Archives des catégories : status

Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Agricultural Sciences. The Case of Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA) :
The Internet hasmade it easy to create digital collections and make them readily accessible. Academic and research institutions in developing countries generate an enormous amount of information. Most of the information exists as grey literature and is often difficult to collect, store, preserve and make accessible to users. In addition, developing countries are facing barriers in access to scholarly information due to financial constraints. One way of overcoming these problems is to promote open access (OA) and institutional repositories (IR). OA and IRs are indispensable for academic and research institutions in developing countries because access to adequate, timely and relevant information is imperative to improve research and development in the agricultural sector. This paper explores OA and IRs from practical perspectives. It describes the Botswana College of Agriculture Library’s IR as a case study, including lessons learned in establishing and running the IR.
URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/viewFile/127/94

Preserving Open Access Journals: A Literature Review :
This literature review addresses certain questions concerning the preservation of free, born-digital scholarly materials. It covers recent thinking on the current state of preservation efforts of born-digital materials; the range of actors involved in significant preservation initiatives of these artefacts; the perceived barriers preventing open access materials from benefiting from existing preservation efforts; initiatives that may enable local, small-scale preservation efforts to be undertaken; the challenges and opportunities posed to preservation by new models of scholarship such as open access datasets, reference sharing and annotation, collaborative authoring and community peer review. The review identifies representative international collaborative preservation initiatives, describes their goals and results, their specific preservation strategie, and their applicability to the preservation of born digital open access materials.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18414/

Free and open scholarship in the internet age :
Describes an action research project on scholarly communication in early stages. Research sites include the Open Access Journal Supports in Canada research team, E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information, Scholarly and Research Communication (a new open access journal), and Stream, the SFU School of Communication graduate student open access journal. Methods include action research, economic and discourse analysis.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18406/