Étiquette : open repositories

Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study

Author : Susan Boulton

This article explores the community reach and societal impact of institutional repositories, in particular Griffith Research Online (GRO), Griffith University’s institutional repository.

To promote research on GRO, and to encourage people to click through to the repository content, a pilot social media campaign and some subsequent smaller social media activities were undertaken in 2018.

After briefly touching on these campaigns, this article provides some reflections from these activities and proposes options for the future direction of social engagement and GRO in particular, and for institutional repositories in general.

This undertaking necessitates a shift in focus from repositories as a resource for the scholarly community to a resource for the community at large. The campaign also highlighted the need to look beyond performance metrics to social media metrics as a measure of the social and community impact of a repository.

Whilst the article is written from one Australian university’s perspective, the drivers and challenges behind researchers and universities translating their research into economic, social, environmental and cultural impacts are national and international.

The primary takeaway message is for libraries to take more of a proactive stance and to kick-start conversations within their institutions and with their clients to actively partner in creating opportunities to share research.

URL : Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.504

Enhancing Content Discovery of Open Repositories: An Analytics-Based Evaluation of Repository

Author : George Macgregor

Ensuring open repositories fulfil the discovery needs of both human and machine users is of growing importance and essential to validate the continued relevance of open repositories to users, and as nodes within open scholarly communication infrastructure.

Following positive preliminary results reported elsewhere, this submission analyses the longer-term impact of a series of discovery optimization approaches deployed on an open repository.

These approaches were designed to enhance content discovery and user engagement, thereby improving content usage. Using Strathprints, the University of Strathclyde repository as a case study, this article will briefly review the techniques and technical changes implemented and evaluate the impact of these changes by studying analytics relating to web impact, COUNTER usage and web traffic over a 4-year period.

The principal contribution of the article is to report on the insights this longitudinal dataset provides about repository visibility and discoverability, and to deliver robust conclusions which can inform similar strategies at other institutions. Analysis of the unique longitudinal dataset provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to the technical configuration of a repository can generate substantial improvements in its content discovery potential and ergo its content usage, especially over several years.

In this case study, COUNTER usage grew by 62%. Increases in Google ‘impressions’ (266%) and ‘clicks’ (104%) were a notable finding too, with high levels of statistical significance found in the correlation between clicks and usage ( t=14.30,df=11,p<0.0005 ).

Web traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar (GS) was found to increase significantly with growth on some metrics exceeding 1300%. Although some of these results warrant further research, the article nevertheless demonstrates the link between repository optimization and the need for open repositories to assume a proactive development path, especially one that prioritises web impact and discovery.

URL : Enhancing Content Discovery of Open Repositories: An Analytics-Based Evaluation of Repository

Original location : https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/8/1/9

From Meow to ROAR: Expanding Open Access Repository Services at the University of Houston Libraries

Authors : Annie Wu, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Santi Thompson, Bethany Scott, Anne Washington, Xiping Liu

INTRODUCTION

The rapidly changing scholarly communication ecosystem is placing a growing premium on research data and scholarship that is openly available. It also places a growing pressure on universities and research organizations to expand their publishing infrastructures and related services.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

To embrace the change and meet local demands, University of Houston (UH) Libraries formed a cross-departmental open access implementation team in 2017 to expand our open access repository services to accommodate a broad range of research products beyond electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

The result of this effort was the Cougar Research Open Access Repositories (Cougar ROAR), a rebranded and expanded portal to the UH Institutional Repository, and the UH Dataverse, which disseminates the full range of scholarly outputs generated at the University of Houston.

This article describes the team’s phased activities, including internal preparation, a campus pilot, rebranding, and a robust outreach program. It also details the team’s specific tasks, such as building the Cougar ROAR portal, developing ROAR policies and guidelines, enhancing institutional repository functionality, conducting campus promotional activities, and piloting and scaling a campus-wide open access program.

NEXT STEPS

Based on the pilot project findings and the resulting recommendations, the team outlined key next steps for sustainability of the UH Libraries’ open access services: continuation of the campus CV service, establishment of campus-wide OA policy, further promotion of Cougar ROAR and assessment of OA programs and services, and investment in long-term storage and preservation of scholarly output in Cougar ROAR.

URL : From Meow to ROAR: Expanding Open Access Repository Services at the University of Houston Libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2309

Checking Rights: An IR Manager’s Guide to Checking Copyright

Authors : Stewart C. Baker, Sue Kunda

Institutional repository (IR) managers often find themselves providing copyright guidance to faculty who wish to self-archive their published scholarship or to students depositing theses and dissertations. As IR managers may not be copyright experts themselves, making determinations and checking rights can be difficult and time-consuming.

This article is intended as a practical guide to describe common types of material that can be placed in an IR as well as potential copyright issues and other considerations for each type. Material types covered include book chapters, journal articles, conference proceedings, student papers, electronic theses and dissertations, research data sets, historical and archival materials, and oral histories.

Underlying issues such as copyright ownership, work made for hire, and the legal definition of publication are also discussed. For easier reference, the appendix contains a chart with brief descriptions of issues and resources.

URL : Checking Rights: An IR Manager’s Guide to Checking Copyright

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v3i3.8248

Collaborating Across Campus to Advance Open Access Policy Compliance

Authors : Andrew Johnson, Melissa Cantrell, Ryan Caillet

In 2018, the Data and Scholarly Communication Services Unit (DSCS) at the University of Colorado Boulder began implementing two open access (OA) policy workflows with the aim of increasing content in the institutional repository CU Scholar, expanding awareness of the campus OA policy that was passed in 2015, and decreasing the burden on researchers for participation in the policy.

DSCS leveraged collaborative relationships with other library departments and campus units in order to mobilize the data, infrastructure, procedures, and documentation to execute these workflows.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) workflow identifies existing open access publications by CU Boulder faculty and mediates deposit in order to make them available in CU Scholar. The liaison outreach workflow partners with liaison librarians to request from faculty preprints and author’s final manuscripts of publications in which the publisher version may have copyright restrictions.

At present, the DOAJ workflow has resulted in 754 articles deposited in CU Scholar, and the liaison outreach workflow has resulted in 91 articles deposited. Each of these workflows pose challenges that have required flexibility, experimentation, and clear communication between stakeholders.

This case study, which includes detailed descriptions of both open access policy workflows, initial results, and plans for future implementation, may serve as a guide for other institutions wishing to adopt and/or adapt institutional repository workflows and forge collaborative relationships to further open access initiatives in their local context.

URL : Collaborating Across Campus to Advance Open Access Policy Compliance

Alternative location : https://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol11/iss3/7

The International Open Access Movement and Its Status in Pakistan

Author : Arslan Sheikh

The objective of this study is to analyze the present status of the open access movement in Pakistan, identify challenges, and make recommendations for the effective use of this publishing model.

The article looks primarily at the open access movement in Asia, with special reference to Pakistan, India, and China. Findings show that, since the emergence of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001, the open access movement has developed rapidly at the international level. From the Pakistani perspective, gold open access, in which articles or monographs are freely available in their original form on publishers’ websites, developed quickly.

However, green open access, which relies on authors to self-archive their articles in institutional or subject repositories, has been relatively slow to develop. A lack of support from educational institutions, libraries, library associations, and funding bodies may explain the slow growth of green open access in Pakistan.

The author recommends that Pakistani universities, research institutions, and funding agencies develop open access policies, set up institutional repositories, and encourage publishing in open access journals and self-archiving in institutional repositories.

URL : https://preprint.press.jhu.edu/portal/sites/ajm/files/20.1sheikh.pdf

Repositories for academic products/outputs: Latin American and Chilean visions

Authors : Leandro Torres, Ricardo Hartley

Open access policies have been progressing since the beginning of this century. Important global initiatives, both public and private, have set the tone for what we understand by open access.

The emergence of tools and web platforms for open access (both legal and illegal) have placed the focus of the discussion on open access to knowledge, both for academics and for the general public, who finance such research through their taxes, particularly in Latin America.

This historically unnoticed discussion must, we believe, be discussed publicly, given the characteristics of the Latin American scientific community, as well as its funding sources.

This article includes an overview of what is meant by open access and describes the origins of the term, both in its philosophical sense and in its practical sense, expressed in the global declarations of Berlin and Bethesda.

It also includes the notion of open access managed (or not) by some reputable institutions in Chile, such as CONICYT (National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research) and higher education institutions reputed nationally, such as the Universdad de Chile and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Various Latin American initiatives related to open access (Scielo, Redalyc, among others) are described, as well as the presence of Chilean documents in those platforms.

The national institutional repositories are listed, as well as their current status and a discussion about what open access has implied in Latin America and its importance for the replicability of the investigations carried out locally.

Finally, we describe some governmental initiatives (mainly legislative) at the Latin American level and propose some recommendations regarding the promotion and implementation of repositories for the access to scientific data (for access and replication purposes) of the national research.

URL : Repositories for academic products/outputs: Latin American and Chilean visions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.19976.1