Beyond Romary & Armbruster On Institutional Repositories and Open Access | Science Blog

Summary (1) Repository size and "infrastructure" do not generate content. (2) Empty repositories are useless. (3) The only way to fill them is to mandate deposit. (4) Not all or most research is funded. (5) But all research originates from institutions. (6) Institutions' interests are served by hosting and managing their own research assets. (7) Hence both institutional and funder mandates should converge on institutional deposit. (8) Any central collections can then be harvested from the global distributed of institutional repositories. The Denominator Fallacy. Unmandated central repositories are no more successful in getting themselves filled with their target content than unmandated institutional repositories. The critical causal variable is the mandate, not the repository's centrality or size. The denominator -- i.e., the total target content relative to which we are trying to reckon, for a given repository, what proportion of it is being deposited -- is far bigger for a central disciplinary repository than for an institutional repository. For an institutional repository, its denominator is the total number of refereed journal articles, across all disciplines, produced by that institution annually. For a central disciplinary repository, its denominator is the total number of refereed journal articles, across all institutions worldwide, published in that discipline annually. (For a national repository, like HAL, its denominator is the total research output of all the nation's institutions, across all disciplines.)