Biz of Digital — An IR Workflow and its Ethics: Extending Services beyond the Privileged who can Afford to Pay APCs

The assignment was maddeningly simple: Increase the size of the institutional repository (IR). I suspect I looked as bewildered as the character David Rose in the hit television show Schitt’s Creek as his mother Moira instructed him to just “fold in the cheese” while making a recipe without any further guidance on how to accomplish such a goal.1 Though our electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) collection grew at a regular pace every semester, Texas Tech University (TTU) Libraries’ ThinkTech faculty research collection2 sat with just a couple hundred works (overwhelmingly by librarian authors) to show for its decade-long existence. Several of my library colleagues had been given the faculty research collection assignment before me, and all of them had experienced burnout attempting to make the slightest progress in pleading with faculty authors to self-archive their research articles. The anecdotal evidence at our university was that many of the faculty were resistant to open acces