Moderator: Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University

Sue Kriegsman, archivist and librarian, Harvard University [ SLIDES ]
David Palmer, Scholarly Communications Team Leader, Hong Kong University Libraries
[ SLIDES 1 2 3 ]
Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship Services, Cornell University Library [ SLIDES ]

Overview

It’s a challenge to make the case for the services supplied by libraries and digital repositories in the current economic climate. “We are not in normal times,” said panel moderator Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins University. The intensity of the situation may vary, but many in higher education are experiencing budget cuts and share a concern for sustainability of services. Many digital repository users are not affiliated with an institution and don’t pay for access. This panel discussed creative ways to get documents in a repository and new models to generate income.

HARVARD

Harvard University has an Office for Scholarly Communication that provides a central infrastructure to support its open-access policies. It helps populate Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), a dSpace repository through the Harvard University Library, with faculty scholarly articles. Articles in DASH have grown from 1,500 in September, 2009 to 3,500 a year later. As content increases, there has been a significant increase in the number of downloads.

The office provides centralized services on a campus that is very decentralized, said Sue Kriegsman, the Program Manager for the Office for Scholarly Communication who has also worked at Harvard University on campus wide library digital initiatives. There are 73 libraries at Harvard and five schools (law, government, education, business and arts and sciences) have adopted open-access policies so far.

Although faculty member vote for the policies, it is taking time for them to become involved in the implementation – actively getting the content into the repository. While there might be some merit to individuals taking responsibility for posting work in the repository, Kriegsman says it would take the Office of Scholarly Communication out of the picture. “One concern that I have by automating getting content, we lose the opportunity to talk to faculty about Open Access,” she said.

Moving forward and thinking about sustainability, Kriegsman and her colleagues have tried a variety of avenues to get material for DASH.

Here’s what they’ve learned along the way:

• Hire student help. At first, Harvard hired 70 students to pump up content in DASH by contacting faculty members for their research. “It was an administrative nightmare,” says Kriegsman. She found it’s more effective to have eight, well-trained students who contact faculty by email and in person, plus spend two hours a week in the Office of Scholarly Communication. However, it’s not particularly cost-effective
• Utilize faculty activity reports. The reports are run independently for each school. The Office of Scholarly Research approached individual schools and send emails to faculty to ask about what they recently produced and asked them to upload it directly onto DASH. This was a cost effective way to get a sense of what the faculty was creating and Kriegsman said she got a great response when she asked faculty to upload directly to DASH.
• Tap into existing resources with bulk ingests. Kriegsman went to PubMed Central and downloaded work from Harvard authors and found it was a successful venture. They will continue to explore utilizing other subject based repositories.

CORNELL

In January, Cornell University announced a new business model to sustain its digital repository – and the response so far is encouraging, according to Oya Rieger, the associate university librarian for digital scholarship services at Cornell University Library.

It was a simple request to the top 200 institutional users of its popular digital repository, ArXiv: Please make a voluntary annual contribution of $2,300- $4,000 to support the service. So far, it has raised $319,000 from 95 institutions in 10 countries. It’s an interim three-year strategy to gain community support. “We think we are just at the tip of the iceberg in addressing the sustainability problem,” said Rieger. Here, Cornell was asking for help in maintaining its service before it was in danger.

In deciding if your institution subscribe to a model such as arXiv, Rieger offered the following principles for supporting open-access scholarly resources:

1. Deep integration into academic community and scholarly processes. It is an online resource with broad international use?
2. Clearly defined mandate and governance structure. Before investing in a system like arXiv, consider who operates and maintains it.
3. Technology platform stability and innovation. It’s critical if you want open-access resources to be used globally that has a stable IT architecture and is reliable and scalable.
4. Systemic development of content policies. Look for quality control and reliable systems with clearly defined collection policies
5. Reliance on business planning strategies. Open Acess is free access without legal barriers, but it does cost money. Understand the stakeholder perspectives and look at the return on your investment – cost per download. Cornell is considering a user study to expand the understanding of how arXiv is being used by different communities and how it can continue to support evolving scholarly communication patterns.

THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG (HKU)

The institutional repository of HKU, The HKU Scholars Hub, began in 2005 as a traditional IR collecting OA fulltext materials. In 2009, the major funder of tertiary education and research in Hong Kong, the University Grants Committee, asked all Hong Kong universities to begin a new policy of “Knowledge Transfer”. This policy articulated at HKU is known as, “Knowledge Exchange” (KE), with the Hub chosen to be the chief vehicle to do, show, and measure HKU KE activities.

David Palmer, Scholarly Communications Team Leader, and the developer and manager of The Hub, said that the influx of KE money to Hub has been an unexpected boon, making it sustainable now and in the future.

At first, Palmer estimated the HKU Libraries was only capturing about 10 percent of the faculty research output for the repository. The situation changed when  the University Grants Committee gave US$6 million per year, to be shared amongst eight institutions to implement the new initiative. The vision is that the academy will  share technology, expertise, and research output with society for mutual benefits, socially and economically. HKU re-articulated mission and vision statements, and strategic plans to show KE. Departments, faculties, and the University must do and measure KE, in order that this funding will recur in subsequent years. Soon, staff appraisal also will include measures of KE.

In the first round of KE funding, the Libraries received funding for  three initiatives. In the first project, the Libraries devised means to clean HKU data  in Scopus, Web of Knowledge (WoK), and Google Scholar, and then harvest this data for display in The Hub. This data in these three sources is often used to discover the research at HKU, form the basis of peer review, etc., Second, it worked with Springer Open Choice Publishing to begin a limited project to fund gold OA. After six months, 70 HKU OA articles were available on SpringerLink and The Hub.

The third project was to convert the Hub into a database of visible research and expertise for the purpose of KE. Before, like most repositories, it was item centric with records on publication items. Now, it will have records on other types of data, such as 25,000 grants and 1,500 HKU ResearcherPages, or author profiles. The Libraries harvest data from many silos on campus and off, to create mashups in The Hub. Researchers can edit their information by using the HKU single-signon. The Hub has found new purpose and visibility as an expertise directory, and a current research information system (CRIS), that will supply data and decision support on all aspects of research at HKU.

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