Via Open Access News, I found Stuart Macdonald’s Notes from Edinburgh Repository Fringe where he gives us his notes on Dorothea Salo’s keynote for the conference.

Presumably Dorothea will blog about it herself, and eventually put it in MINDS, but I’m pleased to read the coverage on the day of the show.

I was interested to read this from Macdonald’s notes on Salo:

She highlighted the fact that self archiving doesn’t have a management component, she’s ‘tired at watching good code fly past’ i.e open utilities that could be utilised within the repository environment but aren’t.

So rather than adhering to an opinion of the IR that ‘everybody knows they all fail!’ lets re-think, re-innovate, re-invent the IR as a suite of services and solutions.

On the same day I read this in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

…Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables authors to structure and annotate their documents according to formats that publishers and digital archives require. The articles can then be converted easily to formats that facilitate their digital storage and preservation. The company is offering the new software free to licensed users of Word and other Microsoft products.

That from an article entitled Microsoft Rolls Out Publishing and Research Tools for Academics. That article also notes that Microsoft is working on something called the “Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007″ and further reveals that,

…Microsoft has developed other new tools, now in testing, such as one that helps institutions build digital repositories for research output. The company has also set up an “e-journal service” that aids in self-publishing of online-only journals and other documents, such as conference proceedings. And its Research Information Centre, developed with the British Library, helps researchers collaborate throughout a project, from seeking money to collecting information and managing data and research papers.

Dorothea has been saying all along that the tools for open access repositories aren’t functional for authors and aren’t functional for archivists. At first it seems like an article about a Microsoft product that could facilitate Open Access belongs in the Onion rather than the Chronicle. When you think about it, though, most of our faculty are using Microsoft Office products every day to do their research and prepare their work for publication. Having MS tools available to researchers and writers could be very appealing.

I’m less optimistic about a Microsoft repository, and wonder if institutions might find themselves facing a dilemma between, on the one hand buying a Microsoft product that integrates with existing faculty practices but comes with the usual Microsoft baggage, and on the other hand, sticking with open source platforms that are more in the spirit of open access, but fail to present faculty with a viable workflow.