Open access to scholarly communications:…

Open access to scholarly communications: advantages, policy and advocacy :

“The Open Access (OA) movement regards OA modes of disseminating research as the unequivocal future of scholarly communication. Proponents of the open access movement itself have, over the last ten years, carried out systematic research to show how OA can tangibly benefit researchers, institutions and society at large. Even so, the number of research papers being uploaded to OA institutional repositories remains relatively low, frequently based on concerns which often contradict the facts. Policies for OA have been introduced to encourage author uptake, and these are also discussed here. Briefly delineating aspects of these phenomena, this paper will then move on to outline and discuss advocacy for OA in organisations, and whether this should be “downstream”, in the form of informational campaigns, or “upstream”, in the form of top-down change management. This paper seeks to make a contribution to these issues in the OA sphere, by brining into the debate strands from the literature of the sociology of science and management science that will hopefully elucidate aspects of author reactions to OA, and the perceived changes that its adoption gives rise to.”

URL : http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1419/

The Use of Institutional Repositories: T…

The Use of Institutional Repositories: The Ohio State University Experience :

“All institutional repositories face the issue of content recruitment. The fact that we speak of recruitment rather than collection development implies that non-librarians or
non-archivists have a major role in what goes into the repository and by extension, what is preserved. However, for many universities librarians and/or archivists set the selection policy for the institutional repository. This selective approach enables the library and archives to decide where to commit tight resources for long term preservation and maintenance. However, such policies have the potential to diminish a sense of ownership and participation among other units on campus, thus making the
repository more a library/archives project than an institutional initiative.

The goals for the institutional repository (IR) determine its content. The concept of the “Knowledge Bank” at the Ohio State University began with a high level University task
force on distance learning. After a year of work, this task force approached the then Director of Libraries, Joseph J. Branin, with a conceptual model for better managing and using the intellectual digital assets of the institution. This history of interest beyond the Libraries has influenced greatly the goals, policies, and management of the Knowledge Bank. The responsibility for getting content is a distributed one. From its inception the Knowledge Bank was seen as a project of the University and not of the Libraries. The role of the Libraries is one of knowledge management providing hardware, software, training and support to entities on campus wanting to make available their digital assets. Many collections originate with subject specialists from the Libraries and Archives but there are also many collections that originate outside the Libraries and Archives.

“In the summer of 2009 the staffs of the Libraries and the Archives discussed ways to increase collaboration between the two units and to tag content contributed by end-user
communities that is also within the scope of the Archives. An offshoot result was the desire to know more about the use of IR content. In this paper the author examines the use of digital materials that have been deposited in The Ohio State University (OSU) Knowledge Bank (KB) from three perspectives: 1) Are there differences in the frequency of use of materials identified by the archives as within scope of their
collections and all other materials in the Knowledge Bank? 2) Are there differences in the frequency of use among categories of sources for content? Categories of sources examined are academic units, research centers, support units and informal communities. 3) Are there differences in the frequency of use among different types of content? Type refers to the nature of the materials; text and moving-image are examples of two of the twenty types of materials examined.”

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2010/07/23/crl-134rl.short?rss=1

OA report in Southern Europe : “The cou…

OA report in Southern Europe :

“The countries of Southern Europe have unique characteristics as regards participation in the scientific communication process: they use languages that have a long tradition but are not the usual channel for scientific communication, they do not have a powerful publishing industry, they spend a smaller percentage of GDP on research and scientific data acquisition, etc. The present report arose from the activities of the Southern European Libraries Link (SELL),2 which represents library consortia of six countries (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey). Although this organization was created to exchange experiences and to act as a pressure group in relation to scientific and technical publishers, its founding charter also states clearly that one of its main goals is “to draw common policies towards information acquirement and provision”. In order to move towards common policies for open access to science, experts in each country were asked to provide reports on the situation of open access.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19429/

An analysis of open access schorlarly co…

An analysis of open access schorlarly communication Tanzanian public universities :

“The aim of this study was to investigate factors affecting the adoption of open access in research activities within Tanzanian public universities in order to device mechanisms of enhancing the use of this mode of scholarly communication. The study adopted the UTAUT model to formulate an open access research model comprising of six constructs and five moderators for guidance of this investigation. A triangulation approach for data gathering was adopted. In the first instance, a semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 398 respondents selected using the stratified random sampling from a population of 1088 university researchers from six public universities in Tanzania. The interview involving 63 policy makers and structured records review were also conducted to complement the questionnaire survey. The descriptive and binary logistic regression statistics of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) were used for data analysis. The study established that majority of the policy makers (90.5%) and researchers (72.1%) were aware of open access. Attitude, awareness, effort expectancy, and performance expectancy were established as the key determinants for researchers’ behavioural intention of open access usage while age, awareness, behavioural intention, facilitating conditions and social influence were found to significantly affect researchers’ actual usage of open access. It was concluded that researchers’ and policy makers’ general perceptions about open access were very positive signifying the acceptance of this mode of scholarly communication in the study area. Current poor research conditions and researchers’ low Internet self-efficacy such as inadequate information search and online publishing skills were cited as the main hindrances for researchers to use open access in scholarly communication. The study recommends institutionalisation of open access publishing in Tanzanian public universities and other similar research institutions so as to improve the dissemination of research output emanating from such institutions. Six areas for further research to establish more insights regarding the feasibility for open access development in the country are also recommended.”

URL : http://uir.unisa.ac.za/dspace/handle/10500/3684

Open Access Advocacy: Think Globally, Ac…

Open Access Advocacy: Think Globally, Act Locally

“While the open access movement is a global movement, University of Northern Colorado librarians acted locally and collaboratively to make changes to their scholarly communication system. Authors of this article describe how global advocacy affected their local, institutional open access activities that resulted in a library faculty open access resolution at University of Northern Colorado Libraries. This article is based on the “Advocating for Open Access on Your Campus” presentation at the CALC Summit on May 21, 2010”

URL : http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/99

The project NECOBELAC : “NECOBELAC stan…

The project NECOBELAC :
“NECOBELAC stands for NEtwork of COllaboration Between Europe and Latin American Caribbean (LAC) countries. This network is intended to spread know-how in:
• scientific writing
• open access publishing among all the stakeholders in scientific communication for the safeguarding of public health.
NECOBELAC aims to foster scientific and technical cooperation between Europe and LAC countries.

The project benefits from European and LAC experiences and take into account different socio-cultural scenarios. The health information needs of the areas involved contribute to stress the importance of creating awareness on document and data diffusion at different levels.

A network of institutions is being creating to collaborate in ad hoc training programmes in information production and dissemination, including technical and ethical issues. NECOBELAC promotes the coordination and effectiveness of the existing health-related information infrastructures in Europe and LAC countries to achieve a wider scale uptake of community engagement, embedding the use of open access methods within accepted working practices.”

URL : http://www.necobelac.eu/en/overview.php
The publications of the project : http://www.necobelac.eu/en/documents.php

This project is not new (it started in 2009), but I just discovered it