Having attempted a few times on http://techessence.info/node/104 to register to add a comment, without success, to Roy Tennant’s referral to my repository comparison, I am left to make one comment here.
Roy rightly comments that the picture is bigger than I have indicated here (my blog comparison is in fact a truncated rump of something I prepared 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 tied in with a repository in order to save on numbers of finger clicks to process 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. It does not handle peer-review, though there are thoughts afloat for integrating ICE with the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems software for 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. The University of Sydney has a workflow line between their IRMA research reporting system and their DSpace repository. Murdoch University is engaged in establishing a similar workflow between their IRMA system and Fedora 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
ICE: Integrated Content Management
Integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses
ASK-OSS post — courseware publishing system
More on Dr Peter Sefton’s blog
Metalogger 