v31#5 The Once and Future IR Agenda: Resolving the Dialectic Aims of Institutional Repositories - Against the Grain

"In our 2016 work, Making Institutional Repositories Work, Callicott, Scherer, and I drew a distinction between institutional repositories and institutional repository initiatives.  The former referred to the technical infrastructure of the repository itself, while the latter referred to the holistic suite of infrastructure and services “intended to support the preservation and organization of, and access to, the intellectual output of the institution in which they [institutional repositories themselves] were housed” (XV).  In the forward to the book and in subsequent publications, Clifford Lynch and subsequently Scott Plutchak identify the yet unresolved dialectical aims of institutional repositories.  By which, they refer to the tension between repositories as vehicles for Green OA, and repositories as platforms to augment the scholarly record by hosting non-traditional research outputs.  Both Lynch and Plutchak challenge the former in support of the latter.  Our book consisted of case studies and practitioner observations and, as such, largely discussed the ways in which IRs have enabled green OA.

This practitioner thinks that IR support for the green OA movement has been impactful, and while I am inclined to agree that the future of IRs is best represented by hosting and preserving new forms of scholarship, I do think they can and should continue to support green OA.  To that end, I would like to encourage us to think of the dialectical aims of institutional repositories in a Hegelian sense, which is to say not as thesis and antithesis in static opposition to one another, but as an interplay of movement between the two which reveals them to be interdependent parts of a whole.  In this way, we can continue with a conceptualization of institutional repositories as locally-based networked suites of both services and infrastructure, rather than singularly-focused platforms aimed at promoting either Green OA or augmenting the scholarly record. Thinking of repositories in this way encourages further diversification of the scholarly communication ecosystem in terms of both types of scholarly outputs, and versions of traditional outputs...."