Building a Repository in Partnership with Elsevier: The University of Florida's Perspective - The Scholarly Kitchen

"The University of Florida (UF) and Elsevier have entered into a partnership to build links between the institutional repository and ScienceDirect. Yesterday, writing here in the Kitchen, David Crotty explained some of the potential benefits of the partnership. It has also received quite a bit of criticism in recent weeks, including from friends and respected colleagues. Judy Russell, the dean of libraries at UF, is also a friend of mine, and I was recently able to interview Judy about the partnership and her aspirations for Florida’s role in it. I have found it useful to try to understand the different sides of what seems to me to be a debate about how best to utilize the increasingly mature infrastructure and programmatic capacity for scholarly communications.

The Elsevier-UF partnership itself is straightforward. It links the institutional repository with ScienceDirect via API, depositing into the repository metadata for all publications with at least one UF author. Where the final version of the article is available on an open access basis, it is made freely available through a link to ScienceDirect; otherwise it is available through regular authentication and authorization mechanisms. In a second stage of the partnership, accepted manuscripts will be similarly linked. As a result, there will be less pressure for UF to track down manuscripts from its authors to ensure compliance with various article deposit mandates. Judy hopes the partnership will be extended to additional publishers, possibly under the auspices of CHORUS....

But UF’s objective in this initiative is not to expand open access. Judy noted that in entering this arrangement with Elsevier, “the primary objective…is to facilitate compliance [with article deposit mandates] and understand and aggregate the intellectual work of our faculty.” ..."