Will the parasite kill the host? Are institutional repositories a fact of life - and does it matter?

Abstract

Despite an apparent lack of enthusiasm among academics themselves, institutional repositories seem set to grow. Two studies have highlighted the possible damage which could be caused to journal subscriptions by widespread self-archiving. If journals were damaged financially, the scholarly community would lose some functions which it appears to value very highly: management of peer review; editing; selecting and collecting content into a convenient package. It would also suffer indirectly, if learned societies were no longer able to give the same support to their disciplines. However, publishers cannot afford simply to oppose these developments; rather, they need to work with the scholarly community to identify those functions which are of greatest importance to the community in the digital era, and then to work out how to deliver and market these.