Praxis Commons

Institutional repositories have taken a few knocks in the six years since Cliff Lynch's “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” appeared in ARL 226 [4]. But I'm concerned more here about the upcoming crashes than the bumps we hit on the road to more settled standardizations. 

Proprietary software vendors often try to finesse the open source access promise by offering small customizable ports of entry into their code, usually as application program interfaces or APIs.

For a long time, it has been argued that the market, as represented by proprietary software solutions, is more responsive to the needs of users, to new requirements and to innovations. Open source is now seen as a diverse infrastructure of solutions each in competition while also free to borrow from each other.

The ends and the means of institutional repositories are one and the same. The infrastructure that supports open access needs to be open itself.

A quick glance at the most recent statistics produced by the OpenDOAR Directory of Open Access Repositories suggests that the vast majority of existing institutional repositories are currently built upon open source software.

Twitter's API drives 20 times more ­traffic to the service than its own website does, and Twitter's web market share passed that of social news site Digg in January. Third parties using Twitter's API have developed a huge range of services and applications that have helped drive Twitter's growth spurt.

The inordinately complicated and refined nature of current “assessment and evaluation”—outcomes, expectations, rubrics, learning skills, achievement chart categories, assessment guidelines, and so on—partly explains why administrators are reluctant to tolerate failure: too much methodology, expertise and commitment has been invested for anything but success

When this becomes a systemic culture, the traditional and arguably natural principle of education is subverted: the school now finds itself adapting increasingly to its students. A school does this when, for example, it allows late assignments to go unpenalized, plagiarized essays to be rewritten, absolute deadlines to be repeatedly extended, unsubmitted work to be accepted after the semester is over, and obvious failures to be overturned. Students are quick to sense when those ultimately accountable for enforcing the standards of the school, its administrators, are soft; that so few students take advantage of this is a wonder.