Leaders, innovators, and practitioners from North America, Europe, and Asia will test new frontiers in online open archives at the 2010 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. The international gathering, organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) in cooperation with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan/National Institute of Informatics, will take place November 8 & 9, with pre- and post-conference events November 7 & 10.
The *draft* schedule for the meeting is as follows:
ePrints user group
Microsoft user group
Opening keynote: Michael Nielsen, quantum computation pioneer
(Read the announcement for details)
Repository-based publishing services: strategies for success (or failure)
After a period of exuberance, the challenges of producing original scholarly publications using digital repository infrastructure are becoming apparent. Repository-based publishing programs must deliver scholarly legitimacy while aligning with the research or teaching focus of the host institution—sometimes a difficult balancing act. After its creation, a repository-based publishing program needs to be nurtured, and its sustainability depends on the coherence of its underlying economic logic.
While managers of digital collections recognize such challenges, they are also discovering great opportunities for publishing partnerships (with academic units and university presses, for example) and for the creation of new dissemination models that link multimedia and datasets to text. Through trial and error, practitioners are increasingly identifying the unique selling points of a repository-based publishing platform, and building on this success to create innovative and impactful vehicles for scholarly communication.
This panel brings together speakers from a variety of repository-based publishing programs to openly share their experiences, and offer strategies for success.
Open data
There has been much discussion about the impending data deluge and the ways in which the scholarly community can ensure the preservation of valuable research data. Numerous local, disciplinary, and national data initiatives are being launched to address this, but roles and responsibilities have not yet been well established. This session will explore the potential role for libraries in the evolving data universe. Speakers will consider how libraries can position themselves and the skills they will need to manage data sets. The session will also discuss the intersection of large-scale data programs with local institutional projects and envision the best ways of connecting them.
Innovation fair and all-conference reception
Will highlight new technologies, strategies, and approaches.
Institution-based Open Access modeling workshop (7:30 - 9:30am)
Global repositories networks
We are building infrastructure to present and preserve an open layer of scholarly content on the Web. As one element of that infrastructure, repositories will play an increasingly important role in the research lifecycle by supporting complex, collaborative workflows and exposing them appropriately, and by allowing researchers to effectively manage and combine heterogeneous resources. This will require repositories to declare their contents, services, and policies in machine-understandable ways, probably using linked data to ensure they are web native. It will require a reliable and complete identification infrastructure covering persons, organizations, objects, geo-spatial location and so on. It will require mutual trust between different repositories (e.g. subject repositories, institutional repositories), between repositories and service providers (e.g. those building services based on citation data), and between repositories and researchers (e.g. to simplify ‘deposit’). Linking or exchanging content between central and other repositories is a key technological hurdle as policies that require content to be deposited in specific repositories begin to overlap.
Several international initiatives are working toward a vision of a coherent global network of repositories in different ways. This session will allow participants to engage with a selection of these initiatives and to assess progress.
Luncheon keynote: Dr. George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office for the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program
(Read the announcement for details)
Making the case for financial sustainability
The economic downturn has created even greater pressure for digital repositories to demonstrate their return on investment (ROI) to their host institutions. How can the value of a digital repository be articulated and measured in ways that are meaningful to both institutional administrators and the owners of the content? Are usage statistics, citation data, and repository collection growth useful metrics for advocating for digital repositories as an institutional priority? Are the preservation of scholarship, the public interest, and the institutional profile more compelling arguments than metrics? Will it be those repositories with less-traditional funding models, which may rely on partnerships and value-added or income-generating services, that will prove to be the most financially sustainable?
This session will explore the forces driving or hindering the financial sustainability of digital repositories, emerging best practices, and ways of advocating for scarce institutional resources.