Building the Digital Repository at 3:23am

Here are the challenges-There is a large body of scholarly work produced by the Brockport faculty - how do we:

• identify all the citations?
• get permission from faculty to post their work?
• find out from publishers if and in what format we are allowed to post?
• come up with the article in publishable format?

Right now we have 1204 identified in the initial round of harvesting. Of those, 105 are eligible to be posted in publisher pdf (the ideal format). Please note this is less than 10% of the total. From here, we have to get the faculty's permission to upload. What about the other 1100? About half of those we do not know what the publisher allows, if anything. They will have to be individually searched, perhaps contacted, and then permission requested from faculty. Or perhaps, we should get the permission from the faculty first, so we don't waste time with the publisher, just to have a faculty member say no. (Do they ever say no?)

Maybe another strategy would be to identify a prolific author from each department, and hope they will approve a publishable article, as well as provide us their CV, so we can work person by person. Then, they could act as a champion in their department, to encourage others to work with us. The biggest obstacle that I see is that you have to balance faculty permission gathering with publisher permission gathering. Some publishers (the minority) will allow the formatted pdf from the journal to be posted. Others will only allow preprints (pre-peer review), or post prints (peer reviewed, but not journal formatted). Preprints have little value, and although post prints are somewhat better, they are potentially hard to come by. I know from my days in ILL that faculty often don't even have copies of their published works, so expecting them to have copies of their working papers might be expecting too much.

Ah, workflow issues. And did I mention the challenge of collating the citations and checking for uniqueness? But that is another post, I guess.