Institutional Repositories & (the Lack of ) Faculty Motivation

Davis, Philip M, and Matthew J. L. Connolly. "Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace." D-Lib Magazine 13, No. 3/4 (2007). Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html

In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine L. Borgman observes that "Institutional repositories based at universities have the potential to become an important component of the content layer in all fields" (194). They are part of what she terms the "pull of new technologies" and the "push of institutional restructuring" responsible for major changes in the field of scholarly publishing. However, if institutional repositories are to succeed as forums for scholarly communication, faculty members must actively contribute to them on a regular basis. The article by Philip Davis and Matthew J. L. Connolly that I read for this week's blog suggests that this won't necessarily be an easy sell. Focusing on Cornell's implementation of DSpace, Davis and Connolly investigate how that university's institutional repository is being used and why faculty members (when not unaware of it) are disinclined to contribute to it.

Davis and Connolly describe Cornell's institutional repository as "underpopulated and underused" by its faculty. 80% of the collections in its highly structured DSpace installation contain fewer than 10 items, and though the repository as a whole is growing at a rate of 1000 items a year, most collections exhibit a plateau growth pattern. The few collections that are growing steadily--Theses and Dissertations, Cornell Library staff articles and presentations, and Multimedia and Videos--tend to have some type of active administrative mandate or disciplinary incentive. For the purposes of comparison, Davis and Connolly also surveyed DSpace implementations at seven other institutions. They found that though the organization of collection structures tended to vary from institution to institution, the growth patterns of collections were still predominantly either plateau or stair-step in shape, as at Cornell.

In addition to compiling statistical data from the Cornell's DSpace interface and server log files, the authors also interviewed eleven Cornell faculty members (ranging in discipline from High Energy Physics to Romance Literature). Predictably, the interviews revealed that professors are primarily concerned with the opinions of their departmental and disciplinary peers (after all, these are the opinions that will affect tenure decisions and one's standing in the field). At present, there is little incentive coming from these arenas to contribute to university institutional repositories. Some of the faculty members interviewed (principally those in the sciences) preferred to use subject repositories (such as arXiv, PubMed, and GeneBank) or their personal websites to provide increased access to their work. Since Cornell's DSpace offers no additional functionality, it was viewed as redundant and/or as an island that cannot further important inter-institutional conversations.

Several factors discourage faculty members from contributing to digital repositories at all, including subject repositories. These include the copyright concerns and the difficulty of learning new technologies, as well as fears of plagiarism, being scooped, or creating a decreased market for a piece's future publication. One faculty member (an economist) was concerned about the variable quality of the work in digital repositories, and did not want to have his work associated with questionable materials. For those in the humanities, where the publication of monographs is key to advancement in the field, there was no perceived advantage to making material available outside the confines of publication. Indeed, several of the life scientists interviewed were wary of distributing their work without the error-check provided by the peer review process. It is instructive to see how different sets of concerns govern different fields, which makines one-size-fits-all solution difficult.

Disciplinary practice seems to reign supreme, and at present this is a stumbling block for the institutional repository. Professors are overworked and accordingly will expend energy only on those activities that will help them advance in their field. If universities want to encourage participation in institutional repositories, Davis and Connolly's article suggests that they might do best to mandate (or provide incentives for) participation at the level of individual departments. But of course there remains the question of whether we really want to pressure scholars to adopt practices and technologies that they have valid reasons for resisting. Could open access subject repositories (with their disciplinary pull) simply be a better outlet than institutional repositories for preserving and increasing access to scholarship? Larger studies on faculty behavior and disciplinary dynamics are needed to help inform repository design and set institutional priorities.