Re: ARL Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:30:21 +0100

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:

> [1] http://www.arl.org/pubscat/pr/2006/spec292.html
> [3] http://www.arl.org/spec/SPEC292web.pdf
> - Thirty-seven ARL institutions (43% of respondents) had an
> operational IR (we called these respondents implementers), 31 (35%)
> were planning one by 2007, and 19 (22%) had no IR plans.

I don't know who is and who isn't in ARL, but according to ROAR, there
are at least 200 OAI-compliant archives in the US:

    Institutional/Departmental: 115
    Theses: 18
    Central: 11

        http://archives.eprints.org/

> - The mean cost of IR implementation was $182,550.
> - The mean annual IR operation cost was $113,543.

That would be a figure worth breaking down by software used

http://archives.eprints.org/?action=browse#version

A calculation by IR policy and content, with a quick calculation
of the cost per paper (full text!) might be revealing too.

> - DSpace [6] was by far the most commonly used system: 20
> implementers used it exclusively and 3 used it in combination with
> other systems.
> - Proquest DigitalCommons [7] (or the Bepress software it is
> based on) was the second choice of implementers: 7 implementers used
> this system.

The ROAR figures for total US archives are (again, with no index of what
is and is not an ARL IR):

    DSpace: 55
    EPrints: 52
    Bepress: 44

The corresponding figures worldwide are:

    EPrints: 210
    DSpace: 167
    Bepress: 53

> - Only 41% of implementers had no review of deposited
> documents. While review by designated departmental or unit officials
> was the most common method (35%), IR staff reviewed documents 21% of
> the time.

It would be interesting to see the correlation between whether an
IR had a review-bottleneck in depositing and the number of
full-text deposits (eliminating proxy deposits).

(Prediction: The unbottlenecked IRs will be much fuller.)

> - In a check all that apply question, 60% of implementers said
> that IR staff entered simple metadata for authorized users and 57%
> said that they enhanced such data. Thirty-one percent said that they
> catalogued IR materials completely using local standards.

Obviously library proxy depositing has to be analyzed separately from direct
deposits by authors (or their assigns).

> - In another check all that apply question, implementers
> clearly indicated that IR and library staff use a variety of
> strategies to recruit content: 83% made presentations to faculty and
> others, 78% identified and encouraged likely depositors, 78% had
> library subject specialists act as advocates, 64% offered to deposit
> materials for authors, and 50% offered to digitize materials and
> deposit them.

No US university yet has a self-archiving mandate. They ought to try
that: They might find it trumps all other factors (as Arthur Sale's
analyses have been showing):

    http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

> - The mean number of digital objects in implementers' IRs was
> 3,844.

What percentage of those were full texts of OA target content
(peer-reviewed research)?

Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Aug 21 2006 - 20:27:17 BST

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