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Sustainability: Scholarly Repository as an Enterprise

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The expanding need for an open information sharing infrastructure to promote scholarly communication led to the pioneering establishment of arXiv.org, now maintained by the Cornell University Library. To be sustainable, the repository requires careful, long term planning for services, management and funding. The library is developing a sustainability model for arXiv, based on voluntary contributions and the ongoing participation and support of 200 libraries and research laboratories around the world. The sustainability initiative is based on a membership model and builds on arXiv’s technical, service, financial and policy infrastructure.

Five principles for sustainability drive development, starting with deep integration into the scholarly community. Also key are a clearly defined mandate and governance structure, a stable yet innovative technology platform, systematic creation of content policies and strong business planning strategies. Repositories like arXiv must consider usability and lifecycle alongside values and trends in scholarly communication. To endure, they must also support and enhance their service by securing and managing resources and demonstrating responsible stewardship.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.00322

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UNT Libraries Open Access Fund Research Report …

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

UNT Libraries: Open Access Fund Research Report :

« This report discusses Open Access (OA) funds created at universities in order to assist faculty authors with Article Processing Charges (APCs). Building on the research initiatives of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), thirty North American universities’ OA fund initiatives were reviewed on their sponsors, eligibility, reimbursement criteria, and stipulations related to the fund. In addition, fifteen OA journal funding models and twelve hybrid journal funding models were reviewed on their average APCs and their licensing policies. This report serves as a framework for building upon emerging best practices and outlining possible approaches and considerations for the University of North Texas. »

URL : http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc111007/

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Supporting Digital Scholarship Bibliographic Control Library Cooperatives and…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Supporting Digital Scholarship: Bibliographic Control, Library Cooperatives and Open Access Repositories :

« Research libraries have entered an era of discontinuous change—a time when the cumulated assets of the past do not guarantee future success. Bibliographic control, cooperative cataloguing systems and library catalogues have been key assets in the research library service framework for supporting scholarship. This chapter examines these assets in the context of changing library collections, new metadata sources and methods, open access repositories, digital scholarship and the purposes of research libraries. Advocating a fundamental rethinking of the research library service framework, the chapter concludes with a call for research libraries to collectively consider new approaches that could strengthen their roles as essential contributors to emergent, network-level scholarly research infrastructures. »

URL : http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/16084/

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Scientists who engage with society perform better academically…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Scientists who engage with society perform better academically :

« Most scientific institutions acknowledge the importance of opening the so-called ‘ivory tower’ of academic research through popularization, industrial collaboration or teaching. However, little is known about the actual openness of scientific institutions and how their proclaimed priorities translate into concrete measures. This paper gives an idea of some actual practices by studying three key points: the proportion of researchers who are active in wider dissemination, the academic productivity of these scientists, and the institutional recognition of their wider dissemination activities in terms of their careers. We analyze extensive data about the academic production, career recognition and teaching or public/industrial outreach of several thousand of scientists, from many disciplines, from France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. We find that, contrary to what is often suggested, scientists active in wider dissemination are also more active academically. However, their dissemination activities have almost no impact (positive or negative) on their careers. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4672

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Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline :

« Most refereed journal articles today are published in subscription journals, accessible only to subscribing institutions, hence losing considerable research impact. Making articles freely accessible online (« Open Access, » OA) maximizes their impact. Articles can be made OA in two ways: by self-archiving them on the web (“Green OA”) or by publishing them in OA journals (“Gold OA”). We compared the percent and growth rate of Green and Gold OA for 14 disciplines in two random samples of 1300 articles per discipline out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI using a robot that trawled the web for OA full-texts. We sampled in 2009 and 2011 for publication year ranges 1998-2006 and 2005-2010, respectively. Green OA (21.4%) exceeds Gold OA (2.4%) in proportion and growth rate in all but the biomedical disciplines, probably because it can be provided for all journals articles and does not require paying extra Gold OA publication fees. The spontaneous overall OA growth rate is still very slow (about 1% per year). If institutions make Green OA self-archiving mandatory, however, it triples percent Green OA as well as accelerating its growth rate. »

URL : http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/

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Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International Scholarly Communication :

« Japan has achieved social and economic growth through its strengths in science and technology. However, in the face of globalisation, various factors, including the continued appreciation of the yen, the emerging economic powers, and a declining birth rate combined with an aging population have weakened Japan’s competitiveness in the world and resulted in a prevalent sense of stagnation in society.

Intellectual assets are among such important resources for Japan, which is a country with limited material resources, that greater efforts on the promotion of science and technology, and the promotion of creative and forward-looking scientific research, in particular, have to be taken than ever in order to enhance Japan’s international competitiveness.

To promote scientific research, it is essential that timely and wide access to information be guaranteed to those who need it. At the same time, it is important to promptly publish and distribute outstanding research results domestically and internationally, and to make use of them in society. Doing so will increase Japan’s intellectual presence and attract excellent researchers from around the world, leading to further development of science in Japan and stimulation of society as a whole. »

URL : http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/10/25/1323890_4_2.pdf

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The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability (2012) :

« In the past few years, Open Access repositories and their associated services have become an increasingly important component of the global e-Research infrastructure. The real value of repositories is their potential to be connected in order to develop a network of repositories which enables unified access to an open, aggregated mass of scholarship and related materials that machines and researchers can work with in new ways.

However, this potential to create a unified body of scholarly materials is entirely reliant on interoperability – specifically, that repositories follow consistent guidelines, protocols, and standards for interoperability which allow them to communicate with each other; connect with other systems; and transfer information, metadata, and digital objects between each other. The repository infrastructure is still relatively new, leading to an evolving interoperability landscape that at first sight may appear chaotic, confusing, and complex.

This report is designed to be the first stage of a multi-phase process aiming to establish the COAR Roadmap for Interoperability. The second phase is planned to be completed with the release of a follow-up report: Future Directions for Interoperability. The follow-up report will address emerging issues and current research & development efforts. »

URL : http://www.coar-repositories.org/files/COAR-The-Current-State-of-Open-Access-Repository-Interoperability.pdf