The Role of an Entity Registry in Schola…

The Role of an Entity Registry in Scholarly Communication: Exploring Creative Uses of Research Activity Data :

“The Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) is the University’s open access repository for research outputs. To simplify deposit in ORA, a registry has been created containing data harvested from existing sources to be used as repository metadata. The registry stores publicly available research activity data, that is, data about research including people, projects, and funders. Data held in the registry are available for purposes beyond the repository, particularly as the registry uses semantic web technologies which expedite data sharing. Value is added by aggregating disparate data for discovery, by making creative use of data such as revealing connections between entities and recording data provenance. This article describes the entity registry, its role within ORA, and as a tool to support scholarly communication. The advantages of storing data as entities and gathering, aggregating, and displaying research activity data to assist dissemination of research are explained. Examples of use of the registry and its data are provided that enable easy discovery of researchers and their activities and reveals hidden connections between them, thereby, encouraging communication and collaboration between different subject areas. Development of the registry and examples has been underpinned by extensive stakeholder analysis and user testing.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928391042~frm=titlelink

Obligation de dépôt de la documentation …

Obligation de dépôt de la documentation Ifremer dans Archimer :
“Le 1° septembre 2010, l’Ifremer a mis en place une obligation de dépôt de sa documentation dans Archimer, son Archive Institutionnelle. Cette obligation concerne sa littérature grise (rapports, compte rendu de campagne, avis…) et ses publications.

Objectifs :
* Assurer la conservation et donc l’accessibilité sur le long terme à la documentation scientifique et technique produite par l’Ifremer,
* Automatiser et fiabiliser le calcul des indicateurs bibliométriques définis entre l’Ifremer et ses ministères de tutelle dans le cadre de son contrat quadriennal, ainsi que l’élaboration des comptes rendus d’activité,
* Faciliter le partage de la documentation interne entre les équipes de l’Ifremer,
* Améliorer la visibilité de la production de l’Ifremer, et notamment de ses publications internationales, en les diffusant gratuitement sur Internet, dans le respect des règles de copyright des éditeurs.”

URL : http://archimer.ifremer.fr/depot.htm

The University of Alicante’s institutio…

The University of Alicante’s institutional strategy to promote the open dissemination of knowledge :
“Purpose : Information and communication technologies have became pervasive in people’s lives and in this changing world education cannot remain anchored in old-fashioned models which ignore the evolution through which society is going. This paper seeks to present the gamble made by the University of Alicante (Spain) on the promotion of open knowledge.

Design/methodology/approach : The educational environment cannot continue to be fixed, closed and isolated, where students – assuming a basically passive role – receive standardised teaching. It must consequently experience a fast and decisive transformation which allows it, amongst other things, to respond to the new challenge posed by society: the need for all of us to share the knowledge we generate, so that further progress can be made.

Findings : The Institutional Repository (RUA) and the OpenCourseWare of the University of Alicante (OCW-UA) were conceived from the very beginning as related projects that could constitute consecutive phases in the open publication of knowledge. In this way the aim of presenting the promotion of open knowledge not as a series of discrete projects but as a global strategic gamble of the institution was achieved. In addition to the most visible educational benefits, this policy has had the virtue of favouring the assumption by the University of its role as an online provider of quality (scientific and teaching) content.

Originality/value : RUA is the storage place of all the teaching materials published by the University of Alicante’s teaching staff, which are retrieved from OCW-UA, while OCW-UA serves as an organisational model of teaching content self-archived by the teaching staff in RUA. The connection between the projects has allowed the presentation of the promotion of open knowledge as a global strategic gamble of the University, which has contributed to a greater acceptance by the teaching staff. This work is original in that it shows a successful experience of involvement by one university and its members in the promotion of open knowledge.”

URL : http://rua.ua.es/dspace/handle/10045/14319

Developing an Institutional Repository at Southern New Hampshire University: Year One

In 2008, Southern New Hampshire University was awarded a threeyear, $500,000 national leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create a digital repository using DSpace open source software. Events from the first year of the repository’s development are presented and discussed. Key elements addressed include the challenges involved with customizing the DSpace infrastructure, creating standards for access and master files, implementing metadata standards, and developing digital preservation policies.

The value of cross-departmental participation is shown, and the importance of planning for digital preservation is presented.

URL : http://metroblogs.typepad.com/files/ditrw_16.pdf

Measuring the visibility of the University’s scientific production using GoogleScholar, “Publish or Perish” software and Scientometrics

Open access to scientific information through institutional digital repositories presents today’s world information environment and the transformations imposed by information society.

The first Romanian institutional repository was implemented at Transilvania University of Brasov. As part of the undertaken research, the visibility and the impact of the university’s scientific production was measured using the scientific methods of scientometry, as a fundamental instrument for determining the international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.

The results showed that an open access institutional repository would significantly add to the visibility of the university’s scientific production.In this article we define the scientific production and productivity and present the main indicators for the measurement of the scientific activity.

The impact of the research is analyzed and measured through scientometric indicators. The analysis of the citations represents a scientometric indicator for the evaluation of the scientific researches.

Through the number of citations we can analyse the quality of the scientific information. Google Scholar was used as a scientometric database which can be consulted free of charge on the Internet and which indexes academic papers from institutional repositories, identifying also the referenced citations.

The free “Publish or Perish” software can be used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the research, by analysing the citations through the h-index.

We present the methodology and the results of an exploratory study made at the Transilvania University of Brasov regarding the h-index of the academic staff. H-index was calculated by using “Publish or Perish” software, comparing the number of ISI indexed published articles and the number of citations from “ISI Web of Science”.

Using “Publish or Perish”, we calculated h-index, g-index, hc-index and HI norm. We analyzed the research performances achieved by Brasov academic community in 2008, as realised in their annual evaluation -number of papers, books, research contracts, etc- by comparing the four indexes of those 60 professors with the best results.

We will present correlation indicators and the importance of open access for increasing the impact of scientific research by using institutional repositories.

URL : https://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-repanovici-en.pdf