ARL 226: Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age

Lynch, Clifford A. “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.

One of the biggest problems in academic and research libraries is the increasing cost of professional journals. All subscription formats are going up but the movement to electronic makes it worse by requiring the library essentially pay twice for the same content.

At the same time, while digital versions are much more convenient presently, archiving is problematic, to say the least. Often, when a journal is canceled, the institution also loses electronic access to the content it has paid for. If they don’t have paper copies, they lose the content completely.

Institutional publication and archiving is an idea gaining support as an alternative to the current commercial process.