The future of institutional repositories: The experts (and audience) debate

“Every university in the world can and should have its own open-access, OAI-compliant repository…” Suber 2006 Panel goals: Panel members, each of whom brings different expert knowledge about institutional repositories (IR), will take turns answering a set of provocative questions about the future of IR and challenges inherent in ongoing management of IR. Panelists will also be given an opportunity to respond to each others' comments and audience members will also contribute questions to the discussion. The debate style format will give audience members a rich understanding of the challenges related to IR The IR experts on this panel will debate the future of IR in academic institutions globally. Specific questions the moderator will pose to the panelists may include the following: 1 How will IRs come to vary across in 10 years in terms of presence or absence, but also in terms of the types of materials collected? (e.g., preprints versus local digital collections)? 2 What will the relationship between university libraries and disciplinary IRs be in 10 years? What will be the relationship between IR and scholarly societies, especially those which publish journals? 3 Under what circumstances will consortial or outsourced efforts become popular? 4 Under what circumstances should we expect increases in deposit activity among researchers and faculty? 5 Under what circumstances will IRs change the status of developing nation scholars and the typical flows of scholarly communications? 6 How would our investments in IR be assessed? From an economic/financial perspective? From a status perspective? From the promotion and tenure perspective? From an open access perspective? 7 How will IR be funded in the long term? Questions from the audience will be welcomed.