The Use of Institutional Repositories: T…

The Use of Institutional Repositories: The Ohio State University Experience :

“All institutional repositories face the issue of content recruitment. The fact that we speak of recruitment rather than collection development implies that non-librarians or
non-archivists have a major role in what goes into the repository and by extension, what is preserved. However, for many universities librarians and/or archivists set the selection policy for the institutional repository. This selective approach enables the library and archives to decide where to commit tight resources for long term preservation and maintenance. However, such policies have the potential to diminish a sense of ownership and participation among other units on campus, thus making the
repository more a library/archives project than an institutional initiative.

The goals for the institutional repository (IR) determine its content. The concept of the “Knowledge Bank” at the Ohio State University began with a high level University task
force on distance learning. After a year of work, this task force approached the then Director of Libraries, Joseph J. Branin, with a conceptual model for better managing and using the intellectual digital assets of the institution. This history of interest beyond the Libraries has influenced greatly the goals, policies, and management of the Knowledge Bank. The responsibility for getting content is a distributed one. From its inception the Knowledge Bank was seen as a project of the University and not of the Libraries. The role of the Libraries is one of knowledge management providing hardware, software, training and support to entities on campus wanting to make available their digital assets. Many collections originate with subject specialists from the Libraries and Archives but there are also many collections that originate outside the Libraries and Archives.

“In the summer of 2009 the staffs of the Libraries and the Archives discussed ways to increase collaboration between the two units and to tag content contributed by end-user
communities that is also within the scope of the Archives. An offshoot result was the desire to know more about the use of IR content. In this paper the author examines the use of digital materials that have been deposited in The Ohio State University (OSU) Knowledge Bank (KB) from three perspectives: 1) Are there differences in the frequency of use of materials identified by the archives as within scope of their
collections and all other materials in the Knowledge Bank? 2) Are there differences in the frequency of use among categories of sources for content? Categories of sources examined are academic units, research centers, support units and informal communities. 3) Are there differences in the frequency of use among different types of content? Type refers to the nature of the materials; text and moving-image are examples of two of the twenty types of materials examined.”

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2010/07/23/crl-134rl.short?rss=1

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Comm…

Creating and Curating the Cognitive Commons: Southampton’s Contribution :

“The Web is becoming humankind’s Cognitive Commons, where knowledge is created and curated collaboratively. We trace its origins from the advent of language around 300,000 years ago to a recent series of milestones to which the University of Southampton has contributed, helping Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories (IRs), OA IR contents, and OA mandates to grow through the posting of the Subversive Proposal in 1994, the creation of CogPrints in 1997, the OpCit citation-linking project in 1999, the creation of the Eprints IR software in 2000, the Citebase citation-linking engine in 2001, the ROAR repository in 2002, the adoption and promotion of OA mandates (beginning with the ECS Southampton mandate, the world’s first, in 2002), the creation or the ROARMAP mandates registry in 2003, and the ongoing bibliography of the Open Access Impact Advantage since 2004.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21844/

Science, institutional archives and open access: an overview and a pilot survey on the Italian cancer research institutions

Background

The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) refers to a movement started around the ’90s to guarantee free access to scientific information by removing the barriers to research results, especially those related to the ever increasing journal subscription prices.

This new paradigm has reshaped the scholarly communication system and is closely connected to the build up of institutional repositories (IRs) conceived to the benefit of scientists and research bodies as a means to keep possession of their own literary production.

The IRs are high-value tools which permit authors to gain visibility by enabling rapid access to scientific material (not only publications) thus increasing impact (citation rate) and permitting a multidimensional assessment of research findings.”

Methods

A survey was conducted in March 2010 to mainly explore the managing system in use for archiving the research finding adopted by the Italian Scientific Institutes for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care (IRCCS) of the oncology area within the Italian National Health Service.

They were asked to respond to a questionnaire intended to collect data about institutional archives, metadata formats and posting of full-text documents. The enquire concerned also the perceived role of the institutional repository DSpace ISS, built up by the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Italian National Institute of Health, ISS), based on a XML scheme for encoding metadata.

Such a repository aims at acting as a unique reference point for the biomedical information produced by the Italian research institutions. An in-depth analysis has also been performed on the collection of information material addressed to patients produced by the institutions surveyed.

Results

The survey respondents were 6 out of 9. The results reveal the use of different practices and standard among the institutions concerning: the type of documentation collected, the software adopted, the use and format of metadata and the conditions of accessibility to the IRs.

Conclusions

The Italian research institutions in the field of oncology are moving the first steps towards the philosophy of OA. The main effort should be the implementation of common procedures also in order to connect scientific publications to researchers curricula.

In this framework, an important effort is represented by the project of ISS aimed to set a common interface able to allow migration of data from partner institutions to the OA compliant repository DSpace ISS.

URL : http://www.jeccr.com/content/29/1/168

Open Access repositories and journals fo…

Open Access repositories and journals for visibility: Implications for Malaysian libraries :

“This paper describes the growth of Open Access (OA) repositories and journals as reported by monitoring initiatives such as ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), Open DOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Directory of Web Ranking of World Repositories by the Cybermetrics Laboratory in Spain and published literature. The performance of Malaysian OA repositories and journals is highlighted. The strength of OA channels in increasing visibility and citations are evidenced by research findings. It is proposed that libraries champion OA initiatives by making university or institutional governance aware; encouraging institutional journal publishers to adopt OA platform; collaborating with research groups to jumpstart OA institutional initiatives and to embed OA awareness into user and researcher education programmes. By actively involved, libraries will be free of permission, licensing and archiving barriers usually imposed in traditional publishing situation.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=960

Global visibility of Asian universities’ Open Access institutional repositories

This paper highlights the current state of open access repositories of Asian universities. It describes their characteristics in terms of types, contents, disciplines, language, technical and operational issues, and policy.

The web performance of Asian institutional repositories as reflected through global visibility and impact of the repositories in Open Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR), is also examined; as well as the performance of Asian top-ranked universities in the archiving and sharing their research output through institutional repositories, based on the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR).

Findings signify Japan as the biggest contributor of Asian repositories, followed by India and Taiwan. An investigation of the status of these universities revealed that out of the 191 Asian organizational institutional repositories identified in this study, only 48 are listed in the Top 400 RWWR.

This implies that only 12% of Asian institutional repositories are visible and incorporate good practices in their web publication as extracted from the quantitative webometrics indicators used by the ranking. Out of these 48 institutions, 29 are among the Asian Top 200 universities.

However, only 14 of these 29 universities were ranked top 100 in the RWWR. It is revealed that some of the top ranked universities in Asia are not actively contributing to the open access movement.

It is suggested that if the web performance of an institutional repository of a research institution is below the expected position, the university authorities should reconsider their web policy to increase the volume and quality of their intellectual output / research publications through institutional repositories.

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=957

Librarians’ role as change agents for i…

Librarians’ role as change agents for institutional repositories: A case of Malaysian academic libra :

“The primary reason for establishing an institutional repository is to increase the visibility of the institution’s research output by making it Open Access. Academic libraries are becoming very involved in managing electronic scholarly products and participating in the evolving scholarly communication process through institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories can make room for easier access to universities’ research output, unfortunately it is not fully developed in some academic institutions. The origin of this problem is that there are known instances where librarians in-charge of institutional repository are unaware of their roles, and are unskilled in implementing the institutional repository. This paper describes a study conducted on the roles of librarians in the deployment and content recruitment of institutional repositories in eight (8) universities in Malaysia. Sample for this study are librarians who are involved with the development and implementation of institutional repository in their respective universities. The study reveals that the act of collecting materials for depositing is mainly done by librarians rather than the authors and researchers. Providing training sessions, holding meetings in departments and faculties, and also linking of the institutional repository website from the university and faculties’ website have the highest rank in librarians’ approach to promote the institutional repository. The paper also discusses the process of depositing, motivation factors, roles, marketing and benefits of institutional repository that will have reference value for the librarians who desire to embark on an institutional repository.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=961

Web Services for Bibliometrics

Institutional repositories have spread in universities where they provide services for recording, distributing, and preserving the institution’s intellectual output. When the Lausanne “academic server”, named SERVAL, was launched at the end of 2008, the Faculty of Biology and Medicine addressed from the outset the issue of quality of metadata. Accuracy is fundamental since research funds are allocated on the basis of the statistics and indicators provided by the repository. The Head of faculty also charged the medical library to explore different ways to measure and assess the research output. The first step for the Lausanne university medical library was to implement the PubMed and the Web of Science web services to easily extract clean bibliographic information from the databases directly into the repository.

Now the medical library is testing other web services (from CrossRef, Web of Science, etc.) to generate quantitative data on research impact mainly. The approach is essentially based on citation linking. Although the utility of citation and bibliometric evaluation is still debated, the most prevalent output measures used for research evaluation are still those based on citation analysis. Even when a new scientific evaluation indicator is proposed, such as h-index, we can always see its link with citation. Additionally, the results of a new indicator are often compared with citation analysis. The presentation will review the web services which might be used in institutional repositories to collect and aggregate citation information for the researchers’ publications.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00540289/fr/