Clifford Lynch has referred to the “unresolved” dialectic between a vision of institutional repositories as providing a framework for managing new forms of digital scholarship while nurturing innovation, and the view that repositories are primarily a mechanism to transition the traditional scholarly journal literature to open access models. The latter view, with its focus on filling the repository with Green OA articles, has so far fallen short of achieving its stated purposes. This is, in part, a result of Green OA’s parasitic relationship to subscription publishing, as well as the difficulty of persuading researchers that such deposits have value to them. Repositories that have been guided by the former view appear to be more successful in recruiting content and connecting the value provided by the repository to the varied missions of the members of the community it serves. With nearly two decades of repository implementation to guide us, can we achieve a synthesis that refocuses the energy of repository managers on a more complete vision for the value that repositories can provide?
