Science, institutional archives and open access: an overview and a pilot survey on the Italian cancer research institutions

Background

The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) refers to a movement started around the ’90s to guarantee free access to scientific information by removing the barriers to research results, especially those related to the ever increasing journal subscription prices.

This new paradigm has reshaped the scholarly communication system and is closely connected to the build up of institutional repositories (IRs) conceived to the benefit of scientists and research bodies as a means to keep possession of their own literary production.

The IRs are high-value tools which permit authors to gain visibility by enabling rapid access to scientific material (not only publications) thus increasing impact (citation rate) and permitting a multidimensional assessment of research findings.”

Methods

A survey was conducted in March 2010 to mainly explore the managing system in use for archiving the research finding adopted by the Italian Scientific Institutes for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care (IRCCS) of the oncology area within the Italian National Health Service.

They were asked to respond to a questionnaire intended to collect data about institutional archives, metadata formats and posting of full-text documents. The enquire concerned also the perceived role of the institutional repository DSpace ISS, built up by the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Italian National Institute of Health, ISS), based on a XML scheme for encoding metadata.

Such a repository aims at acting as a unique reference point for the biomedical information produced by the Italian research institutions. An in-depth analysis has also been performed on the collection of information material addressed to patients produced by the institutions surveyed.

Results

The survey respondents were 6 out of 9. The results reveal the use of different practices and standard among the institutions concerning: the type of documentation collected, the software adopted, the use and format of metadata and the conditions of accessibility to the IRs.

Conclusions

The Italian research institutions in the field of oncology are moving the first steps towards the philosophy of OA. The main effort should be the implementation of common procedures also in order to connect scientific publications to researchers curricula.

In this framework, an important effort is represented by the project of ISS aimed to set a common interface able to allow migration of data from partner institutions to the OA compliant repository DSpace ISS.

URL : http://www.jeccr.com/content/29/1/168

OA Repositories: the Researchers’ Point…

OA Repositories: the Researchers’ Point of View :

“Open access has become very popular over the last few years. It is evident in the increasing number of scientific journals being made available free to readers on the Internet, and the increasing number of institutions that are building repositories to house the electronic versions of open-access articles written by scholars at their institutions. The academic and research communities seem to support this movement and their right to obtain easy and free access to publicly funded scientific information. But, how often do researchers actually use such free publications as readers and how often do they choose to publish in an OA journal or institutional repository? How trustworthy do they consider those journals and repositories? Would they prefer that OA repositories be more selective? Although today about 10-15 percent of scientific peer-reviewed journals are OA] and there are several declarations encouraging institutions to build OA repositories, there is still a long way to go, especially where OA repositories are concerned. This research is trying to determine why acceptance and growth of open access, particularly open access repositories, has been so slow.”

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.304

The York Digital Journals Project: Strat…

The York Digital Journals Project: Strategies for Institutional Open Journal Systems Implementations :

“Embarking on a university wide journal-hosting initiative can be a resource-intensive undertaking. Providing such a service, however, can be equally rewarding, as it positions the library as both partner and colleague in the publishing process. This paper discusses ideas and strategies for institutional journal hosting gleaned over two years by the York Digital Journals Project. Suggestions for startup including policy considerations and service models are discussed. Ideas for advertising and networking are explored as well as the question of project sustainability.”

URL : http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/handle/10315/4517

Electronic Publishing, Knowledge Sharing and Open Access: A New Environment for Political Science

In this article, we present an overview of the major changes occurring in electronic publishing, with a focus on open access. We shall argue that the notion itself of publication is undergoing a deep transformation, as it is no longer the monopoly of a limited number of specialised companies and institutions, but, through the web, it has become an option available to an infinite number of collective and individual actors.

URL : http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eps/journal/v9/n1s/abs/eps201035a.html

Open Access repositories and journals fo…

Open Access repositories and journals for visibility: Implications for Malaysian libraries :

“This paper describes the growth of Open Access (OA) repositories and journals as reported by monitoring initiatives such as ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), Open DOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Directory of Web Ranking of World Repositories by the Cybermetrics Laboratory in Spain and published literature. The performance of Malaysian OA repositories and journals is highlighted. The strength of OA channels in increasing visibility and citations are evidenced by research findings. It is proposed that libraries champion OA initiatives by making university or institutional governance aware; encouraging institutional journal publishers to adopt OA platform; collaborating with research groups to jumpstart OA institutional initiatives and to embed OA awareness into user and researcher education programmes. By actively involved, libraries will be free of permission, licensing and archiving barriers usually imposed in traditional publishing situation.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=960

Global visibility of Asian universities’ Open Access institutional repositories

This paper highlights the current state of open access repositories of Asian universities. It describes their characteristics in terms of types, contents, disciplines, language, technical and operational issues, and policy.

The web performance of Asian institutional repositories as reflected through global visibility and impact of the repositories in Open Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR), is also examined; as well as the performance of Asian top-ranked universities in the archiving and sharing their research output through institutional repositories, based on the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR).

Findings signify Japan as the biggest contributor of Asian repositories, followed by India and Taiwan. An investigation of the status of these universities revealed that out of the 191 Asian organizational institutional repositories identified in this study, only 48 are listed in the Top 400 RWWR.

This implies that only 12% of Asian institutional repositories are visible and incorporate good practices in their web publication as extracted from the quantitative webometrics indicators used by the ranking. Out of these 48 institutions, 29 are among the Asian Top 200 universities.

However, only 14 of these 29 universities were ranked top 100 in the RWWR. It is revealed that some of the top ranked universities in Asia are not actively contributing to the open access movement.

It is suggested that if the web performance of an institutional repository of a research institution is below the expected position, the university authorities should reconsider their web policy to increase the volume and quality of their intellectual output / research publications through institutional repositories.

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=957

Librarians’ role as change agents for i…

Librarians’ role as change agents for institutional repositories: A case of Malaysian academic libra :

“The primary reason for establishing an institutional repository is to increase the visibility of the institution’s research output by making it Open Access. Academic libraries are becoming very involved in managing electronic scholarly products and participating in the evolving scholarly communication process through institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories can make room for easier access to universities’ research output, unfortunately it is not fully developed in some academic institutions. The origin of this problem is that there are known instances where librarians in-charge of institutional repository are unaware of their roles, and are unskilled in implementing the institutional repository. This paper describes a study conducted on the roles of librarians in the deployment and content recruitment of institutional repositories in eight (8) universities in Malaysia. Sample for this study are librarians who are involved with the development and implementation of institutional repository in their respective universities. The study reveals that the act of collecting materials for depositing is mainly done by librarians rather than the authors and researchers. Providing training sessions, holding meetings in departments and faculties, and also linking of the institutional repository website from the university and faculties’ website have the highest rank in librarians’ approach to promote the institutional repository. The paper also discusses the process of depositing, motivation factors, roles, marketing and benefits of institutional repository that will have reference value for the librarians who desire to embark on an institutional repository.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=961