EXCERPETD FROM PETER SUBER,S BLOG
1;Launch an open-access, OAI-compliant institutional eprint archive, for both texts and data.
The main reason for universities to have institutional repositories is to enhance the visibility, retrievability, and impact of the research output of the university. It will raise the profile of the work, the faculty, and the institution itself.
A more specific reason is that a growing number of journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in institutional but not disciplinary repositories. Even though this is an almost arbitrary distinction, institutions without repositories will leave some of their faculty stranded with no way to provide OA to their work.
"OAI-compliant" means that the archive complies with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). This makes the archive interoperable with other compliant archives so that the many separate archives behave like one grand, virtual archive for purposes such as searching. This means that users can search across OAI-compliant archives without visiting the separate archives and running separate searches. Hence, it makes your content more visible, even if users don't know that your archive exists or what it contains.
There are almost a dozen open-source packages for creating and maintaining OAI-compliant archives. The four most important are Eprints (from Southampton University), DSpace (from MIT), CDSWare (from CERN), and FEDORA (from Cornell and U. of Virginia).
When building the case for an archive among colleagues and administrators, see The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper, by Raym Crow.
When deciding which software to use, see the BOAI Guide to Institutional Repository Software.
When implementing the archive, see the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide.
Configure your archive to facilitate crawling by Google and other search engines.
If your institution wants an archive but would prefer to outsource the work, then consider the Open Repository service from BioMed Central or the DigitalCommons@ service from ProQuest and Bepress.
Help faculty deposit their research articles in the institutional archive.
Many faculty are more than willing, just too busy. Some suffer from tech phobias. Some might need education about the benefits.
For example, some university libraries have dedicated FTE's who visit faculty, office by office, to help them deposit copies of their articles in the institutional repository. (This is not difficult and could be done by student workers.) The St. Andrews University Library asks faculty to send in their articles as email attachments and library staff will then deposit them in the institutional repository.
Consider publishing an open-access journal.
Philosophers' Imprint, from the University of Michigan, is a peer-reviewed OA journal whose motto is, "Edited by philosophers. Published by librarians. Free to readers of the Web." Because the editors and publishers (faculty and librarians) are already on the university payroll, Philosophers' Imprint is a university-subsidized OA journal that does not need to charge upfront processing fees.
The library of the University of Arizona at Tucson publishes the OA peer-reviewed Journal of Insect Science. For detail and perspective on its experience, see (1) Henry Hagedorn et al., Publishing by the Academic Library, a January 2004 conference presentation, and (2) Eulalia Roel, Electronic journal publication: A new library contribution to scholarly communication, College & Research Libraries News, January 2004.
The Boston College Libraries publish OA journals edited by BC faculty. See their press release from December 16, 2004.
The OA Journal of Digital Information is now published by the Texas A&M University Libraries.
See the BOAI Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal.
See SPARC's list of journal management software.
See the list of what journals can do, below.
Consider rejecting the big deal, or cancelling journals that cannot justify their high prices, and issue a public statement explaining why.
See my list of other universities that have already done so. If they give you courage and ideas, realize that you can do the same for others.
Give presentations to the faculty senate, or the library committee, or to separate departments, educating faculty and adminstrators about the scholarly communication crisis and showing how open access is part of any comprehensive solution. You will need faculty and administrative support for these decisions, but other universities have succeeded in getting it.
Help OA journals launched at the university become known to other libraries, indexing services, potential funders, potential authors, and potential readers.
See Getting your journal indexed from SPARC.
Include OA journals in the library catalog.
The Directory of Open Access Journals offers its journal metadata free for downloading. For tips on how to use these records, see the 2003 discussion thread on the ERIL list (readable only by list subscribers) or Joan Conger's summary of the thread (readable by everyone).
Take other steps to insure that students and faculty doing research at your institution know about OA sources, not just traditional print and toll-access sources.
Offer to assure the long-term preservation of some specific body of OA content.
OA journals suffer from the perception that they cannot assure long-term preservation. Libraries can come to their rescue and negate this perception. For example, in September 2003 the National Library of the Netherlands agreed to do this for all BioMed Central journals. This is a major library offering to preserve a major collection, but smaller libraries can do the same for smaller collections.
Undertake digitization, access, and preservation projects not only for faculty, but for local groups, e.g. non-profits, community organizations, museums, galleries, libraries. Show the benefits of OA to the non-academic community surrounding the university, especially the non-profit community.
Negotiate with vendors of priced electronic content (journals and databases) for full access by walk-in patrons.
A September 2003 article in Scientific American suggests that only a minority of libraries already do this.
Annotate OA articles and books with their metadata.
OA content is much more useful when it is properly annotated with metadata. University librarians could start by helping their own faculty annotate their own OA works. But if they have time (or university funding) left over, then they could help the cause by annotating other OA content as a public service.
Inform faculty in biomedicine at your institution about the NIH public-access policy.
SPARC has put together a good page on the benefits for researchers in complying with the NIH policy and suggestions on how to do so in the most effective way, and another page for librarians on ways to help faculty understand the policy and realize its benefits.
Help design impact measurements (like e.g. citation correlator) that take advantage of the many new kinds of usage data available for OA sources.
The OA world needs this and it seems that only librarians can deliver it. We need measures other than the standard impact factor. We need measures that are article-based (as opposed to journal or institution based), that can be automated, that don't oversimplify, and that take full advantage of the plethora of data available for OA resources unavailable for traditional print resources.
Librarians can also help pressure existing indices and impact measures to cover OA sources.
Join SPARC, a consortium of academic libraries actively promoting OA.
Join the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of U.S.-based non-profit organizations working for OA to publicly-funded research. See the existing members of the ATA. If you can persuade your university as a whole to join the ATA, then do that as well.
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