The challenge now for UK Universities will be to keep librarians out of the way of reserachers, or their assistants, depositing the basic meta-data and full text in the repository. At the University of Reading, where I was involved in early developments around the IR but left the University before the final deposit mandate (*) was adopted and the process decided on, they have librarians acting as a roadblock in getting material uploaded.Thisistotheextentthat a paper published in an electronic proceedings at a conference was refused permission to be placed in the repository, for example, while there is a significant delay in deposited materials becoming visible, while librarians do a host of (mostly useful but just added value and not necessary) checking. Sigh, empire building and other bureaucratic nonsense getting in the way of the primary mission - scholarly communications.
(*) They have a deposit mandate but refuse to call it that. I'm not sure why, butthey insist on calling it a "policy". If one reads this policy, it's a mandate (albeit not an ideal one). For a University with an overly strong management team and a mangerialist approach, this unwillingness to call a spade a spade and a mandate a mandate, seems odd. Perhaps it's that this policy came from a bottom up development and not a senior management idea so they're unwilling to give it a strong name. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
