An Alternative American Approach to Repositories

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, "Repository Rants" 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p9gn9h0dn49/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 1:15:28).

This presentation is about how one repository (ours) has found success by rejecting the “conventional” wisdom and “expert” advice of consultants, and “thought leaders”. We have declined to support the SPARC Addendum, promote campus mandates, encourage Creative Commons licensing, use open-source software, rely on faculty self-archiving, or require peer-review for original publishing; and we are not even considered truly “open” access by SPARC or the hard-line “libre” adherents. Yet we are the second-largest U.S. institutional repository, with more than 70,000 full-text documents available. We experience 7.5 million hits and furnish 6 million downloads annually. Our content ranks higher than Elsevier’s and Springer’s in Google search results. We enjoy a high degree of faculty participation and an exceptional level of return “business.” Our repository accounts for 10%–12% of all daily university website traffic. We have developed a variety of innovative service practices to win over our campus and attract users throughout the world. These practices include mediated deposit, delegated hunting and gathering, typesetting and formatting post-prints to match published versions for layout, pagination, etc., assistance with PubMed Central deposits, original and reprint monograph publishing, and the aggressive application of U.S. copyright rules on eligibility and the public domain.