institutionalrepositoriespreparingforthefuture.docVIP

Institutional Repositories: Preparing for the Future Keynote presented at the International Conference on Developing Digital Institutional Repositories: Experiences and Challenges, Dec. 9, 2004, Hong Kong Kimberly Douglas University Librarian, California Institute of Technology December 2004 Abstract: Much has happened in the last year to advance the cause of open access to scholarly papers. As significant as this is, change can come in unexpected ways. Through Institutional Repositories, the academic library can position itself for change that is desired and also for future unknown developments. This has been a very significant year for Institutional Repositories. Since Samson Soong and I discussed this conference last year, open access, a movement in which institutional repositories play a critical role, has become a major political topic world-wide and has garnered a great deal of publicity. It is not a small thing that in January Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, told the story of how he had tried to access a report in Journal of Infectious Disease on malaria research in Gambia, work funded by the Wellcome, but was unable to access the paper as he navigated to the journal issue over the web from his office and instead got the message access denied. Apparently the Wellcome Trust didn’t subscribe to this journal. By October, within ten months of that story-telling, the Wellcome Trust had issued a research report and a supportive policy position on open access to scholarly, particularly scientific information. Since then other funding or public agency groups, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the U.K.’s Science and Technology Committee, as well as Danish, German and other continental European agencies as well as the National Scholarly Communications Forum in Australia, have all, in one way or another, announced that the results of publicly funded research must be made openly available to the public. There must be open access. Dis