There is no question that electronic publishing has profoundly impacted research and teaching. It is simply astounding that most current scholarship is literally at your fingertips and can be located within seconds, most often seamlessly made available to you by libraries. This sea change has prompted many in the research, publishing, and library fields to question traditional practices, and the implications and effects of new emerging digital information sharing tools have yet to be fully discovered. Yet, one immediate and undisputed benefit of institutional repositories is that they are filling a critical place in the digital information gap, providing a safe space to house information that would otherwise be lost or inaccessible.
Institutional repositories provide faculty a free, secure, permanent and centralized database in which to store their work. As an online archive accessible worldwide, institutional repositories also increase readership and visibility. Perhaps most innovative in the development of the IR is the idea that instead of articles or books being the only point for scholarly exchange, IRs create an environment where other forms of thinking can be accessed, shared, and widely distributed with one click of the mouse.
Ann Green and Myron Gutmann in their paper, "Building Partnerships Among Social Science Researchers: Institution-based Repositories and Domain Specific Data Archives," point out that repositories benefit researchers in all phases of the research lifecycle and more than just through the housing of "eprints" of published work that may exist only in paper form. Institutional Repositories "seek to provide safe harbors for a more inclusive interpretation of the intellectual output of local faculty-driven research and teaching, by including pre- and post-prints, working papers, research reports, datasets, course materials, personal image collections, among other types of content." 6
"It's not enough anymore to just publish in a research journal," said Steve Harnad in his recent interview with Times reporter Matt Baker.7 Harnad is Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University and his department of electronics and computer science was the first in the world to adopt a non-commercial self-archiving mandate. He goes on to add that "authors who have put their work in a repository have twice as many citations as those who don’t self-archive." 8
"A rich part of the knowledge process…This is the future of where we’re heading in research," adds Dr. Ceasar L. McDowell, who uses MIT’s institutional repository DSpace@MIT as a way to share, organize, and distribute data for his work in the Center for Reflective Community Practice.9
Secondarily, institutional repositories serve as meaningful markers of an institution’s academic quality. They help showcase the work of faculty and students and provide tangible examples of work being accomplished. "Where this increased visibility reflects a high quality of scholarship," noted Richard K. Johnson, Enterprise Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), "this demonstration of value can translate into tangible benefits including funding--from both public and private sources--that derives in part form an institution’s status and reputation." 10
Some faculty have been slow to embrace self-archiving or their institutional repository. "One reason for this cautious approach," writes Baker in his interview with Paul Ayris, Director of Library Services at University College London, "is the misconception that open access means lack of peer-review."
"This is not true," Ayris explains. "Academics see peer-review as the gold standard of academic excellence, and there is no wish to lose it. Papers in open-access journals can be peer-reviewed just as rigorously as materials in commercial subscription journals. Where publishers’ copyright policies allow, that published peer-reviewed literature is deposited in open-access repositories." 11
Although the rise of repositories has prompted some to see the digital tool as a threat to the traditional revenue streams of publishing, an important point to note is that institutional and other digital repositories don't necessarily compete with scholarly journals. They house more than just the types of materials published by societies and publishing houses, which is what many argue makes IRs so innovative and important to scholarly exchange.
When faculty do participate in institutional repositories, the increase in visibility can be profound. In May of this year, Brunel University reported 17,000 downloads in three months from Bura (Brunel University Research Archive). "It’s a great way of showcasing work to the public and other researchers. We encourage everyone to self-archive," says Geoff Rodgers, Dean of Brunel University's Graduate School.12
