12 · Survey Results: Executive Summary
the disconnect between curation activities and the
research cycle (Pryor 2012) presents a barrier even
for publication-oriented disciplinary repositories.
The obvious exception to this is PubMed Central®,
which alone has the benefit of federal legislation for
content deposit. Dedicated services for knowledge
generation facilitate the success of subject repositories
(Armbruster and Romary 2009), and many reposi-
tories in this survey provide social networking and
community building tools as well as content to their
communities.
Disciplinary repositories are also similar to in-
stitutional repositories in that they both require a
significant financial investment to operate. A variety
of funding mechanisms, including external grant
funding, internal library budgets, one-time supple-
ments, endowments, and membership fees are em-
ployed alone or in combination to support these
initiatives. Many repositories included in this study
use unique funding models, but more than half of
the reporting libraries support their disciplinary re-
positories through their own budgets. This support
may contribute to a sense of confidence in repository
sustainability.
There were few meaningful trends identified
in the survey responses, and the low number of
library-managed repositories identified are best pre-
sented in a case study report format. Because of their
explicit focus on specialized communities and diverse
management models, the lack of identifiable trends
seems appropriate. Although disciplinary communi-
ties have a common dedication to broadening access
to their research outputs, they assemble a variety
of administrative models, collection development
strategies, and outreach mechanisms to accomplish
their goals.
Origins, Subjects, and Communities
While there are many reasons that a community
would undertake the effort of developing a disciplin-
ary repository, the primary reason reported is a de-
sire to alleviate the barriers of accessing the literature
and other resources within the discipline (see Figure
1). Centralizing resources and increasing their vis-
ibility support this inclination to remove barriers to
access. The Aphasiology Archive, for example, explic-
itly noted the need to create a central location for the
products of an annual disciplinary conference. A call
from the disciplinary community itself was frequently
reported, as was some evidence of community readi-
ness that a disciplinary resource was needed. In some
cases, the opportunity to leverage a funding source, or
Figure 1: Motivating Factors for the Development of a Disciplinary Repository
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2 2
0
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4
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desire to alleviate
barriers to accessing
literature or other
resources within
discipline
desire to centralize
distributed research
desire to increase
visibility of the
discipline's
scholarship
call from a
community to build a
centralized resource
expressions of
community readiness
opportunity to
leverage funding to
build a resource
call from a funder to
build a centralized
resource
call from a
professional society
to build a centralized
resource
other
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