Librarians Role In Dealing With Irs And Open Access

Abstract

The article presents a brief overview of Open Acess, IRs and Librarians role. Universities and other institutions can have complex motives for establishing IRs; providing free access to all IR materials is often one of them. Open access initiatives may focus on technical support costs of IRs, while librarians may also be concerned with various other problems such as staff and user training and support, IR advocacy and promotion, metadata creation and maintenance, and long-term digital preservation etc. Consequently, we can see IRs as cheap to support and quick to implement, while as librarians we can take a more cautious approach that takes in to consideration other constraints and the library maxim that it is easier to establish a new service than to stop offering one. IRs are best seen as an enabling technology for open access and as their best hope for establishing permanent repositories.