IRs will become more sophisticated by “disappearing”. The repository should become a fixed backplane to the more resource appreciated and utilized content services supported by the university. Another solution is to reconceptualize the IR as a process rather than a place. The process begins upstream, at the point of creation. An author embeds an itinerary in his/her work when it is finalized. This would happen via a discrete widget or ideally via the application (e.g. Acrobat). For example, when a research paper is complete, the author wraps the work in what I’ll call destination metadata. The author essentially instructs the paper to send itself to, say, the university’s repository, a selection of author-designated subject servers, the Journal of [fill-in-the-blank], the local instance of Blackboard, and the author’s e-portfolio. Ideally this all takes place in ‘the cloud’. The widget or application also calls and then embeds an appropriate Creative Commons license, and the university’s watermark.

Harvard is a monolithic brand but not a culture that can incubate a disruptive technology. The solution to Harvard’s implementation of their faculty mandate will be found not at Harvard but at a downstream institution.

To use Joe’s business term, ‘brand’, a college or publisher is a much weaker brand than a journal or society brand. The Harvard brand carries a gatekeeping stamp [2], since it necessarily filters out everyone who cannot (or does not care) to be part of the Harvard faculty. Yet, it is still stuck in the 1920s model of college-centric publishing. Now someone will respond to my post and claim that it is possible to create ‘channels’ or ‘layers’ to provide some organization to this shoebox model. Or alternatively, that when enough colleges do this, we could create ‘information streams’ that would facilitate a democratic participatory model of subject-focused publishing. Folks, you have just reinvented the modern journal.

References:

[1] Price, D. J. S. (1986). Collaboration in an Invisible College. In Little science, big science…and beyond (pp. 119-134). New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published as: Price, D. J., & Beaver, D. D. (1966) American Psychologist, 21(11):1011-1018
Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges; diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. Chicago: U. Chicago Press.

[2] see: Crane, D. (1967). The gatekeepers of science: Some factors affecting the selection of articles for scientific journals. American Sociologist, 2(4), 195-201.
Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1967). Scientific Communication as a Social System. Science, 157(3792), 1011-1016.
Zuckerman, H., & Merton, R. K. (1971). Patterns of evaluation in science: Institutionalisation, structure and functions of the referee system. Minerva, 9(1), 66-100.

Is this not called Green OA? Gold = OA Journals. Green OA = (self) archiving of (peer reviewed) research papers in OA repositories. I do not think OA proponents refer to Green OA as “publishing” or anything of the kind.

And if you are the same person that suggested* that institutional repositories might not ‘be with us in even a few years’, how does that coincide with this post of yours, which is essentially focusing on the potential value of (institutional) repositories and its increase in significance/popularity ‘in the years ahead’?

I do agree that (institutional) repositories are likely to grow in significance, especially with Green OA growing. And that they are potentially suitable platforms for supporting journals with the certification function of scholarly communication, which is currently the most significant one to consider, as the other functions of scholarly communication are already being supported by (OA) repositories.

*http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind08&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=40488

Journals also differ in whether or not they make their articles accessible for free online. If they do, this is called Gold Open Access (OA) Publishing. Otherwise it is ordinary, non-OA publishing.

Non-OA publishers differ in whether or not they give their “green light” to authors to make their own articles OA (accessible free online) by self-archiving them in their Institutional Repositories. When articles have been made OA by their authors through self-archiving, this is called Green OA.

If provosts mandate that their authors self-archive their published articles, that too is called Green OA — but not Green OA publishing, of course, because it is the journal that publishes and the author merely self-archives, to provide (Green) OA to his own article.

The author may also self-archive articles published in non-peer-reviewed journals; this too is access-provision, not publication. The publisher is again the non-peer-reviewed journal that published the articles.

The author can also self-archive unpublished papers. Legally speaking, this counts as “publishing,” but of course in an academic (“publish or perish”) CV the author cannot list such a paper as “published” (let alone as peer-reviewed). It is listed (and cited” as “unpublished.”

In all of this, there is no such a thing as “provostial publishing” — though provosts who mandate self-archiving might perhaps be honored in calling this “provostial access-provision”…

Stevan Harnad