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Various suggestions have been made about the correct response to the challenges facing scholarly publication in the current situation. One radical measure is to abandon the current journal system entirely, and let scholars and investigators “repatriate” their work. Repatriate means, bring back home. In this view, researchers should create, manage and maintain their work on their own servers, either personal equipment or that belonging to their insitution.

The term “institutional repository” (IR) has been used to describe such an arrangement, and this description has gathered general acceptance. Networked systems make possible the general and almost immediate dissemination of scholarly reports over the web. Journals, editors, boards and the whole apparatus of the current publishing structure disappear. The emergence of various forms of metadata ( description schemes), and of protocols for sharing this information over networks, make the location and retrieval of research results possible, even easy.

In an IR-based publishing model, authors retain copyright. Free and immediate world-wide distribution of research results would aid scientific and technological progress. Many of the complaints about the equity and justice of the current journal model would vanish. The researcher’s institution would re-assert its importance as the intellectual center of the discovery process, and the contributions of each investigators would be made known more rapidly. At least, that’s what the IR advocates say.

Other observers are not so sure, and their hesitations rest in part on confusions about what an IR is, and who is responsible for it. Some definitions of IR are rather minimal, and imply little more than a couple of old servers in an outbuilding someplace, holding the odd preprint or report. An IR of this kind is more an adjunct to conventional academic publishing, with low demands for resources and low expectations. Other definitions call for the IR to maintain in perpetuity, the “total intellectual output” of the organization in question. If this is taken seriously, the limits zoom to include all lectures and notes, all “learning objects” prepared, every concert or rehearsal in the School of Music, every guest lecture, every case and all briefs and all drafts of all briefs in the moot court of the School of Law, and so on, archived and made accessible, now and forever, across all technology changes. An IR of this kind is quite a different creation, with very much more serious outlays involved and perhaps whole new campus agencies created and staffed to maintain its operations.

Special software packages, designed to help an institution set up an IR have been offered by various sources. Dspace from MIT is one of the most widely used. BePress (Berkeley Electronic Press) from the University of California and SHERPA in the UK are other examples of software systems which can be used in creating an IR.

Prof. Miriam Drake of Emory University has a good summary of the IR scene:
Hidden Treasures

The Association of Research Libraries has a position paper by Clifford Lynch, describing the maximalist IR concept:
Report 226

Morag Mackie of the University of Glasgow Libraries describes efforts to motivate faculty into using an IR:
Populating an IR