'Cannot predict now': the role of repositories in the future of the journal

Repositories, whether institutional or subject-based (disciplinary), typically provide open access to preprints and final manuscripts of accepted journal articles, among other material. While repositories generally do not perform all of the traditional activities of formal publication such as peer review, editing and formatting, and, except for a few exceptions, have struggled to attract researchers to deposit articles, it is fair to ask what impact such repositories have or might evolve to have on the academic journal. A handful of disciplinary repositories have become loci for scholarly dissemination and interaction. Academic libraries and other institutional-based hosts of repositories are slowly gaining experience in building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for participation in the scholarly publishing sphere. While a few libraries have begun to use this experience to offer support for publishing, others have developed programmes to raise awareness of ‘author rights’ and to encourage faculty advocacy within the scholarly publishing arena. This chapter provides an overview of the repository landscape and outlines some of the ways in which repositories may have an impact on the future of the academic journal. The title of this chapter refers to one of the responses given by Mattel’s Magic Eight Ball when asked to answer a yes or no question. With two rather momentous events in early 2008 – the mandate that research funded through the National Institutes of Health be deposited into PubMed Central and the unexpected mandate from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences that published articles be deposited into the institutional repository – it is clear that this rapidly changing landscape is subject to upheavals, reversals, and sudden surges forward. I should also make the disclaimer that I manage an institutional repository and thus have certain prejudices and hopes. I have tried to minimize these in the presentation of this discussion. The current repository landscape What is a repository? For the purposes of this discussion, a repository is a digital assets management system of some kind or a network of systems that allows for the deposit and subsequent distribution of digital files over the internet. The type of content contained in repositories can vary widely: published articles, conference papers and book chapters, as well as unpublished papers, technical reports, working papers, presentations, data sets, scholarly websites, dissertations and theses, digitized material from library holdings, audio, video, and other materials. Most of the discussion in this chapter will focus on repositories that contain preprints (papers not yet accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal) and postprints (papers accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal). These are sometimes collectively called e-prints (Bailey, 2006). Postprints may be the author’s final manuscript version (post peer review but before final formatting and editing) or the published version (with the formatting, pagination, and headers and footers of the journal). In most cases, the content of these repositories is available freely to anyone with access to the internet. Repositories typically collect content and some descriptive information either through direct deposit by researchers or through deposit by another on behalf of the researcher. Repositories thus fit into the ‘self-archiving’ model of open access, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘green’ road to open access (as opposed to the ‘gold’ road which is publishing in an open access journal) (Harnad et al, 2004). (Another form of self-archiving is to make the content openly available via a personal or departmental