Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers

This study investigated factors that motivate or impede faculty participation in self-archiving practices – the placement of research work in various open access (OA) venues, ranging from personal Web pages to OA archives.

The author’s research design involves triangulation of survey and interview data from 17 Carnegie doctorate universities with DSpace institutional repositories.

The analysis of survey responses from 684 professors and 41 telephone interviews identified seven significant factors: (a) altruism – the idea of providing OA benefits for users; (b) perceived self-archiving culture; (c) copyright concerns; (d) technical skills; (e) age; (f) perception of no harmful impact of self-archiving on tenure and promotion; and (g) concerns about additional time and effort.

The factors are listed in descending order of their effect size. Age, copyright concerns, and additional time and effort are negatively associated with self-archiving, whereas remaining factors are positively related to it.

Faculty are motivated by OA advantages to users, disciplinary norms, and no negative influence on academic reward. However, barriers to self-archiving – concerns about copyright, extra time and effort, technical ability, and age – imply that the provision of services to assist faculty with copyright management, and with technical and logistical issues, could encourage higher rates of self-archiving.

URL : http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123585469/abstract

The ADMIRAL Project: A Data Management Infrastructure for Research Across the Life sciences

ADMIRAL is a project of the Image Bioinformatics Research Group and is funded by the JISC. The purpose of the ADMIRAL Project is to create a two-tier federated data management infrastructure for use by life science researchers, that will provide services (a) to meet their local data management needs for the collection, digital organization, metadata annotation and controlled sharing of biological datasets; and (b) to provide an easy and secure route for archiving annotated datasets to an institutional repository, The Oxford University Data Store, for long-term preservation and access, complete with assigned Digital Object Identifiers and Creative Commons open access licences.

URL : https://web.archive.org/web/20110828062449/http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/ADMIRAL

Impact of Open Access on stem cell research: An author co-citation analysis

We explore the impact of Open Access (OA) on stem cell research through a comparison of research reported in OA and in non-OA publications. Using an author co-citation analysis method, we find that (a) OA and non-OA publications cover similar major research areas in the stem cell field, but (b) a more diverse range of basic and medical research is reported in OA publications, while (c) biomedical technology areas appear biased towards non-OA publications.

It appears that OA helps maintain diversity of research in this highly interdisciplinary field, and hence contributes to a healthy balance of scientific advancement.
URL : http://conference.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-strotmann-en.pdf

The creation of an information repository: a perspective from Mozambican higher education sector

Open Access Repositories are seen as an opportunity for knowledge exchange and scholarly communication, especially in a country like Mozambique, where the spread and access to information is still very poor and there are few journals where the researchers and academic staff can publish the results of their work.

Due to this situation, the common sense is that there is not research activity in the country, even in the higher education institutions. In order to change this vision and taking advantage of the technology available, a group of university librarians has decided that, even if they are few, it is possible to present the research results which have been still hidden within the walls of each university, by establishing a joint Open Access information repository.

The paper aims to describe the project of establishing an information repository in Mozambique, the implications of having a joint project, the challenges for getting contents, bearing in mind all the issues related to copyright, and also the inclusion of other institutions in the project.

Also, it looks at the impact of the repository in the academic and research community within the country and some strategies that have to be defined in order to increase the readership on the repository contents, either by Mozambican users, or from other parts of the world.

URL : http://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/138-issak-en.pdf

NOPR (NISCAIR online periodical repository): NISCAIR initiatives

The development of technology has brought enormous opportunity to bring the results of research primarily to all through digital communication – anyone, anywhere and anytime.

IT is playing an important role in today’s world and these technologies are meant to help the customers/clientele. To keep pace with the changing world, libraries are also using these technologies to upgrade themselves, improving services, reaching each and every corner and making available resource to reach its users and Institutional Repository is an emerging concept and playing an important role in preserving the intellectual capital of the academic and research institutions.

Now every institution wants to launch its IR and one such initiative is done by NISCAIR by launching NOPR.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/14487/