Opening access to agricultural information in Ghana Kenya…

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Opening access to agricultural information in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia :

“Agricultural innovation systems in Africa need to have access to both local and global agricultural sciences and technical information if they are to have an impact on agriculture and food security initiatives on the continent. While access to global agricultural information resources and innovations is relatively easy, local agricultural content is generally not visible and easily accessible. Providing access these important resources, through institutional repositories of metadata records and associated full-text documents, is one pathway of ensuring that the content generated locally is easily accessible within the country, region and around the globe. This paper highlights three initiatives implemented by national research institutes in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia aimed at opening access to agricultural information and knowledge resources. It also presents the major challenges faced in the implementation of the initiatives and the key lessons learned that could be useful when implementing similar initiatives.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18921/

Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh…

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Institutional Repositories and Open Access Initiatives in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm of Scholarly Communication :

“Nowadays, open access (OA) in its diverse forms constitutes the most interesting and promising model for the research output of an academic or research institution. The purpose of the present study is to discuss the situation of OA in the developing world, with a focus on Bangladesh. The study also addresses why OA is important for developing countries and which initiatives have been taken in Bangladesh. Finally, we discuss some challenging issues of OA and suggestions on how to overcome these issues. It is rather obvious that developing countries have always faced a lack of research information and were unable to afford sufficient subscriptions to journals. The other side of the picture is the poor dissemination of the research outcome in the developing world. In Bangladesh, only three organizations have their institutional repository and have a reasonable number of local OA journals. We will identify some problems that impede the process of building open access IR, or more generally an OA environment in Bangladesh. We are convinced, however, that we will witness in the near future a sustainable growth of open access initiatives, with more open access literature and digital repositories.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8245

Anatomy of Green Open Access Open Access…

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Anatomy of Green Open Access :

“Open Access (OA) is the free unrestricted access to electronic versions of scholarly publications. For peer reviewed journal articles there are two main routes to OA, publishing in OA journals (gold OA) or archiving of article copies or manuscripts at other web locations (green OA). This study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about green OA. A synthesis of previous studies indicates that the green OA coverage of all published journal articles is approximately 12%, with substantial disciplinary variation. Typically, green OA copies become available with considerable time delays, partly caused by publisher imposed embargo periods, and partly by author tendencies to archive manuscripts only perio dically. Although green OA copies should ideally be archived in proper repositories, a large share is stored on home pages and similar locations, with no assurance of long-term preservation. Often such locations contain exact copies of published articles, which may infringe on the publisher’s exclusive rights. The technical foundation for green OA uploading is becoming increasingly solid, which is largely due to the rapid increase in the number of institutional repositories. The number of articles within th e scope of OA mandates, which strongly influence the self-archival rate of articles, is nevertheless still low.”

URL : http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc8/Personal%20VersionGreenOa.pdf

Adding Value to Electronic Theses and Dissertations in…

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Adding Value to Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories :

“Part of the grey literature, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) represent a growing segment of open, available content in institutional repositories (IR) where they contribute to the impact and ranking of their institution. More than half of all IRs listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories contain ETDs. Most of these open access projects have similarities and common features, such as access to full text and compliance with the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. But more important are the differences, with regard to metadata, policy, access restrictions, representativeness, file format, status, quality and related services. In this paper, we investigate what can be done to improve the quality of content and service provision in an open environment, in order to increase impact, traffic and usage. Based on a review of 54 recent communications and articles on PhD theses in institutional repositories, this paper shows five ways in which institutions can add value to the deposit and dissemination of electronic theses and dissertations and describes two developments that are challenging institutional repositories.”

URL : http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/schopfel/03schopfel.html

Synthèse sur les politiques institutionnelles de libre accès…

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Synthèse sur les politiques institutionnelles de libre accès à la recherche :

“En matière d’archives ouvertes, les politiques strictement incitatives se sont avérées relativement peu efficaces (environ 15% de dépôts plein texte volontaires). Par contraste, les mandats institutionnels, dont le principe est de rendre ce dépôt plus ou moins obligatoire, permettent d’augmenter significativement la participation des chercheurs. Diverses enquêtes ont d’ailleurs montré qu’une majorité d’auteurs seraient disposés à archiver leurs travaux si un tel mandat les y contraignait. Depuis 2003, les mandats essaiment à travers le monde, particulièrement aux États-Unis, mais également en Europe, où l’Université de Liège fait désormais figure de modèle. L’Union européenne, qui via son 8e PCRD (Horizon 2020) devrait rendre obligatoire le libre accès à toute recherche qu’elle finance, recommande l’adoption de mandats à ses États membres. De son côté, le Royaume-Uni semble privilégier la voie dorée, au détriment de la voie verte, avec pour conséquence probable l’envolée des coûts de publication, à la charge des universités. En France, les mandats, défendus par le CNRS et dont l’efficacité a été reconnue et approuvée à un niveau officiel, sont encore plutôt le fait d’organismes nationaux que d’universités. L’adoption et la mise en œuvre d’une politique institutionnelle est un processus de longue haleine : pour qu’elle soit comprise et acceptée par la communauté scientifique, il faut en méditer soigneusement la formulation, l’expliquer aux chercheurs de manière à éviter tout risque d’interprétation erronée, l’accompagner par des actions de soutien et de suivi, proposer des services à valeur ajoutée en rétribution aux efforts d’auto-archivage. Il peut s’avérer stratégiquement judicieux de limiter dans un premier temps l’application du mandat à des laboratoires-relais, dont l’exemple peut avoir un effet incitatif.”

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00794497

Le format CERIF du projet euroCRIS Un cadre…

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Le format CERIF du projet euroCRIS. Un cadre de référence pour l’identification des chercheurs et les archives institutionnelles ? :

“Le séminaire OASIE (Open access, Services, Interdisciplinarité, Expertise) du CNAM à Paris du 28 mars 2012 a interrogé la visibilité des chercheurs et de leurs domaines d’expertise par le biais des archives ouvertes. Entre autre, OASIE a posé la question de l’intérêt des systèmes d’information de recherche (CRIS) pour le mouvement du libre accès à l’information scientifique. Plus concrètement, il a étudié l’intérêt du format européen CERIF, développé pour les CRIS européen mais encore peu connu en France. Notre communication décrit le format CERIF et présente l’organisme qui le maintient et le développe (euroCRIS), puis fait le lien avec les archives institutionnelles et la question des identifiants uniques, en particulier pour les auteurs-chercheurs.”

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00794982

Staffing and Workflow of a Maturing Institutional Repository…

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Staffing and Workflow of a Maturing Institutional Repository :

“Institutional repositories (IRs) have become established components of many academic libraries. As an IR matures it will face the challenge of how to scale up its operations to increase the amount and types of content archived. These challenges involve staffing, systems, workflows, and promotion. In the past eight years, Kansas State University’s IR (K-REx) has grown from a platform for student theses, dissertations, and reports to also include faculty works. The initial workforce of a single faculty member was expanded as a part of a library-wide reorganization, resulting in a cross-departmental team that is better able to accommodate the expansion of the IR. The resultant need to define staff responsibilities and develop resources to manage the workflows has led to the innovations described here, which may prove useful to the greater library community as other IRs mature.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/4/