Caveat Lector » Less cognitive load, faster deposit
Dorothea Salo makes a great argument for streamlining the submission process to upload things to institutional archives at Caveat Lector » Less cognitive load, faster deposit. I hope our own Texas Digital Library designers are on to this one. But she also identifies the licenses as a major area for improvement. That’s something I can help with, and I’ve made a mental note about it. We don’t need no stinkin’ licenses! At least not at the item level as concerns the relationship between the scholar and the library. She’s absolutely right. We do have to find a way to get Creative Commons license terms that match faculty preferences affixed to documents, however, but that seems like something that could be batched. But then I’m not a techie. Darn, I wish I were a techie.
She even goes so far as to suggest that maybe navigating submission processes should be offered as a service, at least in the backfile context. We are taking that approach to current submissions in a project with the School of Nursing here at UT Austin. We (Lexie, Roxanne and I) are working with the administration and several faculty members to create a process that would allow the School to submit faculty papers to PubMed Central quickly and efficiently. Faculty only publish one or two papers a year. A process you have to repeat that infrequently, especially one that can be a bit complicated at times, has to practically be “relearned” each time. On the other hand, if a departmental administrator deposits everyone’s papers as published (with required embargoes implemented for access rights), we create a more efficient process, one that faculty are more likely to take advantage of. Admittedly, there are faculty who will deposit their papers themselves and that’s fine. But there are also a lot of faculty who would be happy to hand the process off to someone else. In light of the possibility that the NIH policy suggesting submission to PubMed Central could become mandatory, if not this legislative session then sooner or later, exploring how to streamline submission is an important consideration now. Whether it’s PubMed Central or our institutional repository, there’s opportunity here to increase submissions and we ought to be taking advantage of it.
As for backfiles, she is right again. The need to batch-process these is critical. That’s the kind of thing that we can do and we can’t expect faculty to do in any effective or efficient way. Comments from our techies? Are we on this?
