This section addresses some common concerns that authors have about institutional repositories.
Will depositing your work reduce your chances of being published?
Depositing your work into an institutional repository will not reduce your chances of being published.
As stated above, 91% of journals listed in the SHERPA/RoMEO database now support self-archiving of some kind. Additionally, Peter Suber reports that the number of journals still following the Ingelfinger Rule157 – that is, refusing to publish papers that have already been made available – is diminishing.158 In 2006, only 7% of surveyed journals still followed the Ingelfinger Rule,159 and that figure is likely to be less today.
Are institutional repositories professional?
Some authors express concern that repositories are not considered professional and that self-archived articles are not considered to be quality papers.
The critical point to remember is that most self-archived articles are simply copies of fully peer-reviewed articles that have already been published or are soon to be published in learned, well-respected journals. Many repositories will identify when and where a self-archived article was published, thus retaining the perception of quality endowed by the journal. Repositories merely provide another means for researchers to locate quality, peer-reviewed literature.
156 Note that an end-user need not necessarily be an individual – your own university could be considered an end-user. As far as rights granted to your university as end-user are concerned, these rights may be granted in a University Licence of the kind adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Law School (see above), in a Repository Deposit Licence (RDL), or in an End-User Licence that applies equally to the university as it does to individual end-users.
157 This rule is named after a former editor at the New England Journal of Medicine.
158 Peter Suber, “Six things that researchers need to know about open access” 94 SPARC Open Access Newsletter, 2 February 2006 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm accessed on 25 March 2008.
159 Ibid.
More and more academic institutions are establishing institutional repositories, including highly regarded institutions such as Harvard University. Moreover, many institutions maintain two repositories – one for faculty research publications and another for graduate student theses. This keeps the work of professional staff separate from that of their students.
Will making your work easily available encourage plagiarism?
A common concern is that providing easy access to work will encourage plagiarism, especially by students. In fact, open access discourages plagiarism by making it easier to detect. SHERPA explains,
“It is far easier to detect [plagiarism] if the original, date-stamped material is freely accessible to all, rather than being hidden in an obscure journal.”160
How will people find your work in the institutional repository?
Some academics have not deposited into an institutional repository because they fail to see the relevance to research practices – how will researchers with no affiliation to the author’s institution find the author’s work in the institutional repository? How will researchers know where to look?
Fortunately, researchers do not have to know where to look. Repositories have been designed to be interoperable through the use of common metadata standards developed by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). In other words, as long as the repositories contain OAI-compliant metadata, all repositories can be searched via mainstream search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo.
SHERPA explains:
Such institutional repositories share records about their content with service providers, who then offer search services to users across every record that they hold. This means that a researcher using a search service is searching across all repositories, not just individual ones. Once the researcher finds a record, then they can view the full-text direct from the institutional repository. As well as services which just search repositories, the full-text is also searched by Google, Yahoo and others.161
“Metadata” is the information entered into repository records to describe the material deposited. For example, metadata includes the name of the article deposited, your name as author of the article, and where and when the article was published. Although it may seem a tedious task, it is imperative to enter full and correct metadata at the time of depositing your article. Without it, your article cannot be properly indexed by search engines, thus reducing the likelihood that it will be found and cited by researchers. By entering incomplete or inaccurate metadata, you are only acting to reduce your chances of improved research impact that can be gained by self-archiving.
The fact that institutional repositories are indexed by large search engines such as Google is an important advantage. In 2005 it was found that 72% of authors used Google to search web for
160 SHERPA, “Fifteen Common Concerns – and Clarifications” 2006, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/15concerns.html accessed on 18 March 2008.
161 SHERPA, “Authors and Open Access” 2006, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/authors.html accessed on 25 March 2008; see also Alma Swan, “Open access self-archiving: An Introduction” Key Perspectives, May 2005, www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/jiscsum.pdf accessed on 24 March 2008.
scholarly articles,162 and by 2006 this figure was 75%.163
Aren’t there better places to post your work?
It may seem unnecessary to deposit your work into an institutional repository because your work is already available online either on your personal website, your publisher’s website or in a subject-based repository. However, there are ample reasons for depositing your work in an institutional repository as well.
Firstly, subject-based repositories and institutional repositories are not in competition. They can and do contain the same material. By depositing your work in more than one repository, you simply increase the likelihood that it will be found by potential users.
Secondly, as explained above, institutional repositories are easily searchable through the most frequently used search engines. Users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located or what they contain.164 Work deposited into an institutional repository is more likely to be found than work posted only on a personal webpage.165 Thirdly, institutional repositories offer value-added services that cannot be found elsewhere, such as personal “Researcher Pages” that list your achievements and publications and provide direct links to your publications in the repository.
Finally and most importantly, institutional repositories are focused on long-term preservation of their content. Dedicated staff have the responsibility of maintaining content in readily-accessible formats and protecting your work from loss or destruction. University-based archives are also more stable than publisher webpages, which may be affected by restructuring or the commercial decisions of the publisher.166 Put simply, articles in an institutional repository – and links to the articles – will remain stable, readable and permanently accessible.167
162 Alma Swan, “Open access self-archiving: An Introduction” Key Perspectives, May 2005, www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/jiscsum.pdf accessed on 24 March 2008.
163 Kristin Antelman, “Self-archiving practice and the influence of publisher policies in the social sciences” 19(2) Learned Publishing, April 2006, 85-95, http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00006023/ accessed on 24 March 2008.
164 Peter Suber, “Open Access Overview” Open Access News (blog), last revised 19 June 2007, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm accessed on 24 March 2008.
165 SHERPA, “Fifteen Common Concerns – and Clarifications” 2006, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/15concerns.html accessed on 18 March 2008.
166 See footnote 82; see also Alma Swan, “Open access self-archiving: An Introduction” Key Perspectives, May 2005, www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/jiscsum.pdf accessed on 24 March 2008.
167 SHERPA, “Fifteen Common Concerns – and Clarifications” 2006, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/15concerns.html accessed on 18 March 2008.