Digital Repositories Foment a Quiet Revolution in Scholarship - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"All a would-be depositor has to do is send Digital Commons a CV or publications list. "We do the hunting and gathering and uploading," explains [Paul Royster, coordinator of scholarly communications at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln]. The staff checks publishers' Web sites and an online database of copyright and self-archiving policies maintained by a group called Sherpa, in Britain, to make sure an author's contract allows for an article to be made publicly available. Every month, authors get a report that shows how many times their work was downloaded. "It's a great incentive," Mr. Royster says....If Mr. Royster has his way, repositories like Digital Commons will eventually help create what amounts to a revolution in the scholarly communications system—the original promise of repositories. "I envision the day when the universities take back scholarly communications from the publishers, and we don't have to ransom our content back from for-profit companies," he says. "And that's our long-range goal here. That's probably not going to happen until well after I retire, but we see ourselves moving that way." Repositories have not yet brought about an open-access revolution, but they have had some success making scholarship more accessible and visible...."