcosts are taken into account.A university’s overall investment in research is a much

larger scale matter, of course. Until recently, the visibilityand reputation of the institution based on that researchhad to be contrived in one main way—by its researcherspublishing their results in journals and books and hopingthat the right people around the world would see theseoutputs, cite them, and build upon them. The efficacywith which this process happened depended upon theappropriate journals being available to the appropriatepeople, something that was by no means a certainty.Now, by using a repository properly, a university canraise its research visibility hugely (viz. Southampton).With all the research outputs collecting day-on-day inthe repository and with Google providing the world-wide indexing service needed to search and to retrieverepository content – as it does – the repository willbecome the competitive tool for maximizing researchvisibility, status, and reputation of an institution.Indeed, this does not just pertain to research since theuniversity’s pedagogical reputation will also be centeredaround its digital resources and wealth in the sameway. The locus for promotion of the institution,therefore, moves from institutional and departmentalWeb pages and other marketing channels to a newplace—its digital collections of real outputs andresources.

An Institutional Payoff

The promise for a vastly better presence and enhancedstatus is the primary payoff for universities thatproperly grasp the opportunities their repository canbring them. There is no doubt that a repositoryincreases the usage of an institution’s research outputs.The University of California’s eScholarship repositorylogged two million downloads less than four years afterit was established. Moreover, the rate of downloads isincreasing. The first 0.5 million downloads took twoyears, the first million took three years, and by ninemonths later the total had reached two million. Thenumber of items in the repository at the time was10,000. At the time of writing, there are 20,000 itemsin the repository, and these have been downloaded 5.3million times. Downloads are currently running ataround 38,000 per week (University of California

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eScholarship Repository). Of course, this is a largerepository at one of the world’s most prestigious univ-ersities, but this sort of success story with respect tousage is not confined to such a repository. The repo-sitory for the School of Electronics and ComputerScience at the University of Southampton in the UK is asmaller, School-based archive containing around11,500 items, about half of which are full-text researchpapers. Downloads from this repository have averagedaround 30,000 per month over the last year, animpressive level of outreach to researchers around theworld who wish to read these articles.There are other potential payoffs, too. A repository

offers the locus for dissemination of outputs in a moreformal way. In the last half of the twentieth centurythe proud tradition of university presses largely diedout as commercial publishers came to dominateacademic publishing. Only the largest universitypresses could compete head-on with their commercialrivals. The upshot, at the beginning of this century, isthat the situation for young scholars in the arts andhumanities, in particular, is very difficult. These youngpeople need to get their “first book” published – oftenit is based on their doctoral thesis work – in order toget their foot firmly on the academic career ladder.Unfortunately, the small sales volumes expected ofsuch monographs mean that they have frequently beenconsidered an uneconomic prospect by most commer-cial publishers. Now there is something of a renais-sance in thinking and acting. Presses are springing upagain in universities, enabled by the move to digitalinformation and the concomitant savings that can bemade in many aspects of publishing. The logical strategyfor a university is to use its digital research repository asthe submission tool for works that the press intends topublish formally—that is, to provide peer review, animprint, and copyediting services to the author. Indeed,that is what is starting to happen. A number ofuniversities now are combining press and repository tocreate an efficient and highly functional digital publish-ing platform. An example of this is the eScholarshiprepository at the University of Sydney (University ofSydney eScholarship). Moreover, some universitypresses that use the repository platform are also movingto Open Access publishing of both journal and books,such as the Amsterdam University Press (AmsterdamUniversity Press repository) and the University ofPittsburg Press (University of Pittsburgh Library). Weshould expect to see other institutions follow suit.For senior managers in a university, the repository is

a tool par excellence. First, it provides the means ofrecording and assessing research in the institution.Coupled with an institutional Research InformationSystem – which records who is working where in theinstitution, with whom, on what project, funded bywhat grant and using which equipment – the repositoryfacilitates the measurement of research activity in theinstitution with great granularity. Research managersare able to retrieve exactly the information required forresearch assessment exercises, for institutional recordkeeping, and for research management and planning.

Alma Swan and Leslie Carr Serials Review

Repository software has even been adapted to enablethis function: for example, the EPrints software nowhas an add-on that enables an institution to select andpresent its research outputs in formats required for theperiodic national Research Assessment Exercise in theUK. Second, the repository becomes part of theuniversity’s shop window for the world. Currently, nouniversity is using the repository optimally for thisfunction. What is needed is a holistic view of the wholeinstitution’s Web offerings, with extensive linksbetween departmental Web pages, researcher Webpages, project Web pages, the institution’s press officeWeb pages, the institution’s research office Web pages,and the repository where the intellectual wealth of theinstitution is accumulating. In these early days, noinstitution has yet implemented the linking and inter-relationships across its entire Web presence that wouldoptimize its image, facilitate the navigation of its Website by interested visitors, and maximize its overallimpact.

The same sort of holistic approach will see reposi-tories play a major role in enabling the progress ofscholarship within and institution and outside itsconfines. The trend towards interdisciplinary researchis gathering pace as techniques, methodologies, andapproaches developed in one discipline become increas-ingly applicable, indeed essential, in others. This trend isnot confined to the natural sciences, though it iscertainly very pronounced in these disciplines now,with increasing amounts of research funding beingallocated to inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches toresolving some of the big questions in biomedicine andenvironmental science particularly. Not all research thatwould benefit from a cross-discipline approach is thesubject of such explicitly organized interdisciplinarity,though. This is the point where repositories will comeinto their own over time. Collecting the research outputsof the institution in one location, tagging entries withappropriate terms and keywords, tying the repository into other sources of information within the institution,and providing a rich context-based navigation capacitywill facilitate the enhanced communication, serendipi-tous discovery, and semantics-based relating of dispa-rate entities that could profit from partnership andcollaboration. The research life – and the teaching – ofinstitutions will be enriched by such architectures andways of thinking. We are seeing the beginnings of suchsystems in a few far-seeing U.S. universities – Harvard,Minnesota, and Cornell – and it is salient that theinitiatives beginning right at the top of the institution(Harvard University Planning Committee for Scienceand Engineering, 2006; Rosenstone, 2006; Devare et al,2007).

Finally, in a manner analogous to the facilitation ofinterdisciplinary research, repositories are positioned toplay a major role in facilitating the workings of theSemantic Web. The true benefits of the Web on scienceand scholarship have yet to be realized. They will comefrom the intelligent (semantic) machine-to-machine link-ing of items, not just at item level, but at subitem levelsuch as by paragraph, sentence, phrase, or significant

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concept. The benefits come not only from the moreprecise, meaningful linking but from the fact thatmachine tools will be able to work across documentsand records, putting together pieces of informationthat have additional or new meaning and truly takingus into a realm where the whole is greater than thesum of the parts. Pieces of information from similar,dissimilar, or downright different sources will be puttogether to create knowledge – new knowledge – andmake possible more enlightened and advanced think-ing. Some tools to do this already exist and more willbe developed. They can only work, of course, on afully Open Access literature and that, before long, willbe provided in abundance by university repositories.They are the fundament of future scholarship andinnovation.

Notes

1. Australian Scheme for Higher Education Repositories (ASHER),2006–8. http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews/key_issues/research_quality_framework/asher_and_iap.htm%23Australian_Scheme_for_Higher_Education_Repositories_(ASHER)_programme.

2. Brody, Tim, Leslie Carr, Yves Gingras, Chawki Hajjem, StevanHarnad and Alma Swan. 2007. Incentivizing the Open AccessResearch Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scien-tometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3 (3) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14418/.

3. Devare, Medha Jon Corson-ikert, Brian Caruso, Brian Lowe,Kathy Chiang and Janet McCoe. 2007. “VIVO: Connectingpeople, creating a virtual life science community,” D-LibMagazine. 13(2), July-August. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july07/devare/07devare.html.

4. G-Factor International University Ranking. http://www.universitymetrics.com/tiki-index.php?page=G-Factor.

5. Harnad, Stevan. 2006. “Metrics and assessment,”Open AccessArchivangelism, April 14. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/79-guid.html.

6. Harvard University Planning Committee for Science andEngineering. 2006. Enhancing Science and Engineering atHarvard. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, http://www.provost.harvard.edu/reports/UPCSE_Interim_Report.pdf.

7. Joint Information Systems Committee. Digital Repositories Prog-ramme, 2005–7. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_digital_repositories.aspx.

8. Joint Information Systems Committee. Repositories and Preserva-tion Programme, 2007–8. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres.aspx.

9. Primary Research Group. 2007. The International Survey ofInstitutional Digital Repositories. http://www.primaryresearch.com/200711071-Information-Science-excerpt.html.

10. Sale, Arthur. 2006. “Comparison of IR content policies in Aus-tralia,” First Monday 11 (4). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/.

11. Sale, Arthur. 2007. “The Patchwork Mandate,”D-Lib Magazine,13 (1/2). http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/january2007-sale.

12. Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of WorldUniversities. http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm.

13. Times Higher Education SupplementWorld University Rankings.http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/.

14. University of California eScholarship Repository. http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/.

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15. Rosenstone, Steven J. 2004. University of Minnesota President’sInterdisciplinary Initiative on Arts and Humanities. College ofLiberal Arts, Twin Cities Campus, Minneapolis, MN. http://www1.umn.edu/pres/00_images/pdf/Abstract_7-15-04.pdf.

16. University of Sydney eScholarship. http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/.

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17. Amsterdam University Press repository http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_repository&m=29&l=1.

18. University of Pittsburgh Library. 2007. Pitt’s Libraries andUniversity Press Collaborate on Open Access to Press Titles.Press release, 29 November. http://www.library.pitt.edu/uls/news/pittpress.html.