Round Table A: "Practical impact and experiences of institutional OA mandates for IRs" (Helen Muir, Queen Margaret University)
Opening remarks from Helen Muir indicated that there had been resistance to the mandate:
- Perception that it was a time burden.
- Researchers resented feeling pressurised.
Carrot approach
- Emphasise benefits with Google Analytics.
- Ease researchers concerns by utilising the ePrints 'request a copy' feature.
- Using Scopus to find missing articles.
Stick approach
Should there be any penalty for not complying with a mandate ? The consensus was no.
Without exception all those present had a mediated deposit process. This might be library staff but might also be department research administrators depositing on behalf of staff. A perceived advantage of using research administrators was that they know the staff and therefore also know who to chase up etc.
Other observations from participants:
- There is a difficulty in getting 'final' versions.
- Targeting 'star' researchers appears to have a knock on effect.
Additional thoughts on how to emphasise benefits to the researcher included:
- Publications lists for web pages seen as an important incentive.
- Statistics to demonstrate increased exposure.
- Advocacy appears to work. Increased deposit rates amongst those that had had the benefits explained.
Amongst those institutions that have a mandate there was agreement that it could not been seen as the final solution. One such institution reported a 25% compliance rate. Nevertheless there was agreement that mandates were generally a good thing. It raised the profile of the IR and generated debate on the subject. Mandates are considered another useful tool in the battle for deposit.
Round Table C: "Where will repositories be in 5 years time ?" (Ian Stuart, EDINA)
The key points in this session were that:
- IRs will become part of a wider research management process.
- Research pools are difficult to manage - cross institution, cross discipline.
- Identity management and naming authorities are important factors in delivering trusted and consistent repositories.
- The hope and/or expectation is that IRs provide the core management of data with agile services using the data in varied ways. There is a need to avoid IR software becoming monolithic.
- The expectation is that there will ultimately be many copies of items available from different sources on the internet. Is this in itself a valid form of preservation?
- Will current peer review practices change ? Could a more informal model work where works are 'reviewed' in the public domain (the internet)?
- Who will manage the content? University departments? Do they have sufficient resources to do so?
- Will IRs hold content or could they just be 'virtual' repositories pointing to the content held elsewhere? This brings us back to the role of IRs and preservation.
