Person:

Lukens, Colin

This recipe bakes a diverse network of library and academic staff who can facilitate deposits through an institutional repository (IR), increasing the size of its collection, improving its metadata, and assuring greater licensing compliance. It will build a program that more efficiently facilitates deposits to an IR and creates scholarly communication and open access advocates in library and administration staff. This network speaks to the power and benefits of open access and addresses questions and issues in scholarly communication.

A significant challenge in administering an institutional open-access repository is acquiring local scholarly content to distribute and build the repository. Complicated licensing and author re-use rights can sometimes be viewed as a barrier by authors who are looking to deposit their work. Paired with the challenges of communicating the benefits of repository deposit and the rights afforded by institutional open-access policies, limited resources, or lack of administrative support, repository managers often struggle to build a broader culture around deposits outside of open-access advocates. A proactive, mediated, and collaborative publication review program can mitigate or solve some of these issues. By reviewing an author’s publication list or CV with an eye towards repository deposit, repository managers and scholarly communication librarians can demystify the process and educate depositors on licensing and open-access policies. Here, we outline such an effort at Harvard University.