Strategies for Expanding Content

Advocacy | Faculty/Departmental Campaigns | External Downloads | Other Approaches

Advocacy

A number of different advocacy strategies can be used, including top-down and bottom-up, blanket and targeted. Resources available will also need to be considered and can affect the advocacy strategy. To ensure there is some initial content in order to encourage more deposits, institutional repository managers and librarians can identify so-called 'green' publishers - those who allow self-archiving in any form - and then asking the academics who have published in those journals for permission to deposit those papers in the institution's institutional repository. To check the list of publisher copyright policies on self-archiving, visit RoMEO.

Advocacy can also use an intellectual, emotional or political message to achieve its intended results.

Other approaches to encourage self-archiving practices include presentations at events; the use of posters; and organising workshops and training. A starting point could be to organise a departmental staff briefing and present the launch of the repository, outlining its key features, benefits and future plans. This can be extended to a bigger event to invite key institutional staff such as Heads of Department, Heads of Research and senior administrative staff.

Faculty/Departmental Campaigns

Presentations promoting the new repository are also useful at departmental meetings. Securing an invitation to a departmental research committee is a very good opportunity to advocate the benefits of Open Access and self-archiving. For ideas on presentations advocating Open Access and the benefits of institutional repositories, visit the SHERPA website under Guidance and Advocacy or contact any of the RSP partners for ideas on presentation slides. Presentations may be more effective if they are delivered separately for academics, library staff and senior management.

However, institutional staff such as managers, librarians and repository administrators should be aware of concerns often voiced by academics regarding the deposit of their work. Examples of such concerns include the disruption of the traditional publishing model, the actual quality of work found in repositories, the fact that it could be time consuming and issues of work preservation.

External Downloads

The Depot (http://depot.edina.ac.uk/) is a JISC-funded repository available to researchers whose own institution does not yet have a repository. Material deposited in the Depot is available for download into an institution's new repository. The Depot will direct researchers to their institution's repository once it is available."

[More information on other download sources to follow.]

Other Approaches

It is clear that having a repository is useless without having a significant amount of content in it. The problems that most institutions face is how do they get staff to deposit content in a repository. It seems that just asking them to do this voluntarily produces little content. All the research seems to point to the fact it is only when there is a mandate in place (i.e. staff HAVE to deposit) does this result in significant amounts of content in a repository. However, not all institutional environments are comfortable with this perceived level of interferance with academic freedoms and it remains an area of much debate.

Sally Rumsey, leading the Oxford University repository work, has written a well-balanced and comprehensive summary of the issues of engaging with academics and gaining content, called "Towards a Knowledge Lifecycle: Populating Repositories “Upstream”" on the Fedora Commons HatCheck newsletter. This concludes with a summary of what could be said as the aim of advocacy campaigns to make repositories part of normal academic practice:

"If repositories can overcome the hurdle of being an interesting but largely misunderstood and confusing extra, offer seamless deposit and make their value known to local user communities, then deposit and re-use will be adopted as part of normal day-to-day workflows. There is still some way to go."

References

Xia, J. & Sun, L. (2007) Assessment of Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories: Depositorship and Full-Text Availability, Serials Review, Vol.33, No.1, pp.14-21
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0098791306001729, Accessed 31st Aug 2007