Open Access at the University of Southampton Pushing…

Open Access at the University of Southampton. Pushing the boundaries and the art of the possible.
Case study
:

“At the University of Southampton researchers, academics, service providers and senior management have been working together for ten years in a partnership to underpin an “open” approach to research and learning resources based on the repository model.

Innovative research at the School of Electronics and Computer Science set out the technical building blocks for making research available on open access. As a next step, the JISC- funded TARDis project (Targeting Academic Research for Dissemination and Disclosure) successfully brought together internal departments – the Library, the University Computing Service and the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Research Group within Electronics and Computer Science. Together, they committed to support an institutional strategy for making scholarly communication both more visible and more accessible. This partnership approach remains key and has allowed Southampton to extend open access into other areas including the learning repository.

At institutional level the value of the research repository has been strongly identified with the University’s strategies for the RAE/REF, and with the institutional response to meeting funder mandates. The University of Southampton became the first university in the UK to adopt a formal requirement that all academic staff make access to their published research available online through the institutional repository. Senior management support has been crucial as has been the promotion of the benefits to the author. Institutional strategy often means less to individual academics and researchers than how the services provide benefits to them. It is therefore important to link open access to the research and learning process, and to the benefits of increasing visibility. A pragmatic approach combined with a strongly visible support service has underpinned the way in which open access has been developed institutionally at Southampton.

The University’s main priorities going forward are to increase the amount of open content by encouraging the direct deposit of postprints in the research repository and increasing the range of material across disciplines in the learning repository. In parallel Southampton will experiment with scoping options to link access to research data initially at metadata level.”

URL : http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/opentechnologies/openaccess/institutionsandoa/southampton.aspx

A case study in openness Salford University …

A case study in openness: Salford University :

“A case study in institutional openness has just been published, focused on Salford University. Written by the Vice Chancellor and EOS Board member, Professor Martin Hall, the study describes the drive to openness and the benefits it brings to the University and its public. “The University aims to create economic and social value through innovative ways of working together. A key element of this is openness”, says Professor Hall.

In the paper, he develops the concept of a ‘Generic Open Access University’ and describes how the univeristy repository, USIR, is the core of intermediary agencies and a wide range of networked connections. “The open access repository is at the heart of this model, in the place that the library has occupied from the earliest days of the university”, Professor Hall says.”

URL : http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_7273/a-case-study-in-openness-salford-university

The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals A…

The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals: A Study of College and University Libraries in Indiana :

Objectives: This study examines what factors are considered by college and university libraries in Indiana when making the decision to cancel subscriptions to print journals when an electronic equivalent is available. The study also looks at who the primary decision makers are in this regard. Libraries at public and private institutions of varying sizes were included in the study.

Methods : An online survey was sent to seventy-three libraries in the consortium, Academic Libraries of Indiana. Structured interviews with administrators at nine libraries were also conducted.

Results: Academic libraries in Indiana use subscription cost, redundancy of formats, student preference, budget reductions and usage as the primary factors in canceling print journal subscriptions in favor of their electronic counterparts. There is also a preference for the electronic format for new subscriptions even when a print version is also available.

Conclusions: The study indicates that subscription cost is the most important consideration in the journal cancelation process with other factors also having an effect on the preference of libraries for electronic versions of journals. The study also shows that libraries at public and private colleges and universities are at different stages of moving away from print to an online-only journal format. At the same time, there is consensus that a small collection of print titles will still be needed. The primary decision-makers are librarians, faculty, and library administrators.”

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/10330

The impact of open access journals on library and information scientists’ research in Taiwan

“As some library and information science (LIS) journals in Taiwan are open access, the aim of the study is to investigate what, if any, impact open access journals have on library and information science scholars‘ research in Taiwan. Therefore, the objectives of the study is to explore the scholarly productivity of LIS scholars in Taiwan, to find out what articles they publish and OA articles as a percentage of all titles, and to calculate the mean citation rate of open access articles and articles not freely available online. A bibliometric method was used in the study. To determine whether a difference in research impact existed, two research impact indicators were used, that is, open access articles as a percentage of all published titles and mean citation rate of open access articles and those not freely available online. Data on published articles with citation counts by the LIS scholars in Taiwan from 2000 to 2009 was collected from the ACI Database and Social Science Citation Index Database. The study shows that for 72 LIS scholars who were subjects of the investigation, 64 of them had published 745 articles within the previous ten years: 679 articles in Chinese and 66 articles in English; 499 of these were OA articles, and 264 were non-OA articles; OA articles constituted 66.98% of the total number of academic articles. The mean citation rate of OA versus non-OA article citation was 1.29.Analysis of impact indicators shows that open access journals have an impact on the research of LIS scholars in Taiwan, in particular, LIS OA journals have more research impact in Chinese than those in English.”

URL : http://eprints.ptar.uitm.edu.my/3624/

Etat de la publication en Open Access dans les disciplines scientifiques présentes à l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Ce mémoire, réalisé sous mandat de la bibliothèque de l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), fait état de la publication en Open Access aujourd’hui. Il couvre ainsi les disciplines scientifiques présentes dans l’institution, plus particulièrement les Sciences, Techniques et Médecine (STM).

Bien que ce travail porte principalement sur la publication dans les revues en Open Access (« gold path »), il aborde aussi l’archivage ouvert (« green path»). La partie théorique de ce mémoire dresse un panorama actuel de l’Open Access. Elle détermine les principaux modes d’Open Access existants via une typologie et définit les différents modèles économiques existants.

Ce travail s’intéresse aussi à la question de l’évaluation des articles scientifiques, des droits en vigueur dans ce domaine, ainsi que l’usage d’outils statistiques pour la qualification des revues. L’importance de l’Open Access est démontrée, en tenant compte des particularités, propres aux grandes disciplines scientifiques.

Le point de vue des chercheurs sur la question du libre accès est présenté, suivi d’une réflexion autour de projets de financements institutionnels. Enfin, d’éventuelles perspectives de développements futurs sont élaborées.

La partie pratique présente, quant à elle, les résultats d’une enquête, menée entre février et juin 2011 sur le campus. Elle repose sur une analyse quantitative des références d’articles scientifiques publiés, présentes dans Infoscience, l’archive ouverte de l’institution. Une mesure de l’importance de la publication en Open Access à l’EPFL, entre 2008 et 2010, a ainsi été effectuée.

En parallèle, une analyse qualitative, menée sous la forme d’entretiens individuels, a permis de prendre connaissance des attentes et des besoins de certains chercheurs sur ce sujet. Les résultats obtenus renseignent aussi de manière significative sur leurs pratiques et leurs préoccupations, qui varient sensiblement selon leurs habitudes et leurs expériences.

Ce mémoire a donc pour but de faire une synthèse de ces différents éléments et ainsi, de déterminer les enjeux actuels de l’Open Access, que ce soit à l’EPFL ou dans n’importe quel autre contexte institutionnel, côtoyant la publication scientifique.

URL : http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/169218/

Difficile convergence des archives ouvertes en SIC

L’article rend compte d’un test de moissonnage pour quatre archives ouvertes sélectionnées afin de déterminer la faisabilité et les limites de leur interconnexion pour un domaine scientifique particulier: le champ des SIC. Les problèmes rencontrés d’interopérabilité organisationnelle, technique et sémantique sont détaillés et contextualisés à un état de l’art sur la question. La question de la difficile représentation sémantique commune pour ce champ scientifique, manifeste dès l’étape de repérage et d’identification des archives ouvertes SIC sur le répertoire international OpenDOAR, est ensuite approfondie à partir de l’étude détaillée du champ ” subject “.

L’article conclut à la nécessité de repenser à la source les modes de production de ces dispositifs selon des procédures partagées au sein de la communauté scientifique et entre gestionnaires de ces archives.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00627729/fr/

AUPress A Comparison of an Open Access University…

AUPress: A Comparison of an Open Access University Press with Traditional Presses :

“This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way ANOVA analyses show that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AUPress in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AUPress, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by the number of downloads of the open electronic versions.”

URL : http://ifets.info/others/abstract.php?art_id=1165