Robert P. Spindler
University Archivist
Arizona State University
Faculty members at universities across the country now have
many options for publishing their formal and informal intellectual products. Commercial
scholarly journals (paper and electronic), open access scholarly journals,
personal, departmental and college websites, scholarly association websites,
and now Institutional Repositories (IR’s) are all competing for the
intellectual output of university faculty.
Typically faculty members choose a publisher or journal for
its academic reputation, since publication in prestigious journals is usually
rewarded in tenure and promotion applications.[1]
The strong reputation of a small number of journal titles (often those of
commercial publishers) is visible to administrators and members of higher-level
tenure review committees who may have a superficial understanding of their
colleagues’ field. Recently university administrators have started to judge the
impact of particular research publications by accessing citation indexes that
count references to articles in the “core journals” of certain disciplines.[2]
Introduction of more competition in the form of the other
publishing venues described at the beginning of this article, and new forms of
scholarly communication (e.g. gray
literature or pre-print publication, threaded discussions and streamed
conference presentations), have the potential to broaden the visible market for
ideas and ultimately diversify and advance scholarly inquiry. But only some
venues are likely to convey the prestige necessary for publishing faculty to
receive tenure and promotion in the traditional evaluation system. How can an
alternative publisher achieve stature in this environment? Are there different
levels of stature associated with scholarly publication, scholarly
communication and digital asset management?
“Institutional repositories, by capturing, preserving, and
disseminating a university's collective intellectual capital, serve as
meaningful indicators of an institution's academic quality.” “Where this
increased visibility reflects a high quality of scholarship, this demonstration
of value can translate into tangible benefits…”[3]
But conversely, if this increased visibility does not show a high quality of
scholarship (e.g. unreviewed gray literature, or worse, the next faux atomic
fusion discovery), the university reputation may not be enhanced and the
scholarly community may not seek this IR for quality information. Small bodies
of high quality content may be buried in larger quantities of lower quality
content, reducing the visibility of quality work. Unrestricted IR submissions
proposed by some institutions may not satisfy a university’s desire to enhance
its prestige, especially amongst “aspirational” universities. Professional
visibility, prestige and tenure continue to serve as primary motivators for
faculty, and they are currently associated with formal scholarly publication
rather than newer forms of scholarly communication.
Prestige may be primarily associated with the university for
some faculty, and with professional associations for other faculty. When a prestigious
university hires a faculty member the university itself may replace the
scholarly association as the validator, whereas faculty of “aspirational”
universities may count upon scholarly associations and their editorial boards
(often populated by scholars from prestigious institutions) for validation and
recognition of their work. Prestigious universities will likely compete with
discipline-based repositories more effectively than “aspirational” universities
because faculty members at prestigious institutions may associate their career
accomplishment with their university rather than with their discipline. If
true, IR’s at “aspirational” universities must create incentives to encourage
faculty participation to compete with the name journals and universities until
external scholars and professional communities recognize their IR’s as sources
of quality content.
IR’s concentrate content at the university level and
facilitate institutional branding, but they may disperse content related to a
specific discipline but produced at several universities. With substantial
faculty and staff participation, IR’s could eventually concentrate the
scholarly output of a university in a single place, but unless those IR’s are
the recipients of incoming links or search queries from sites and search
engines frequented by the related scholarly community, they will be forgotten.
Academic institutions should consider how they could attract
the attention of faculty stars from different scholarly communities in an
effort to build prestige. In addition to collecting published or unpublished
works of their own faculty, scholarly associations or universities could begin
to serve as effective aggregators (or collocators of links) instead of, or in
addition to acting as direct scholarly publishers. The value and convenience
added by new aggregations of content and well-formatted collocations of links
to quality content can bring recognition and prestige to the university and
associated faculty.
Another way that aspirational universities can compete for
prestige is by offering online services that address unmet needs of certain
disciplines. Research at the University of Rochester suggests that some faculty
want IR’s that allow them to share works in progress with their colleagues, “They
want something that will support the authoring process, not just the finished
product.”[4]
This concept may be extended to providing chat rooms or shared workspaces
within or adjacent to an IR so that it becomes a virtual meeting place as well
as a stable repository for finished products.
IR’s should not be monolithic across the university, but
should be responsive to the variant needs of individual scholarly communities
and the host institution’s position within them.[5]
Aspirational universities may choose uneven development and support of their
IR, strategically focusing on certain programs of excellence within their
institution that can attract the scholarship and participation of the leaders
in their field. Programs of excellence
may have highly selective guest editorial boards, and lesser programs may
choose to facilitate less formal scholarly communication initiatives in an
attempt to build institutional prestige in those areas rather than in formal
scholarly publishing.
If only the prestigious universities have successful IR’s,
and faculty from prestigious institutions dominate the editorial boards of the
scholarly associations, we risk the same lack of competition and homogeneity of
ideas feared by critics of news media conglomerates and those opposed to
copyright extension. Innovation suffers in this model. Conversely, large bodies
of lesser quality research with poor indexing and uncertain accessibility also
impede the advance of knowledge.
IR literature conflates scholarly publishing, scholarly
communication and digital asset management, probably because all these are
possible IR functions. But there are substantial differences between these
goals, the resources required to reach them and the relative prestige
associated with them. We have seen that formal scholarly publication requires
external review and validation from prestigious faculty. Digital scholarly
communication offers informal and fast publication, community review and
comment. Hosting vehicles of scholarly communication for a specific discipline
may have some beneficial impacts on institutional reputation, particularly if
the vehicle attracts participation from prestigious faculty and/or some
editorial control is exercised to maintain quality.
Comprehensive digital asset management (DAM) is a much more
expensive and ambitious undertaking that may or may not enhance an
institution’s stature. Typical DAM implementations address internal information
assets, and they may include the raw materials of scholarship (e.g. digitized
archival materials, research data) rather than research articles ready for
publication. DAM implementations are usually internally focused, and they
declare and defend institutional ownership of discrete digital objects. Often
the culture of DAM is proprietary and closed, as opposed to the scholarly
communication environment, which many academics believe should be free and
open.
In recent years the US Congress and federal agencies have
inquired about digital asset management for university research records. In
1999 The Office of Management and Budget caused some concern in the research
community when it expanded public accessibility requirements for raw data
produced during federally funded research in its OMB Circular A-110. More
recently the National Institutes of Health have issued new regulations
requiring recipients of grant awards over $500,000 to declare how they will
preserve and make available raw data and products of their research, or explain
why they are unable to do so.[6] Regulations of federal funding agencies may
compel faculty to contribute to an IR, if only to avoid incurring the
substantial costs of digital asset curation in their laboratories. It remains
to be seen whether funding agencies will eventually require specifications for
retention such as those proposed to certify “Trustworthy Digital Repositories”.[7]
Individual digital assets (e.g. digitized photographs) of
universities are value-neutral in terms of scholarly recognition unless their
quantity, quality and accessibility reach a critical mass and become an
essential resource for a specific discipline. Prestigious DAM requires
possession of unique high quality assets, a commitment to broad distribution
through permissive ownership or licensing, and substantial investments in
metadata and infrastructure so the assets are trustworthy and reliable (i.e.
found on a continuing basis). Simply quantifying and presenting digital assets
will not withstand academic scrutiny when reliable discovery, utility and
longevity of this content may be in question. Disappearing or inaccessible
content (through withdrawal, digital corruption, possessive rights management
or poor indexing) will not enhance the reputation of its host in the scholarly
communities.
Digital asset management (DAM) is a positive step for
universities since most institutions do not do this comprehensively, and some
assets are being lost and/or rebuilt at considerable expense. However
comprehensive DAM is a “blank check” unless policy decisions are made to
control the scope and costs of acquisition and maintenance. Both the IR and DAM
communities assert the value of permanent retention, but neither has identified
continuing funding sources or specific strategies (other than simple bit storage)
to support this. Defining collecting scope and establishing format standards
are two ways to control IR costs. IR and/or DAM scope and costs should be
evaluated with an eye toward the institutional benefit derived.
Faculty and Digital Preservation
Regardless of the increasing research and publication
documenting the challenges of long-term digital preservation,[8]
effective or comprehensive DAM does not serve as an incentive for faculty
contributions to an IR at this time. Schonfeld and Guthrie indicated that
faculty members believe preservation of electronic journals is important, but
effective archiving does not drive their choice of publishers.[9]
Richard K. Johnson writes that faculty cannot be convinced to adhere to digital
asset format standards for “attitudinal and practical reasons”[10].
Robert Spindler has suggested that format standards for electronic theses and
dissertations may infringe upon academic freedom.[11]
Although Clifford Lynch has correctly identified the
problems of distributed and unprofessionally maintained digital assets[12],
research suggests that most university faculty only generally perceive the
threats of digital obsolescence or total loss. They do not understand the
important role they may play in preservation through their selection of
production technologies and effective maintenance of their content in the
pre-formal publication stages. Faculty may also influence preservation through
their selection of publishing venues, since some venues have made the
investments necessary to sustain their electronic content. Unfortunately,
faculty members believe that the “archival journal” of their discipline will
still be archival when it moves to the web, and preservation issues will be
handled by someone else.
Non-professional management of digital assets is
unreliable, and preserving non-standard materials will be far more expensive
and problematic. As web-preservation researchers from Denmark recently
commented, “We face a trade-off between
how much we can preserve and the resources we can spend on preserving it. It
would make little sense to allocate many resources to correct preservation of a
file format that appears only a few times in a billion object archive.”[13]
In the end, products made with customized or narrow market tools will only be saved if the value of the information justifies higher costs for preservation, and the creators and curators of this information take action early in the product development life cycle. This is unlikely because most often the long-term value of research is not immediately recognized, and explicit preservation of digital assets is rarely funded. As a result, non-standard content is at substantial risk. Faculty should be made aware of the significance of their product development and publication venue choices.
At the same time institutions and especially IR’s also have
an obligation to maintain standards and adapt them to meet the changing needs
of faculty and the advance of technology. In the long run, those institutions
that have successfully retained and made the best content widely available, and
facilitate the advancement of new media scholarship rather than retard it, will
attract the best scholars and scholarship of the future and realize the
greatest prestige.
Helping IR’s Compete in the Market of Ideas:
Here are a few suggestions for how universities can position
themselves to effectively compete with faculty or departmental websites and
scholarly and commercial publishers:
1)
Universities, especially aspirational universities, must
create incentives in the tenure review process to encourage faculty to publish
in their IR’s. Simply building IR’s will not ensure faculty participation at
most universities. Monetary incentives may be quite effective given the low
rate of author compensation offered by scholarly publishers.
2)
If aspirational universities solicit unpublished material
for their IR, they must seek participation of external reviewers from
prestigious universities to validate their IR content, or other forms of validation
must be developed that are widely recognized by the target scholarly
communities. They may build vehicles of scholarly communication that assist
faculty in the creation of new research products, as well as IR’s that store
the resulting scholarship.
3)
Non-commercial aggregators are just as important as direct
scholarly publishers because they give efficient subject-specific visibility to
IR content. Universities will be competing with commercial and non-commercial
publishers for market share, seeking links to the best quality content from
IR’s across the world.
4)
Faculty members need more information about the risks and
costs of digital preservation and the value of adhering to standards. Special
funding to support continuing maintenance and preservation of university
digital assets may emerge as an incentive for faculty participation, especially
as losses of digital assets maintained by formal publishers, scholarly
associations and local servers receive more attention from the media.
5)
Institutions should decide if they are building IR’s for
digital asset management, scholarly communication support, or formal scholarly
publishing. All three are possible, but the costs and implications of this
choice vary substantially.
6)
Prestige is the province of university faculty of specific
disciplines, and of a small number of research universities, it is not conveyed
by publishers. Aspirational universities need to find new models for deriving
prestige from scholarly publishing, scholarly communication or digital asset
management.
[1] Foster, Andrea L., “Papers Wanted”, Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 25, 2004, Information Technology section, p 37.
[2] Thomson’s Web of Science product includes several
discipline-based citation indexes. http://isi10.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi?DestApp=WOS&Func=Frame
(Accessed August 30, 2004)
[3] Johnson,
Richard K., “Institutional Repositories: Partnering with Faculty to Enhance
Scholarly Communication”,D-Lib Magazine,
8(11) November 2002. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november02/johnson/11johnson.html
(Accessed May 31, 2004)
[4] Foster, “Papers...” p. 37.
[6] Proctor, Michael, “No Free FOIA Gras: The 1999
Changes to Circular A-110 Information Access Provisions”, ECURE 1999:
Preservation and Access for Electronic College and University Records
Presentations, http://www.asu.edu/ecure/1999/proctor/index.html
; Lynch, Clifford, “Keynote Address”, ECURE 2004: Preservation and Access for
Electronic College and University Records Presentations, http://www.asu.edu/ecure/2004/keynote/;
National Institutes of Health, “Final NIH Statement On Sharing Research Data”,
February 26, 2003. http://grants2.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-03-032.html
(Accessed August 23, 2004)
[7] Research
Libraries Group, “RLG and OCLC Issue Final Report on Trusted Digital
Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities”, http://www.rlg.org/pr/pr2002-repositories.html
(Accessed August 23, 2004)
[8] See the Digital Preservation Bibliography at http://www.public.asu.edu/~spindler/Digital%20Preservation%20Bibliography.2004.08.htm
[9] Schonfeld, Roger C. and Kevin Guthrie, What Faculty
Think of Electronic Resources: 2003, Washington D.C., Coalition for Networked Information,
2004. http://www.cni.org/tfms/2004a.spring/abstracts/PB-what-guthrie.html
(Accessed June 14, 2004)
[10] Johnson, 2002.
[11] Spindler, Robert P. “Archival
Considerations for ETD’s”, Coalition for Networked Information Fall Meeting,
San Antonio, TX, December, 2002.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~spindler/Archival%20Considerations%20for%20ETD's.cni.ppt (Accessed August 23, 2004.)
[12] Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories:
Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no.
226 (February 2003): 1-7. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html
(Accessed May 31, 2004)
[13] Christensen-Dalsgaard,
Birte, “Web Archive Activities in
Denmark”, RLG Diginews, 8(3) June 15, 2004.
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=17661#article0
(Accessed June 21, 2004).