Roy rightly comments that the picture is bigger than I have indicated here (my blog comparison is in fact a much abbreviated and highly edited report I wrote for another institution to assist them to investigate one specific issue), but I would suggest that his illustration of Digital Commons extra capabilities vis a vis DSpace is one example of many factors that seem to me to cloud decision making among some institutions.

A peer view/publishing system no doubt will serve the interests of many universities, and anything that can save academics or their support staff quantities of keyboard and mouse clicks to process their publishing and reporting and other administrative work is a good thing.

But a scholarly publishing workflow system does not have to be the preserve of a single enterprise solution. One example from Australia: the Integrated Content Environment for Research and Scholarship (ICE-RS) is a Federal Government funded project to create a collaborative authoring and publishing (cum repository deposit!) tool that is open-source, and capable of integration with repository systems. But it does not handle peer-review.

Moreover, the same number of clicks for authors can be reduced for repository ingest purposes where there can be collaboration and integration with a university’s research office and reporting system. Some universities have been able to have current papers (including preprints) deposited in their repositories directly from a research system. Murdoch University is engaged in establishing such a workflow between their IRMA research system and VITAL repository. The University of Sydney has a similar arrangement in production between IRMA and their DSpace repository.

Further, Roy’s allusion to the “highly popular DSpace” repositories may be seen as further testimony to the success and sustainability of open-source solutions in a world of highly competitive and highly expensive enterprise products.

More on ICE-RS:

Australian govt archive news release

Slide presentation

ICE: Integrated Content Management

Integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses

ASK-OSS post — courseware publishing system

Why ICE works

ICE developers blog

More on Dr Peter Sefton’s blog