Archives des mots-clés : open repositories

The Use of Institutional Repositories: T…

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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

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Comm…

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Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution :

“The Web is becoming humankind’s Cognitive Commons, where knowledge is created and curated collaboratively. We trace its origins from the advent of language around 300,000 years ago to a recent series of milestones to which the University of Southampton has contributed, helping Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA IR contents, and OA mandates to grow through the posting of the Subversive Proposal in 1994, the creation of CogPrints in 1997, the OpCit citation-linking project in 1999, the creation of the Eprints IR software in 2000, the Citebase citation-linking engine in 2001, the ROAR repository in 2002, the adoption and promotion of OA mandates (beginning with the ECS Southampton mandate, the world’s first, in 2002), the creation or the ROARMAP mandates registry in 2003, and the ongoing bibliography of the Open Access Impact Advantage since 2004.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21844/

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

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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…

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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

MePrints: Building User Centred Reposito…

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MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories :

“Over the last few years we have been working to reinvent Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key part of this work has been the development of an extension for the EPrints repository platform, called MePrints, that enables configurable profile pages, and works alongside existing extensions such as IRStats and SNEEP in order to give users live feeds about repository events that matter to them. Through these deployments we have discovered that more sophisticated profile pages give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit. This increases the visibility of the repository and encourages more deposits.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21716/

Trends in Large-Scale Subject Repositori…

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Trends in Large-Scale Subject Repositories :

“Noting a lack of broad empirical studies on subject repositories, the authors investigate subject repository trends that reveal common practices despite their apparent isolated development. Data collected on year founded, subjects, software, content types, deposit policy, copyright policy, host, funding, and governance are analyzed for the top ten most-populated subject repositories. Among them, several trends exist such as a multi- and interdisciplinary scope, strong representation in the sciences and social sciences, use of open source repository software for newer repositories, acceptance of pre- and post-prints, moderated deposits, submitter responsibility for copyright, university library or departmental hosting, and discouraged withdrawal of materials. In addition, there is a loose correlation between repository size and age. Recognizing the diversity of all subject repositories, the authors recommend that tools for assessment and evaluation be developed to guide subject repository management to best serve their respective communities.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november10/adamick/11adamick.html

Ktisis: Building an Open Access Institut…

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Ktisis: Building an Open Access Institutional and Cultural Repository :

“The unique value of cultural heritage has long been recognized together with the need for accurate and detailed information in order to preserve and manage cultural heritage material. Any organization whose mission includes promoting access to information is aware of the value of digital collections. For the last few years, digital technology has become very familiar in cultural organizations, providing enhanced access to the content. This paper gives information about Ktisis (http://ktisis.cut.ac.cy), the institutional repository of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT). Ktisis was developed by the Library and Information Services of CUT. The paper reflects on the technical issues that the Library had to face in the preparation of this project and the strategy that had to be defined in order to tackle them. Such issues, among others, include the file and metadata format, the design and implementation software, etc.”

URL : http://www.euromed2010.eu/e-proceedings/content/project/504.pdf