Étiquette : open repositories

Can Accessibility Liberate The “Lost Ark” of Scholarly Work?: University Library Institutional Repositories Are “Places of Public Accommodation”

Authors : Raizel Liebler, Gregory Cunningham

For any body of knowledge – an ark of power or a corpus of scholarship – to be studied and used by people, it needs to be accessible to those seeking information. Universities, through their libraries, now aim to make more of the scholarship produced available for free to all through institutional repositories.

However, the goal of being truly open for an institutional repository is more than the traditional definition of open access. It also means openness in a more general sense. Creating a scholarship-based online space also needs to take into consideration potential barriers for people with disabilities.

This article addresses the interaction between the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and university academic library based institutional repositories. This article concludes that institutional repositories have an obligation to comply with the ADA to make scholarly works available to potential users with disabilities.

For managers of institutional repositories, following the law is an opportunity to make scholarship even more widely available. University open access institutional repositories need to be accessible to existing and potential disabled users. However, there are no specific rules that university institutional repositories must follow to be compliant with the ADA’s “public accommodation” standard.

Accessibility is a changeable, moveable wall, consistently and constantly needing to be additionally inclusive of more – more technology and more users, regardless of disability or limitations.

Institutional repositories should not become the crated Ark of the Covenant with their secrets locked inside; instead, they should be as open as possible to all, sharing the scholarship inside.

URL : https://repository.jmls.edu/lawreview/vol52/iss2/2/

The institutional repository landscape in medical schools and academic health centers: a 2018 snapshot view and analysis

Authors : Daniel G. Kipnis, Lisa A. Palmer, Ramune K. Kubilius

Objective

This study uses survey research methods to gain a deeper understanding of the institutional repository (IR) landscape in medical schools and academic health centers.

Methods

Members of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) were surveyed about their IRs. The authors used a mixed-methods approach of a survey and qualitative content analysis to identify common themes.

Results

Survey results indicate that a large majority of responding medical schools and academic health centers have or are implementing an IR (35 out of 50, 70%). Of these, 60% (21 institutions) participate in an institution-wide IR rather than administer their own repositories.

Much of the archived content is grey literature that has not already been published, but the percentage of original content varies greatly among institutions. The majority (57.1%) of respondent institutions are not considering an open access policy or mandate. Most institutions (71.4%) reported that repository staff are depositing materials on behalf of users.

DSpace and bepress Digital Commons are the most popular repository platforms in this community. The planned enhancements that were most frequently reported were implementing a discovery layer and ORCID integration. The majority of respondents (54.3%) do not plan to migrate to a different platform in the foreseeable future.

Analysis of respondent comments identified the following themes: integration, redundancy, and reporting; alternatives and exploration; uniqueness; participation; and funding and operations.

Conclusions

The study results capture a view of the IR landscape in medical schools and academic health centers and help readers understand what services their peers have in place as well as their plans for future developments.

URL : The institutional repository landscape in medical schools and academic health centers: a 2018 snapshot view and analysis

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.5195%2Fjmla.2019.653

Open Access in developing countries – attitudes and experiences of researchers

Authors : Andy Nobes, Sian Harris

Open Access is often considered as particularly beneficial to researchers in the Global South. However, research into awareness of and attitudes to Open Access has been largely dominated by voices from the Global North.

A survey was conducted of 507 researchers from the developing world and connected to INASP’s AuthorAID project to ascertain experiences and attitudes to Open Access publishing.

The survey revealed problems for the researchers in gaining access to research literature in the first place. There was a very positive attitude to Open Access research and Open Access journals, but when selecting a journal in which to publish, Open Access was seen as a much less important criterion than factors relating to international reputation.

Overall, a majority of respondents had published in an Open Access journal and most of these had paid an article processing charge. Knowledge and use of self-archiving via repositories varied, and only around 20% had deposited their research in an institutional repository.

The study also examined attitudes to copyright, revealing most respondents had heard of Creative Commons licences and were positive about the sharing of research for educational use and dissemination, but there was unease about research being used for commercial purposes.

Respondents revealed a surprisingly positive stance towards openly sharing research data, although many revealed that they would need further guidance on how to do so. The survey also revealed that the majority had received emails from so called ‘predatory’ publishers and that a small minority had published in them.

URL : Open Access in developing countries – attitudes and experiences of researchers

Alternative location : https://zenodo.org/record/3464868

An Analysis of Search Results from Institutional Repository: Econpapers

Authors : Sidharta Chatterjee, Sujoy Dey, Mousumi Samanta

The goal of this research is to examine and explore information retrieval process of patrons who access institutional repositories. Repositories are generally hosted by public universities and run by volunteers which allow researchers to submit their draft versions of their manuscripts in pre-print forms.

In this study, we analyze using search methods to sort out research papers classified according to their levels of relevance that are available from a repository, and report the pattern of search results as our findings.

Our model employs search methods for searching Econpapers which utilize RePEc bibliographic data. Our analysis attempts to highlight how information seekers, scholars and researchers search relevant topics of their interest and how relevant such information is which is retrieved from an institutional repository.

This could aid researchers to modify their search processes to obtain better search results from their queries. The goal is to obtain the most relevant documents from online search.

We discuss about the methods employed to retrieve information which is most pertinent to the requirements of researchers. A broad implication could be better utilization of time and resources for efficient retrieval of the most relevant documents of interest that could be expected from searching institutional repositories.

URI : https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/id/eprint/96178

Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska

Author : Paul Royster

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy.

Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support.

Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time.

A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/382/

Open Access Routes Dichotomy and Opportunities: Consolidation, Analysis and Trends at the Spanish National Research Council

Authors : Mercedes Baquero-Arribas, Luis Dorado, Isabel Bernal

This article gives a comprehensive overview of recent Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) publications available in Open Access. With a focus on research articles from the last decade (2008–2018), this work aims to fill the gap in previous studies about publishing trends and impact monitoring of publications by researchers from the Spanish National Research Council.

Evolution and main trends of Green and Gold Open Access routes at CSIC are addressed through a close insight into DIGITAL.CSIC repository and institutional Open Access Publishing Support Programme.

The article draws on major conclusions at a time when an institutional Open Access mandate has just entered into force. The article also relates findings about performance of institutional Open Access Publishing Initiative and total volume of CSIC articles published in Open Access with an estimation of overall costs on article processing charges during these years.

Furthermore, the data serve as a basis to make preliminary considerations as to opportunities to move from a subscription-based model to one fully aligned with Gold Open Access publishing.

The data analyzed come from a variety of sources, including public information and internal records maintained by the CSIC E-resources Subscription programme, DIGITAL.CSIC and data retrieved from GesBIB, an internal, in-house development tool that integrates bibliographic information about CSIC publications as well as data from several external APIs, including Unpaywall, DOAJ and Sherpa Romeo.

URL : Open Access Routes Dichotomy and Opportunities: Consolidation, Analysis and Trends at the Spanish National Research Council

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030049