Critical issues in Open Source repository software and its contribution to Open Access
Edmund Balnaves · 2010
The phenomenal growth in electronic publishing has not been matched with equal development in the management, ownership and preservation issues surrounding the intellectual output of institutions. While many universities have established institutional repositories, there exist outside our major institutions many special libraries and research organisations that want to achieve better knowledge management and intellectual property control over the output of their organisations. The availability of well accepted, robust, open source applications for institutional repositories is acting as an enabler for organisations to implement open access systems to support their research output. This can include not only journal publications, but also research reports, image collections and many other assets. The example of Dspace will presented in the context of developing an enterprise model for open source in libraries and the potential this has to foster open access, and the critical issues around adoption of open source repositories, including: institutional adoption, persistent referencing, digital archiving, content ingestion and the mitigation of obsolescence. INTRODUCTION – WHY OPEN ACCESS? There is a growing body of published experience in the process of building digital libraries in major institutions, including the work of JISC