MIT's Superarchive

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By Sally Atwood

01/01/2001

Reaching Out to Others

Having a digital superarchive makes MIT's intellectual output available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, but the greatest value of DSpace may be in revolutionizing the way research is communicated and disseminated.

Even in this era of digital media, the vast majority of scholarly material at most universities goes unshared. But once DSpace is up and running, it will serve as a portal not only to MIT research, but also to research at partnering institutions. To test this possibility, MIT has entered into a federation with five other research institutions-Columbia University, Ohio State University, and the universities of Washington, Toronto, and Rochester-which will become the early adopters from outside the Institute. More than 30 other institutions have lined up to install DSpace on their campuses once the system proves itself.

The implications for such collaborations are mind-boggling. Researchers who want to stay current with their colleagues' work will no longer have to wait for conferences or journal publications. Discussions of new ideas can flow unimpeded. James Neal, vice president for information services at Columbia says, "DSpace gives us a vision and a well-developed strategy. It gives us a new tool for our faculty and colleagues to communicate around the world."

At Cornell University, Robert Cooke, dean of the faculty, says that his school will bring DSpace to campus by the end of this year. "I think the archival function of DSpace will be wildly successful," he says. "Faculty have collected huge amounts of data that are not publicly accessible. We are genuinely impressed with DSpace. They've done things right."

DSpace is also hailed as the beginning of a shift on the scholarly publishing front. Many journals refuse to publish important work that has appeared in any public arena, including an institutional repository or a Web site. But the "general trend is moving toward allowing a copy to be online on a Web site or in an archive," says Margret Branschofsky, the faculty liaison on the DSpace project team. MIT team project members and the advocacy group Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as well as representatives at many institutions, hope that changes will come to the traditional publishing system as digital archives proliferate. "We don't think of repositories replacing journals," says Rick Johnson, enterprise director of the coalition. "In the near term, they are complements." But there is no doubt they would compete as well. Copyright agreements offered by journals will have to change, allowing faculty to retain the right to archive their papers in institutional repositories.

Having met the challenges of creating a digital archive, MIT and HP will continue to improve DSpace through their new metadata project and the federation with other institutions.

For Cornell's Cooke, MIT's attention to the needs of its faculty, the open architecture of DSpace, the federation design, and its decentralized nature comprise "a genius stroke." DSpace, he says, is "destined to fundamentally reshape and enhance the way research universities and their faculties function."