Minutes of November 20, 2008 Meeting

Present:

Boyle, Frusciano, Hoffman, Kuchi, Marker, Niessen (recorder), Triggs, Womack

1. SPARC Institutional Repositories conference in Baltimore (Marker)

Attendees were mostly developers and repository managers, but also vendors (eg DSpace, Digital Commons), university librarians. The program was driven by SPARC, including representation by SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan. There were no breakouts, but one general session. A recurrent theme was outreach. Marketing came up a lot: how to speak to your users about repositories. The conference site has papers and podcasts.

The speakers identified the following emerging trends:

1. Moving away from the do it yourself model, toward do it for me. Do it yourself doesn't work; instead, the IR should undertake the scanning on behalf of the author. We can't ask authors to navigate the permissions quagmire, either
2. Provide all kinds of service, not just putting up articles but also monographs, etc.
3. Combining content from multiple institutions. This might include jazz at IJS, New Hampshire, and Columbia

In Europe, EU funding is going to require deposit in an IR with standards for harvesting.

Some publishers are saying they won't permit depositing unless it is mandated by the home university or the funding agency.

Marker spoke to a colleague whose institution harvested all its faculty's articles from PMC and placed them in the IR, without asking permission. A decision to do this would have to come at the university level!

2. RUcore discussion in November 20 LRC/USC joint meeting (Marker, Niessen)

Marker and Niessen gave presentations at the joint meeting under the heading RUcore and Selector Involvement. They emphasized that RUcore is ready to accept deposits and it is not too early for liaisons to communicate this to their constituencies and, most of all, to gather insights about how it may be useful to them. Marker answered a series of questions about the deposit process, and Niessen presented a simplified decision tree about authors' rights to illustrate his experiences in depositing his own articles. There was interest in a "talking points" resource for liaisons.

3. RUcore Policy Discussion at the November 7 RULF Meeting (all)

There was sentiment in favor of including undergraduate essays in RUcore. We should contact SAS Honors and Aresty. FAQs should clarify the process. Advisors would need to secure students' permission for deposit.

RULF also raised some concern about the open-endedness of the term "collaborations" in the policy document. CSC did not see the problem, believing that collaborations are important and the document should not be overly detailed or prescriptive.

4. Planning for a Rutgers Scholarly Communication forum in 2009 (Boyle)

Boyle reported that the RU Libraries Advisor Council expressed interest in a campus forum on scholarly communication, possibly in Spring 2009. Possible themes for such a forum, as raised by RULAC:

1. Tenure and peer review. There should be more openness to alternative publication formats.
2. Digital humanities. For instance, how do we datamine EEBO?
3. Copyright and authors' rights
4. The cost of information
5. How to increase the impact of your scholarship

A Steering Committee for the forum is anticipated that might include VP Pazzani, Dean Greenberg, and Dean Schement. CSC was asked to come up with a potential title for the forum. It came up with two alternative titles:
Scholarship in a Changing Environment: How Should the Change be Reflect the Digital Transformation and
Transforming Scholarly Communication; Transforming Scholarship?

Goals of the forum would be a discussion of tenure and promotion, moving Rutgers toward a Harvard statement, and reflections on the significance of digital dissertations