Culture Change

Changing the Culture | Open Access Drivers | Resource Bank

Changing the Culture

It is widely agreed that the technical implementation of a digital repository is the easy side of the equation and that the most significant challenge facing institutions is the need to promote and drive cultural change. Creating 'buy-in' to the concept of a digital repository amongst the academic community and encouraging researchers and teachers to submit their work for inclusion is further covered in the advocacy section of this web site. A key first step to successful culture change is to define the message and motivation for repository development at your particular institution. The motivations for setting up repositories varies depending on the community that is doing it, some of which include:

The Publications/Serials Crisis
Scholarly communication and sharing
Teaching and Learning, including re-use and re-purposing
Management of digital assets and preservation requirements

Changing the culture of an institution is not an overnight job, nor is it one that can be achieved without a significant application of resources. It is however key to the success of a repository that the academic community whom are its principal contributors understand why such a resource is needed, what the driving forces are and the crucial need for their involvement. Thorough planning for your repository will help define these elements.

Cultural change is classically commonly brought about through engagement with academics on one of three levels:

Intellectual (conceptual, logical, the greater good)
Emotional (hearts and minds, enlightened self-interest)
Political (necessitation, external drivers, compliance with policy)

Intellectually repository administrators can expound the professional virtues and benefits brought-about by the repository, persuading their academic community of the need for their engagement. Alternatively they can advocate the personal value to individuals of repository use, and seek to achieve engagement in this manner. Or finally they can drive the community through the introduction of mandated or strongly-recommended policies for the deposition of material, a process that may take some time to accomplish, uncover simmering issues of academic freedoms but ultimately prove an exceptionally successful approach to repository enlargement.

Open Access Drivers

Open access is a very important driver in implementing repositories in institutions and has the backing of the House of Commons Select Committee and UK Research Councils.

The primary push for repositories to exist came from Open Archive Initiative (OAI) which promotes that each institution should make all of its publicly funded research available not just in the institution but everywhere else, .i.e. enhancing access to scholarly communication both at institutional level and subject based archives. It is important to note that not all repositories are open access. The OAI movement has two important requirements of repositories:

The repository must provide open access to its content (unless there are legal constraints)
The repository must provide open access to its metadata for harvesting

The Open Access movement is working on trying to encourage all researchers who have published work (primarily peer reviewed but also work that isn't) that has been funded publically to make it freely available to all through a repository. The OAI-PMH enables the sharing of metadata and where allowed, links to the content between services and this is a standard that has been adopted by most repositories. There are services that have been set up specifically to search across OAI PMH compliant repositories such as ARC, CiteBase, Google Scholar OAISTER and OpenDOAR Search.