Implementing Institutional Repository in Nigerian Universities : Status, Challenges, Prospects, and the Role of Librarians & Libraries

This is a report of the study carried out in late 2013. In this paper, the authors identify the extent of adoption of Institutional Repository (IR) in various universities through an online survey. Concepts of institutional repository (IR) and institutional memory (IM) are clarified. It lays down the findings from the survey.

The paper also explains the essential elements of IR, Service Model of IR, prospects and challenges of IR in Nigerian universities, IR implementation strategies; including the role of the libraries and librarians.

Findings reveal that as at the time of study world IR presence numbers 3479. Nigeria has only nine (9) Universities representing just 0.23% of the world IR. But some African countries’ universities have more. South Africa alone had 40, which amounts to 1.15% of the world Institutional Repositories as at then. The paper concludes with recommendations on the ways Nigerian universities could overcome the barrier in IR implementation.

URL : http://www.jatlim.org/Volumes/Vol.1%20No.1/Jonathan.pdf

The role of arXiv, RePEc, SSRN and PMC in formal scholarly communication

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Purposes 

The four major Subject Repositories (SRs), arXiv, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and PubMed Central (PMC), are all important within their disciplines but no previous study has systematically compared how often they are cited in academic publications. In response, this article reports an analysis of citations to SRs from Scopus publications, 2000 to 2013.

Design/methodology/approach

Scopus searches were used to count the number of documents citing the four SRs in each year. A random sample of 384 documents citing the four SRs was then visited to investigate the nature of the citations.

Findings

Each SR was most cited within its own subject area but attracted substantial citations from other subject areas, suggesting that they are open to interdisciplinary uses. The proportion of documents citing each SR is continuing to increase rapidly, and the SRs all seem to attract substantial numbers of citations from more than one discipline.

Research limitations/implications

Scopus does not cover all publications, and most citations to documents found in the four SRs presumably cite the published version, when one exists, rather than the repository version.

Practical implications

SRs are continuing to grow and do not seem to be threatened by Institutional Repositories (IRs) and so research managers should encourage their continued use within their core disciplines, including for research that aims at an audience in other disciplines.

Originality/value

This is the first simultaneous analysis of Scopus citations to the four most popular SRs.

URL : http://www.yorku.ca/lixuemei/The_role_of_subject_repositories_AslibPreprint.docx

Institutional policy implementation at University of Minho, Portugal

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This case study describes the implementation process of the Open Access institutional policy at the University of Minho (UMinho), Portugal. Starting with a brief introduction about the institution, in terms of its academic community and research, the document then provides a detailed description of the steps taken to implement the UMinho’s institutional repository (the IR) and the Open Access policy. We highlight the main goals which oriented the implementation of the repository, the devised communication plan, the value-added services created for authors, and finally, the engagement within the international community in these areas.

Regarding the Open Access policy, we present a brief summary of the main points of the self-archiving policy, approved late 2004, and also point out the main additions to the policy when it was upgraded in 2011.
This case study also provides some figures and tables about the results of the various monitoring processes carried out by the University of Minho Documentation Services to follow-up and measure policy compliance.
In summary, since the beginning of 2004 with the IR implementation, several initiatives have been taking place with the purpose of increasing the number of deposited documents. The Open Access policy adoption was, definitely, the main success factor amongst all the other initiatives and efforts.

URL : Institutional policy implementation at University of Minho, Portugal

Alternative location : http://www.pasteur4oa.eu/sites/pasteur4oa/files/resource/Case%20Study_UMinho.pdf

The Future of Institutional Repositories at Small Academic Institutions: Analysis and Insights

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Institutional repositories (IRs) established at universities and academic libraries over a decade ago, large and small, have encountered challenges along the way in keeping faith with their original objective: to collect, preserve, and disseminate the intellectual output of an institution in digital form. While all institutional repositories have experienced the same obstacles relating to a lack of faculty participation, those at small universities face unique challenges.

This article examines causes of low faculty contribution to IR content growth, particularly at small academic institutions. It also offers a first-hand account of building and developing an institutional repository at a small university. The article concludes by suggesting how institutional repositories at small academic institutions can thrive by focusing on classroom teaching and student experiential learning, strategic priorities of their parent institutions.

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september15/wu/09wu.html

E-thesis repositories in the world: A critical analysis

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The advent of Information Communication & Technology (ICT) has resulted into a revolution in the ways of production, dissemination, preservation and accessibility of information. Traditional librarianship has opened its doors and embraced ICT to enhance and improve the quality and quantity of services provided by libraries. Libraries have expanded their scope to Library & Information Centres. With the changing trends of libraries, the users have also moved to advanced stages of accessing the information.

Theses and dissertations are one of the major sources of authentic in-depth information on a particular topic on which a researcher conducts extensive research work. In spite of being a main source of scholarly communication, the print theses and dissertations is mostly not accessible to outside world. In this way, the important information remains unused and unknown to users. The Electronic format of the theses and dissertations makes it possible for the information content to be used by information seekers.

‘Open Access’ is a boon for the users who strive for information. Policy Guidelines framed by National and International Organizations like UNESCO, BOAI, Berlin Declaration, ECHO Charter, Bethesda Statement, Salvador Declaration, National Open Access Policy and National Knowledge Commission‟s Report on Open Access (India) have promoted the benefits of open access for researchers, organizations, public and funding organizations.

Institutional repositories provide access to various institutional documents through open access. The type of contents vary from books, journals, conference proceedings, theses, dissertations, newspaper clippings, datasets, manuscripts, software, lectures, learning objects, maps, pre-prints, post-prints, research reports, audio-visual material etc.

The present research work deals with the Electronic Thesis Repositories which are a major form of grey literature of any organization. There are various benefits of ETDs like they help in increasing the citation count of the author and the institution, minimum time required for dissemination of scholarly information, various file formats can be incorporated in the electronic form which is not possible in the print theses and dissertations and they provide a solution of long term preservation of theses and dissertations. In spite of the benefits of ETDs, authors hesitate in depositing their research work in electronic format mainly due to fear of plagiarism.

There are various concepts in the whole process of setting up of an ETD Program. The present research work aims to study the various concepts of ETDs by analyzing the E-thesis Repositories in the world and collecting data from the Repository administrators through Web Questionnaire.

URL : http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/pubnum/3715419.html

Open Access and Discovery Tools: How do Primo Libraries Manage Green Open Access Collections?

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The Open Access (OA) movement gains more and more momentum with an increasing number of institutions and funders adopting OA mandates for publicly funded research. Consequently, an increasing amount of research output becomes freely available, either from institutional, multi-institutional or thematic repositories or from traditional or newly established journals.

Currently, there are more than 2,700 Open Access repositories (Green Open Access) of all kinds listed on OpenDOAR. Scholarly OA repositories contain lots of treasures including rare or otherwise unpublished materials and articles that scholars self-archive, often as part of their institution’s mandate. But it can be hard to discover this material unless users know exactly where to look.

Since the very beginning, libraries have played a major role in supporting the OA movement. Next to all services they can provide to support the deposit of research output in the repositories, they can make Open Access materials widely discoverable by their patrons through general search engines (Google, Bing…), specialized search engines (like Google Scholar) and library discovery tools, thus expanding their collection to include materials that they would not necessarily pay for.

In this paper, we intend to focus on two aspects regarding Open Access and Primo discovery tool.

In early 2013, Ex Libris Group started to add institutional repositories to Primo Central Index (PCI), their mega-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources (journal articles, e-books, reviews, dissertations, legal documents, reports…). After two years, it may be interesting to take stock of the current situation of PCI regarding Open Access repositories. This paper will analyze their progressive integration into PCI, the numbers of references, the resource types, the countries of origin…

On basis of a survey to carry out among the Primo community, the paper will also focus on how libraries using Primo discovery tool integrate Green Open Access contents in their catalog. Two major ways are possible for them. Firstly, they can directly harvest, index and manage any repository ‒their own or any from another institution‒ in their Primo and display those free contents next to the more traditional library collections. Secondly, if they are Primo Central Index subscribers, they can quickly and easily activate any, if not all, of the Open Access repositories contained PCI, making thus the contents of those directly discoverable to their end users.

This paper shows what way is preferred by libraries, if they harvest or not their own repository (even if it is included in PCI) and suggests efforts that Ex Libris could take to improve the visibility and discoverability of OA materials included in the “Institutional Repositories” section of PCI.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/2268/185329

The One Repo: background, implementation and call for funding

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“As scholarly communication undergoes seismic changes, endless opportunities are opening up. In an open-access world, there is potential for Internet-enabled research on huge corpuses, discovering new correlations and making new connections. To facilitate these processes, we need platform that provides uniform access to the metadata and full text of all open-access articles, whether in repositories or open-access journals. The platform must provide data that is complete, up to date, high quality and open for every kind of re-use.

The One Repo ( http://onerepo.net/) is is that platform. It aims to make the entire open-access scholarly record available via a Web UI, embeddable widgets and various web-services, as well providing all of the metadata for direct download. It is built from battle-tested components that are in use in high-volume commercial systems.

Numerous harvesting methods are used. The existing demonstrator presents a UI that integrates results from a small number of repositories and other sources. We seek funding to rapidly increase coverage. The One Repo has dramatic implications forscholarship, research and engineering across every field of human endeavour.”


URL : http://onerepo.net/onerepo-whitepaper.pdf