Traditional metrics are meaningless in the age of AI. This is the hardest story to tell both researchers and administrations without devaluing the work of the IR and open scholarship in general. The temptation is to play whack-a-mole with scraper traffic, implementing technical barriers to distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” access. But this approach both fails technically and misses the deeper problem: download metrics were never adequate measures of repository value, and AI scraping simply makes that inadequacy impossible to ignore. We should stop telling that story. This presentation argues that we need an entirely new set of stories to tell about what repositories (and by extension OA) do. Rather than trying to galvanize compromised metrics, I will propose frameworks for thought around how to talk about IR value that don’t depend on circulation, downloads, and outmoded ideas of engagement. In what is meant to be a participatory discussion, I ask: What stories can we tell about our value and the value of our material if we throw metrics to the wind? How can we reposition the work of digital publishing and also reposition the IR as a pedagogical tool to leverage in AI literacy discussions on campus? Drawing on experiences at Syracuse University, this presentation provides space for collective brainstorming as well as concrete strategies for shifting administrative and faculty conversations away from the download metric entirely—not by fixing it, but by telling better stories about what repositories actually do for institutions and scholarly communities.
